The Pope of Brooklyn

by Joseph Di Prisco

Overview

Joseph Di Prisco’s latest memoir brings back to life the hustler, gambler, criminal, bookmaker, and confidential informer who was his father. On the street they called him Pope, and he made his bones in Brooklyn during the ’50s and ’60s. Di Prisco discovered by accident fifty-year-old transcripts of New York State Appellate Division trials, where his dad was the star witness against corrupt NYPD cops—cops with whom he collaborated. Suddenly, Pope’s hazardous, veiled, twisting past was illuminated. This new book is both sequel and prequel to his much-praised memoir, Subway to California, and enlightened by these disclosures, Di Prisco memorably traces how secrets once revealed led to even deeper mysteries. In The Pope of Brooklyn he grapples with unsettling truths that simultaneously bind and separate father and son.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945572364
Publisher:	Rare Bird Books, A Vireo Book
Publication date:	03/20/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Joseph Di Prisco was born in Brooklyn and lives today in Northern California, with his wife, photographer Patti James. He's the author of the novels All for Now, The Alzhammer, The Confessions of Brother Eli, and Sun City, books of poems, and books about childhood and adolescence. The Pope of Brooklyn is the follow-up to his previous memoir, Subway to California.

Table of Contents

Conspiracies of the Past 17

It Was True at the Time 23

Down and Out in Brooklyn 31

Upon Information and Belief 43

Incriminations 51

Infinitely Dropped 59

1961 70

My Urban Plan 85

Slouching from Brooklyn 90

The Pope Meets Santa 92

Dog in the Rain 105

Testimony 108

Divided Selves 117

Star Witness 122

Cutting Stone 129

Turf 145

Sealed Files 152

The Fast Eddie F. Complex 153

Mitzvah Madness 159

Consideration 161

Ciao, Bella 180

More Alive Than Ever 192

Between He and I 197

Fresh Head 202

Organized Crime? 209

Sympathy for the Guy Sitting On My Phone Tap 214

Morning Bells are Ringing, Morning Bells are Ranging 220

Correspondences 228

Mysteries of the (Hair) Salon 253

She Don't Lie, She Don't Lie, She Don't Lie 259

What Larks 274

One Happy Birthday 286

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Something Like the Truth 293

Keeping Watch 326

Records & Sources 337

Editorial Reviews

"A literary son traces his fugitive father in a pulpy yet cerebral memoir. . . This sprawling narrative is punctuated by Di Prisco's reflections on literature, faith, mortality, and his own tangled romances and outré experiences, ranging from cocaine addiction to mentoring adolescents...Deft, amusing, and tough.”

—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2017-01-04
A literary son traces his fugitive father in a pulpy yet cerebral memoir.Novelist Di Prisco (The Alzhammer, 2016, etc.) roots this sequel to his previous memoir, Subway to California (2014), in his serendipitous discovery of a raft of trial transcripts concerning his father, a small-time criminal and gambling addict who helped crooked New York City cops shake down bookmakers and then testified against them, apparently receiving consideration for his own offenses. This explained the family's flight during his childhood from Brooklyn to California but opened up numerous other questions for him. "My father didn't exactly come out of nowhere, but it was close," writes the author. "It was on the mean streets of Brooklyn in the hardscrabble fifties where he made his bones." The memoir's strongest aspect is this unsparing portrait of his family as a whirl of combative intensity. Although Di Prisco always saw his father as "unmanageable, impulsive, bottled-up, unhinged," his volatile mother and his brother (who himself became a career criminal and heroin addict) considered him "a liar and a con man, a chump and a loser." The author relies on the trial transcripts (and other primary sources such as family letters) to evoke both a vanished urban era and a seamy moral landscape of casual criminality: "All of us kids knew of the hit man who lived on the block." Yet, despite his father's lifelong gambling habit and tendency toward prevarication, he redeemed himself later in life as a labor union executive, winning nine consecutive elections: "He took pride in the job and worked very hard….His Brother Teamster leaders always spoke of him in laudatory terms." This sprawling narrative is punctuated by Di Prisco's reflections on literature, faith, mortality, and his own tangled romances and outré experiences, ranging from cocaine addiction to mentoring adolescents. When his father died after their relationship had finally stabilized, he wondered, "for whom, besides myself, am I writing this book?" Despite some solipsistic meandering, a deft, amusing, and tough memoir.

Kirkus Reviews