Nick Pirovolos    

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TOO MEAN TO DIE

TOO MEAN TO DIE

By
Nick Pirovolos with William Proctor

©copyright 1982
by Nick Pirovolos and William Proctor
ISBN 0-8423-7283-0
Computerized version by Nick Pirovolos and David Hinsey


“I had to learn my first lessons in freedom in the most “un-free” spot in all the world---death row in the Ohio State Pen.” 083284

Nick “the Greek” Pirovolos is the executive director of Inside Out, Inc.


1) OUT OF CONTROL


I had been on a fast track for a long time. My life was filled with big money, beautiful women, and the bright red blood of anybody who dared to get in my way.

But despite the blinding pace of my life, I still had the sense of having a hand on the throttle. I could influence the fate of my friends and enemies. I could select my own special brand of thrills and excitement. And most important, I could choose my crimes.

Then things careened out of control. I suppose if I had been older or more experienced, I might have seen what was happening to me. But that wasn’t meant to be. It’s like when you’re in a car that’s plunging off the edge of the road at 100 miles per hour. You can always look back and say, “I guess maybe I should have slowed down at that last turn.” But that doesn’t get you back on the road or prevent the inevitable crash. And that’s exactly what I was headed for—a massive personal pileup that would shake me to the very roots of my cocky Greek being and change my future forever.

The final countdown started at an unlikely spot—a pinball machine in a Cleveland bar. I was playing the machine, and this big, heavy guy walked up to me and asked, “You want to bet a little on that?”

“Sure,” I said. I knew was a pimp who made the rounds from state to state with his girls, moving from one town to the next when the heat from the police got too intense. But he didn’t know me—and he certainly didn’t know I had practically been born on that machine.

I won twenty dollars from him on the first game. Then $100 on the next. I kept on winning, and soon I had all his money, though I didn’t realize it until later.

“Double or nothing,” he said.

I said okay, and won again.

“Double or nothing again, but this time we don’t touch the machine,” he said.

“Fine.” I said. I could tell by now he was in trouble, but I wanted to get his last cent, and I knew how to tap that machine on the sly, just as I let the ball go.

He went first and had a fairly good run. But then on my turn, I put that ball out there in the middle—with my secret little tap—and it just didn’t want to quit.

The pimp saw I was a sure winner, so rather than let me walk away with all his money, he started in on me: “Why you cheatin’, skinny Greek, you…”.

“Yeah, you keep talking slick. And I’m going to make you a little heavier than you are right now.” I said, feeling for the pistol in my pocket.

“Hey Greek,” Sam the bartender yelled. “No more here. Step outside and take care of your business.”

I knew without a doubt I was going to have to shoot this guy. So just as we stepped outside I reached for the little .25 caliber pistol I kept in my pocket. But I was late. Before I could shake the gun loose, he had turned around, stuck a big German Luger in my face, and pulled the trigger.

But nothing happened. There was just a click, no explosion. Now, things like this had happened to me often enough that I was beginning to think I had some kind of invisible shield around me. I didn’t waste any time patting myself on the back, though. I grabbed for his gun and his Adam’s apple at the same time. And then my luck ran out. He jerked his gun hand loose and whacked me as hard as he could on the top of my head with the barrel. That was when the Luger finally went off. It sounded like a cannon, and the bullet plowed a groove right across the top of my skull.

The blood gushed over both of us, but I kept wrestling with him until I finally rolled on top. I was just about to let him have it with a fist when thirty private detectives and the city police arrived.
I was well known among the cops. Some of them were even my friends—at least, they were friendly because I had paid them off on occasion in the past.

“Whose gun is it?” one cop asked.

“It ain’t mine,” the guy relied. “It’s his,” he said pointing at me.

But I lifted up his shirt, and there was his empty Luger holster, big as life for everyone to see.

“Just leave me alone with him for a couple more minutes,” I asked the cops. But they wouldn’t let me get near him. I could wait to get even. I always got even. (Thirty days later, I caught him just after they released him from jail, and I worked him over well enough so that he couldn’t walk away so easy. I also took his fourteen prostitutes away from him.)

As the cops drove off with the pimp, I realized my head was still bleeding, so I went back into the bar to look for something to clean myself up with. All I could find was a dirty bar rag they had been using to mop out ashtrays. The barmaid almost fainted when she saw the blood all over me, but I just said, “Don’t worry, sweetheart, this is nothing. I’m Nick the Greek. I eat bullets for breakfast and knives for lunch. Everything is cool.”

But I didn’t feel so cool after I got into the washroom and locked the door behind me. As I washed my head off, the whole sink turned red with blood. The bleeding finally slowed down a little, but then I found I was having some trouble hearing. So I shook my head, but the motion started the wound gushing like a geyser again.

I knew I had to do something fast to patch myself up or I’d pass out, so I walked outside, hailed a cab, and gave my mother’s address. The driver didn’t notice anything was wrong with me at first. I guess he figured I had put too much grease on my head to keep my curly black hair down. But I must have gotten excited during the ride because the head wound started spouting blood again, and this time the driver did notice. As he hit the brake and eyeballed me through his rearview mirror, he said, “Get out of my cab!”

I pulled my pistol out, stuck it against his head, and said, “You’re going to take me home.”

“No I’m not!” he replied and pointed at a big building outside the car. It was a police station. I didn’t want any more trouble than I already had, so I put my gun back in my hip pocket, got out of the cab, and walked as straight as I could to a nearby bar.

I ordered a drink, but that didn’t help much. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stay conscious much longer, so I turned to a shaggy-haired, hippie-type guy standing next to me and said, “Brother, I got hurt and need your help. Can you take me home?”

I lucked out because it turned out the guy had a heart, He agreed to help. I gave him some money for a cab, and that’s all I remember. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in my mother’s home, lying in a bed that was soaked with blood.

Somehow I managed to make it downstairs where my mother was talking to my sister, Irene, who had just come over from Greece. I guess they hadn’t known I was upstairs because my mom almost fainted when she saw me.

“What happened?” she gasped.

But I didn’t feel like going into detail. In my twenty-four years, she had put up with a lot of things from me, and she had learned at some point it didn’t pay to ask too many questions.

“Can you do anything with it?” I asked her. Irene said she thought I should go right to the hospital. But I was more afraid of hospitals and doctors than I was of flying bullets. I didn’t trust doctors fooling with my body. And I didn’t want my name on any hospital records.

Mom understood how I felt, and she knew there was no point in arguing with me. So she got her scissors and some iodine and started cutting away the clumps of hair matted with dried blood. Her first aid helped some, but the real problem was that the bullet had creased my skull and left a long gouge there that she couldn’t fix. So even though the bleeding stopped for a while, I was still in bad shape. During the next few days I lost my sense of taste, and the pain in my head got so bad that I started looking for anything to ease it—morphine, speed, booze, anything that would give me a few moments of physical peace.

The only way I could maintain the drug habit I developed over the next few weeks was to steal. And the best places to pick up a lot of cash through quick stickups were some of the local bookie joints and after-hour bars. Unfortunately, the mob bigs that owned those places weren’t too understanding. They learned I was behind the robberies, and they put out an open contract on me. That meant any freelance hit man who wanted to could pick up a quick buck by wasting me wherever and whenever they found me. I had become fair game for all the human-hunters of the mob.

It didn’t take too long for me to realize I was a marked man. I was driving along in this big Chrysler with two big toughs sitting beside me. We were all armed and on the lookout for a store or a bookie place to knock over. I hoped these henchmen of mine weren’t going to be all hot air. I had met many more big talkers than big actors in my day. At any rate, I kept a close eye on them because I had learned never to trust anybody.

We spotted a likely place. I was about to stop when I glanced up into my rearview mirror and saw a couple of guys in a car just behind us. Something didn’t look quite right about them. For one thing, they seemed to be watching us too closely. Also one guy was black and another was white, and this “salt and pepper” combination was a little too unusual in that section of Cleveland.

Relying on the animal instincts I’d developed over the years, I shouted, “Something’s up!” and stepped on the gas. It’s a good thing, too, because at almost the same time, one of the guys on our tail stuck a chrome pistol out of his window and started firing at us. Now, things were happening so fast that there was no time to think. Before I knew it, we were barreling along at 115 miles per hour, sometimes on the wrong side of the two-lane street, sometimes even on the sidewalk. The two guys with me, who had been telling me how tough they were, had fallen completely apart. All the one in the back seat could do was to whine over and over, “Oh Greek, please stop the car—You’ll get us killed!” The other was crouching on the floorboard of the front seat, deep in prayer.

As for me, I got so excited the blood started to gush out of my head again and ran down my face so much I could hardly see. At one point, the hit men pulled right up beside us and when I looked to my left, I found myself staring down the barrel of a big pistol. I’m sure the thug pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. Another misfire had saved me.

I pulled out ahead of them again, but then my luck ran out. The gunmen shot my right rear tire. I went into this spin and slammed into a parked Rambler. I was knocked half senseless and couldn’t even turn my head as I saw out of the corner of my eye the two hit men walking toward me. Blood poured out of my eyes, nose, and mouth, and I had been shot through one of my hands. I remember the thugs were both wearing blue suits, and they looked real efficient and businesslike. One yanked my car door open, stuck his gun in my face, and pulled the trigger. But once again, nothing happened. These misfires were getting to be a regular part of my life.

But the fists and feet and a couple of pipes wielded by the two hit men didn’t misfire. They punched me so hard and so often I stopped feeling any pain. My eyes were almost completely closed now, and I couldn’t even defend myself, much less carry the fight to them.

