The Gypsy King

The Goose stands outside Tony the Barber’s shop on Third Avenue staring as the ragged caravan bumps to the curb alongside 479 Carroll Street.
“The fuck is this?” he half-shouts.

Alongside him, Mikey Romanelli tugs at the beautifully tailored cuff of his white shirt and looks up. Half-a-dozen dusky women and raggedy children pile out of two sedans onto the sidewalk, the cars a patchwork of rust and unfinished bodywork. The lead car, a bronze ‘65 Cadillac in slightly better condition, stays idling at the curb.
“Spics,” says The Goose, short, squat and as easily ruffled as his avian namesake. “What are they doing in this neighborhood?”
“They ain’t Puerto Ricans,” says Mikey, staring over his bifocals. “Gypsies.”

“Same shit!” The Goose turns his attention back to the scribbled sheets of paper his numbers runners have hidden in the graffiti-covered U.S. Postal Service mailbox in front of the barber shop. Nobody in the neighborhood, not even Brownie the mailman, is allowed to use the mailbox, and for spite, the more reckless of my friends throw lighted matchbooks down the chute.

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Two women in long skirts, their necklaces strung with costume jewels and gold coins, stroll across Third Avenue, oblivious to the stares of Fat Rosie, the eagle-eyed neighborhood gossip, the bleached-haired crossing guard (“Butchie the Fag"), and the air horns of the tractor-trailers rumbling along the avenue. They walk into Luzeen’s grocery store, ignoring the baleful stares of the Italians.
“See that shit! They leave the little kids on the corner?" The Goose says concerned.. "They’re gonna get run over!”
“What are yous animals!” Louie Diamonds pipes up.
Romanelli frowns. “Eh, mind your business. They ain’t bothering nobody.”
The battered driver’s door of the bronze Caddy opens with a groan. The driver, a wiry 30-year-old in bellbottom jeans and flowered shirt, skips out, opens the back door, and stands back. An old man, bearded and wearing rumpled dress slacks and a wife-beater tee-shirt, steps onto the sidewalk. Like the Italians, he wears multiple rings and a thick gold chain and crucifix around his neck. He looks around, his gaze taking in the impeccably dressed Romanelli, and the half-dozen Italians wearing powder blue leisure suits, canary yellow shirt-jacs, black see-through silk shirts staring at his ragged entourage. He nods to Romanelli, and is joined by a plump bejeweled woman. They stroll regally past the tin garbage cans, through the battered front door of three story yellow brick apartment building
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Half-a-dozen dozen gypsies follow them into the vacant ground floor apartment. The kids are still on the sidewalk, uncertain as kittens. In better days, the apartment had been a doctor’s office, sitting catty-corner from the neighborhood’s sole attorney, Vincent P. Mangano, both long dead or fled to Bensonhurst.  A picture window facing Third Ave. has been bricked over with unpainted cinder-blocks, a prize fighter whose eyes have been battered shut.
The women exit the grocery store, eating cheap, white bread sandwiches. Third Avenue is wide; they don’t cross until every bite is consumed, ignoring the stares of the kids
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“Wait a minute," hisses The Goose. " They think they gonna live here? Are you fucking kidding me?”
I’m on the opposite sidewalk watching this unfold, drenched in sweat, compounding and Simonizing my first car, a piece-of-shit  black Triumph TR-4.  A familiar trickle of fear stirs in my gut.
And so, it began. A tribe of gypsies arrived in a place so tribal that a stranger could not cross the Gowanus Canal without being accosted, where young black men daring a glance from a car stopped at the red light on Carroll Street could be dragged out and beaten (the same awaited me if I dared walk three blocks to Degraw St. Park), where life and death authority radiated from the backroom of the Capri Club—50 feet from the mailbox—along with the sonorous tones of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.
No one acknowledged government—I can’t recall a single guy from Carroll Street who served in Vietnam—or the church (Father Mario hung out in Monte’s Venetian Room with the gangsters), or the cops from the 76^th Precinct who collected brown paper bags of money and provided free car service to a mad mafia assassin named “Apples” MacIntosh.
Yet, no one would ever think of harming “Brownie,” or the processed-haired brothers, Freddy and Marty, who ran the gas station on Third Street, or the half-dozen black men who worked for years at the paint factory alongside the canal. In the neighborhood, women, a pre-hippie guitarist, the alarming assortment of mental defectives, each with the tag pazzo (crazy) attached to their given names, were protected. They were insiders.
Gypsies were outsiders, eternal outsiders. Outside the law, but now within the grasp of dangerous men.







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To be continued

The Jordan Brothers, Stout-Hearted Men

 When I was a child, Gloria, my mother, would sing to me and tell stories of my grandfather Jim Jordan, a pro boxer, and his six brothers. Born “Giordano” in the impoverished Mezzogiorno region of Italy, these were big, burly men, lumberjacks, (the reason why as a 6’ 1” and 190 lb. teenager, I towered over the Italian shrimps in my neighborhood).
The Giordanos had a rambunctious, expansive sense of themselves, long since diluted in me and my Americanized cousins. They’d arrived , flat-broke, in South Brooklyn on the Gowanus Canal at the turn of the century. Within 10 years, two had joined the NYPD and were Mayor Fioriello Laguardia’s personal bodyguards Two others strongmen and pro wrestlers who toured the ethnic enclaves of the East Coast and Midwest as the mad Russian and a bone-breaking Sicilian, a ruse that came to a bad end when from the mat, the “Russian” whispered to his brother in Sicilian, “Shithead, you’re hurting me!” Real Sicilians were in the front row.
My grandfather, insanely jealous, but otherwise righteous, is remembered for dangling a man over the rail of the Gowanus. The guy had dared tip his cap and say, “Buongiorno’ to my grandmother, Clementina.
When Gloria told me the 10-year-old me, her uncle Frank Jordan and the brothers organized their own annual, costumed Thanksgiving Parade and rode through the cobblestone streets of South Brooklyn—now overrun by an infestation of fedora-wearing hipster ass-wipes—on horseback, I balked. I admit I did.
All these years later, my cousin Lorraine (Giordano) Garrison comes up with a photo from the 1922 Brooklyn Standard newspaper. It’s all true and all these folks are long gone, their lives and stories unremarked, but sometimes when I return to Carroll Street and stare over the turgid, toxic green waters of the Gowanus, I remember a line from the odd lullaby my mother used to sing: “Give me some men who are stout-hearted men…” And I see my grandfather, bull-necked big-nosed, muscles rippling, holding a guy over the canal, I know exactly who that person would be.


The Seven Giordano Brothers: