![]() They were also becoming reckless in their ambition. With my father's rise in the Gambino family, a great deal of money was changing hands. My father's crew was becoming increasingly ambitious. The truly fatal misstep occurred not long after my 13th birthday. We had been in the new house for two years when disaster struck. ![]() From the day we moved into the mansion by the water, our lives began to swerve out of control. Moving there was the beginning of a nightmare for our family. Building such a house was the pinnacle of the American Dream for a Brooklyn boy like my father. The neighbourhood we were about to enter was among the wealthiest on Long Island, with wide, curving tree-lined streets and mansions that housed an assortment of lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers - and mobsters. With his income expanding exponentially, my father began building his dream house on the southern shore of Massapequa. The year before, my father had been inducted into the Gambino crime family as a made man by 'Big' Paul Castellano. After that, my father was never able to piece the fragments together again.Īs I prepared to enter the seventh grade, our family was planning for another change. But in the early summer of 1979, something happened that shattered the bubble. For 23 out of 24 hours, he was just like any other father. Like other fathers, our father liked movies and music, good food and Sunday nights in front of the TV. Bad guys are not bad guys 24 hours a day. ![]() Inside the bubble, my father was a regular dad. My parents had a traditional marriage in most respects and my sisters grew up like the daughters of policemen and stockbrokers, worrying about grades and party dresses. From the inside, the bubble was a very convincing microcosm of the real world. As long as we stayed inside that bubble, we would be safe. For the first 12 years of my life, my father worked to keep our family in a glass bubble. ![]()
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