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

talk about the bad things, just the good things. It was just like it was when we were kids—as if our lives hadn’t been separated by twenty years. I took her up in the lighthouse at Coney Island. She was petrified of heights. So I kissed her and calmed her down.
    â€œWhy don’t you come back to the house and see my mom?” she asked.
    â€œLike your mom would want to see me? Because the last time I remember, she hated my guts.”
    â€œEverything has changed since then, and a lot of stuff has happened.”
    I went back to Linda’s house that day. We took my car from Brooklyn to her house in Staten Island. When I walked in, her mother said, “Oh, my God.” I talked to her mom for quite some time. After that day Linda and I started talking again. We still talk on the phone sometimes, and on the Internet. We’re good friends. We had a good friendship when we were kids, and we still do now.
    Linda has been through so much in her life. But I’ve always told her to “turn your wounds into wisdom.” I heard Oprah Winfrey say that once.
    I live in Virginia now—I’m about an hour from Baltimore and about an hour from D.C.—where I manage a restaurant.
    I left Brooklyn in 1990 and went to Maryland. My friends were getting involved in gambling and drugs and a lot of them were getting killed. I had to get the hell out of there.
    I saw my life going downward. I started getting involved in gambling, and the drug use had gotten worse and worse. My dad had a job offer in the D.C. area. He asked me to help the family move and then check it out. I went out there one weekend to help them, and then I went back to Brooklyn. About a month later I was on the phone with my father.
    â€œDad, I have to come out there. I have to get the fuck out of here because I’m dying.”
    That beating made me realize that if you screw around with the Mob, you’re going to end up dead. I still partied, but I didn’t get involved in any of that friggin’ bullshit. But it really planted a seed in me. It was something that always haunted me. It never went away.
    To this day I don’t handle physical confrontations well, especially if there’s more than one guy approaching me, and when I feel like they’re going to gang up on me. I’ll stay pretty much calm if it’s a one-on-one encounter.
    But when I feel like there are three or four guys who might try and come after me, I flip out. I’ll go after them. I’m not going to stand there and take a beating. I’m going down swinging. I also don’t like to be in the backseat of a car with two people, one on each side of me. I don’t like that feeling of being closed in.
    Through the years, though, I did hold on to some anger and hatred toward the whole situation, but it was wearing me down. You don’t forget about something like that, but it did make me a better person. Sometimes a good beating will straighten you out.
    If I had a chance to say something to Linda’s dad right now, I would say, “Thank you.” First I would thank him for not killing me, because he very easily could have.The fact that he didn’t kill me gave me an opportunity to have the things that I have today. It all stemmed from that. I could’ve been dead, but I was spared—not too many people were spared.
    I would also thank him for helping me stay away from Mob-related business. I had opportunities to get involved with other close-to-Mob things, but I stayed away. I learned a lot from that beating.
    I don’t get high anymore or do drugs. I’ve been sober since 1991, completely sober—no drinking, nothing, zero. I don’t gamble at all. I don’t get involved with the Mob. A lot of guys in the neighborhood always wanted to be mobsters—little guys always acting like little gangsters. I was never like that—as a matter of fact, I used to like to beat up guys like that.
    So, Greg,