The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter by Linda Scarpa Read Free Book Online Page B

They didn’t care who my family was—not that they really knew at that age—but they didn’t care that my father was a scary guy.
    There was this big girl, and her name was “Fat Karen.” She came up to me one day when I was sitting on the stoop and hit me in the face with a closed fist. My father and mother heard me scream and ran outside. My father almost hit her—he never hit women—because she hurt me. My mother had to grab his arm.
    Growing up, I always felt that nobody liked me. I figured I must be ugly because nobody wanted to talk to me. A couple years after all this happened, I asked my father about it.
    â€œDad, nobody likes me. Am I ugly?”
    â€œLinda, do you know who your father is? Do you know who I am?”
    â€œWhat does that mean? What does that have to do with what I’m telling you, Dad?”
    â€œLinda, they’re afraid of you because of me.”
    Then I started to figure out that he was in the Mob. I was getting older, and it just made sense. Nobody ever said, “Your father is a gangster” or “Your father is in the Mob.” But as I got older, I got smarter.
    I knew that he wasn’t a professional gambler. He was a violent guy out on the street. I didn’t get the whole Colombo crime family thing yet, but I did know that people feared him.
    I never really got over what my father did to Greg. It stayed with me for a very long time. I ran into Greg when we were adults and we became friends again. I apologized to him a thousand times.
    He said he didn’t hate me anymore. “Linda, I was just a kid getting beat up by men. I don’t know how I lived.”

CHAPTER 4
    TURN YOUR WOUNDS INTO WISDOM
    When I told Greg Vacca I was writing a book and I was going to include what my father did to him, he started telling me the whole story from his perspective. He reminded me of things I guess I forgot about, or maybe subconsciously didn’t want to remember. His story is so powerful that I decided to ask him to tell you about it in his own words.
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    I was celebrating my sixteenth birthday with the guys I always hung around with—there were about five of them. We decided to have a little party in this apartment we had rigged up downstairs in an abandoned building in Brooklyn. It used to be the super’s apartment. We rigged it up with electricity and everything.
    We had a secret entrance. To get down to the basement, you had to go around the side of the building in the back. There was a basement window that was all boarded up. We would take the boards on the outside off, but when we got inside, we would put the boards back up on the inside so the window still looked boarded up.
    We decided to have Linda and one of her friends meet up with us there to party. When she arrived, she came up to wish me a happy birthday.Then she gave me a cigarette pack about half full of joints. It was just what I wanted. I asked her where they came from and she told me she took them from her dad.
    Linda really wasn’t an experienced pot smoker like us. She had tried it a few times, but she really wasn’t doing it right. So that night she started smoking, and she still wasn’t doing it right. I told her, “You’ve got to inhale it.” But when she inhaled, she basically coughed her brains out. She nearly puked, but she said she was okay.
    We smoked for most of the night. Then she said it was getting close to her curfew so she was going home. I tried to talk her out of it.
    â€œLinda, do not go home like that. Your father is going to pin you out right away.”
    I knew her father was involved with the Mafia, but I didn’t know how much he was involved.
    â€œNo, I’ll be all right. I’m going to go to Argie’s house.”
    Argie was one of our friends. Argie’s parents, especially her father, were really strict, too. I didn’t really like him. So Linda left and we continued our party.