Anthony "The Moron" Mirabella & Friends

The picture to the left is a group shot of American Mafiosi, maybe after some kind of collective Cosa Nostra induction ceremony. Sort of a graduation picture then, I guess. They’re a pretty generic bunch, if you ask me. It's hard to find pictures of Anthony The Moron on the Internet, so these guys will have to do. Pick one, any one of them, and that’s probably what The Moron looked like in his prime. Anthony Mirabella was a grade A Mafia cretin. They discovered his decomposed body in the marshes of Warwick, Rhode Island during my youthful sojourn in Providence. The media clued us all in to, first of all, his splendid nickname, and to the fact that he himself had served time for a double murder back in the seventies. They even showed video footage of The Moron getting arrested, obscenely waggling his tongue at the camera. His nickname was well-earned.

After his release from prison in 1980, Mirabella knew he was a marked man. According to his wife, he was a full-blown paranoid who stocked the house with guns, always afraid that his former cronies would come gunning for him. And they did. He was too much of a wild card to be trusted. Allegedly, the fat man in the photo below - whose name is Frank "Bobo" Marrapese - and several other Providence Mafiosi cornered Mirabella in Fida's Restaurant in the Olneyville section of town in 1982, and shot him dead. They took him in the back, stabbed him repeatedly - to make him rot quicker, according to witnesses - then put his corpse (or corpse pieces) into a garbage bag (or bags) and deposited the remains in the wetlands of southern Rhode Island. I remember him primarily because of - one - the irresistible nickname - and also, two - Geoffrey Wolff, author of the memoir, The Duke Of Deception, about his con-man dad, and brother of the more famous Tobias Wolff, wrote a novel based on the case called Providence. Read it sometime. It’s a one-off kind of crime novel as I don’t believe Wolff ever ventured down those mean streets again, but it’s fun.

Amazingly enough, I don’t rightly know if anybody ever served time for Mirabella’s execution.

Frank "Bobo” Marrapese, whose day job was apparently as a cook (which is where, I suppose, he got his knowledge on how to make dead meat rot quicker), did end up serving time for another murder altogether. In 1975, he killed mobster Richard Callei, whose “bullet-ridden” corpse he left on a golf course in Rehoboth, Mass. He was tried for that one in 1987 and got 20 years. Although he was also charged with killing Mirabella, he was somehow found not guilty on that one (mob jury tampering?). He was also found not guilty of another 80’s murder charge, an infinitely more heinous one, that of killing a young guy named Ronald McElroy, who made the mistake of cutting off Marrapese in traffic, whereupon “Bobo” forced him off the road and beat him to a pulp with a baseball bat. Yeah, he was found not guilty of that one, too (more mob jury tampering?). It’s one thing when these guys kill their own, but when they whack civilians...

Poetic justice sometimes gets ya, when no other kind can. Released from prison in 2008, Marrapese was sent back to jail in 2010 for parole violations and, so far as I know, remains there. Other suspects in Mirabella’s demise include Vito DeLuca, Thomas Pisaniello and Nicholas Bianco. DeLuca was eventually deported to Italy. Nicholas Bianco was convicted of racketeering charges in 1991, and died in prison of Lou Gehrig’s disease. To my knowledge, he was never convicted of Mirabella’s murder. I don’t know what happened to Pisaniello.

I have one question though. Seeing as how the murder took place in an Italian restaurant, how would Gordon Ramsay have behaved had he been there to reform the place? Would he swapped swear words with the cook-slash-killers? And, if so, who would have sworn better? Would he have been appalled by the goings on? And, if so, would he have been appalled at the murder itself or merely at the sloppy preparation of the corpse? Or would he have joined in? Ramsay himself likes to dress up in tight black muscle outfits, just like the guys in the picture, so maybe he might have.

