56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports by Kostya Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page B

around the busy dining table plates were passed and red wine was poured. Amid the happy commotion, all those voices going and laughing at once, Joe would sit silently and eat, keeping to himself. He was relaxed. The dinners at the Spatolas reminded him of the best days as a kid back home with the family in San Francisco.
    So, in some ways, did life in Newark’s First Ward remind Joe of North Beach. Every coffee shop and fruit stand in the First Ward, every candy store and bakery, had stenciled on its window an Italian family’s name. The peddlers walking down Garside Street or Seventh Avenue pushed carts filled with special meats or carried covered trays of warm pizza, and they would advertise their wares in loud voices using the Italian names. Spatola knew everyone in town it seemed. He ran the local funeral parlor below the family’s home on Mount Prospect Avenue, and he would organize Italian Catholic burials with all the right touches. It was the funeral parlor that led Spatola to get in with Richie the Boot. Richie all but owned that part of Newark, controlled its crime patterns, decreed who owed money to whom, and decided, often, what the local politicians would say. Richie was the guy that all the liquor and the numbers ran through. He wore a diamond as big as a baseball on his belt buckle.
    The story was that Richie the Boot—Boiardo was his surname—wanted the store owners in the First Ward to “unionize,” that is to pay a little something on the side just to keep things nice and orderly, make sure that nobody somehow accidentally and unfortunately got hurt. But Spatola wouldn’t do it. The funeral parlor was his business, passed down from his father, and he wasn’t about to give chunks of it away for the privilege of being allowed to keep running it the way that he always ran it. Sometimes a couple of guys would stop by Spatola’s office and suggest to him again why getting in the union might make a lot of sense for a guy like him, with a young family and all. Spatola still said no.
    One night Spatola was outside the place when he was confronted by an especially neckless man he’d seen around plenty of times and who was carrying something that seemed sure to make Spatola change his mind. “No,” Jerry said. “I’m not giving you money. I won’t pay.”
    The bullet, it turned out, went down through the side of Spatola’s cheek and out the underside of his jaw; when he came upstairs and into the house that night, he was bloody and in a bad way. He had to go to the hospital, of course, and when the police heard about the injury and caught up to Jerry, to find out just what had happened in a neighborhood they were hoping somehow to get clean, he did not have much to offer. Spatola said it was just plain dumb luck that he had run into a mugger or whoever that was. He said that he had no idea who had shot him nor why. Unfortunately, Spatola said, he had just never gotten a real good look at the guy. The police gave up the case.
    With that, Spatola won Richie the Boot’s respect. All the boys now knew to let Jerry Spats alone, and, more than that, to take care of him when he needed anything. That’s how Spatola became a regular at Richie’s restaurant, the splendid Vittorio Castle on Eighth Avenue, with its high ceilings and its heavy curtains in the doorways, street scenes of Italy painted on the walls. Spatola would bring DiMaggio here—or sometimes across the street to Vesuvius, another old-world Italian place—and Richie and his son Tony Boy and whoever else was hanging around that night made sure that Joe got treated right. In his immaculate suits and with his way of sitting quietly while others buzzed around him, DiMaggio fit right in. Even before they were married, he began taking Dorothy to the Castle sometimes too, for a meal with Jerry and Rose, and once for the party celebrating their engagement. Dorothy’s diamond engagement ring, four carats and emerald cut, had come to DiMaggio as a