Born to Fish Page 3

  The fishing was fabulous, and they hauled in one largemouth bass after another, having the time of their lives. “This is really great, Greg!” said Mr. Mondillo.

  Greg smiled and started to cast his lure again when suddenly he noticed the farmer walk out the back door of his house. “Run!” he screamed at the teachers.

  “Why?” asked Mr. Mondillo, but Greg was already racing away through the woods.

  “They started running with me, these two older teachers,” said Greg. “And they’re like, ‘What the fuck?’ I said, ‘You can’t fish here.’ It was funny as hell. I’d sneak into this pond, and the farmer would chase me out all the time. My teachers busted my chops about it later, but I know they loved it.”

  Each year, a huge fair took place at North Haven, featuring roller coasters, shooting galleries, baseball tosses, and other attractions, as well as numerous booths. Greg’s favorite was the trout club booth, where you could learn to tie flies. He never got past that booth when he went to the fair with his father and his brother. The man showed him step-by-step how to tie a fly, using feathers, thread, and model cement. The first time this happened, Herb and Dave just left him there and went off in search of carnival rides. When they returned hours later, Greg was still completely engrossed in tying flies and had no interest whatsoever in going on rides, eating cotton candy, or other fair staples. That first year at the fair, he came back to the trout booth four days in a row and became a proficient fly tyer. He was seven years old.

  Not long after this, his paternal grandmother’s parrot died. She was devastated by the death of her bird, so Greg comforted her and offered to bury it—but first he pulled out a few clumps of its feathers to use for tying trout flies. The parrot feathers were a gaudy green and yellow and made a fly that really stood out—which came in handy the day he first tried out one of the flies on a nearby river. The water was high and muddy from a recent storm, making visibility poor for the fish. But a huge sea-run rainbow trout, still glistening chromelike from its time in the ocean, hammered the fly, and the fight was on. Greg’s cheap fly rod was barely a match for this mighty fish as it surged away, making run after run as it fought to escape, bending the rod double, but Greg finally managed to land the trout and put it on a stringer.

  Herb happened to drive down to the river that day, looking for his son, and asked him if he was catching anything. His mouth dropped when Greg pulled the stringer from the water and showed him the enormous trout, more than twenty inches long. The next day, the front page of the local newspaper featured a picture of Greg wearing a crimson Boston Red Sox hat and grinning widely as he held up his prized fish.

  The yard at the Myerson house was big enough to serve as a football or baseball field for local kids, and they would sometimes have huge neighborhood games there. Greg’s brother Dave was the star even then. He would often get Greg to stand at a makeshift home plate in front of a wooden fence while he threw sizzling fastballs and curve balls at him.

  “The fence was all pushed in from him throwing fastballs at me,” said Greg. “I’d be crying, but Dave wouldn’t let me stop. I grew up playing sports with him and his friends, who were always at least two or three years older than me.”

  It was cruel, but it made Greg into a phenomenal slugger. “I wound up becoming a really good hitter, because he’d be throwing these hundred-mile-an-hour fastballs and curve balls and all this other crap at me. And sometimes he would bean me—on purpose. So when I got to Little League, I led the team and league in home runs all the time. The pitches that I saw in Little League were a hell of a lot slower than what he was throwing.”

  Dave was always the star, and he quickly advanced from Little League to the Babe Ruth League, a prestigious international baseball program. The Babe Ruth field was next to the Little League field, separated by a wire fence. Greg, a lefty, would often hit home runs high over the fence, and the ball would bounce right in the middle of the Babe Ruth field as Dave stood at the pitcher’s mound. “Dave would always give me the thumbs-up as I was jogging around the bases.”

  Verne Carlson was the same age as Greg and lived just down the street from him. They were both avid anglers in elementary school and were trout fishing on a nearby river the first time they met, Greg using dry flies and Verne bait-fishing with worms. Verne bet him he’d catch more trout using bait than Greg would with flies, so the race was on. They were both very competitive and fished hard, up and down the river, catching fish after fish, but at the end of the day Greg had won handily.

