My Cousin Richie

I fly up for my brother's wedding held in one of the glittery Bensonhurst halls Italian-Americans love. Big band;  feasting followed by “Venetian Hour,” preceded by “Cocktail Hour,” topped off by a flaming post-midnight breakfast. My sister-in-law has a tuxedo for four-year-old Thomas and a personal stylist to do 12-year-old Gaby’s hair. Having been married by a justice of the peace with a “Here Comes Da Judge” sign on his desk, I marvel at all the splendor. Unknown to me, the groom had quit the job I’d gotten him at Newsweek and was now a bookie. Unknown to his Armani-clad bosses—seated at their own gangster table near the kiddie table—he was a crazed gambler.
When I step out of my limo, all my female cousins are screaming, “He’s coming!!”
“Who?”
“He’s starring in a new movie with Robert DeNiro!”
“Who?”
“Cousin Richie! Richie Castellano!”
That’s odd. Richard Castellano, who played the portly “Clemenza” in The Godfather (“Leave the gun; take the cannoli”), had died 10-years before. At that moment, one of the shrieking teenagers thrust a glossy headshot at me. Sure enough, the cutline proclaimed “Richard Castellano,” but the broken-nosed visage smiling at me was my cousin Richie, “Richie Mel.”
Everyone knew that. Or so I thought.
*****
One of the last times I’d seen Richie, I was living on Fifth Street (above 8th Avenue to connoisseurs of Park Slope). Teaching English at Automotive High School in Williamsburg. That morning, I was unlocking my car when I heard a hoarse shout.
“Cuz! You gotta help me!”
I looked up. “Hey Richie. What’s up?”
“Cuz! I’m begging ya!”
Everyone in South Brooklyn shouted. All day, all the time, as if they really were players fretting and strutting on some invisible stage. The rest of us were scenery for them to chew.
“What’s wrong?”
“Cuz, they say I robbed a gas station!”
“What?”
“I’m innocent. I swear to my mother! They saying I shot a guy…with a shotgun!”
“Get outta here!”
“Fuckin’ cops! You know how they lie!”
I did know. Ten years before, I'd made the mistake of getting drunk on Tango, pre-bottled rutgut vodka and orange juice. A very bad choice for a Catholic high school boy. I was swept up in a dragnet--there had been a street gang murder that night--and dragged into the 78th precinct where a two cops took turns beating me for hours hoping for a confession. They were disappointed when the real killer was caught and marched in. By way of apology, an Irish cop walked me outside, punched me in the stomach and threw me down the concrete steps.
Richie paused as if to find his mark. “Cuz, you’re an educated guy. You went to college. I’m stupid! You gotta help me. I know I did some things, but I’m innocent this time. I got a wife…”
He choked back a sob. “Maybe…maybe you could talk to Uncle Sonny.” (Our uncle, Sal Giordano, was an NYPD detective so straight he was known in the neighborhood as “Elliot Ness.”) “Uncle Sonny knows people.”
“I could call him.”
I knew Uncle Sonny's first impulse would be to strangle Richie. For years, he and his wayward brothers—“JuJu,” “Jimmy Psycho,” and “Popeye Anthony”—had been the bane of Sonny's existence. (Another Castaldo brother, despite his nickname, "Alibi Ike," went on to lead a blameless life, serving in the Air Force, building a successful career, supporting a wife and family.)
“Maybe you can write a letter to the prosecutor," Richie added. "I was thinking the bishop too. You know my sister Carol works in Our Lady of Peace rectory. She cooks for the priests…Cuz, I’m really scared.”
“What’s his name?”
"Who?"
"The bishop."
“Fuck I know.”
I’d always felt Richie and his brothers—all smart, engaging, personable guys--were a photographic negative of my family. Or victims of some mysterious curse. The curse of growing up by the Gowanus Canal. Three of my brothers had graduated from college; none of us had ever been in trouble (all this would change). I felt guilty; I’d committed the sin of hard work and ambition.
“I’m fucking innocent!” he sobbed.