Today in History: Seeking justice for 'The Moron' (Providence Journal)
Mobster Set For Release (Providence/New Bedford Local News)
Mobster Marrapese takes first steps out of ACI (Providence Journal)

Genteel New England Mystery Writer William G. Tapply

And now for something completely different. Something halfway pleasant, for once. I turn your attention to William G. Tapply, an esteemed New England mystery writer who passed away two years ago from leukemia. I've never read any of his books, but I should try at least one of them. They seem like the kind of mysteries my own Ma used to take home from the library in their cellophane covers, back in the day. Although Mr. Tapply got a relatively late start as a writer - publishing his first mystery in his forties - he seems to have lived the kind of life that most of us just dream about. The chance to do what you love for a living, and yet not get so successful at it that your life becomes a bloated caricature of its former self and you want to suck the lead out of the barrel of a shotgun (Ernest Hemingway, I'm not necessarily thinking of you...)

Tapply seems to have led a charmed life in many respects. His bio reads like the bio of a person who lives in one of those enchanted cabins painted by Thomas Kinkade, or like that of a character in some touchy-feely upper middle class drama on the Hallmark Channel. I mean truly - not to dis the guy, I'm sure he was talented, but still... His father wrote for Field & Stream, and he grew up in Lexington, Mass. in the forties and fifties - a perfect time for a suburban boyhood. He was "a fabulous athlete", according to his wife, excelling at baseball and basketball. He was also no slouch academically, having attended what is probably the classiest liberal arts college for smart WASP's - Amherst - and then later Harvard, to pick up a master's in education. He taught English and worked as an administrator at Lexington High School for 25 years, thus garnishing his resume with the noblest of professions - teaching - before moving to New Hampshire and writing full-time. He also found time to become an expert fly-fisherman and to travel extensively. His wife found him "infinitely interesting".

To me, he sounds insufferably perfect.

I mean - my attitude here is not snark, not really, it is just old-fashioned envy and admiration, intermixed. The guy sounds like a modest and tasteful version of that rakish old bearded guy in the Dos Equis commercials. His modesty was reflected in his writing as well, which he preferred to be "invisible", stylistically. “If someone tells you, ‘Wow, that’s great writing,’ you know you’ve failed,’’ he wrote. His best known creation was Brady Coyne, “a Spenser-like character, but more polished. He was a lawyer with Brahmin clients who always wanted to keep the police out of it." The Scarlet Pimpernel of Middlesex County, to wit - “a skillful blend of amateur versus professional, serious versus frivolous, and intellectual versus physical.” These are the sorts of books you can snuggle up with when you can see the maple leaves turning orange outside the window of your study, or when the snow is falling (but not too heavily), or - if it's summer - when you can hear the piquant eruption of a lawn mower half a block away.

There's a paradox afoot in the idea of crime novels the mere reading of which evokes a serene and soothing world. But we all like to feel comfortable now and then, even while reading one's favorite literary genre. Let us hope that at least Tapply's villains were more tormented than he seemed to be.

William Tapply, 69, prolific writer of mysteries, nonfiction (Boston Globe)
Author Website
William G. Tapply - Short Bio

Homicidal Harry Potter Fan & MA Native "Mucko" McDermott

Michael (AKA "Mucko") McDermott is one of our most notorious local murderers. In December 2000, he went on a rampage at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield, Mass., killing seven co-workers, four of them women, and including one guy who lived less than ten blocks from me. Once apprehended, McDermott claimed that he believed he was killing "Nazis" - the German-speaking, WWII kind, not metaphorical or figurative Nazis. He brought this claim to court in a farcical attempt to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. It did not work. His actual motives were more mundane. He was angry at the human resources and accounting departments for garnishing his wages, and clearly just lost it. Six-foot-two, weighing something like 300 pounds, not to mention bearded and wild-haired, the 42-year old software tester paced methodically down the halls of his workplace with an AK-47, targeting specific individuals. Yet another variation on the familiar theme of "going postal".