“Oh God,” I thought. “What a cheap way to die.” And I slipped to the ground, still holding one of the guy’s coat lapels.

The police came right at that moment. If they’d come a minute later, I wouldn’t have lived to tell you about it. The cops waded through the crowd of people that had been watching the show, grabbed me and rushed me straight to the hospital. But like I said, I don’t like hospitals. And I heal pretty fast. So as bad as I was still feeling and as much as I was still bleeding, I checked myself out of the hospital that same night, picked up a pistol and went out to take care of some unfinished business that was bugging me—getting even with the two thugs who had done this to me.

I tried several spots I figured they might be hanging out, and I finally found them in a pool hall. I yelled out to them, just to let them know that the Greek had come back. Then I let fly with a hailstorm of bullets. I don’t know how much damage I did. But I do know I had this warm, satisfied feeling inside me that the scales of Greek justice had tipped once again in my favor.

But the good feeling didn’t last long. My head soon started hurting again, this time from a concussion I’d suffered, and now it was worse than ever. I needed even more drugs and medicine, and that meant holding up more stores and after-hour joints.

Then came what I thought was not only my chance to solve my medical problems, but to take a ride on easy street for a while. I got a small gang together to hit a grocery store in a little town outside Cleveland. We had heard that the owners of this place had big money in a safe there, and I figured that with my cut I could pay for a lot of painkillers and have plenty of good times besides. So I threw together a quick plan, got a pistol and a few knives, and headed out to the store with these three other guys.

The holdup went real smoothly. We walked in on the store manager, and our plan proceeded without a hitch. We were in and out of the place in a few minutes. But there were a couple of things that made the job less than perfect. For one thing, there wasn’t any big money. My cut was only $368. I often spent more than that on dinner for my friends at nice restaurants, or on a new suit of clothes.

And there was another little problem. As we sat in the car splitting our nickel-dime take, our driver glanced up in the rearview mirror and saw a couple of squad cars bearing down on us. We took off like a bunch of wild men and managed to keep ahead of them until we reached a nearby interstate. Now, I figured, they wouldn’t have a chance to catch us—not with Nick the Greek directing the getaway.

It was then that I saw them—eighteen more squad cars parked in a massive horseshoe formation just in front of us, blocking the highway. And behind us, where there had been only two police cars, there were now four or five. We were trapped.

“Let’s have a shoot-out,” one of my brighter men said. I looked at him like he was crazy.

“You got to be kidding,” I said. “We’ve only got one gun.”

I managed to get rid of the gun before they arrested us, but they still charged us with several counts of armed robbery and concealed weapons. You see, I forgot to ditch my stiletto knives.

It was a big deal for me to finally wind up in jail. The police had been trying to nail me with something for years. Five Ohio counties took part in the arraignments because they all wanted a hand in my arrest. The courtroom was packed with spectators and reporters, and I heard a radio blaring in a courthouse hallway. “Flash! Nick the Greek, armed robber and terrorizer, has been captured….”

I didn’t really believe my arrest was going to change things much, though. For one thing, I didn’t expect to spend much time behind bars. Also, while I was in jail, I still expected to rule the roost.

When I first walked into the county jail, an inmate “trusty” a trusted prisoner who helped out with official administration, came over to me and said, “You get cell number seven, but you’ll have to sleep on the floor because there ain’t enough bunks.”

I looked at him kind of hard and said, “No, you get the floor because I’m taking over your bunk.”

And that’s what happened. Just like that. I didn’t have time to play with those guys, and I had a way of making other people feel afraid of me. I had been shot in the head and through the hand, pistol-whipped, and punched and kicked, and I wasn’t in the mood for tea and crumpets. I walked into that jail like an animal because I knew it was important to make your power play right at the beginning. When the lions start to growl, the toughest lion has to growl the loudest. And that’s what I did.

But the guards still had the ultimate power over me, and they wanted me to hurt. So they kept my medicines away from me. I needed enough painkiller to stop an elephant, yet they allotted me only one lousy pill each day. So I struck out the only way I knew how. Although they had taken everything out of my cell but my mattress, I set it on fire with some matches I had hidden away. They slapped a couple of counts of arson on me for that, but I wasn’t about to let them get the last blow in. As the sheriff was walking by my cell one day, I reached out, grabbed him by the neck, and started to choke him.

The official response was to put a mean-looking weight lifter in my cell with me. This inmate, who always wore a smelly Mickey Mouse T-shirt, was supposed to be some kind of enforcer, who imposed order on unruly prisoners in return for certain favors from the guards. He didn’t jump me right away, though. I could see he was sizing me up, biding his time.

The first day I let him do his thing, and he kept his distance from me. But the second day he started playing his Mickey Mouse games with me. I always like my coffee in the morning, so when the jail trusty came by with a couple of big buckets, I started to stick my tin cup through the bars to get some.

But the weight lifter said, “No. I’m running this thing now.”

But when he opened his mouth to say that, I was already prepared for him. I looked straight into his face to get his attention, but my cup was turning at the same time in my hand in my hand so that I was holding the bottom of it with the sharp upper lip facing out. He never knew what hit him because I never gave him a chance. I caught him right on the temple with the edge of that cup, and as he staggered backward, I started hitting him on the face with my head.

We call this kind of fighting “coco-butting,” I guess because you try to crack the other guy’s head open like a coconut. This way of mixing it up always hurt me, but it hurt the other guy a lot more. Also, I didn’t really care if I got hurt, and that made me doubly scary in a fight. Pretty soon, his whole face was bleeding. The jail guards, who were watching the whole thing on a closed-circuit TV camera, didn’t stop it at first because they thought the weight lifter would beat me up. But when it became obvious that I was the one who was doing the beating, the guards came in with their clubs and hard hats and stopped it.

That night, just to show them I was still in good shape, I convinced all the guys on my side to stick their blankets down the toilets, so my whole side of the jail got flooded. “I’m Nick ‘Persaw,’ the devil’s son-in-law!” I yelled when they came in to clean things up. Not such a great rhyme, maybe, but they got the point.

At first, I told my lawyer I wanted to plead not guilty to everything so they’d have to hold a jury trial on each of the charges against me. I wanted to make them pay. But then the prosecutor showed me a movie that had been taken of us holding up the grocery store. I didn’t know there had been a camera on us, but there I was, big as life, waving a pistol around during the armed robbery. I just smiled during the last part of the film. “They got me,” I told my lawyer.

So I decided to plead guilty. But I wasn’t really very worried. The judge knew I was sick, with all those bullet holes in me. They had to be worth a little sympathy. Also, I had never spent any long period of time in jail before. And if none of this moved the judge, surely he had heard of my family. He must know he could get paid off if he wanted. Or he or his family could get worked over pretty nice if he didn’t fall in line.

I was confident when I walked into the courtroom for my sentencing. I wore a pink shirt and a maroon tie because I had already picked the restaurant and bar where I’d celebrate when they released me.

I strolled with my cocky little strut to face the judge on the bench. When I looked into his eyes, I started to lose some of my confidence. “Young man, I’ve been a judge for twenty-five years, and you are the very first Greek who has stood before me,” the judge said. “So I’m going to make an example of you. I sentence you to ten to twenty-five years in prison.”

I couldn’t believe it. My mind went completely blank. This really couldn’t be happening to Nick the Greek. I had done plenty of worse than this two-bit armed robbery, but all I’d gotten before was a slap on the wrist. Didn’t this judge know that, despite all the trouble I’d been causing in the jail, I was a sick man. I could hardly walk from one side of the courtroom to the other without getting a splitting headache and nearly passing out. Didn’t he know it was going to cost the state more in hospital bills to keep me in prison than it would if he just let me go?

But I could see the judge wasn’t about to change his mind. And that’s when I started to get really scared. I began to think about the Mansfield prison where I would be sent. I had a lot of enemies there—a lot of guys I had knifed and shot and beat up.

And my fears didn’t subside when I finally saw the prison from the truck they used to transport me. The driver took an extra long time to get there, and when I asked him about that, he said, “We know you probably got some guys waiting on the regular route to hijack us, Greek. So we ain’t taking no chances.”

Actually, I didn’t have anybody waiting on the regular route. But I decided that if I ever came this way again, I’d see what I could do not to disappoint my next driver. In the meantime, though, I had plenty to keep me occupied. The mean-looking gun towers and forty-foot high walls of Mansfield had appeared on the horizon, and my fear turned into panic. Even though I could play a tough-guy roll well, I knew I wasn’t superman. I had beat up a lot of people in my day, but one reason for my success was that I often used an “equalizer”—a hidden knife, brass knuckles, or a gun. It wasn’t so easy to get the kind of weapon I liked in jail.

Not only that, but as I looked down at myself, I was reminded I am actually a rather small man. I often assumed I was a giant. But I was really kind of short, and I weighed only about 130 pounds. I had found in the past I could rely on surprise and cocky self-confidence to win over bigger opponents. But now, as I neared those prison walls, I sensed the rules of the game were about to change.

There was another fear that I had always pushed out of my mind before, but which I now knew I was going to have to face directly. I had heard there were only two types of guys who survived in prison: those who walked around rough and tough and scared their enemies off or crushed them; and the homosexuals and “slaves” who serviced the tough guys.