“Come on. It’s okay." I gave him a pretend hug. "Nothing’s going to happen. I promise. When I get home from work, come by. We’ll eat. I’ll help you. Ok?"
This was the Vietnam War era; the Watergate era; the Berrigan Brothers…injustice, civil rights
“You mean it Cuz?”
“Sure…But I gotta get to work now.”
“No problem. I don’t want to bother you. I know you’re a busy guy. Responsibilites.”
As I was tossing my briefcase—stuffed with papers I’d spent half the night marking--into my green Karmann Ghia, Richie called out again.
“Cuz...”
I sighed and stood up. The tears were gone. He was grinning. I stared as he pulled a greasy wad of bills from his pants’ pocket. Hundreds of dollars. He fanned it in front of my face.
“Cuz,” he said. “But I got the money!”
He couldn’t resist. He had to let me know he thought I was an idiot.
***
Years pass before I see Cousin Richie again. Out of jail, he’s now pursuing a career as a prize fighter. It turns out our family has a long boxing history. One of my earliest memories is a tabloid photo of my maternal grandfather, club fighter “Jim Jordan,” standing, thick arms raised in triumph, over a battered black man named “Preacher” something or other. The caption is typical of the era: “Negro’s Prayers No Help Against Jordan Onslaught.” All seven Jordan (Giordano) brothers, lumberjacks in Itay, were outsized men. Two were pro-wrestlers in the 1930s, one supposedly a “Russian.” In Chicago, an astute fan heard this Russian hiss in Neapolitan dialect to his brother—“Take it easy! Goddamn it! You’re hurting me!”—and the jig was up. My grandfather had big hopes for his eldest son, but my Uncle Tony’s nickname (“Punchy”) said it all.
Richie is holding court in Snooky’s Pub on Seventh Ave., surrounded by a gaggle of intrigued women. (Think Johnny Boy in Scorsese’s Mean Streets.) The same girls, braless and casually available I, with my droopy mustache and faded jeans, my teaching job, my books and bullshit, could not get my hands on. This is post-hippie era Park Slope. The communes of the mid-‘60s—one of them, the four-story brownstone at 16 Polhemus Place could be had for $60,000 if you could find a banker willing to write a mortgage—are passing away like the elvish people in Lord of the Rings, replaced by armada of arrogant Gen X'ers pushing Peg Perego prams, assuming nothing and no one existed before they’d arrived on scene.
Trim, blond hair cut unfashionably short, nose suitably broken, Richie spots me at the front of the bar. “What is it Cousin Vin! Get over here!”
“Here we go,” I think
“This is my cousin. He’s a school teacher.”
Instantly, the women’s eyes glaze over. With a ninth grade education, and a fourth grade writing style, Richie had spent two years writing his prison memoirs; in longhand, on spiral tablets, in multi-colored ink that had arrived at my apartment every few months.
“Cuz!” he'd suggested. “Polish this up a little. You know how. We split the money!”
A blizzard of misspelling, cliché, and repetition. I couldn’t say this the few times he’d called me to check on our “investment.” But Richie is nothing but resilient. To my relief, he’s surrendered his literary aspirations along with his orange jumpsuit.
“Cuz, I’m fighting next week in Sheepshead Bay,” he crows, shooting jabs in all directions. “I’m gonna kill this fuckin’ guy. Am I right ladies?”
The women instantly perk up.
“Cuz, get these girls some drinks. I’ll get yous all front row seats.”
The fight was actually staged at a street festival near Emmons Avenue. Tickets were free and Richie was knocked out in the first round. A dying swan, nose streaming.
“Cuz, I’m bleeding!”
****
Fast forward. I’ve flown up from Atlanta to visit my mother. I'm crossing Third Avenue—the Carroll Street Bridge and the Gowanus Canal glimmer in the summer haze—when Richie spots me.
“Help me Cousin Vin!” he rasps. “They’re gonna kill me!”
