The Beginning
A Forum for Stories of Incarceration, Justice, and Redemption
This excerpt from my memoir recounts the early years of my life. Before the fall, before the real estate deals and the prison sentence. A young man, unsure of his path, stumbling into the family construction business.
THE BEGINNING
I chose the wrong life. I should've never been in business in the first place. I’m not sure I even chose it, I just meandered into it with my usual vacuous deference to the family lore, and all the while convincing myself that I was different and immune to it. My grandfather, the family patriarch, didn't consider me an heir to that life. There were others who were more likely to him. And in the end, he was probably right. I had a run, but it ended badly.
The buy-in to business started before I realized it. During college, I visited my grandparents in Miami and listened to my grandfather’s stories while lounging in his garage, furnished with simple but comfortable chairs and small tables. Every afternoon at 4:00 pm, like clockwork, my tiny, wearied grandmother served “dacs and cracks” there. They were daiquiris, made with fresh grapefruits, chunks of parmesan cheese, and crackers. My Grandfather, a striking contrast, sat there in a suit and tie, shirts with French cuffs, and bright stone cufflinks of varying colors and designs. Even on sweltering Florida afternoons, he rarely removed his jacket. A manly, tanned figure, with silver-gray hair, a Romanesque profile, and granitelike features, he presided in his garage, telling stories about his beginnings, emigrating from a small mountain town in Molise, Italy. Most of the stories were frequent re-tellings: his first job as a stone cutter in the Bronx and confronted by other Irish workers who arrived before him, the fisticuffs, the beatings he inflicted, walking four miles to work from a tenement in an Italian ghetto, learning the construction business in New York city, until eventually starting his own company in the Bronx that grounded our family for three generations.
The stories didn't resonate with me then. I didn't even believe most of it; I was still in that bubble of obnoxious indifference that privilege often produces in its children. But exposure matters despite our self-talk, and over time, rattling around in my early twenties after college, I dipped my toes into the family construction business. A temporary landing spot, I told myself, until I figured out my life's work.
It was shortly after college in 1968, floundering and living with my parents, that I was considering graduate school with aspirations to become a writer. One night that summer, watching the Mets game with my father after dinner, Seaver pitching, I asked my father about working at the company for the summer. Sitting on the sofa, his jacket off and sipping a Dewars, he smiled and nodded his approval.
“So, you want to come into the business,” he said.
“Just temporarily. For the summer,” I said.
His company was one of many construction companies digging up New York’s five boroughs and constructing a complex, underground infrastructure to clean up the Hudson and East rivers, where sewage had been flowing for decades. It was a brutally competitive and dangerous enterprise, confronted by complicated and unpredictable underground conditions, a hostile public works bureaucracy, corrupt inspectors, harassing labor unions, blackmailing policemen, and a challenge in managing a diverse and difficult labor force.
“Go to the Yard tomorrow,” he said. “Report to Sandy at seven AM.”
The “Yard” was the company's headquarters in the Bronx, where offices, a maintenance facility, equipment, and supplies for various projects were located. Sandy was the Yard manager.
“Well, I was thinking about Monday, after the weekend.”
He finally turned to me. “If you want the job, you start tomorrow.”
When I arrived at the yard the next morning, dozens of men were urgently loading ten-wheeler trucks with the help of roaring, massive equipment and lots of shouting.
“Get those fucking pumps on Sanchirico’s truck,” Sandy, the yard manager shouted, to a group of workmen loading materials for the job site. Then he turned to me.
“John,” he shouted. “Go with Sanchirico.”
Sanchirico was a small, skinny man who talked to himself and worked on and off for years. Due to Sanchirico’s chronic drinking, Sandy kept firing and rehiring him. I got in the cab of the truck, and he tapped me on the knee.
“Welcome to DiMenna & Sons,” he said, smiling and revealing two missing teeth.
It remained that way for the following year. There was no formal plan. I just showed up at the Yard every day, and Sandy would send me somewhere. I was unskilled at everything, so I was nothing more than another pair of hands. Fortunately, I never killed anyone, but I came close one day, dropping the end of a heavy beam down a trench. Luckily, no one was there. But Vic Zuccarelli, a wiry carpenter and the only witness, couldn’t resist telling everyone, and the guys broke my chops for weeks.
"Kid went to college to become a fuckin idiot," Sal, a labor foreman said.
"College Fag,” said Little Joe, his assistant, but followed by a broad smile, revealing crooked rows of tiny black teeth.
Over time, the razzing increased, and yet I loved those guys. I loved the right-in-your-face, the letting-nothing-pass if it wasn't authentic. You paid big time for that. And despite that I was the boss’s son, and constantly fucking up, they treated me almost as one of them. It was probably because my father, who visited the job sites every day, openly and loudly chastised me. I used to think he was so cruel for that. It wasn't until much later that I realized he was doing me a favor, so the other workers didn't resent me.
I loved working with the pump man, Billy Buckley, whose clothes were covered with grease and always stashed a bottle of Four Roses whiskey in the glove compartment of his ratty pickup truck. He loved to tease me.
"You're fuckin useless kid. Good thing you're good lookin. Maybe the broads won't figure out how useless you are.”
Buckley’s coffee breaks were trips to an Irish bar under the L in the North Bronx, where the regular barmaid was a sexy but steely brunette with a nasty expression to ward off all the drunks at the bar hitting on her. Buckley’d stop talking while she poured boiler makers, never looking directly at her, waited till she walked away, and lowered his voice before speaking.
“What she needs is Dr. Buckley's two-ball compound."
By the end of the year, I was hooked, and graduate school seemed like a distant fool’s errand.
If this story resonates with you, or if you’ve wrestled with your own origin myths, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
John DiMenna is a member of the White Collar Support Group, a non-profit organization that supports those impacted by the criminal justice system.
Up Next on White Collar Journal:
Wednesday (Justice Notes): Plea Deals
Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse reflections
Sunday (Prison Camp): More from the early years