McDermott was an odd duck. To say the least. Born Michael McDermod Martinez, he was reputedly accepted by MIT during his senior year of high school, but declined to attend. He believed that he had been accepted only because of his Hispanic surname, and subsequently changed his surname to the Irish white-boy "McDermott". Then he joined the Navy and became a submariner. The sailors and the officers liked him all right, although some recalled that he tended to overreact to slights - often violently (also characteristics of McDonald's spree killer James Huberty and Luby's Cafeteria killer George Hennard). He didn't rack up a sterling record as a shipboard techie, but then he probably didn't want to. McDermott clearly belonged to the subspecies Homo sapiens nerdicus. Beyond that MIT acceptance (and his infantile repudiation of it), he is said to have scored 165 on at least some IQ test (most likely the Internet variety), and loved The X Files, Harry Potter, Dungeons & Dragons and the rest of that huge, weird subculture related to science fiction and fantasy. And he remained interested in the most child-oriented aspects of this subculture well into middle age. He was the veteran of a divorce and a suicide attempt and took anti-depressive medication. At one point, he actually even lived in a renovated grammar school, which graphically suggests a real need to regress back into childhood to escape his problems.

He regularly expounded his views on Internet bulletin boards (shades of other recent rage killers, like George Sodini and Anders Behring Breivik), and liked to fool around with chemicals that exploded when mixed together (shades of Ted Kaczynski and even of the murderous Atlanta day trader, Mark O. Barton, who was a chemist in a former life). As a matter of fact, he had helped design Duracell batteries for a living before his employers relocated from Massachusetts, after which he segued into a new career in IT. Like Hitler, he had a quirky compassionate streak, exhibiting a fondness for children and giving blood on a regular basis. And, like the suspected Zodiac Killer, Arthur Leigh Allen, he was an overweight, underachieving recluse with a high IQ. The guy was totally a textbook case, the quintessential profiler's composite.

The press at the time unfairly smeared middle-aged IT professionals everywhere by painting McDermott as merely another hapless, overage computer guy who, at the age of 42, took orders from people who were often (or at least occasionally) "a whole generation younger". All you need to do is take a good look at the guy to know that he was something else entirely - an intellectually talented man-child who never grew up and was torn apart by the distance between his inner self and the demands of maturity. Like the so-called "criminal genius", George Nassar, McDermott was a maladroit smart guy whose enraged social frustration left him no option but to communicate with a gun. The Boston area, whose many colleges and universities are a magnet to intellectually yearning folks worldwide, must surely host more than its share of dudes like this. Criminologists, take note.

Wakefield Massacre (Wikipedia)

Hoboken And The Presiding Spirits Of Sinatra And The Mob

Outside of Providence, the one town I lived in that had an intimate connection with the Cosa Nostra was Hoboken, New Jersey. The home also, coincidentally enough, of Frank Sinatra. As a matter of fact, I lived in a ground floor apartment in a brownstone that the Sinatra family used to own. I was comin' out of my hole one day, and some middle-aged guy from the hood told me as much. He was standing on the stoop of the next building over, and he caught my eye and said, "The Sinatras used to live where you're living now. Didja know that?" No, I did not, I thought, and ever after that day I'd sit in my living room, look up at the ceiling, and wonder if there were Sinatra ghosts jitterbugging around me. I also remember sitting in a bar down across from the PATH station, and there was this burly old Italian-American ex-jock type sittin' there telling the guy next to him, "I used to know Frank Sinatra. I went to school with Frank Sinatra. And, let me tell you, he was nothin'. Nothin'! He couldn't play ball, he didn't get good grades. He couldn't do shit." Then he reared back in his seat and laid out his kill-shot, "All he could do was sing!" Ta-dum...

Anyway, I could get loud myself in those bars, when I was in my cups. One night at another watering hole, there was this other Italian guy sitting a few barstools down. He sort of looked like Jerry Orbach from Law and Order, except that he was dressed in an outfit the same powder blue color that prom night tuxedos often tend to be, but he was an adult and this was his actual suit. He seemed kind of down in the dumps. "No offense, but you're with the mob, aren't ya?" I asked, trying to be friendly. In a voluble, asshole kind of way. "Ahhh..." he growled, clutching his drink. "Come on now, man. Aren't you with the Mafia?" I persisted. "I ain't no mobster!" he cried. "Fuck you!" Then he got up and left, staggering up the stairs out of our subterranean little boite. "I was only kidding," I confessed, lamely, to those barflies who remained. The bartender explained, "Joey owns a restaurant. The Mafia have been on his ass for years about paying protection. And the last thing he wants to talk about is the mob, even as a goof." I stood corrected. I had taunted not The Beast itself, but one of its victims.