He was clinging to the iron rail fence of a rundown apartment building on the corner. A sedan idled at the curb. Two guys were grabbing at his arms. I didn’t know them, but I’d grown up with the third guy, Chuckie R, a capo in the Colombo family run from prison by Carroll Street’s own Carmine “Junior" Persico. Chuckie had been a serious, thoughtful guy; never intimidating, always interested in my career as a journalist in the American South. Our parents had been friends growing up. It seemed to me Chuckie had had the misfortune of being born into a particularly ill-starred and oft-targeted mafia family. Today he’s serving life in prison on a RICO conspiracy with a dozen of his cousins and uncles.
“Cousin Vin!” Richie shouts frantically.
By now, Fat Rosie and Carroll Street’s other resident gossip mongers are all eagerly watching.
“Vinny,” Chuckie says, “Get this fuckin moron to shut up.”
“They’re gonna kill me. Don’t let them take me!”
“Nobody’s gonna hurt you!” Chuckie hisses.
“Richie shut up!” I plead “It’s okay.”
All I want to do is visit my mom. Once again, I'm caught in his mad web. Any moment, I knew Gloria would be out the door, charging up the street to our rescue. (It had happened before when my brother Thomas who was gay, beat the hell out of Michael Romanelli, a bigshot bookie's son.) Chuckie takes me aside. It turns out that, while jailed, Richie repeatedly claimed to have numerous connections among the correction officers and administrative staff of a particular prison in upstate New York. He was so well-connected, he insisted, that for a few thousand dollars, he could guarantee that some wise guy’s son, nephew, father or cousin would be provided exceptional treatment and perks—the best jobs, free access to food parcels, choice of cellmates, books, who knows what. An offer they couldn’t refuse. With generations of family members being incarcerated at a dizzying pace, it was a perfect, though wildly reckless scam. Richie collected thousands of dollars and then disappeared.
Now he's was back and the word was out. Another family, perhaps a murderous splinter of the Colombo family in Bensonhurst or Howard Beach, has put a contract on Richie. All this was patiently explained to me as if what I thought counted. I don’t understand this world or its arcane rules, but my cousin—certainly no made-man—was under the protection of the Persico faction.
That’s a very long story, maybe going all the way back to his father, (“Uncle Fat”) who as a young man was crippled by a Southern scab driving a tractor-trailer into a dockworkers’ picket line. Uncle Fat made the most of his martyrdom. He’d limp into supermarkets on Fifth Avenue, pack his cart with steaks and beer and groceries for his wife and offspring, then threaten any hapless proprietor who dared to hand him a bill with his cane, shouting,
“Let them pay!” And they did, for years.
Richie was simply going to a meeting; get a talking to, after which, some outsized lug would doubtless “throw him a beating.” The phrase demonstrates how absolutely unimportant one’s well being is in the grand scheme. I guess what the Alcoholics Anonymous types mean by “powerlessness.” But Richie would live to rise again.
And, of course, he did.
***
When Analyze This premiers in 1999, I swear I spot him next to Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. WTF! I track down his sister Carol in Brooklyn, and she proclaims him “a star!” (The whole family exaggerates.) “Richie got me on the set! Robert De Niro kissed me.” (Approximate translation: “Fuck you Vinny and your college education!”)
As “Jimmy Boots,” De Niro’s "dese and dose" bodyguard, Richie croaks just 16 lines (“What are you, some kind of moron?” among the more memorable), but like a viral vector, exposure is more than enough for him to infect an exponentially bigger—and much more naïve—population than a Park Slope bar or the streets along the Gowanus Canal.
