Jennifer Masia (3:17)
I grew up in Southern California land, all right, Southern California land of seashell pink mini malls. The only child of Brooklyn reared parents. My mother was a liberal Jewish Manhattan beach sophisticate and my father was an Italian from Bay ridge with a 12 tree Brooklyn accent and tattooed biceps. Opposites attract, I guess. They had me in their 40s so they spoiled the shit out of me, which they could do. Because my father's carpet business was entirely off the books. My parents idea of a bank was cutting a hole in the padding under the carpet and praying it didn't flood. My father called his business CNC Carpets, which stood for Cassis and Cassis, which was our last name. I was Jenny Cassis in school. My mother was Eleanor Cassis. And outside the house my father was known as Frank Cassis, although inside the house my mother always called him Johnny. And they were like my soulmates. We were very close, the three of us, and if I didn't tell them something, it was like it didn't happen. One day when I was five, I came home from school and someone was slapping handcuffs on my father and I said, are you arresting my daddy? And I was told, no, honey, it's not real. They're making a movie. So I soon learned it wasn't a movie because I visited my father in jail, which my my mother told me I could call the correctional facility. In one facility I got to sit on his lap. In another I had to talk to him on the phone through the glass. And soon he was shipped to New York without explanation. And my mother and I put all of our possessions in storage and we hopped in Amtrak and we followed him. And after eight excruciating months without my father, he was suddenly, miraculously returned. He bounded through the door. Hey kids. Like he'd never been gone. And we resumed our lives in California. But my mother Told us that we were now going to go by our real names. I was Jennifer Masia and my parents were John and Eleanor Masia. And I instinctively knew that I was never really supposed to ask why my father was arrested that time. A suspicion that was confirmed when I finally did when I was 17. My father's business went belly up. They didn't really save any money and he panicked and pulled up stakes and moved us to New York where he still had family. So two days after graduating high school, my parents yank me out of Southern California and deposit me in Farmingdale, Long island into a brutally humid summer where I'm surrounded by the buzz of cicada bugs. And on day two, my father gets a job in Queens based paint crew. So. So he sets off spray painting Texacos and Taco Bells. And my mother and I are largely left to our own devices all summer tooling around in this Toyota Camry that was about to be repossessed. And I realized that my whole life I'd lived away from my father's family. And now I was in a place where everyone must have known what he did to get arrested. So I was kind of tired of being the last one in the dark. And one day, after my mother and I had hit up every Starbucks and Barnes and Noble on Long Island, I drew up the courage to ask her, mom, what did dad do to get arrested in California that time? You remember that? She said, of course I remember that. I was five. It was one of my first memories. I remember she sent me up to my room and locked me in there. And I was clawing at the door because all I wanted to do was say goodbye to my father. And by the time I got downstairs, he was gone. And I'm telling my mother this, and it's coming out tangled in sobs because I'm crying and I realize that this is the first time I've ever spoken aloud about this. The five year old inside of me was finally reacting to having her daddy taken away. So my mother pulls into the parking lot of a gas station and parks far from the pumps. And the air conditioner is freezing, the tears on my cheeks. And she says, I need a cigarette for this. And she pulls out her Benson and Hedges Ultra Deluxe Menthol in the box and she inhales and she exhales and she says, your father was in prison before you were born and he violated his parole. That's why he went to jail when you were 5. Oh, I thought, well, that's not so bad. I imagine much more sinister Stuff. Well, how long was he in jail before I was born? 12 years. She said 12 years. 12 years. 12 years is a long time. And these were years in his prime. I mean, if he had me at 40, then he was in jail for most of his 20s and 30s. My father's life had a really big chunk missing. What did he do 12 years for? And my mother was extremely reluctant to tell me, so reluctant that it took, like, an hour of nagging and crying to get her to admit that my father stole cars and robbed houses and sold hot clothes off the back of a truck. He was an associate of an early incarnation of the Gambino crime family. But before John Gotti, he was like a good fella, a freelancer, if you will. He was not a made guy. To be made involves some kind of induction ceremony, I guess, like Boy Scouts, but with guns. And, you know, they wanted to make him, but he resisted because he didn't want to kick his money up to a captain. Why should I run around all day making money just to give it to some guy sitting on the corner eating cup of coal, you know? And my mother smiled at this because she was really proud of my father's independent streak. Jenny, she says, you must never, ever tell anyone what I just told you. You never, ever tell our business to strangers. They are not your blood. They are not your family. And don't tell your father I told you this. You can't. He never wanted you to know. He changed his life for us. For you. So five years later, I'm living with my parents on Staten island, and I open up the New York Post, and I read on page 24 that the new York State Department of corrections has put 500,000 of their past and present inmate records online. And I remembered how reluctant my mother had been to tell me what my father did. And I thought, now is my chance to independently verify, thanks to the Internet. So I run home and I lock myself in my room, and I type in his