Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Italian American City Aldermen Investigated for Fathers Penny Ante Gambling

The ANNOTICO Report

 

Have you heard the one about... The Alderman that was being investigated on the basis of a wiretap, that he knew his Father was engaged in penny ante gambling  but didn't report him????     ...    NO REALLY!!!!!

 

The Alderman had an inkling trouble lay ahead. He had run ins with the Police Chief, People kept telling him they were gunning for him, but through his father.  The Alderman told his father to cool it with the gambling in the bar. The Father said he wasn't hurting anyone. Let the cops go chase the crack dealers His father said he sure wasn't going to change his gambling habits just because his son was a politician. Fine, dad, said the Alderman.

 

OK, does it makes more sense if the Alderman is Joe DeStefano, Italian American?

 

The son thinks it's a Political Vendetta. The Father thinks it's a Mafia Smear.

 

While the focus of the article are the facts above, the story is more about a long time "Little Italy" perseverance, it's ties, it's loyalty, it's comforting protectiveness.

 

 

1ST WARD IS MIDDLETOWN'S OLD WORLD REFUGE

NATIVE SON FINDS `RELATIVE' SAFETY IN NEIGHBORHOOD


Times Herald-Record

Middletown,NY,USA

By Mike Levine
January 14, 2007

Sunday, March 5, 1989 - The Saturday morning paper of Feb. 11, bearing stunning news, hit the 1st Ward around sunrise. It rattled the porches of Montgomery and Ogden streets, where the old ladies were leaving for the bakery. It flew hot off the racks of grocery stores like Marcello's over on Beattie Avenue.

There it was in black and white. Joe DeStefano, the brash 30-year-old homeboy alderman, had announced that an Orange County grand jury was investigating him on official misconduct charges relating to a gambling bust. He would be charged with knowing about bookmaking and refusing to blow the whistle.

By 9 a.m., the phone at Chi Chi's restaurant started ringing. DeStefano's mother, Teresa, answered the first batch of reservation requests. Then Chi Chi took some calls. Their son the alderman arrived in the late afternoon.

``Hello, Chi Chi's,'' answered Joe DeStefano.

``Dinner reservations for two, please. Don't worry about it, Joe.''

``Reservations for six. It's petty ante stuff, Joe.''

The phone continued to ring all day. By dinnertime, 1st Ward residents packed Chi Chi's, the small 50-seat DeStefano family restaurant at Beattie Avenue and Prince Street.

They kept coming all night. Respectable people. Bank vice presidents, lawyers, government agency supervisors, aunts, uncles, merchants. You'll beat 'em, they told Joe, we're behind you.

Even some of those who don't like the alderman thought it was a nonsense charge. Gee, what's the kid supposed to do, tell on the people he's known his whole life, betray his own father, for crying out loud?

They turned the tables over four times that night at DeStefano's, serving close to 200 dinners, their busiest night ever.

Outsiders might have considered the scene incredible. The public official had announced he was on his way to a grand jury indictment for official misconduct and a parade of well-wishers were there to pat him on the back.

To understand why, it is important to know something about the DeStefanos and their connection with the mile wide stretch of old houses and backyard tomato gardens. Those who live elsewhere call it Little Italy. Many residents call the neighborhood Albert Street.

Joe DeStefano and his father, Chi Chi, simply refer to it as their ``entire world.''

* * *

Looking down from Highland Avenue, it becomes clear why Middletown isn't really a city at all.

You see a series of separate enclaves, tucked away in hillsides and valleys. Houses wind along short narrow streets circling into themselves, cut off by the next crooked hill. There is little citywide perspective, only neighborhood ones. The forlorn central business district is called downtown by some, uptown by others.

Inside the neighborhood enclaves, lives were once open books. Family births, deaths, marriages, brawls, illnesses were all common community knowledge.

That changed as life in mobile America changed. Entire Middletown neighborhoods have turned over now, populated by strangers looking blankly at each other as they climb in their cars to commute to Rockland and Manhattan. Middletown is becoming a mind-your-own-business town.

Only the Little Italy section of the 1st Ward remains tightly knit. It's landscape is unimposing, a stretch of treeless flatland east of downtown, directly in the shadow of the massive Route 211 suburban shopping strip.

Here, among the modest worn houses, a sheltered Old World way of life thrives. Folks get their daily bread from family bakeries. Devout neighborhood churchwomen from St. Joseph's send donations to churches ``back home.'' Families still live in clusters according to where they lived in Italy. Houses are handed down generation to generation. And new immigrants from Italy continue to arrive.

Old World values prevail: Hard work, family, church, community. Low crime, very little in the way of illegal drugs. And, oh yes, there's plenty of gambling.

In fact, the 1st Ward hasn't changed much from the place where Joe DeStefano's grandparents came nearly 80 years ago.

Back then, the Highland Avenue rulers smugly looked down on the ward as a kind of immigrant serfdom. Once the ward had been mostly Irish, but they were pushed aside by the wave of Italian immigrants of the early 1900s.

Eventually, the Italians were able to work their way into the front seats at St. Joseph's church but when it came to opportunity in the work world, they were trapped. Some local factories would not hire Italians. Forget the police force or white-collar jobs.

Italians were consigned to sweep the city streets and work on the railroad.

Filling one of those thousands of railroad jobs was Angelo Bianchi. He came to the neighborhood in 1916 from Frosinone, 150 miles outside of Rome. He found work as a trackman on the O&W. When he became a U.S. citizen five years later, he sent for his wife, Filomena, and their children.

Their oldest daughter, Julia, grew up and married Eugene Raponi, a childhood friend from Italy, who ran a candy store on Prince Street.

Julia's younger sister, Teresa, also worked in the Raponi store when she became a teen-ager. One day, a handsome, strapping high school football player named Chi Chi walked in and her heart leaped.

The young man's father, Carmen, had arrived in Middletown from a mountain outside of Naples to work on the railroad. Because he couldn't read or write, he couldn't become a U.S. citizen. He had to enlist in the Army during World War I to get his citizenship. Hard work and family, that's was Carmen's life.

Louis, or Chi Chi as they called him, was the middle of the DeStefano's five children. He joined the life of hard work early. By age 9, a bus at the firehouse would pick up Chi Chi and other neighborhood kids, hauling them off to work the Pine Island onion fields at 22 1/2 cents an hour. Every nickel went back to the family.

When the boy came home, he would watch the crap games going on all over the neighborhood. Life was grim; there were few luxuries. The entertainment was gambling. There were penny games, quarter games, and for the hotshots, dollar games. Just a little action to spice up the dreary dead-end workaday world. Didn't hurt anyone, the men agreed.

Chi Chi's father only knew work; he considered gambling sinful. But this was America, land of possibilities. Little Chi Chi DeStefano longed to have a couple of pennies so he could play.

Chi Chi did go on to play Middletown High School football, developing a reputation as a real macho guy. One day, he walked into the Raponi candy store and saw a cute girl named Teresa working behind the counter. Even as a serviceman in Korea, he never forgot her face.

In 1953, Chi Chi and Teresa married.

Chi Chi took advantage of the small opportunities beginning to open up for Italians. He found a job as a truck driver for Dana Distributing. He faithfully brought home that paycheck to his family every week for 37 years.

He also worked second and third jobs. Blood money, he called it. That was his to gamble.

He had plenty of company. Every night, tired working men would hang out at the corner of Ogden and Prince or in the barrooms spread along Cottage Street.

And they would bet. Craps, Yanks, Giants, horses, whatever. To be sure, not everyone gambled. And, surely, men in other neighborhoods bet plenty. There was betting in the nice clubs where judges and politicians lived and Italians weren't allowed. But no one would venture that gambling wasn't a major part of life in the 1st Ward.

The men of the 1st Ward decided to build their own social club. In 1949, neighborhood masons and carpenters built the First Ward Social and Athletic Club.

``The social part is drinking,'' went the joke. ``The athletic part is shooting crap.''

This was the world Joe DeStefano was born into. He was the youngest of the DeStefano boys, strikingly similar to Chi Chi. Like his father, he likes to gab, tell a joke or a tall story, have a good time.

And like a lot of kids in the neighborhood, he grew up with the gambling.

It got in the blood early. Diana's Restaurant had a pool table back then. The men played for money. They'd give the kids a buck to get the paper. Joe and the other kids would spend the change betting on the pool games.

On Monday nights, when Terese waitressed and Chi Chi had to mind little Jo Jo, the father would take him along to Monticello Raceway. Joe hit his first daily double when he was 11 years old. He still remembers the second horse's name - Wallkill Sunny - and the payoff - $64.

As he grew older, Joe would sometimes accompany Chi Chi and the carload of 1st warders making nightly trips to the Roosevelt and Yonkers harness tracks.

One day, before Joe turned 18, Chi Chi brought home a pair of dice. Like an master Indian hunter passing on his secrets to his son, Chi Chi taught Joe how to shoot craps and how to detect loaded dice. He wanted Jo Jo to know so he could hold his own when he became an adult and participated in the First Ward Social and Athletic Club clambakes.

``These are the ways of the world,'' said Chi Chi.

By the 1960s, the ways of the Middletown world were changing. The old power structure was breaking up. Factories closed. The kids were getting a decent public education.

Opportunities opened. Many 1st Ward residents succeeded in business, becoming prominent lawyers and businesspeople.

Teresa suggested the family could even move to a nicer house on Woodlawn Avenue, still in the 1st Ward but several blocks away from the Albert Street hub. No way, Chi Chi told her. ``This is my world right here.''

And it became Joe's. He received typical 1st Ward schooling. Albert Street kindergarten, St. Joe's elementary, Middletown High School. But even he was affected by the growing opportunities. Joe became the first in his family to go to college. ``He never liked hard labor,'' goes the family line.

He went to Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry. He lived down there for a semester, but he soon grew homesick, and commuted from the 1st Ward. Classmates talked about the million and one places where they might live after school. Joe knew. Graduating with a business degree, he went right back to the old neighborhood. He worked for a while in the accounting department of Channel Master in Ellenville. But Chi Chi and Joe had a 1st Ward dream, one that prominent families like the Dianas and the Scalis had realized.