I wasn’t sure I was big or healthy enough at this point to be a successful tough guy. But I was absolutely sure of one thing: I knew I would never become a slave or a homosexual. In fact, the more I thought about it, the madder I got. “If I’m going to die in there, at least I’ll take a few of them with me,” I muttered to myself. So I pushed all those fears down inside of me and walked into Mansfield on a wave of hate.

And I needed that hate to keep me going as I was processed that first day. Every prison is ugly, and Mansfield was no exception. There were tough-looking guards all over the place, with ugly uniforms and billy clubs. They had built gun towers inside the prison, so they could actually shoot inmates who started riots. Everywhere I went, I saw dull gray walls, cages, and bars, and I felt my aching head being jarred down to my spine as the metal cell doors clanged open and shut around me.

As for the inmates, they all looked like they were sizing me up, like that weight lifter in the county jail. None of them smiled. Smiling was a sign you were weak or a homosexual. They just stared holes in me, like wild animals studying their prey’s most vulnerable spot before an attack. I was a “fish,” or a new boy, and everybody was waiting to see where I’d fit in—or if I’d fit in.

On that very first day, I saw a few guys I had know on the outside. Some had been allies, others enemies. But I wasn’t quite prepared for what happened when I was finally assigned to a cell on the lowest tier and plopped down on my rack for a little shut-eye, to ease that headache I still had from the gunshot wound and beatings.

Before I could even close my eyes, I heard some guy on the next tier of cells yell, “Hey Greek, swing with the doors!”

I sat bolt upright and asked my “celly,” or cellmate, “What does that mean?”

“It means there’s going to be a war between you and him,” my celly explained. “He’ll be waiting for you when his doors open in the morning.”

I didn’t know who this guy was, and I had no idea what I had done to him in the past. Not only that, I had never played this particular prison game before. But they didn’t call me treacherous for nothing. Whenever I was threatened, I always relied on surprise and dirty tricks. And I knew that was exactly what was called for in this case.

So I got the attention of one of the other inmates I had known on the outside—a “range boy” who brought water to the other inmates at night. He had the run of some of the prison shops, and he agreed to slip me a big can of lighter fluid that night. My cell door was one of the first opened for breakfast in the morning, but instead of going directly to the mess hall with the other inmates, I lagged behind with my lighter fluid and some matches I’d managed to get from another inmate. When the way was clear, I climbed to the next tier and found the cell of the guy who had yelled that challenge at me.

He was still asleep under his blanket, and I thought, “Sweet dreams sucker!” as I sprayed him and his mattress with lighter fluid. As he finally started to wake up , I yelled, “Here I am!” I could tell by the terrified look on his face, as he stared into the grin I was giving him, that he knew what was coming. I sprayed some more lighter fluid on him just for good measure. Then I lit the match.

The flames were all around him in a matter of seconds, and I left him screaming and beating the fire out with his other blankets. I went on down to breakfast as though nothing had happened, and the prison officials never found out who was responsible. He lived, but he learned his lesson. And the word got around among the other inmates. They knew not to mess around with me after that.

With such a successful spree of violence my first day, I might have been well on my way to becoming one of the prison’s godfathers. But I was a very sick young man. I tried to be mean, but I often got dizzy and even passed out once from the head wound.

And that wasn’t my only problem. The left side of my face, where I had been pistol-whipped, had become so sensitive I couldn’t stand to be out in the winter air or even to touch my injured cheek. Every time I coughed, I coughed blood. I also started to lose my sense of balance and taste, and I began staying in my cell instead of going out for food or the other inmate activities.

One of the friendlier guards, who had noticed that I was acting funny, said, “What’s the matter, Greek?” I wasn’t used to asking anybody for help, but I knew I had to get some medical help soon or I wouldn’t last much longer in the prison jungle. The strong devour the weak in prison, and I was getting weaker by the day. So, against my usual nature, I opened up to the guard, and, to my relief, he immediately offered to help.

The guard took me to the prison hospital, where they arranged some X-rays. It was decided my condition was so bad I’d have to go to the intensive care ward at the Ohio State Penitentiary. So they sent me to the Ohio State Pen where some other doctors took some more X-rays. And all the time I was getting more and more scared. It seemed as if most of the time I was standing around in my underwear, getting ready for somebody to stick a needle in me here, poke me with some instrument there, or take another picture of my cracked-up insides. The doctors kept talking about putting me on the operating table and cutting into my skull, and a question that kept coming up was, “Hey Greek, want to sign this sheet so your eyeballs will be donated to science if something happens to you when you go under the knife?”

No, I didn’t want to donate my eyeballs! And I didn’t want to undergo any operation, either. But I knew I was in bad shape because I still had great pain, and every time I coughed, some blood would come up. I didn’t know if I was dying, but I did know I needed help. The question I had was, did these doctors really want to help me? For that matter, could they help me? And could I trust them?

With all these doubts and worries on my mind, I wasn’t in any mood to make friends—especially not with the strange little Mexican inmate who always seemed to show up to take my X-rays. He always had this big smile on his face, and I thought he was either a homosexual or a bandit out to get what little possessions I had left. As I said before, nobody smiles in prison unless he’s a little strange.

“What’s happening brother?” the Mexican asked me one day.

I got wise right away. “Hey,” I said. “I don’t have a brother in here, and I never knew my father got to Mexico.”

I wanted to cut him off, let him know I wasn’t playing any games. But he turned around and said, “We’re all brothers! In Jesus Christ!”

I couldn’t believe my ears. This guy was talking about God on Wednesday instead of Sunday. I thought maybe he was a priest, but he was wearing a white hospital coat, so I started looking for a crucifix or something that would put him in the clergy. But there was nothing like that on him.

“My name is Ernie, and they call me ‘Supermex!’ ” he said.

“Okay, okay.” I tried to shut him up by ignoring him.

But then he got more interesting. He asked, “Do you want freedom?”

“How much?” I asked almost without thinking. “How much would it cost me?” I did want freedom because by this time I had gotten a dear John letter from my old girlfriend. I hadn’t treated her too well, and she wanted some revenge for all the bad things I’d done to her. Not only that, I was scared to death of the prison doctors. And I had heard the immigration people might be after me to send me back to Greece because they had decided I was an undesirable person who had committed moral turpitude—whatever that was—against the American people. So yes, I definitely did want freedom, to escape the pressures of the prison, settle some old scores, and pick up my old life on the outside again.

But that wasn’t what Super-Mex had in mind. He said, “Freedom is when you allow Jesus Christ to come into your heart.”

Now, I knew God was Greek, so how could this heathen, this unbeliever, tell me about the God we Greeks had created? What did he know? Mexico was not as old as Greece! But there was something different about this Mexican, something I couldn’t put my finger on right away. He was certainly different from the other inmates I knew. In the few weeks I’d been in prison, I had got used to having guys come in, sit on my bunk, and talk about what life used to be like in the old days when they were on the outside. But in the meantime, they were smoking my cigarettes, and eating my candy bars. They wanted to talk, but they also wanted to get something off me. But this Mexican wasn’t trying to put on the dog, or put something over on me. His eyes told me he was real. Something inside me said, “This guy has something I wish I could get.” But then another voice said, “I’m Nick the Greek, and I know only chickens and homosexuals and old ladies and little kids turn to God.”

But there was something true about what this guy was saying. His words reminded me of the Bible passages my mother had read to me as a kid and the stories about God my grandmother had told me on the flat rooftop of our house in Greece as we lay around in the cool evening air just before we went to bed. Finally, though, I decided I was probably too far gone to change my way of life now; and besides, what would my friends say if I gave my life to Jesus in the way he was talking about?

But the Mexican kept working on me until finally I had to tell him, “Shut up I don’t want to hear about your God! Just let me do my time. I’m a convict, and I don’t want to hear nothing more about God.”

But I was still scared. I was feeling as bad as ever. I couldn’t understand half of what the doctors were trying to tell me because my English wasn’t so good. They kept shooting needles in me, in my thighs and shoulders and rear. My skin got so tough, they could hardly get the shots in me sometimes. They took me to some kind of therapy every day and hung me in traction from the neck up, but it never seemed to do any good. In fact, at one point the pain got so bad—I was in such a living hell—that I actually paid a guy two cartons of cigarettes, or $2.65, to kill me. You couldn’t trust anybody, it seemed.

I cursed the doctors all the time, but that seem to do any good either. I felt like a guinea pig because all these specialists kept coming in and looking at me for a few minutes without doing anything to help me. They seemed to get a big kick out of showing me the X-rays: “Now this is where you were cut on the left eye, and that’s where you were shot with the pistol…” But none of the talk did a thing to ease the pain I felt. If I even got touched on some parts of my head, the pain would be so bad I’d pass out.

The only way I found to get my mind off of my own problems was to get into some of the criminal activities that go on in every prison. Since I was in the hospital, I had access to drugs other people didn’t, so I started dealing a little dope to the other inmates, in exchange for underwear, towels, or whatever else I might need. Sometimes I even traded my own medicines if I wasn’t hurting too bad myself some days.

I also tried to make some useful underworld connections that I thought might help me in prison and also later, when I was released. One of the top dogs I had known on the outside was in the Ohio Pen while I was in the hospital there. He was so bad he had started a riot in the prison and had killed several people with a sledgehammer. He managed to get into the hospital to see me by swallowing some iodine and gauze so the prison authorities would admit him.

But despite all my efforts to submerge myself in the criminal world of the prison, I somehow couldn’t get away from Ernie, the Mexican. “Hey, Greek-o, how you doing?” he’d say almost every day with a big smile when he passed my bunk.

