The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

school, what do I say?”
    â€œJust tell them that I’m a professional gambler.”
    â€œA professional gambler, what the heck is that?”
    â€œLinda, that’s a real job. People do gamble professionally.”
    So whenever anybody asked what my father did for a living, I’d tell them that he was a professional gambler. They’d just sort of look at me. At that point, I didn’t really know any better. My brother and I just went with it. What choice did we have? Maybe we weren’t sure what he did for work at first, but one thing we did know for sure was that the love that my father showed us was unconditional—at least before all the violence started.
    My father pretty much kept us sheltered until we were teenagers. We had really strict rules. Not only did we have to have dinner at a certain time, but we had to be in bed by a certain time—9:30 P.M. when we were younger, unless we were watching a special show as a family, and then eleven o’clock or midnight when we were in high school.
    But even though we were in bed, it didn’t mean we’d go to sleep. Sometimes when we were younger, I’d sneak into Joey’s room or he’d sneak into mine. A lot of times we heard noises coming from my parents’ room—music and laughing. That’s just the way they were—very into each other. So we’d sneak up to their door and try to hear what was going on.
    â€œLin, what are they doing?” Joey would ask because we really didn’t know.
    As we got older, and I started to figure things out, I’d tell my dad, “Me and Joey heard you and Mom making a lot of noise last night and we couldn’t sleep.”
    Then my father would say, “Really. What did you hear?”
    â€œI don’t know. We just heard you making a lot of noise, Dad. And your hair looks kind of messy this morning.”
    They didn’t really hide things like that. They weren’t the type of parents who were discreet. My mother and father were very open. Joey and I didn’t really like it, but what could we do?
    In a lot of ways we were the typical family, spending time together, going on vacation. When we were younger, we went on a lot of vacations to Florida with my mother. My father came with us sometimes, but often we went with people in my father’s crew, such as Joseph “Joe Brewster” DeDomenico—I really loved Joe Brewster—and Robert “Bobby Zam” Zambardi. I was about seven or eight years old. I always thought it was weird that they came with us.
    When I got older, my mother told me why they were with us—they were going there to kill people. Sometimes we’d all go down there first to check things out, like where they were going to do the actual murder.
    One time we drove down because they were going to kill this guy named Joe Peraino, but they didn’t get the job done. Joe Brewster had the gun in his shorts, but he must have forgotten about it because he went swimming and he lost it in the ocean. So we just flew back to New York. I got my first airline pin from the pilot on that trip.
    When Larry Mazza came into the picture, I was around ten and Joey was about eight. Larry was my mother’s lover. We didn’t know that until we were much older. He was eighteen and she was thirty-two when they first got together. My father knew about it and he was okay with it. In fact, Larry became part of the family. That was strange for me and my brother at the time because we weren’t really sure who this guy was. After a while, though, having him around became second nature to us.
    Larry was this really handsome man—tan, good-looking, well-spoken, was polished. He had this way about him. Because he was young, he didn’t seem like the other guys who were hanging around with my father.
    He was so cute and I had a kiddie crush on him. Whenever he came to the house, I always wanted to sit next to him. My mother