  “After that, we would go trudging together up the river for miles all the time, catching rainbows, browns, and brook trout,” said Greg. “We’d fish every spot we could find, walking all the way from North Haven to the MacKenzie Reservoir in Wallingford, going through the woods, then breaking out into where the river went through farmland. We caught a lot of trout back then and released most of them.”

  Verne’s father was one of the most over-the-top anglers Greg had ever met. He was absolutely obsessed with catching striped bass, a fish Greg had not yet ever caught—and he owned a boat. Mr. Carlson ran a family business installing wood floors in houses throughout the area. He was strong and muscular from the work and bore a striking resemblance to Sheriff Andy Taylor of The Andy Griffith Show, which Greg enjoyed watching as a kid. He usually dressed in a T-shirt and blue jeans, as he had probably been doing since he was in his teens in the mid-1950s.

  The first time Mr. Carlson took Greg on one of their fishing trips, they went far out into Long Island Sound, all the way to the Race, at the far eastern edge of the sound, where it meets the Atlantic Ocean—a place of turbulent crosscurrents, powerful riptides, and surging seas. It was as if a whole new world had opened up for Greg, full of adventure and a sense of freedom as the boat rocketed across the pounding sea, splashing salt spray over them as they motored through powerful swells and wind chop.

  It was there, within sight of the Race Rock lighthouse, that Greg hooked his first striped bass. The power of the fish shocked him, instantly bending his fishing rod double, lifting him off his feet, and almost pulling him over the side. Mr. Carlson quickly grabbed him by the back of his pants with one hand. He was already holding Verne, who’d hooked another equally large fish.

  “Keep reeling!” shouted Mr. Carlson. “Don’t let go of those rods!”

  “We were both literally coming up off the deck with the rods in our hands, fighting those fish,” said Greg. “It was the most exciting thing ever. Mr. Carlson was a very strong guy. The fish would definitely have pulled us right over the side if he wasn’t holding the two of us by our belts.”

  The sense of accomplishment Greg felt when he finally brought the fish alongside and Mr. Carlson helped him haul it aboard was indescribable. Nearly forty inches long, the striper weighed close to thirty pounds. And it was beautiful, the most stunning fish Greg had ever seen: sleek, silvery white, and strikingly marked with bold black lines running from its gills to its tail. Although he was exhausted, and the muscles in his arms burned so much from the intensity of his effort that he could barely lift them, he couldn’t wait to pick up his rod, bait the hook with a fresh eel, and get ready for the next tidal drift.

  “Oh my God, I was in love with it!” said Greg. “I just wanted to catch them again and again.”

  The three of them caught several more stripers that day, each one just as exciting for Greg to fight as the first one. He was absolutely hooked by striped bass fishing, by everything about it—the beauty of the fish, the ferocity of their fight to escape, and the places where you went to catch them. This was his first real taste of going out to sea in a boat to pursue fish, and he loved it. He was still in awe as they motored back to the harbor on the way home, and he tried to memorize the route they had taken and the places they’d fished. He knew he’d be returning here again—by himself if necessary.

  Over the years, the vast and often turbulent waters of Long Island Sound would become a refuge to Greg, a place where he could escape the many car
es he had back on land—his difficulties with schoolwork, his disabilities, his mother’s constant nagging. Although he was not quite eight years old, his single-mindedness was astounding even then. He started saving coins in a coffee can and doing whatever he could to earn money: catching baitfish to sell to fishermen; planting tomatoes for a nearby farmer; doing odd jobs for anyone who had some extra chores he could do. And always, his goal of one day having his own motorboat, so he could go out into Long Island Sound anytime he wanted, kept him going.

  * * *

  Married to the Mob

  Greg’s family led a strange life, due partly to Herb’s endless ambition. Right out of the service he had gotten into the liquor business, running package stores. Then he became a bookie for a crime family—which must have been a shock to Diane, the high school teacher, but apparently the money and lifestyle the mob provided was too attractive to pass up, and she looked the other way.