Some of the other inmates would see him coming and say, “Oh, no, here comes that Jesus freak, that homosexual.”

But I also learned these same guys wouldn’t say that to Ernie’s face because he was a top-rated boxer in his weight class and could have made mincemeat out of any of us in a fair fight. When Ernie wasn’t grinning, he was singing songs like “Amazing Grace” and “The Old Rugged Cross,” which I’d never heard before. We never sung tunes like that in the Greek Orthodox Church. These tunes had a catchy lilt to them, and, against my better judgement, I found myself whistling the same tunes myself.

“Hey, Greek, God can give you freedom,” the Mexican kept saying, and even though I had taken to not answering him. A war was raging inside me. When the Mexican spoke to me, I kept on hearing my grandmother in Greece, I remembered I had once wanted to be a priest, and I saw what an animal I had become.

Then one day I started taking an inventory of my life. It was like a tape had started playing in my brain, a tape I had no power to shut off. What have I done with my life? I asked. I looked down at myself and saw that the only thing I owned was the socks I was wearing. Even my underwear, which was full of holes, belonged to the state. I didn’t even have a name. I was a number—inmate 83284.

All my life, I had only been out for myself. And I’d learned to enjoy hurting other people. I always returned bad for good. Even the Mexican inmate Ernie, who had been trying to share his religion with me, got the back of my hand. The only thing he ever asked of me was to teach him to speak some Greek so he could read parts of the Bible in the original language. But I had just taught him Greek curse words until finally he caught on to what I was doing. When I finally did teach him the “Our Father” to get him to stop pestering me, he put my words on tape and slept with it playing in his ear, The very next day, he came in speaking Greek with my accent.

But if I’d done little for Ernie, I’d done even less for my own mother, who had tried to love me and who stuck by me even after all the crimes I’d committed. Some others in my family tried to see me once, but it didn’t work out. They had their own lives to live. And after all, I had done a lot to hurt them.

My mother was the only one who had visited me since I’d been sent to prison. But even though she let me know she loved me, she didn’t pull any punches about how much I’d hurt her. She said, “Son, I’ve prayed to the Almighty God that you would stay in here for the rest of your life. That you would rot in jail. That you would never get out and hurt anybody else again.”

It was tough, hearing words like that from my own mother. But I knew she was just telling the truth. Looking deep into her sad eyes, I remembered those times when I’d come home stinking drunk, and as she would go to help me take my clothes off, I’d kick her. One day I kicked her right in the mouth without knowing what I was doing, and when I came down for breakfast the next morning, I saw she was all black and blue. I asked her what happened, and she said something about slipping down and falling against a door handle.

“At least when you’re in jail, I’ll know you’re alive—and you’re not hurting anyone else,” she said. Those were her last words to me before she left, and they were eating away at my mind.

So this tape kept playing in my mind, this record of my past life, and I didn’t like what I saw. I was a total drain on society and on my family. I had hated my father for his cruelty, but now I was ten times worse. I had become an animal, a no-good. I stank, physically and morally. I put a dirty smudge on every woman I touched. I had made enough money to retire in style—if I hadn’t spent it all on dope and booze and high living. I had learned to sleep with my gun cocked under my pillow, and it’s a wonder I hadn’t shot my own brains away. As a matter of fact, I had been shot and wounded by other people four different times, and I realized that if any of those bullets had killed me, I wouldn’t have been missed.

I used to brag that a mean old dog I owned and I had places prepared in hell next to each other. I had really sold my soul to Satan. So I asked myself, “Can God really forgive me? I think I’m too far gone.”

This argument kept raging inside me, and I wondered to myself, “Can God hear me while I’m lying around here in my bed? Maybe I should get down on my knees if I’m really going to have a chance to hear him if he should want to say something to me.”

Then I thought, “Wait just a minute! There are thirty-two other guys here in the hospital ward. What are they gonna think if I get down on my knees now? It’s broad daylight, and every one of them will see me!”

But I knew something important was happening inside me, and I didn’t want to take any chances that God wouldn’t have his say—if he had anything at all to say to me. So I finally got up enough courage to crawl out of my bed and kneel on the floor, just as I used to do as a little boy in Greece.

The other inmates noticed right away something strange was happening, and the catcalls and sarcasm started almost immediately. “Hey, Greek, you lose something down there?” “Hey, Greek, you losing your nerve?” “Hey, Greek, are you trying to get religion?”

I heard them, all right. And the thought did cross my mind, “Just what am I doing down here?”

But then the tape in my brain—that mental recording of my past life—kept playing louder and louder until I wasn’t aware of what those inmates were saying to me. All I heard or saw were those early years, when I had been a little boy on the island of Chios in Greece….


2) ROOTS


I should have had a happy boyhood. On the Greek island of Chios where I was born, the weather always seemed to be perfect. It was never too cold to go outside and play, and we never seemed to run out of tangerines, oranges, almonds, and olives on the trees around our home.

I had by own little donkey to ride. What kid doesn’t dream of that? And the physical setting I grew up in was matchless for a child, with clear blue water nearby, and a craggy peak we called “Gramdma Mountain” close enough to take hikes to when we were in the mood to play mountain climber.

The people in my corner of Greece were fascinating too. We had some of the wealthiest people in the world who lived on that little island, and even the ordinary folks lived better than most. There was never any reason to want for anything if you lived on Chios. The people of the past were always present with us too, to inspire us and make us proud. Hardly a week went by when I didn’t hear some reference to Socrates, Hercules, or Ulysses.

As I said, I should have been happy as a boy. But I wasn’t. I had one of the most miserable childhoods you can imagine, and the main reason for my unhappiness was my father.

Now, I know what I’m about to tell you may make me look like an ungrateful son. You may even thing I am stooping so low as to tell terrible lies about my own father. But as God is my witness, every word I’m about to relate to you is true.

On their wedding night, my father beat my mother up. That’s how their marriage got started, and things went downhill from then on. As far back as I can remember, my father was always whipping somebody in the family when he was home. Lucky for us, he was gone to sea as a merchant for several months at a time. But when he returned to Chios, we caught it.

Once when he had returned home, he grabbed a loaf of bread we had in the cupboard and put a little nick on the end of it with his knife. “This is how much you’re going to eat tonight,” he said to my mom. But if she and the seven kids she had living at home had tried to get along on that thin slice, there would have been a lot of empty stomachs in our house that day.

So mom decided to disobey him. She put another like the one he had made, but farther down on the loaf, to give us all a little more food that evening. But when my father got home he went right to the bread, examined it, and shouted, “That’s not the nick I made! You weren’t supposed to eat that much!”

And he proceeded to beat my mother as we huddled in the center of the room crying, knowing we would be next. We may have gotten a little more nourishment that day, but we paid for it dearly with bruises and blood. And unlike the family situation in the United States, there was no such thing as talking back to your parents in Greece. If it was night outside and your father said it was day, then it was day—even if you knew it was night.

The way my father tried to deprive us of the basic things in life, like food, you’d have thought we were a poor family. But actually, he made plenty of money on his business trips. Sometimes, it seemed to me that there was actually no family love, no normal human sentiment in my dad. Most adults melt at the sweet smile of a pretty girl who is just starting to walk. But when my baby sister was that age, he kicked her so hard she sprawled out on the floor crying.

If you heard the whole story of my early life, you would get sick; and you should be aware that just remembering it, living through it again in my mind, makes me sick too. But it’s an important if you hope to understand how I developed into the kind of person I did. As much as I hated and feared him. My father was my role model for what an adult male was like. I didn’t like what I saw, but as the years wore on, it became easier and easier for me to conform to the mold that had been set by him.

I’ve often puzzled over why my mother married my dad, but I’ve never come up with a satisfying answer. I know she had reached marriageable age, and she and my grandmom felt it was time to bring a man into the house. That’s the way you did things in Greece. But exactly why they brought this particular man in- well, that’s something I’ve never quite been able to figure out. But once the wedding bells had grown still, my mom found she had literally made a very uncomfortable bed and was going to have to learn to lie in it. More than a dozen kids came out of that stormy union, and nine survived, all with some emotional or physical scars that they would have to carry into adult life.
But the family members weren’t the only ones who suffered from my father’s mean temper. He was a man who seemed to be motivated primarily by revenge of by money, and he was happiest when he was in hot pursuit of one of those goals. He gained a reputation in Chios as the kind of guy who would stop at nothing to settle a score if he felt he had been wronged. For example, he loved hot white bread, and we had a small bakery in our village that produced some of the best. One day, when my dad was in the bakery, he got into an argument with the baker.


My father finally said, “You take back your words, or I’ll make you lick my shoes!”

The baker refused to back down, so my father went to another island and returned with another baker and a lot of flour. He built an old broken-down oven and set up a bakery where he produced bread that he actually gave away to the villagers. Even though the other baker was selling his loaves for only two or three cents, he couldn’t beat my father’s price, which was no price at all.

All this time, my father’s kids, including me, were at home with too little to eat and not enough money to buy shoes. And there he was, sitting on a big brown horse he owned, with woven baskets full of bread slung over the back of the saddle, giving it away to whomever walked past him on the street. I know my father ultimately won that argument with our town baker. I even heard he actually had that man licking his shoes, just so my father would close up his free bakery. So our immediate family members weren’t the only ones who suffered from my father’s vindictive nature.

But like I said, revenge was only one of the things that made him tick. Something that turned him on even more was money, and it seemed he was willing to stop at nothing to enrich himself just a little more, here and there.

