What the book does reveal, quite movingly and unintentionally, is the emotional cost of living a lie.Paperback. These characters, on the other hand, are what DeMeo wants them to be: sisters who never knew of their father’s career and are unscathed by it, and most important, a good father, who was right to involve his son in the business at seven, to send him to brothels at 14 and to stage a fake execution as training. Every character in the Sopranos lives in all their moral complexity. The publishers bill this book as “a real life Sopranos”. More worryingly, these characters seem like cliches. All the character detail that he includes - the dramatic, manipulative grandmother the sunglasses-wearing mob boss the pretty, vacuous, high-school girlfriend the mute mother - seem peripheral. DeMeo is so concerned with recreating his child’s-eye view of a loving father, that he mimics a child’s confusion.īut little really matters to DeMeo except his relationship to his father - his idealised father, that is. Not only was I hazy as to concrete facts, but I could hardly separate the scores of characters, much less picture any of them. Shouldn’t DeMeo have put this - rather important - information a little earlier in the book? Indeed, after finishing it, I was surprised at how little I’d learned. But we don’t learn Roy DeMeo’s chief claim to fame until 200-odd pages into the book: he invented the “Gemini Method”, by which one drains corpses of blood, before chopping them up into little pieces and putting their heads through a meat grinder. He was the stuff of mob legend: an associate of John Gotti, a racketeer and pornographer, head of the most successful car-theft ring in New York. Twenty years after his father’s death, DeMeo still tries to excuse him, still relies on moral equivalency.ĭeMeo tells us that his father, Roy, was a Capo, or “made member”, in the Gambino family - the most powerful of New York’s five families in the 1970s. It’s a study in the half-truths that a wounded child learns to believe, and as such it is fascinating. But it’s interesting more for what DeMeo can’t tell us, than for what he does. This memoir, “For the Sins of My Father,” is what a therapist would call an attempt to find closure. Ten years later, after his subsequent nervous breakdown, DeMeo has published a rebuttal. Don’t the cops bend the rules when it suits them?ĭeMeo kept up this illusion until a pulp history, Murder Machine, was published in the mid-1990s, detailing his father’s prolific career as a hitman. He tried to think of his father as a smart businessman, who functioned slightly outside the law - after all, he told himself, the law’s just an arbitrary line. But despite learning at his father’s knee to “shoot twice in the head make sure they’re dead then slit their fucking throats”, he believed that his dad killed only reluctantly, under necessity. Eleven years later, in 1983, the cops summoned him to identify his father’s corpse, frozen solid after 10 days in the boot of a Cadillac, and shot seven times, an eyeball blown out from the socket.ĭeMeo always knew his father was in the Mafia. Julia Magnet, The Telegraph, book review of “ For the Sins of My Father” by Albert DeMeo, Īlbert DeMeo was six when his father gave him his first gun. My old man, the hit-man: a review of Albert DeMeo’s “For the Sins of My Father”
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