  Greg’s brother, Dave, explained it this way: “I think she just pretended it didn’t exist,” he said. “She knew it was there, and there were just pure logistics like you’ve got phone calls coming in. He used to have these little monitors on the phone, and he would say that if the red light came on, hang up the phone, because someone was tapping the line. So it was really obvious to everyone what was going on, but it wasn’t something that my mom talked about—ever.”

  Herb would often host huge parties at their house, which was perfect for the purpose—large, isolated, and difficult for the police or FBI to watch. Often thirty or more people would show up, various mobsters and their girlfriends. Diane would stop the men at the door and make them hand over their pistols before they could come inside. She’d pile the guns in a fruit bowl beside the front door and give them back when they left. Most of the men who came to Herb’s parties were absurdly stereotypical mobster types, both funny and terrifying—big, dark, pushy Italian American mugs, with names like Frankie Potatoes and Joey Fingers, speaking in working-class New York accents. They would have loud, raucous poker games, sitting around the table together, cussing, smoking cigars, and sometimes getting into fistfights with each other, while their girlfriends lounged beside the swimming pool. Sometimes it got so bad, Diane would scream at them: “Look, I’ve got kids in the house. If you’re going to play cards here, no guns, no fights, no bad language!”

  Greg hated the parties. “I was a quiet kid,” he said. “I didn’t want any part of that. I was usually downstairs in the basement, tying flies to take fishing. When they would fight and yell and scream playing poker, it hurt my ears. I was like a country hillbilly living with all these mobsters,” he said, laughing.

  Some of the goons who frequented Herb’s parties took a liking to Greg. He remembers two in particular named Al and Sal who seemed so interchangeable he could barely remember who was who, except that Al had a goofier personality. Both had mustaches and black hair, stood more than six feet tall, and easily weighed 300 pounds. They were scary men, but always friendly to Greg. Sometimes they’d drop by the house when Diane wasn’t home and let Greg shoot their pistols in the backyard, blowing gaping holes in tin cans or blasting Coke bottles into oblivion. Then they’d hand Greg a twenty-dollar bill and say, “Go spend this someplace.”

  Once when an elementary school friend of Greg’s was visiting him at his house while his parents were away, they found one of Herb’s pistols in a drawer.

  “Do you think it’s loaded?” his friend asked.

  “Naw, I don’t think so,” said Greg. Then he pulled the trigger, blowing a hole through several walls of the house, the bullet finally stopping in a book on a shelf in his parents’ bedroom. Greg desperately squeezed white toothpaste into the holes, trying to hide where the bullet had gone through.

  Although Herb was Jewish, he became a vital member of the Italian crime family he was associated with. It was often Herb who set the odds on football games and other sporting events for the syndicate, and he was good at it. He made a great deal of money for the mob and became powerful in his own right.

  Herb was never violent at home—he was the opposite; nothing made him lose his cool with his wife and kids. But Greg remembers a couple of times when he blew up at people who crossed him. One day, just as the family sat down for dinner, a man who owed Herb a large amount of money showed up at the front door.

  “He had a bunch of pot, big bags of weed, to try to pay my father off, right in front of me and my brother and mother,” said Greg.

  Herb exploded. He grabbed the man and threw him outside. Then, lifting him up from the ground, he punched him again and again till he lay unconscious on the driveway.

  “He finally came back in the house, acting like nothing had happened, and started eating dinner,” said Greg.

  Another time, just after Greg started junior high school, Herb gave him some pointers on how to take care of himself in a street fight. A couple of the toughest kids at school had taken a bitter dislike to Greg and were making his life miserable. They were brothers and rode on the school bus with him every day. The two picked on him at every opportunity. One day they cornered him in a school restroom. As the larger brother held Greg firmly in a bear hug, the other took a deep draw from a cigarette and held it with the bright ember aglow right next to Greg’s eyes, threatening to blind him. He burned Greg’s face repeatedly as Greg struggled to escape.