As a little boy I was told over and over by people inside and outside the family that my father could pick up a piece of garbage and turn it into gold. He could stand on a rock and make money. That was the kind of reputation he had. And I had countless object lessons in the way he went about living his life. I filed in my little brain the sharp dealings he conducted with others in the marketplace; the violence he inflicted on our family. But at that point I didn’t start imitating my father. The seeds of my own rebellion and cruelty had certainly been firmly planted. But the fertile soil in which they were to grow and flourish, to the discomfort and horror of other human beings, didn’t appear until a few years later.

During these early years in Greece, I rejected everything my father did and stood for and turned instead to my mother, Despina Pirovolos, whose God-fearing influence actually made me decide that I wanted to be a priest. Her grandfather had been a priest, and she was raised in the constant presence of church tradition. So I guess with that kind of family background, it was natural for me to think about a career in the church. Because my father didn’t give us enough money to live on, my mother and all the kids had to go out and get extra jobs. One of the things we loved to do the most was serve as church janitors. Our whole clan, minus our father, would go into a church and scour the place from the top to bottom so thoroughly that we got a reputation for being the best in that line of work. Local priests would come to see my mother and try to be sure she plugged their sanctuary into their schedule.

I was also in the church for worship with my brothers and sisters almost every time the doors opened for services. One of my favorite times, though, was Easter, which is the biggest day of celebration in our country. It was like the Fourth of July because when the priests would announce “ He is risen!” everybody would shoot off fireworks to express their joy.
But even the Easter season couldn’t be completely happy when my father was around. I remember one Palm Sunday, when the rest of the family was heading toward church, we passed a plaza where some of the town tough guys, including my father, were sitting around under a big tree. This particular group of men never went to church, not even on the major holidays. They felt religion was something for women and children, but not for strong, grown men. And my father was the most hostile of all.
I still recall that as we passed him that day he was staring at one of the men of the town who had chosen to attend services. “May the ceiling fall on him!” my father muttered. That was the kind of man my father was.

But in those early days, as I said, I didn’t agree with my father. I was much more drawn to the Bible passages I heard in church and in our home. And the exciting Bible stories my mother and grandmother related about Samson and David and Moses and the other Old Testament patriarchs really captivated me. Some of my fondest memories are of those cool nights when we would sit up on the top of our flat-roofed house with the gentle sea breezes wafting over us and listen to those ancient accounts of how God had shaped history through the individual lives of those heroic old Hebrews. I might have had a hard day for an eight-year-old, either cleaning a big church, or selling lemonade and candy apples in the village on holidays, or enduring one of the many beatings from my father. But those nights on the rooftop, absorbing God’s Word in the company of family members who really did love me, was enough to make me ready to face another tough day.

The spiritual world even dominated my play. I was the kind of little guy that if I found a dead animal, I’d give it a whole burial liturgy, like the ones I had seen the priests conduct in church. I’d put together a little casket, get some other young kids to follow me in funeral procession, and then we’d march down the street, singing hymns.

But there was a dark side to the Greek spiritual world- a side I was also regularly exposed to as a boy. There is a belief in Greece that when a person dies, his spirit wanders around restlessly for forty days. To calm the spirit and send it smoothly to the next world, a tradition has sprung up of lighting candles on the dead person’s grave every day for that forty-day period; and poor people are often hired to be sure the candles stay lit.

We were always short of money, and my mom took on this job of lighting the candles in graveyards to bring a few extra coins into our household. She was especially concerned that my sisters would have enough money for a decent dowry when the decided to get married, and a lot of my mom’s candle-lighting money went into the fund.

But lighting those candles could really be a creepy business, and Mom sometimes took me along to keep her company. I remember one night we walked through the graveyard until we found the freshly-dug grave where she was to light her candles. Dusk was already turning into the pitch black of night, and I found myself starting at every rustle of leaves or cracking twig. There are a lot of Greek folk superstitions about how witches and demons come out at dusk, and it was easy to believe in them when you were kneeling on the cold ground in front of a new grave. We lit the candle, and I sat there silently for a few moments in the eerie, flickering light that distorted the appearance of everything it touched. I was too petrified to look at anything but the flame at first, but as the seconds wore on, I dared to glance beyond the flame at the trunk of a nearby tree. Then I looked over to my left, where my mother was sitting. Nothing there but a few more graves and shrubs. I was getting so confident now that I looked over to the right with hardly a thought. And that’s when I saw it. A human skull staring right at me, with a mocking grin showing through jagged, broken teeth!

I flew back down that hill toward my home so fast; I bet my feet never touched the ground! My mom was a little put out when she arrived at our house later that night. She explained that the skull I saw was part of some bones that had been dug up from a shallow grave to make room for a new grave that was being prepared. But all the logical explanations in the world couldn’t have convinced me to go back to that graveyard again.

Even if my experience in that graveyard could be explained in a rational way, there were other strange contacts with the spirit-world that couldn’t be dismissed quite so easily. We Greeks are steeped in Christianity. But we’re also steeped in occult, pagan superstitions, and sometimes those superstitions can get the better of us.

One time, a gypsy came to our house in Chios to try to sell us some clothes. As he was laying out his goods, he glanced up at me and looked into my face. And then he froze. “Young man, your eyes!” he exclaimed. “God help women from your eyes. God help people away from your eyes. You’re going to destroy lives or be a great man—just because of your eyes. The gift is upon you, and it will come through your eyes!”

That little piece of fortune-telling had a demonic edge to it, because the gypsy’s words worked in me all my life. I had learned as a youngster to accept the power of the occult, as well as of God, and I believed, without any reservation, what that wandered told me. I had some reason to believe in the power of the black arts because I had seen them applied, and I was convinced I had seen them work. One of my distant relatives was deep into witchcraft, and my family was constantly getting involved in situations where she had tried to cast some spell or curse on somebody.

One time, she had it in for some guy in our village, so she nailed a bar of soap on the wall in his basement, where the moisture and urine from goats and other animals caused it to begin to melt away.

“If the soap breaks, his life breaks,” she had said in a secret ceremony, and even though the guy had been healthy, he got quite sick and his life seemed to be fading away.

He finally went to the local priest to see if anything could be done that the doctors weren’t doing, and after some investigation, the priest found the soap and removed it. The result was that the man immediately started to recover.

Our family wasn’t immune to this kind of black magic from this relative, either. She put some strands of hair in the cuffs of one of my brother Gus’s pairs of pants, and everytime he wore them he got sick and melancholy. One day when my sister was ironing those pants, she found this clump of hair in the cuff and threw it away. Gus never again had any problem with sickness.

Now some of this occult stuff may not seem so important. After all, you may say, nobody was hurt so bad that they died. But actually, somebody did die—one of my brothers who never lived past his infancy. When this little boy was about a year old, my relative looked at him and told my father, “this baby looks too muck like you. One of you is going to die.”

Now most people might have been able to laugh off such a prediction, but not my father. He was very interested in his own safety, and he believed in the dark powers.

So when this little boy got very sick a few months later, my mother went to my father and cried, “Go get a doctor!”

But he replied, “no doctor will come into this house!” Then, he went back to sleep.

The baby got worse and worse. And finally, he died, while gazing helplessly at Mom and crying, “Mama, Mama!”

So that’s the way I spent my early boyhood, until I was about ten years old. There was hate and love. Fear and comfort. Violence and peacefulness. Pain and innocent play. Satan and God.

But these were just seeds. Nobody, least of all me, knew exactly what they would amount to in the years ahead. Other people, other events, other pressures had to provide the soil in which they would grow to maturity. But that part of my story comes later. For the moment, suffice it to say that my mother and father were finally separated, and then they tried independently to start the bureaucratic wheels rolling so they could immigrate to the United States.

For my mother and all of us children, America had represented a kind of freedom it’s hard for native Americans to understand. The United States had always seemed to be a land where anything was possible. I know now there was a lot of myth in that attitude—a lot like the fantasies we in Greece held about our own glorious past. But real or not, we really believed America was the land of opportunity for us, and we became more and more deeply motivated by that belief. It was hard for a woman and a bunch of small kids to make enough money to make ends meet in a relatively primitive economy like Chios had.

So we were seeking economic freedom from the poverty we faced. But we also a kind of emotional freedom from the environment where we had been oppressed so long by my father’s presence and reputation. Granted, he and my mother weren’t living together anymore. But everywhere we turned, there were unpleasant memories of him. Sometimes, we felt the most important thing in the world was to escape those memories.

But my father was also interested in going to the United States. He had always had a fascination with North America, especially since he sent my oldest brother there. And my brother did quite well for himself. He became a U.S. citizen and turned into quite a hero in the Korean War as a combat soldier.

Most of us in the family were very proud to have such a distinguished relative. But my father’s reaction? While my brother was on the front lines in Korea, I can remember my father saying one time: “God, if you’re there, kill him so I can collect his $10,000 G.I. insurance!”

My father never seemed to change. So in one way it was a devastating shock, but in another way quite predictable that, when we looked over the list of people who had been approved to emigrate from Greece, my father’s name was right there with ours. I remember when my mother read that list and saw his name there, she broke down and cried. But he promised us he had changed and things would be better with a new start in a new country. So she took him in again.

As we boarded that airplane that would fly us into New York, we realized that the perfect freedom we sought was not to be. We did hold out hope that, even with my father present, we might discover a better life than we had known in Chios. But if we had known what a chamber of horrors awaited us on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, we would have probably headed straight back to our little Greek village and never considered leaving it again.