I was maybe not in the right bar. Hoboken, at least twenty years ago, had 50,000 souls packed into a space of just 1.2 square miles. And not all of that area was residential. You had the Stevens Tech campus on one side, near the Hudson, the Maxwell House plant to the northeast, and an enormous automobile demolition yard to the far west of town, just beneath the Jersey City cliffs, which were pretty much the southern tail end of The Palisades. Sometimes I'd walk towards the demolition yard and see a bar, or social club or whatnot, stuck in the middle of a scuzzy-looking quasi-industrial nowhere. Inside I could see guys with slicked down noggins and fancy sports jackets, women crowned like 18th century queens with "big hair". Everybody inside looked Italian, and was dressed to the nines. I never even attempted to step inside. I was afraid to. It's still my own little mental dictionary illustration of the phrase "Mafia private club". A mysterious place off by itself, packed with a lethal, explosive elegance that was utterly closed to the rest of us.

Sometimes you live in a town where the criminal elite is notorious, but you never meet them or even see them. They remain rumors of themselves, their existence not yet proven. Like Bigfoot, but with nicer clothes. Maybe I was lucky that they eluded me.

Heroin In The Suburbs

Full disclosure - I live in the suburbs, not in Boston itself. Mea culpa, mea culpa. But not in a faraway suburb. No exurbia for me, my friend. I like sidewalks too much. Speaking of which, in the last couple of years, two dudes died of heroin overdoses on streets just a short walk up from where I live. Heroin still lives, despite whatever other drugs they have these days. I smoked opium once in college, in the apartment of a classmate who was a premed. (This guy eventually became an anesthesiologist, so I guess he gives people drugs all the time now, as his job.) Anyway, I liked the opium. Totally relaxed me. Erased my worries and all that. Also, I distinctly remember rousing myself from my friend's sofa and trying to walk around. I felt like I was wearing socks two inches thick. The whole world seemed so splendidly padded. I can see why people take heroin. Serious opiates cradle you in a cushy freedom from caring about anything, and who wouldn't want that nowadays - with our freakin' economy, our dumb-ass wars in the Middle East, and the general sense of America going to hell in a hand-basket?

When I was seventeen and, like many another seventeen year old, completely fucked up, a high school acquaintance hooked me up with an, ahem, "encounter group" at the local Youth Services Center. This dude, incidentally, eventually became a prominent Professor of Business who espoused some insane concept called "Hypercompetition", in which everyone everywhere must run around like a chicken with his head cut off to avoid going bankrupt or getting downsized. A friend, shall we say, of the banker-loving Right. But, back then, he was a long-haired and somewhat pompous young liberal whose SAT scores were significantly lower than mine (despite his pomposity) and whose favorite poet was Kahlil Gibran. Anyway, I joined the group - and virtually everyone in it, all kids in the 18 to 21 range, was a recovering heroin addict. There were two guys, very different. One was the Irish hockey player type whose hobby was getting into fights at Bruins games (in the stands, not the rink - he didn't play hockey with them), and who was annoyingly good-looking, sort of like a Viking with a Boston accent. The other guy was this narrow-shouldered, quasi-hunchbacked gimp who needed a cane to get around, but had liquid brown eyes and was reputedly loved by all the (loose) girls for the amplitude of his nether regions. And there were three girls. Two of them quite plump and frighteningly horny, and another one, the soulful daughter of an aerospace engineer from California who had the face of a thirty-five year old (she was only seventeen, too) and who liked to write poetry. Of course, I fell for her instead of the sluts. Idealistic fool that I was. But then, she was the only one who had never shot up. Eventually, she made up for that by getting arrested after her freshman year in college, when she and her buddies picked up an Arab hitchhiker in Casablanca who happened to have hashish on him, and the whole bunch of them ended up spending a month in an Algerian jail. Until their parents paid their ransom. (The hitchhiker had surely been a plant.)

