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My Grandfather the Goodfella
He had all the connections, but not the right ones
One of my all-time favorite movies is Goodfellas, based on the late real-life mobster Henry Hill in New York City from 1955 to 1980.
It details his involvement in the mafia, beginning with him as a youngster running small errands for big-time mobsters, and then progresses into Henry’s adulthood, showing how he became an infamous mobster and, in the final scene, a federal informant.
While watching the film for the first time, I pictured my paternal grandfather, who reminded me a lot of a gangster or a goodfella.
Joseph was born in the North End of Boston but moved to Avolina, Italy, at the age of two, staying there until age thirteen before moving back to Massachusetts for good.
Astute in more ways than one, he was a shrewd businessman who owned a nightclub, a shoe-shine place, and a bar in Everett, Massachusetts, called The Brass Rail.
He never really did much honest work though. Once a Navy man and an amateur boxer — friends would later nickname him “Joe Bananas” because he was a little off-center from his boxing days — Joseph ran numbers illegally at The Brass Rail, with some of the local cops tipping him off and running numbers there, too. At times, he even had my grandmother taking bets.
My grandfather was a womanizer, according to those who knew him, and wasn’t always the best father to his children. He could clear off the table with one fell swoop if dinner wasn’t to his liking. But boy did he dote on his grandchildren, namely, me, a young boy at the time whom he called “Davidu.”
“Come have some ‘vino’ with your Grandpa,” he’d say, and little old me would hop on his lap and take a sip of the bitter wine he’d made in his basement.
Making his own vino by buying fresh grapes and crushing and fermenting them, just like they did in the old country, gave him real pleasure.
I remember how he used to sit at the kitchen table drinking glass after glass of vino. Granted, I was not yet a teenager and he was offering me wine. My grandmother would be slaving over a hot stove as he sat there in the corner chair, indulging in his liquor.