3) A LAND OF LITTLE OPPORTUNITY


Traveling on an airplane isn’t any big deal for most middle-class Americans these days. But for me, that flight from Athens to New York City was like being transported on a magic carpet to some sort of fantasy land.

I had never had a real vacation before. Much of my ten years of life, especially in the recent past, had involved hard work and beatings from my father. But the carpeted aisle and the cushioned seats of that aircraft became the setting for a joyous, if brief, holiday for me. I was especially fascinated by the plastic spoons, forks, and knives they gave us with our food. The flight attendants noticed my interest in these utensils, and they started supplying me with some of the extras that were lying around—until I had collected a big bagful! I thought I had really accumulated a treasure, and it took a lot of convincing from my mother to get me to leave them behind and pay more attention to my more important baggage.

Guess I was hoping, down deep, that my father’s attitude toward the family would change when we moved from one part of the world to another. He did seem in a better mood during the trip. But there were numerous little signs that he was planning to continue his under-the-table dealings in the New World, just as he had in the Old. He swallowed small diamonds and sewed gold coins and other valuables into his clothing so he could slip them by the customs officials. When we finally landed in New York, one of the customs seemed to smell something in one of our suitcases. As a matter of fact, there were a bunch of cheeses and other foods, which we weren’t supposed to be carrying, at the bottom of that case. But there were also some religious icons in the top section of the case, and when my father saw those, his creative mind immediately prompted him to cross himself to distract the officials from the search. This was the first and only time I ever saw my father make the sign of the cross.

I lost two of my baby teeth on that flight. I can still remember working on them until they finally came out. What I didn’t quite realize, as we left the Port of New York and headed over to catch a flight to Michigan where my oldest brother lived, was that I had lost more of my childhood than a couple of teeth. I was also leaving behind, way back there in Greece, any hope I might have had to retain a little innocence and decency in my life.

As I entered the United States that day, my main goal for the future was rather unusual for a ten-year-old boy. I’ve told you I wanted to be a priest, and that was still the case. But I also wanted to become a multimillionaire in America, the great, “land of opportunity.” And then I planned to return to Greece and build a home for all the orphans there. I’m not sure what gave me such a vision at such a young age. Perhaps it was because even though I wasn’t an orphan, I felt like one, and my heart went out to many of my friends who had lost their fathers in sea wrecks. I know I felt sorry for them, and I myself knew what it was like to go hungry occasionally. So I wanted to help them, and the best way seemed to be to make a lot of money and go back and build an orphanage home.

Such innocence. I didn’t realize that as children grow up and become adults, they face an almost overwhelming temptation to spend their money on themselves and to feather their own nests. And I had no idea what hatred and abuse I was to encounter in the so-called land of opportunity, and how that rejection would work on my mind and reopen the deep, ugly wounds I had suffered as a young boy—wounds that would become so painful that I would lash out mercilessly against others in an effort to relieve my own inner pain.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself again. As we were waiting in the New York airport for our flight, I was still filled with a sense of wonder at this strange new land. I had never seen a television set in my life, and when I saw some people watching a program in the terminal, I walked over and couldn’t believe my eyes. There was this little box with horses running around inside. And there were tiny people riding around on the horses. I wondered how Americans had shrunk all those people and horses and got them inside that box! We had shadow shows in Greece, where people moved images around in a cardboard box. But that was primitive, like kind of a puppet show—nothing like this television set I was watching.

When we arrived in Michigan, my brother (the war hero) picked us up at the airport and said, “My mule is around the corner here.”

We walked out into a parking lot and started looking for an animal tied up among all the motor cars. But then my brother pointed to a brand new Ford—his “mule” – and we piled in and headed toward a house he had rented for us. That was another wonder, that house. We were used to sleeping seven in a room in Greece, with everybody on the floor. But now we had many more rooms, new beds, and other furniture, and even a refrigerator. In Greece, we had also had a manure pile out behind our house, where we used to dig for june bugs. I checked behind our new house in Michigan just to be sure—but, of course, there was no manure.

My brother owned a restaurant and he gave us all jobs working for him. I peeled a lot of potatoes and washed a lot of dishes during the seven months we spent in Michigan, but I was happy. My big brother spent about $100 on each of the younger kids for clothes, and even though I couldn’t speak or understand English, I started attending school and got along as well as could be expected with the American kids there. At least, the other students left us alone.

But then we moved to Cleveland, and everything changed. From that time on, things went downhill for me and the rest of my family. My father did seem to bring in more money, but as had been the case in Greece, it never seemed to get into the family coffers. Instead, much of it went into booze and heavy gambling for my father, and that meant we had to suffer from his temper during his heavy drinking bouts.

On one occasion, one of my sisters spent six cents each for about five popsicles which she brought home for the rest of us kids. Unfortunately, my father walked in just as we were enjoying the treats, and he flew into a rage.

“Why do you spend our money on popsicles?” he shouted. “You want a good time? I’ll show you how to have a good time!”

And with that, he started to beat up on us. He caused such a disturbance that our landlady—who lived downstairs and had been tough on us because she thought we weren’t taking good enough care of her wood furniture—threw us out of the house.

The situation that now developed in our family was almost exactly what we had faced back in Greece, before my mother and father separated. We lived in constant fear of a beating and under steady pressure to go out and work so that we could bring in extra income, because my father refused to share much of his earnings with us. Our family situation was worse that it had been in Chios, though, for two reasons: we had no community support and there was no place we could run because neither my mother nor the kids spoke English.

I learned how to pitch pennies with the neighborhood kids to pick up a little extra money. I also went into the shoe shine business and found that if I worked hard, I could make a lot of money.

All this may sound like a pretty hard life for a child. But if all I had been confronted with was a bad family environment and the need to work hard to bring in money to help support others, I think I might have made it all right. The main problem I faced, though, was intolerable pressures at my elementary school. I had gotten along fine with the students and teachers in Michigan, even if we couldn’t communicate with each other. But Cleveland was a different story.

The first day I went to my fourth grade class on Cleveland’s east side, I got beat up by a bunch of kids for no reason. But frankly, I wasn’t so sure whether I had been in a real fight, or some kind of rough American game. I had been hit so hard and so often by my father that the blows these kids gave me seemed more like flies buzzing around than any kind of serious brawl. It seemed that these kids were trying to hurt me, because they tore my clothes, but I couldn’t be sure—I couldn’t what they were saying! At any rate, I just kept on walking home until they got tired and left me alone. I had been told by my mom that if I fought or got into any other trouble, the American authorities would do one of two things: ship me back to Greece, or throw me into a dungeon. Since I didn’t want to deal with either of those possibilities—and since these kids seemed more a nuisance than a danger—I ignored them.

But it wasn’t so easy to ignore my parents when I got home. My mother was the first to see me in my ripped clothes, and she pressed me to tell her what had happened.

“I tripped and fell on the way home from school,” I said. That was an easier story than having to explain about those kids.

“You have to keep your eyes open in this country—all ten of them!” she warned. That was an old Greek saying: If you kept your “ten’ eyes open, that meant you were being careful.

But while mom was just content to scold me and then try to help me get cleaned up, Dad was furious, not because I had a few cuts and bruises on my body, but because my clothes had been ruined. So he gave me the real beating that the school kids had been unable to inflict.

One of my brothers and I were staying in the same room at that time, and that night, when we went upstairs to go to sleep, I began to pray out loud, as I did every night. I said, “God, help us to make friends! We like this country. Help us to win these kids over.”

But instead of saying “Amen” to my prayer, my brother muttered, “Let’s get some of them. Let’s jump on some of those American pigs and get even with them. We can’t let them do this to us.”

But I kept my eyes closed and continued to pray: “help us to win them over with love.”

“Let’s hang or choke a few of them,” he responded. “Let’s knock some of their teeth out of their mouths.”

I couldn’t go along with him—at least not yet. Somehow, as young as I was, I knew it wasn’t God’s will for me to react with violence,

Mom also wanted to help us settle our differences peaceably with these American kids. She whipped up some tasty homemade cookies and gave them to us to distribute to the other kids in the lunchroom. And we tried her approach as best we could, but with those kids, nothing seemed to work.

Instead of taking our cookies and thanking us for them, they made fun of the big lunches we were bringing to school. Besides all the extra cookies, we carried about five sandwiches each. We were both big eaters, and we couldn’t understand these meager one-sandwich lunches the American kids brought. And they couldn’t understand us either—or maybe I should say, they didn’t want to understand us. Even though I couldn’t catch the words they were using, I could tell by their sneers and gestures that they were making us the butt of their jokes. And once again, they roughed us up before we got home from school.

The final straw, though, was the attitude of our teachers. I thing that I might have been able to adjust if some of those teachers in Cleveland had shown some compassion for me. But they were impatient and didn’t seem willing to take the time to help me learn English better. They taught their classes at a rapid clip, and I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. Oh, I caught on to some of the math because arithmetic and numbers are a universal language. But the other subjects were a total loss.

I would watch the teachers closely and try my best to understand them. And when they got way ahead of me, I’d raise my hand to ask a question. But most of them got tired of seeing my hand go up, and they’d send me to the principal’s office fir disrupting the class too much. It may be some of the things I did were disruptive. I’ll give those teachers that much. But I’ll tell you this: I certainly wasn’t aware I was being disruptive. If I spoke out loud while the teacher was talking, it was just because I was trying to understand what was going on. But this fact never sunk in with many of my instructors. So I found myself spending more and more time in the principal’s office, often kneeling in a corner as punishment.