In 1981, they took over a former strip joint (and craps hangout) and opened Chi Chi DeStefanos, a family restaurant. Chi Chi was retiring from his beer truck and Joe quit Channel Master to help run the restaurant.

Using family connections and Joe's business education, the restaurant got off the ground. One day, in 1983, Democratic county legislator and former Mayor John McMickle walked in, sat down at the bar and asked Joe to run for 1st Ward alderman.

Joe was a natural candidate. He had a restaurant. He had five aunts within three blocks. He had close to 150 relatives living in the ward.

Only one problem. The DeStefanos were all registered Republicans.

In fact, the family was related to the esteemed Liberat Raponi. Back in the '30s, Raponi was one of the unofficial liasons between the Republican city administration and the 1st Ward. He made sure everyone registered Republican. In exchange, the Italians would get jobs sweeping the streets.

But behind the deference to authority, there was always a sullen rebellious streak against the power structure. It came out in the secrecy of the voting booth.

Liberat would remind the ladies like Joe's grandmother, Filomena, to vote Republican as he drove them to the polls.

Filomena would come back and sit on the porch like the cat who ate the canary. ``Ah, I voted for the Democrat,'' she said. She wasn't the only rebel. Even though the ward had a heavy Republican registration, Democrats often got elected.

Joe, who had minored in political science, liked his chances. Anyway, his days at college had given him a wider, less conservative world view. He could run as a Democrat.

His father hated the idea. He told him not to stick his neck out. Sure, Chi Chi was involved in his union, but that was bread and butter. You're asking for trouble, he told his son.

DeStefano insisted on running. He played the campaign smart, going door to door, letting family connections ride. He won by a landslide.

In the 1st Ward, his life went on as normal. He gambled a little here and there, he says. His father said he sure wasn't going to change his gambling habits just because his son was a politician. Fine, dad.

Joe DeStefano didn't seem to understand he was a watched man.

There was plenty to watch. DeStefano as the young turk alderman, became something of a bull in a china shop. He accumulated enemies. He had run-ins with Mayor Dan Johnson, a fellow Democrat, Tom Grecco, the School Board president and Police Chief Thomas Lopez. He popped off when he felt like it during council meetings, as if he were sitting in his bar arguing the Giants offense.

Many of the issues played well in the ward, like his successful campaign to save the Albert Street School. Other issues were riskier. He leaped to the cause of rent stabilization, an unpopular issue that went over poorly in a ward populated by many small landlords.

It didn't hurt him. He was re-elected twice by 3-1 majorities. And he began to develop a citywide constituency, with his name being whispered as a future mayor. If it happened, it would be the first time an Italian would be elected mayor.

He married a woman from outside the ward, a non-Italian no less. The old ladies from Montgomery Street didn't show up at the church for the wedding.

The marriage didn't work out. He remarried, this time to a woman from the neighborhood. The old ladies showed up at St. Joseph's for that one.

They bought a house on Grand Avenue, in the thick of the 1st Ward. Last spring, his wife became pregnant.

On Jan. 8, shortly before the NFC championship game, Middletown police busted a local gambling ring.

DeStefano had an inkling trouble lay ahead. People kept telling him he was the one they were gunning for. He told his father to cool it with the gambling in the bar. Chi Chi said he wasn't hurting anyone. Let the cops go chase the crack dealers on Linden Avenue.

* * *

By mid-afternoon, the business lunch crowd at Chi Chi's is gone. The place belongs again to the neighborhood. The bar talk is over someone's illness, someone's new baby, everyone else's family.

On afternoons like these, father Chi Chi and son Joe sit at a dark table away from a window, where red, white and green venetian blinds are drawn against the pale sun.

Chi Chi has just bet a friend on a Cleveland-Houston basketball game on ESPN. ``He didn't even wait for the line,'' says Joe, shaking his head. ``If they made capital punishment a crime, my father would bet on whether or not he'd get caught.''

Over at the bar, they're even setting a line on whether the alderman will get convicted. This week, a grand jury charged DeStefano with official misconduct, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.

The district attorney's office says it has a wiretap on DeStefano placing a bet. District Attorney . Frank Phillips says a public official with gambling debts could be open to corruption. DeStefano claims it's nonsense, that he's a victim of a vendetta by the Middletown police.

He agrees with a visitor who suggests he's still secure in the ward. He might even still challenge Johnson for mayor. This whole thing could blow over by Election Day.

``It won't blow over,'' says his father. ``Things haven't changed that much in this town. An Italian gets into trouble and immediately everyone is saying he's in the Mafia.''

The son counts his worries. A conviction could mean his liquor license might be suspended, closing the restaurant. And he couldn't shake it off so easily. Six weeks ago, he became a father. He has responsibilities.

But the alderman announces that a jury of his 1st Ward peers have already found him innocent. It's no big deal if he doesn't become mayor.

``What of it?'' asks Joe DeStefano, shrugging off the grand jury's charge. ``I'm going to live and die on Grand Avenue.''

 

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