My great-grandmother was a bookie. As the matriarch of the Debrizzi-Dalessio clan, she was the person who began it all.
Marie Debrizzi was born in Italy and came to this country in 1895. She settled in East Harlem, then a thriving, close-knit Italian community. Her husband, who died soon after they arrived, faded into the oblivion of family history.
Marie had one son, Alex, and two daughters, Teresa and Jenny.
She was way ahead of her time, a regular women’s libber, believing that she could do anything a man could do, and most times a helluva lot better.
Marie opened a candy store on 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue that had one large jar of stale penny candy in the window. That was the extent of her involvement in the confection trade. She ran a full-scale bookmaking operation from the store for years. She couldn’t write in any language (she signed her name with an X), but could balance columns of numbers in her head, a feat that would make Meyer Lansky proud. By herself she booked numbers, horse bets, and in later years, became a bootlegger. All without a man to front for her.
The infamous Dutch Schultz, the undisputed boss of the New York mob, was a friend of hers. He admired Marie for her business sense and balls (she had to have a set stashed somewhere--hers was a tough business).
She occasionally had hassles with deadbeat customers, gangs that wanted to muscle her, or the occasional stickup artist. The stickup guys had to be brain-damaged. Holding up a mob-sanctioned bookmaker was akin to sticking your head into the muzzle of a fuse-burning cannon. Years later, some idiot burglarized a well-known Italian restaurant on the next block. They’re still finding the fool’s body parts. Even today, you can walk away from a Masserati with the engine running anywhere on Pleasant Avenue between 114th and 116th Street and come back to find it in the same spot. Probably freshly washed and waxed.
So whenever Marie had a problem, she could turn to Dutch and he’d make it go away, immediately if not sooner.
The only headache that wouldn’t go away was her son Alex. He was constantly getting into trouble. If he wasn’t beating someone up just for the hell of it, he was burglarizing non-Italian businesses. He was generally a wild kid.
Dutch Schultz was often called upon to bail Alex out of a jam. Finally, the Dutchman had had it with the kid’s forays into petty crime.
“Hey, Marie,” he said one day during one of his many trips uptown to extricate Alex from his latest problem, “I think it’s time you should get Alex to someplace he won’t get into so much trouble.”
Marie, I’m sure, probably frowned over the top of her glasses. “Oh yeah, like where?”
“Like Staten Island. It’s like the country, almost. Trees, cows, all that shit. Oops, I’m sorry,” the most feared gangster in New York said. My great-grandmother wouldn’t allow bad language to be spoken in her presence, and was known to dress down anyone who swore.
“Staten Island? You’ve gotta be kidding, Arthur. My business, it’s here. I’m not going nowhere.”
Marie Debrizzi was supposedly the only person in New York who could call the Dutchman by his given name (his real last name was Fleggenheimer--she couldn’t pronounce it).
“I’ll give you the Island,” Dutch told her. “You can control all the numbers, horses, everything.”
“When should I leave?”
Marie Debrizzi was no dope.
And the empire was born. It was March 1924.
Marie and Alex settled in the sparsely populated community of Concord, located on the eastern side of Staten Island, and promptly opened up a gin mill on Dekalb and Britton Avenues. She called it the Webb Inn, choosing the name because the bar was made from trees whose grain resembled a spider’s web. She was the bartender, cook, waitress, and dishwasher. She and Alex lived over the store in a large apartment, where she also conducted her bookmaking business.
Within a short period of time, she bought the two adjoining buildings and expanded the Webb. Eventually, one of the buildings would become the headquarters for Dee’s Cigarette and Vending Machine company, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Every day you could see Marie in her uniform: a house dress, rolled down nylons, and black leather shoes. She wore her hair in a bun, as did most Italian widows. No matter how much money she made, she never indulged in fine clothes or jewelry. She was all business, but found more than enough time to keep her eye on Alex to make sure he stayed out of trouble.
Alex was very respectful of his mother, but he yearned to be a gangster. He made sure he didn’t get caught doing anything illegal, knowing that Dutch Schultz would have been highly pissed if he had to journey to Staten Island to bail him out.
Alex married at twenty-three and had two daughters. He also had a girlfriend off Staten Island who bore him four children. He divided his time between the two families, and if either woman knew of the other, they kept their mouth shut. Alex also maintained his bedroom in his mother’s house, using it to get away once in a while and eat some of momma’s home cooking. Italian men, at least in those days, never strayed too far from their mothers.
Alex was a tough guy. He didn’t take crap from anyone and never lost his fondness for fighting. He demanded, and got, respect. When he became head of the International Longshoreman’s Association, he told everyone that ILA stood for I Love Alex.
I remember when I was a teenager Uncle Alex would think nothing of punching out any of my boyfriends who disrespected me or the family or those he didn’t like. When he got older, he’d send two of his goons to administer the beatings. I had a hard time holding on to boyfriends.
For all his crudity, he was good to his family (both of them). When his sister Teresa (my grandmother) lost her husband Dominic Dalessio, a dock worker, to an accidental fall into a ship’s cargo hold, Alex took three of their children, John (my father), Alec (later called Pope, for reasons that are unclear seeing as how he wasn’t particularly religious) and Mike (Mickey) under his wing. The remaining three, Giovanni (called Jumbo for obvious reasons), Mary, and Patrick, remained with their mother, who never remarried. Italian widows in those days mourned their dead husbands until it was someone’s turn to mourn them.
By this time, Alex had a mini-criminal empire. His mother was getting old, and she turned over the daily operation of the family business to him. With youthful vigor, he expanded the bookmaking business to include loansharking and sports betting.
It was into this atmosphere that his sister’s boys matured and became part of the Debrizzi empire. Jumbo, Patrick, and Mary stayed legitimate, probably due to the fact that Alex didn’t raise them. Patrick was killed during the Anzio landing in World War II, and Mary was to spend her later years in a mental institution, where she remains today. Jumbo was in the vending business until the day he retired, never turning a dishonest dollar in his life.