I knew I was being treated unfairly. But what could I do? My brother kept urging that we should fight back in some way. But I was reluctant. For one thing, I was a little scared of what might happen if we did retaliate. Also, I really believed things had to change for the better eventually. If we could only hold out until we learned English a little better…or until we got a different set of teachers…or until God answered my prayers in some way.

But then the roof finally fell in. I still remember that day very well. I should. It was the big turning point for me here in the United States. Pressures had been building up steadily. The kids still roughed me up every so often, and my father worked me over much more seriously when I came home with yet another set of clothes ruined.

When I walked into my handwriting class that day, I was tired because I had been out most of the night shining shoes on the Cleveland streets. It was the middle of winter, and I had put some paper in my own shoes to keep the snow from coming in through the holes. I was wearing a pair of blue pants that had been ironed so many times they were as shiny as a mirror. They were certainly clean though. That was one thing about my mother: she always kept us clean. We might have been poor and been forced to wear old second-hand clothes. But we were scrubbed as clean as you could get. If I said “Good morning!” to my grandmother without washing my face or brushing my teeth, I’d get a slap and a reprimand: “Don’t talk to me while you’re dirty!”

But my personal hygiene didn’t impress the other kids that day. They still made fun of my old clothes. Most days I could have stood their sneers without blinking an eye. That day, though, they started getting to me. I found my seat and sighed with relief when the teacher stood up and started the lesson by having us all sing “God Bless America.” I didn’t feel like blessing anybody or anything, especially not America, but at least while we were singing I didn’t have to deal with the kid’s abuse.

So I joined in the song, even though I still didn’t know some parts of it. But as we were singing, the teacher started walking up and down the aisles to see who was singing properly and who wasn’t. When she reached me, she stopped and made some remark I couldn’t understand when I stumbled over a word. The whole class started laughing, and that was just too much for me. Maybe I should have gritted my teeth and ignored her until she finally left me alone. But that day, I just couldn’t I was a little man. A little Greek man. And my pride had been hurt. I had been made a fool of in front of the other kids, and as my anger grew, the hair started standing up on the back of my neck.

So when that teacher laughed at me again, I looked her straight in the eye and laughed loudly and sarcastically right back at her: “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

She looked stunned, as though I had slapped her in the face. The whole class fell silent, and some of the students were looking at me open-mouthed. Nobody had expected the little Greek doormat to respond that way. What was happening?

The teacher recovered quickly though. She grabbed a couple of dictionaries nearby and rapped me over the head with them. I wasn’t about to let her get away with that. I pulled those books away from her and slammed her in the face and then in the stomach with them. And I let her have it with my fists too. I don’t know how many times I pushed and kicked her, but when I figured she had enough, I ran out of the room and down the hall to get my brother, who was in another classroom.

“Let’s go home!” I shouted through angry tears. Without asking any questions, he immediately got up and followed me out. He could tell just by looking at me that I meant business, and he was poised and ready. He had been ready for weeks and had just been waiting for me to get pushed over the edge. And that day, I was definitely over the edge, plunging toward a violent fate that most people who knew me later believed could never be altered.

There were extra knives and meat cleavers in our basement, and we headed right down to get them and declared all-out war. I really didn’t want to fight. But I couldn’t see that I really had any choice. So we packed those weapons around us, in our jackets and down inside our pants, and we hurried right back to school that same day. You can see this wasn’t any spur-of-the-moment decision. It had been building for a long time. But now we were like two little volcanoes who, after too much overheating, had finally exploded.

And explode we did. Every kid who had ever stuck out a tongue or made fun of us was marked. I had no love for the American people any more, and especially not for those who hurt me. We went right up to the kids who had treated us the worst, supposedly the toughest kids in school, and “coco-butted” them in the face with our heads until they were lying bloody on the ground. We grabbed the little girls who had so much fun at our expense and pulled their hair and punched them.

Our work-toughened little bodies were too much for our softer classmates. We didn’t even need our weapons at first. We had them running away from us in all directions, with our flailing bare hands and our coco-butting heads. But then we pulled out our knives and meat cleavers, and a near riot broke out. We were like two little cyclones running loose in that school. Teachers and students alike put as much distance between us and them as they could.

Some school officials finally calmed us down and took us home. And my dad, of course, told us off and beat us up. But I think he was a little happy that we had finally fought back. I guess he knew we were starting to be chips off the old block; we were beginning to show our anger the way he did.

For some reason, we didn’t get kicked out of school for that incident. We were allowed to return to classes the next day, but his reprieve didn’t make us feel any more kindly toward our schoolmates. We were ready for more fighting onto the school grounds the next morning, and we weren’t a bit interested in getting involved in any kind of forgiveness. Many American people, I’ve learned, are, at the drop of a hat, ready to forgive those who have wronged them. But that’s not the way with Greeks. Where I come from, a son might not speak to a father for a lifetime if that father had done something the son considered unforgivable. The notion of the grudge is well developed among Greeks.

So my brother and I were ready to get down with those kids again and crack some more heads. But we didn’t have to. Those kids were really afraid of us now. A few of them approached us with money and cookies, either in an effort to buy us off or to make friends with us. It was amazing. We hadn’t been able to make any friends when we let them run over us. But now that we stood up to them, some were too scared not to be friendly. And others who had wanted to be friends but had been reluctant to buck everybody else started to come out of the woodwork and pal around with us. It was the children on the lower end of the social scale who became our buddies, the ones who had been downgraded themselves and now saw us as a way to move up in the school hierarchy.

But now, with our new friends and our growing personal power in that school, we weren’t interested in smiling sweetly at our classmates and teachers to gain acceptance. By using violence we had forced our enemies to accept us. And even more important than any social acceptance or respect, we found that a little violence applied in the right places could also do wonders to make people give us almost anything we wanted, including their most valued material possessions.

So that’s how I began to find my niche in this great land of opportunity. I learned that my own personal America was a land of little or no opportunity, until I finally decided to push aside the usual customs and conventions and take the law into my own hands. I never quite melted into the Great American melting Pot. I remained an immigrant, a violent stranger in a new and hostile land. And the results were often catastrophic for me and for the lives of the other human beings I touched.


4) THE MAKING OF A MOBSTER


You just don’t become a hardened criminal overnight. It takes time. If you asked me to give some instruction on the best way to turn out a professional mobster, my advice might be something like this:
1. Find a young kid who has bad family problems. Look especially for a youngster who’s become embittered because he’s been rejected flat out by one or both parents. If this child has been the victim of senseless violence in his family, so much the better.

2. Bring this brew of hostility to a boil by thrusting the kid into a social situation where he faces more rejection. You should do your best to put him in a kind of stifling emotional box, where he feels trapped and completely unloved.

3. When he begins to strike back by taking out his hostility on others—and you can bet he will take it out on others!—give him a little room to break the law (and other people’s heads). Don’t impose either tough punishment or long-term, loving guidance at this point. Stern discipline or great compassion or some combination of the two might put the kid back on a law-abiding track again.

4. Sit back and watch him get deeper and deeper into the criminal life. Given a little time, he’ll learn all the violence and underhanded skills he needs to become a proficient, dangerous lawbreaker. And if he manages to survive a few shootouts or elude the law for a few years, he may even become one of the best thieves or killers in the business.

I know this is a good way to make a kid into a mobster because it’s the route I took. And don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to lay the blame on anybody else. I know I’m primarily responsible for what I became. But I also know I had some help. There were very few people who encouraged me, even for a short time, to put on the brakes in my slide into the garbage world of crime. In fact, most of the people and situations I encountered as a kid seemed to prod me faster and faster into the life of a mobster.

When I finally learned after that first violent eruption at school that violence works, I felt I had discovered the real America for the first time. But I wasn’t a total hard guy at this point. I still had little pockets of softness and concern for others in me that had to be rooted out.

The thoroughly cruel, low-down meanness came gradually. But the desire to get power over others swept me along much more quickly, and I learned to enjoy it and use it almost immediately. What kid in my position wouldn’t? In matter of a couple of days, I had soared from the bottom of my school’s pecking order to the top. That was heady stuff. I was like a kid with a blank check who had been turned loose in a candy store.

I’m a natural organizer. I have been since I was a little kid, since those days in Greece when I got the neighborhood children to help me put together funeral ceremonies for dead animals. So it was inevitable that I should see the potential in all those downgraded kids at my Cleveland elementary school who were now looking to me for guidance. They wanted some leadership, and I certainly wasn’t about to disappoint them!

It was all sort of informal at first, not really a full-fledged gang in the sense you might understand that word. I would just go to school each morning, and the dozen or so boys who had come to admire me would flock around, waiting for me to tell them what to do. I’d take them out for a walk along the street, and when we came to a parked car, I would point to some cigarettes lying on the dashboard. One of the guys would then break in and get them for me. It was as easy as that.

But then this schoolyard stuff got boring, and we started looking for bigger game. I’d get a bunch of my troops together at night and start doing some more serious stealing. I don’t know how many churches we broke into so that we could help ourselves to the poor boxes and other valuables. I also like to get drunk on the wine the priests kept around for Communion. You can see that by this time, religion didn’t mean so much to me any more. I had turned my back on God because I thought I could do better without him. During those late-night forays, we also stole hubcaps, fenders, and other parts of cars that we would them sell to junk yards or to a fence in Cleveland.