The group was mediated by a perpetually tanned psychiatrist from Brookline with a Harvard education who claimed to still be a virgin at the age of thirty-one. Hmmm... Anyway, the Irish Viking hockey thug boasted about his conquests (in bed as well as in battle), the Gimp lamented his crippled state (but also boasted about his conquests in bed), and the plump girls - who had apparently slept with both the Viking and the Gimp - chortled merrily and boasted about how their guidance counselors thought they should have been getting all A's with their IQ's when, in fact, they were almost flunking out. We were later joined by another guy, also an ex-addict, very blond and prone to wearing hippy-dippy polka dot shirts, who resembled nothing so much as a miniature Don Stroud - or a straight Lance Loud. He was the miracle baby of parents who had finally conceived in their forties after decades of trying, and he had an adopted older brother. He told me I reminded him of his rather brainy older brother, which seemed flattering at the time. As it happened, just a few years later, this same brother shot a friend to death to prevent him from revealing that he (the brother) had cheated on his National Merit Scholarship exam to get into Stanford, and that his entire subsequent career as a San Francisco stock broker was a fraud. After the murder, the brother went on the lam for decades before he was finally apprehended.

Quite a crew, these folks. Outside of heroin and lively personalities, I cannot discern in retrospect what they had in common. At one point, I self-righteously told my mother that these Horrible Heroin Addicts seemed like "weak" people, that they did what they did because they were "weak", but I've had plenty of "weak" moments myself in the decades since, so that judgment seems totally bogus now. Everyone's "weak", I think. Heroin thrives, when it thrives, on two factors - its own availability, and how shitty and insecure your current life (and, by extension, everybody else's current life) seems in comparison to the nirvana of narcotics. Nothing makes bad habits like bad times.

A Tale Of Two Sociopaths

Here is a Boston crime story that everyone knows about. An evil conman with the ridiculous pseudonym of Clark Rockefeller steals his six year old daughter away from her beautiful, brilliant and super-achieving mother, thus leading the police on a merry chase across the Northeast. Now, some years after the kidnapping conviction of the evil conman, it seems that he has been outed as a murderer as well, having done away with a man named Jonathan Sohus in California during his previous false life as some British dude with the equally ridiculous pseudonym of Christopher Chichester. Now here, one might say, is a true sociopath.

Of course, we're talking about German-born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter who, like any guy with a name like that, sensibly changed it when he arrived in the states. Numerous times, in fact. From Thurston Howell III of Gilligan's Island, he adapted a notorious parody of a rich person's accent as his own mode of speech and somehow was able to use it to hoodwink his way into elite society. Perhaps if all those snooty meritocratic social climbers had ever deigned to watch a TV sitcom now and then, they wouldn't have been taken in by Gerhartsreiter's charade, but they were. As they also were by that magical surname - "Rockefeller". Enough to make Harvard Business School grads of either gender swoon - or salivate like Pavlov's dogs. In addition to the ludicrous accent and the iconic surname, Gerhartsreiter embroidered his identity with eccentricities like disdaining socks and eating only white food, and with tales of his entering Yale at fourteen, his parents' tragic death in a car accident, and other more trivial moments of the "Pookie and Skip on the Vineyard" variety. That he chose such an over-the-top and cartoonish disguise in his masquerade as a rich man was not only a stroke of genius - how could such an extreme persona not be real, his victims must have reasoned - but also a hint of the contempt he must have felt for those he duped.

When he was caught, the press made much of his humble origins in Bavaria, his working class parents and his mediocre academic record - as though he were merely "ordinary", not like the Ivy League princess he could twist around his little finger. The truth is, I think, that Gerhartsreiter was at least as "brilliant" as Sandra Boss, and that his dementedly nuanced deception was at least as clever as - and surely more creative than - anything she had ever done. In that sense, they were intellectual peers. To convince smart people that you are as smart as or smarter than themselves, you have to be smart, too - even if whatever evidence you provide of your smartness is a pack of lies. Certainly, Sandra Boss thought he was a brain. Then again she also found him attractive.