I’d spent time in Hollywood—most journalists think about it—I’d seen the throngs of unemployed young actors clustered Sunday mornings in Studio City, futilely comparing notes and filching casting calls. You want Italian? I met dozens: New York-Italian, Chicago-Italian, San Francisco-Italian, blueblood Italians from Rome and Milan; artistic, handsome, beautiful, stupid, charming, effeminate, dangerous, talented Italians—Chazz Palminteri had parked cars!—none of them going anywhere. And here was Richie, strutting and fretting, giving advice and television interviews, fabricating madly: “….. I come from a big family with mob connections. When I was a kid I saw people killed... by the time I was 12 or 13 years old I was an alcoholic. That was the only life I ever knew, the only thing... So I was a street guy, a bank robber (N.B. gas station becomes bank; bank will become shoe store). And in order to survive, one of the skills you got to develop is acting. I been shot, beaten to a pulp with lead pipes, you name it, at various times in my past life—I’ve even been pronounced DOA one time when they took me to hospital. Altogether I survived ten contracts on my life – ten…” . His claim about being dead might be true. What Richie didn’t say, what I recall, is that he overdosed, probably on Tuinals or Seconals, and his brother, Popeye Anthony, an ambulance driver, found him on President Street.
Richie now had an agent; he had a website; he was organizing a film festival. He had a French wife!
I sure didn’t. This was too much.
Richie was no longer a cousin, or a “colorful” Gowanus character. Richard Castellano, ne Castaldo, was a story. At Newsweek, my editor Terry McDonell had me spend a month with the Rolling Stones; at Men’s Journal he’d ordered me to Hanoi after I mentioned a popular disco named “Apocalypse Now.” (He made me eat snakes.) At Esquire, he’d sent me to the New Mexican desert to find Jimmy Baca, a mad Apache poet who’d taught himself to read in prison and held Wallace Stevens’s chair at Yale. (He made me eat mushrooms.) But Terry was no longer at Esquire—he’d temporarily been banished to a fishing magazine—and the new editor, a baldy suburbanite, didn’t know me or care about Richie. This was a shame, because Richie and his new wife, Jocelyne Castellano, aka Jocelyne Castaldo-Castellano, aka Maria Jocelyne Castellano, aka Marie-Helene Rousseau aka Marie Rousseau (the “aka's" are significant), had moved to bucolic Narrowsberg, N.Y., and were plotting to rip off the entire county.
Richie arrived in upstate New York in the spring of 1999, a few months after Analyze This opens in 2500 theaters. (The film would go on to gross more than $100 million.) I know this because I tracked him down. (“Cousin Vin! Where you been?") Jocelyne, in a breathy French accent invites me to their First Annual Narrowsberg International Film Festival. (WTF!) My cousin is now become Jean Paul Belmondo?
A thousand miles away, I feel the old, mad Richie virus singing in my blood. (Surely, he’d find a place for me, his cousin, in the festival.) I fight it off, instead profiling another mad actor, Eric Roberts then living along the Hudson River.
Richie appears in Narrowsberg, a flyspeck along a bend of the Delware River. He arrives draped in black leather with a bodyguard named “Mondo” and a black Cadillac like one of Boccaccio’s shimmering young nobles in the Decameron. Actually, the plague-bearer in “Masque of the Red Death.”
Sixteen spoken lines and he opens the “Richard Castellano School of Acting.” Forty-two people sign on. Sixteen lines and the merchants and an ill-starred chicken farmer named Borg are convinced their hamlet will become “the Sundance of the East.” Sixteen lines and Richie announces he is starring in a gangster movie—Four Deadly Reasons—to be shot, for some unfathomable reason, in Narrowsberg. A good citizen, he wants to include local actors and investors. A lord, he struts, lapels flying like F-16s, down Main Street, shouting at everyone he meets, playfully shoulder-punching stolid burghers like they’re goombahs.
“What is it?” he demands of everyone, but only he does the talking.
His life isan open book, mostly fiction: the gas station he told me he’d robbed is now an armored car. (The next time he's arrested, he will shrink it a shoe store.) He has “$2 million stashed away.” He’s killed people and danced away from “ten contracts” on his life. By the Gowanus, these fantasies would have been dismissed with a knowing grin, a playful “slap in the head,'" or a knowing "Get the fuck out of here.!" In Narrowsburg, they’re intoxicating, an opportunity, unspoken, "to wet their beaks in the champagne fountain of celebrity.