  “We were at the dinner table that night, and I had all these burn marks around my eyes,” Greg told me. His father noticed immediately.

  “What the hell happened to your face?” he asked. Greg looked down, silent. “Those are burns . . . cigarette burns,” said Herb, aghast. “Someone stuck a fucking cigarette in your face!” he said, becoming more and more steamed.

  Greg finally admitted what had happened, and his father insisted he give him all the details. “It was the Allen brothers,” said Greg. Herb knew all about them and about their father—a low-level drug dealer and gangster wannabe, nicknamed “Big Daddy Car” because he always drove around in a big red Cadillac.

  As he listened, the redness left Herb’s face, and a scary coolness descended over him. “This is what you got to do,” he said. “When the school bus drops you off tomorrow, be sure to get off first, then wait at the bottom of the steps. When the first kid gets off the bus, punch him in the throat as hard as you can.” Greg grimaced and glanced downward. Herb grabbed Greg’s shoulder and looked him in the eyes. “I mean it. Don’t punch him in the head; punch him in the throat. Then you can fight one-on-one with the other kid.”

  As the bus left the school the next afternoon, Greg was sitting in the front, near the driver. He glanced to the back and saw that the brothers were not sitting together. The smaller of the two was closer to the front of the bus, but they were both much bigger than Greg. As Greg got off the bus, he turned to one side and waited as everyone exited and walked past him. The instant the boy stepped off the bus, Greg landed a devastating blow to his throat, and he fell like a puppet with its strings cut, lying on the ground, choking and completely incapacitated. The boy’s brother saw everything and began forcing his way to the front of the bus, throwing other students out of his way as he raced to get outside. Greg tried to run, but the boy chased him down, tackling him to the ground. He smashed Greg’s head again and again against the concrete curb until he was bleeding profusely from his face.

  Herb took one look at Greg when he got home and told him to get in the car. He drove straight to Big Daddy Car’s house and rang the doorbell as Greg sat in the passenger seat of the car. When the man opened his front door, Herb took him by the collar and dragged him outside.

  “Look what your goddamn kids did to my son!” he shouted, pointing at Greg. He grabbed the man by the back of his head and slammed his face into the hood of his car again and again until he dropped to the ground, unconscious and covered with blood, then kicked him out of the way like a sack of garbage. Herb got into the car, and he and Greg rode silently all the way home.

  I spoke with Greg’s old
er brother, Dave, about what it was like growing up with a mob-connected father, and he told me about another time he’d seen Herb snap, after he rear-ended a car. “The person in front stopped, and my dad hit him,” said Dave. “Not badly, but he just bumped right into him. The guy got out and was all pissed off. I remember my dad grabbing this guy and throwing him across the front of his car—like he can hit you, and then it’s your fault.”

  Other unspeakably violent events took place in Herb’s world. The day after Herb sold one of his liquor stores, the man who bought it was thrown down a flight of stairs and shot five times.

  “I don’t know what the hell happened, or if my father had anything to do with it,” said Greg. “He owned a bunch of liquor stores, and he sold one to this guy. Maybe he pissed him off or something. I’d seen my father in action. He really had a temper. He was usually nice—but if you got him pissed off . . .”

  But Herb was not all bad. He was a mass of contradictions—a mix of Tony Soprano and Mike Brady. And he hung around at home all day like Ozzie Nelson.

  “He was always locked in his upstairs office all day Saturday and Sunday,” said Dave. “It was always calls coming in, calls going out. He was basically running the whole book.”

  Dave particularly remembers one time when he was very young and was going with his father to a breakfast at the Knights of Columbus hall. “When we were walking out he tells me, ‘Look up at that third-story window in the building across the street. Smile, the FBI’s taking your picture.’ And apparently they really were. I never connected the dots as a kid. It was just normal. We always had lots of uncles, who weren’t really uncles; folks who were coming over all the time.”