Even if we allow that Gerhartsreiter and Sandra Boss had intellect in common - she playing the goody-goody "Achiever" to his cunning bad-boy manipulator - they had something else in common as well. They were both sociopaths. Oh, come now, you might say. Sandra Boss (how aptly named!) was a high-flyer, a super-competent consultant for the exalted McKinsey company, one who had advised boardrooms on corporate strategy to the tune of two million dollars a year. A pillar of society and a sterling exemplar of lifelong classroom obedience. What everyone would be, if they were smart enough - and she was! While he was a mere criminal...

But what do corporate consultants actually do? They show CEO's how to streamline their operations, how to arrange mergers with other companies, so that they can cut costs, lay off workers, and underpay and overwork their remaining workers with impunity - all to enrich themselves and their already obscenely wealthy shareholders. I mean, do corporate consultants really do anything else? Do they invent new technology or cure cancer? Do they - I'm almost choking at the absurdity of the thought - do they console the dying and feed the poor? No - as we have seen in America in the last few years, corporate consultants destroy lives, not mend them. While Gerhartsreiter may have killed one (at most two) people, and fooled (and amused) many others - how many lives has Sandra Boss destroyed? How many strokes, heart attacks, divorces, suicides and descents into alcoholism did this "brilliant and beautiful" woman enable from her immaculately appointed offices in London, Boston and New York? Even if you can't agree that she is a sociopath herself - after all, she's not the one actually sending out those pink slips - isn't she at least part of a sociopathic system? And, as such, a sociopath by association?

No wonder she and Gerhartsreiter got along so famously. Even eHarmony.com couldn't bring together a better matched pair than the, uh, Rockefellers.

'The Man in the Rockefeller Suit,' by Mark Seal (San Francisco Chronicle)
Christian Gerhartsreiter (Wikipedia)

Biblical Figure: Whitey Bulger In The Gospels Of Saint David

Whitey Bulger may have inspired the author of one of our greatest Bibles of postmodernism. The latest saint of American literature, David Foster Wallace, known to his acolytes Yahweh-ishly by the acronym "DFW", spent time in the Boston demimonde in the late eighties, where he first encountered the legend of Whitey Bulger. When he began his immortal opus, Infinite Jest, he could not resist including Whitey, however transmogrified, as the bookie, Whitey Sorkin. To quote his own words, "I don't think Whitey Sorkin's supposed to be an isomorphically unique mapping of Whitey Bulger, but when I was in Boston, there were rumors that Whitey had it fixed so that his people won the lottery. I mean, at least in the parts of Boston in which I was moving, Whitey was a creature of myth." It is curious that he chose to give his Whitey the surname "Sorkin". Had he met the playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin during the New York lit-party days of his early career - and, perhaps, not liked him? It wounds some of us here in the shamrockier precincts of Greater Boston that DFW had not chosen to retain the Irish flavor of the original, but a great artist does what a great artist wants. At least he kept the "Whitey", although he seemed reluctant to explain satisfactorily why his "Whitey" should have that name. In fact, in the novel itself, the only attempt to explain (or, indeed, anti-explain) the moniker that DFW offers is the following: "It was never clear to Gately why Whitey Sorkin was called Whitey, because he spent a huge amount of time under ultraviolet lamps as part of an esoteric cluster-headache-treatment regimen and so was the constant shiny color of a sort of like dark soap, with almost the same color and coin-of-the-realm classic profile as the cheery young Pakistani M.D. who'd told Gately at Our Lady of Solace Hospital in Beverly how Teddibly Soddy he was that Mrs. G.'s cirrhosis and cirrhotic stroke had left her roughly at the neurologic level of a Brussels sprout and then given him public-transportation directions to the L.T.I..."

In real life, as we all know, Whitey was called that because of his light blond hair (although he could really be called that now, based on the color of what hair he has left). Nobody ever called him that to his face though. He apparently preferred "Jimmy". Very prosaic, I know, but great gangsters can prefer what they want. We know Whitey likes to read, and will probably even have the time now to read Infinite Jest in its entirety - but how he's likely to respond to even a non-"isomorphically unique mapping" of himself is anyone's guess. The best thing that we can say about Whitey's appearance in The Gospels of Saint David is that it has given him immortality among the Highbrows.

Approaching infinity (Boston Globe Interview with DFW)
"Whitey Sorkin" Search Results in Infinite Jest (Google Books)