I was an especially effective criminal, despite my young age, because I had this burning hatred within me—a hatred that gave me an extra, almost supernatural strength. It was easy for me to hate, not only because I resented the other kids and teachers who had mistreated me, but also because my father’s treatment of the family seemed to get worse as the years wore on.

I found myself becoming two different kinds of kids at home and on the outside. I was a kind of Greek Jekyll and Hyde. At home, I was nice and obedient because I thought my mother deserved some respect, and also because I was deathly afraid of crossing my father. I wore old clothes around the house and made a big show of giving him all the money I had in my pocket every day when I returned from work.

But I was completely different kid the minute I walked out of the front door. I kept a whole wardrobe of expensive clothes at a friend’s house, and I’d go over there and change before I went out anywhere with my gang. I could afford some nice outfits because I made a lot of money with my shoe—shinning business in local bars. But my income didn’t depend only on taking care of other people’s footwear. I sometimes, when they’d had too much booze, they’d put their paper money on top of the bar and then forget about it if they got to talking to someone beside them. I’d blow on those loose bills and then pick them up when they floated to the floor. It was finder's keepers as far as I was concerned.

Prostitutes also came over to get me to shine their shoes, and they gave me extra money for directing men to them for their business. Some days, I’d make several hundred dollars from this extra “free-lance” work. Do you know what it’s like to be an eleven-year-old kid with a couple hundred bucks in your pocket? It’s power and prestige—that’s what it is. I was the only guy in my class who wore a $300 ring, and in my own little mind, that put me several cuts above everybody else.

But sometimes I made mistakes, as I tried to keep my home life and my “business” life separate. One of the worst slip-ups happened one day when I came home wearing a new pair of shoes. It was Christmas. I had been polishing shoes in a bar, and I was wearing an old pair of loafers that were full of holes. One of my customers saw what bad shape they were in, and I guess he had a big dose of holiday spirit that day because he started showing some concern for me. I couldn’t understand what he was saying because I still didn’t speak English very well. Except for the simplest words and phrases, all I knew were a lot of curse words. I often had to go by the expression on a person’s face, and I could tell just by the look on this particular guy’s face that he wanted to do something nice for me.

Sure enough, he took me to a nearby store and bought me a pair of new boots and socks. That man’s generosity really made my day. I even decided that maybe life wasn’t as bad as I had always thought. Maybe there really were some good people out there who had just been hiding in the woodwork, and now they were ready to come out and change my luck.

But that was just wishful thinking. When I went home that night and gave my father about $130 that I had earned during the last few days, he didn’t even look at the money. He looked down at my shoes. I had a pretty good idea what was coming, but I still took a stab at trying to explain how a customer of mine had bought them for me.

That was a waste of breath. My father interrupted: “Hey, you thief. You crook! You went and spent my money to buy yourself shoes! I teach you!”

And with that he started to beat me up worse than he’d ever done before. He picked up a cane and began to slam me across the back with it so hard I thought I’d pass out. By the time he had finished, I was bleeding all over, and my body was covered with welts and strips. Mom tried to stop him, but then she got it too.

If I’d been able to go to bed that night, I’d probably have recovered pretty well by the morning. But I had to go out to work again after supper, and you can imagine I wasn’t feeling so good. It hurt to walk and move my arms when I was shining shoes, and I guess I must have been moving so slow and careful that it became obvious to the barmaid that something was wrong with me. She happened to be Greek, and she asked me what my problem was, and I explained to her everything that had happened. So she got in touch with the customer who had bought me the shoes, and the two of them took me home to see my parents.

I don’t know exactly what was said at that meeting, but I did pick up a few key words here and there. The man got very angry at my mother and at one point shouted, “Police! Police!” And the Greek barmaid said, “Hey, he was given those shoes for Christmas. What kind of people are you?”

My dad didn’t care. He just shrugged and turned his back on them. But they really got to my mom. She couldn’t take it. She broke down and cried right there in front of everybody.

It was then that my fear of my father started to turn to hate. Part of the reason was that I was getting older and I had had a few more years to absorb his irrational abuse and let it fester in my little brain. But also, I had been young enough when I came to the United States to have my attitudes molded by the values of this country. I had become Americanized more than my older brothers and sisters. And American kids just aren’t conditioned to put with senseless violence from a parent.

So my fantasies began to run toward doing violence to my father. Many times I daydreamed about how I would like to kill him. I wanted to kill him slowly, and the tortures I devised for him in my imagination would make any of the current horror movies seem like a Sunday school lesson.

I think my father must have sensed how I felt, but he didn’t do a thing to change my feelings toward him. If anything, he seemed to want to aggravate me even more, maybe to show his continuing power over me. I remember many times during this period he made the children walk seven miles to meet him at Central Market because he wanted to save himself the dime it would have cost for us to take a bus. Then, after we had finished shopping, he told us to carry four big bags, two in each arm, back home another seven miles. Here I was, a leader of gangs who earned my own money and who paid my own bills and many of those of the family, and he was forcing me to waste my time and demean myself this way. And it certainly wasn’t that any of us lacked the money for a couple of bus rides. I knew our father would throw away $50 to $100 on a tip at his favorite Greek restaurant when he was in a generous mood.

The cane seemed to be coming out more often, too. He beat me another time so bad that my wounds bled through my clothes and stained the outside of the back of my shirt. The teachers at school got so upset they called the police to take me home.

It couldn’t go on much longer. Everybody in the family sensed that. The incident that finally brought everything to a head happened on one especially bad day, when my father had been abusive toward my mother. The whole situation was working on my mind, and I got madder and madder as I thought about it in bed that night. Who was this man, that he could terrorize an entire household this way? He had no right to push everybody around like this and injure anybody, including my beloved mother, whenever he chose. I worked myself into such a state that I temporarily lost control of my reason. I became an animal in my home that night, the same way I could become an animal on the outside, with my gang. I reached into my drawer, pulled out a knife, and started heading down the stairs toward my father’s bedroom.

I guess the creaking of my footsteps on the stairs is what alerted my mother. She came out in her bathrobe and caught me with knife in hand. But even though she stopped me that night, she knew she might not be able to another time> I might make it all the way down to his bedroom, and then what?

She knew we were all heading pell-mell for some sort of tragedy, so she decided to take matters in her own hands. She had separated from my gather once before, in Greece, and now the time had come for her to do it again. So she and my father got a divorce, and now, finally, for the first time ever, there was the prospect of permanent peace in our home.

But it was too late for me. Sure, it was nice to be able to come home and relax, without any abuse from my father. But my path on the outside had been set. I got deeper and deeper into my gang activities. People were always coming to our home to complain about the things I was doing to disrupt the community. Parents would complain to my mother that I was beating up their sons and daughters. They asked for money to cover the destruction I and my gang had done to their cars and homes. When you saw anybody who looked angry or who had a policeman in tow walking down our street, you could almost always be sure they were heading toward our house. But I would always get even with those who complained. Even the police were afraid of me. Some of them lived in our neighborhood, and they didn’t want to get involved with me for fear I’d take it out on their children.

I was thrown out of school regularly for fighting, and I wasn’t even trying to listen to my teachers any more. They had thought at first I was trying to disrupt their classes, and they had been wrong. But, now they were right. Dead right. Sometimes I even brought rats to class and set them on fire when the teachers weren’t looking—and sometimes when they were looking. I wasn’t afraid of them or anybody else.

I was finally thrown out of my regular elementary school, and they put me in a special school so I could get some more discipline and also to learn to read English better. I was doing seventh grade-level arithmetic, but I couldn’t even read the first-grade “Dick and Jane” books.

My experiences in that special school almost saved me. And the main reason was a teacher named Mrs. Flanders, the first American teacher I’d ever had who showed me love and understanding.

She won me over the very first day when she found I was a shoe—shine boy, and she said, “Nick, I’d really like to see how you operate. Why don’t you bring your shoe-shine box to school tomorrow and show me?”

You can bet that was the first thing I put out to take to school the next morning. I popped my rag for her and really felt proud when she seemed impressed by my style and skill. From that day on, I never missed a day of classes in that school. Mrs. Flanders treated me better than my own Greek people—she even succeeded in getting me to read a little bit. Looking back on the experience, I can even say that I loved Mrs. Flanders. That’s how much she meant to me.

And I became something special to her too. She and her husband took me to my very first baseball game, and they also took me on a trip to the Cleveland zoo. I’d never done anything like that before, and I could feel something in me shifting. I actually started to want to establish a good name for myself because I could see there were some rewards in being a nice kid.

But then Mrs. Flanders got sick. Very sick. She missed many classes, and I missed her. I got the bad news one day while I was sitting in her class listening to a substitute teacher. She had died on an operating table. I don’t know what was wrong with her. But I do know the impact she had on my life. I cried and cried that day. Tough little Nick the Greek, the gang leader actually shed tears—and over a teacher! A week or so later, I graduated from the sixth grade, and I left all my childhood tears behind, in Mrs. Flanders’ classroom.

The next year, I entered a school named Addison. I really hoped I could find a teacher like Mrs. Flanders, or at least a class where I could enjoy some of the schoolwork without having other kids trying to push me around to test just how tough I was. But that wasn’t to be. My reputation had preceded me, and I quickly found I had to live up to it.

It happened the very first day I attended classes. I went to the lunchroom, finished my meal, and then walked over to stand in line for a short movie clip they provided for the kids before c