Tony Tetro - Con/Artist: The Life and Crimes of the Worlds Greatest Art Forger

F ulton, the small town where I grew up, billed itself as The City with a Future. My father called it the asshole of New York. Today its just another Rust Belt casualty, but then, it was a thriving all-American town populated by Italian and Irish immigrants who pledged allegiance, went to church, and worked hard at one of the factoriesSealrite, Armstrong Cork, Miller Brewing, or Nestl, making chocolate, which you could smell from across the river when it was about to rain.

We all dropped our native languages, accents, and foreign names and got on with the business of making it in America. We played baseball, rode our bikes, and swam at Fair Haven Beach on Lake Ontario, where I would spend all day building and decorating elaborate sandcastles. We attended Rotary Club and had charity carnivals for the volunteer fire department. And though we traded insultsus calling the Irish kids micks, and them calling us guineas, goombahs, and greasersit never led to any real animosity. Every Italian guy ended up marrying an Irish girl and every Italian girl married an Irish guy. Even one of my own best friends, Gary Battles, married Rosalie Arcigliano.

My father, James, who everybody called The Gump because of his resemblance to Andy Gump, the 1930s cartoon character, had come over from Bari, Italy, as a child, living first in the Bronx, where he carried ice blocks up the tenement stairs of Arthur Avenue, before moving to central New York. My mother, who had entered Ellis Island from Sicily as Beatrice Di Stefano, came out as Bee De Stevens and married my father at the age of eighteen. They bought a house, had four kids, and got on with getting ahead.

The curve of First Street where we lived was called Spaghetti Bend. It was the center of what had been the Italian part of Fulton for decades. In the thirties people called Fulton Little Chicago because of its reputation for Al Caponestyle killings and the fact that it was the mobs stronghold in central New York. When I was growing up, the mob was everywhere, but it was low-key and unremarkablejust part of the atmosphere that you breathed. At the Italian American Club on Broadway, you could see the bosses, Anthony Di Stefano (no relation to my mother) and Bobo Ranieri, playing cards while their entourages hung around, waiting. As far as I knew, they controlled jukeboxes, pinball machines, and the clipboards in every diner and caf where you could bet on sports or play the numbers. If you were in trouble, you could borrow moneywhich everybody told you, You better pay it backbut there was no drugs or prostitution or anything seedy that I could see anywhere.

Of course, Fulton did seem to have a lot of failing businesses with paid-up insurance policies and faulty, fire-prone wiring. The Derby Lanes bowling alley, Gayles Bar and Grill, the car dealership, the furniture storeall of them went up in flames. One of my brothers friends, Lefty Levy, told my brother about torching a few places and even his own car. Lefty had called it Jewish Lightning. When Bobo Ranieri died, Fulton had a funeral that was talked about for decades, a procession of a hundred black Caddies, as far as the eye could see, coming to pay their respects.