last name, my last name, and there he is. He was in jail from 1963 to 1975. Twelve years, like she said. But I scrolled down, expecting to find, like, this long laundry list of petty offenses that added up to a dozen years. But instead, there was only one conviction on his rap sheet. Murder. And I can hear my parents preparing dinner in the kitchen, the clanging of pots and pans and snippets of conversation. And I thought, no wonder my mother lied to me. This is bad. And I couldn't go to my father with this because he was a year into a terminal lung cancer diagnosis. So I sat on it for a few weeks, and one day when my mother drove into the city, she was going to go to Sloan Kettering to see my dad where he was having chemo, and dropped me off at Hunter College where I was in student. She pulled up at 68th and Lex and it just tumbled out. Mom, I said, I looked up daddy's criminal record online. Silence. Mom, do you know what I'm going to say? Jenny, Jenny, why did you do that? She said, he never wanted you to know. Her biggest beef was was that anyone with a modem could see what my father had so desperately tried to hide for so many years. I argued that if you commit a crime like murder, you deserve to lose your anonymity. Ma, I said, you can't hide this from me anymore. This is it. Tell me what he did. So she told me. My mother was a high school teacher in East New York in the 60s and 70s, and she joined a Quaker group that was going around to prisons. And she decided she wanted to write a book on the prison reform movement. And someone suggested that she meet an activist behind bars by the name of John Masia. And that's how I met your father. She said, what you told me all these years, you guys met through friends. And as I'm saying it, I'm realizing how stupid it sounds, and I'm realizing that I've been duped. My father was in jail because when he was 26 and running around with his little drug crew in Bay Ridge, one of their number was informing on them to the cops. So he led this guy into a park in Brooklyn and shot him like eight times. But when he got out of jail, he was going to embark on a legitimate life. My mother said this murder was like an aberration. You know, he had to psych himself up to do it. She said, you know, like I imagine a method actor, you know, summoning rage. So he and my mother moved to Miami, and he was going to go legit. But it didn't work out that way because, you know, once a criminal, always a criminal, I guess. I don't know. And they had me, and my father went back to coke dealing. And in 1978, when I was a baby, he was arrested with coke in his car, and my mother bailed him out. But he knew he was going back to jail for a while because it was a parole violation on a murder charge. And when he got home, he looked at my mother, he looked at me in my bassinet and said, we have to run, Mom. I said to her, are you saying that we went on the lam? She said, jenny, don't you remember how all those years we were the Cassis family? Your father was Frank Cassis and you were Jenny Cassis. And I'm thinking, oh, my God, it's coming back to me like from a past life. I never questioned why we used different names. When I was a kid. The kid in me just kind of accepted it. I said, mom, you know, I used to think that Johnny and Frank were derivatives of the same name, like William and Bill and Richard and Dick. No, she said, they're not. And then she got a speeding ticket, and they traced the VIN number on the car. And the people who came to arrest my father when I was five were the FBI. She said, jenny, you have to understand. All that ended when we left Florida. He changed his life so he could have a family. He changed his life for us, for you. So a year later, when he died, I stood up at his memorial service. And in front of everyone I knew, I said yes to John Macia made mistakes, but he had the strength and grace to move past them because he changed his life for his family. Four and a half years later, my mother was also battling lung cancer. And on Christmas Eve 2005, she had a mini stroke. And she was drifting in and out of consciousness in the ER of Mount Sinai Hospital. And suddenly she says, jenny, there's something I have to tell you about your father. Uh. Oh. You know how you've always asked me over the years whether that was the only person your father killed? Because I did from time to time. It was something that bothered me, and I kind of wanted to keep her on her toes. Well, it wasn't. She said, how many people did he kill? Four, maybe five. She said what? She said that when he was dealing drugs in Miami, before we went on the lam, people double crossed him. People stole money from him. And you stayed with him? I said, not caring, really, who heard me? She said, jenny, it was just business. You have to understand, it was only business. I don't believe in that. I said. And I ran out. And she's screaming at my back, why are you so mad? Why are you so mad? Why am I so mad? Because my mother stayed married to a murderer because she let a monster raise her child. But that's the thing. My father wasn't a monster. He was the guy who snuck me candy, you know, when my mother forbade it. And he was the guy who made up silly songs to sing on the way to school, and he was the guy who was home in time for dinner every single fucking night. He was a good father to me. My mother died 19 days later, but before she did, we did get a chance to talk about my father's unsolved crimes once more. She only knew the vaguest details, of course, but the thing that sticks with me now is something she said a few days after her mini stroke. She had taken a double dose of medication, not realizing that she'd already taken her pills, and I reminded her of this and she looked at me and we locked eyes across my living room and we kind of silently acknowledged the obvious, you know, that she was dying. And she sat down on the edge of my couch and she folded her arms, she looked me square in the eyes and she said, jenny, your father and I will always be with you. And that one I do believe.