Mornings, he storms into the Chatterbox Café on Main Street and announces he's buying everyone breakfast, then breezes out without paying. He brings in crews of “walyos” (guaglioni, affectionate Neapolitan slang for street corner guys) from NYC to people his movie. He scatters checks to wide-eyed vendors like rice at an Itallian wedding. John Borg, the chicken farmer, turns out to be a cinephile. Richie "casts" him as a “Marshall Dillon-type” character. Borg lives in a double-wide trailer; he invests $154,000.
Time passes, seasons change; checks bounce like cherry blossoms, then falling leaves, then a blizzard. A year later, in August 2000, Four Deadly Reasons is screened for the people of Narrowsberg. Richie is nowhere to be seen. This screening is later described on PBS' This American Life as “…a hastily produced, 15-minute montage of scenes from the movie. It's a porn film without sex scenes—awkward dialogue, noodly soundtrack, gratuitous use of bikinis and double entendres, and, most outrageously, no scenes with people from Narrowsburg..
What next unfolds is best described in a series of articles that ran in the Sullivan County Democrat over the following two years. In short, Richie’s dizzy trajectory is blunted. He's charged with four felony counts out of a cornucopia of extravagant malfeasance; named as defendant in at least 16 civil suits involving rental cars, equipment, meals, disgruntled actors. Even Mondo turns on him. Richie has a restraining order against his own bodyguard, certainly. Then his own attorney sues him.
The alleged felonies involve a scheme to secure SAG cards for aspiring actors (“Cousin Vin, I got the money!”),essentially the same con he’d successfully pulled with real wise guys . In Brooklyn at this point the gangsters are more likely to dispose than depose him.
On trial in Sullivan County Court, he chews scenery, constantly interuppting the proceedings, speechifying, ignoring threats of contempt from the bench. (My brother Joey, no angel, tells me, “Richie thinks the judge is a director.”) Ultimately, he plea-bargains, agreeing to restitution and a year in county jail. Of course, he doesn't appear for sentencing.
Reports circulate that he’d been found naked on the Verrazano Bridge about to commit suicide. (I don’t know what movie that was.) He's arrested walking “half-naked” in Manhattan and hauled off to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He claims he’s “taken too many shots to the head as a professional fighter.” (!) He checks into drug rehab, buying 90 more days of freedom. In Narrowsburg, folks are pulling their hair out.
Richie finally appears in court appropriately costumed in orange jumpsuit and shackles. Nonplussed, he asks Sullivan County Judge Frank J. La Buda to do him a "personal favor" and knock three months off his sentence. His daughter is getting married on Staten Island. “Can’t you find it in your heart to let me go to my daughter’s wedding?”
“This is not Let’s Make a Deal!” La Buda snaps.
Meanwhile, farmer and naïf, John Borg, who’d lost his life savings, is parading outside the courthouse with a hand-lettered sign reading “Hang ‘Em High!” Borg apparently couldn’t resist a final cinematic flourish.
Some of the money that dribbles into Narrowsburg over the next months covers Richie’s $12,000 restitution. The mone consists mostlyl of $20 money orders, suggesting that our family and his old neighborhood didn’t forsake Richie once his star had dimmed.
****
The world changed on September 11th 2001. Richie didn’t.
The 7th edition of the “Queens International Film Festival” kicks-off in winter of 2009. Its founder and executive director is none other than Jocelyne Castellano (aka Jocelyne Castaldo-Castellano, Maria Jocelyne Castellano, Marie-Helene Rousseau and Marie Rousseau). Year after year, it turns out, festival vendors and exhibitors from Connecticut to Texas are stiffed on fees and equipment rentals, perchance even hot dog sales. When projectionist James Hill threatens to take his grievance to the media, a gravelly voice hisses over his phone: “I know you’re a smart guy and you’ll understand what I’m telling you between the lines: You won’t talk to nobody!”
By now, you can guess what movie that line is from: My Cousin Richie.
Like Ebola, the virus that's responsible for my cousin's genius and his criminality may be dormant, waiting for a suitable host to begin replicating madly. In 2012, one of Richie and Jocelyne’s myriad victims, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker named Dan Nuxoll contacts me. He remains totally convinced the couple will make one hell of a documentary.
Rest assured Dan