Red Hook is best known to today's New Yorkers for its sparkling blue and yellow IKEA stores, which attract urban furniture shoppers from all five boroughs.
But the Hard Scrubs Wharf area has played a pivotal role in Brooklyn's history as the place where goods and, of course, contraband first enter the city.
This naturally attracted the underbelly of society, and as a young man growing up in society in the '60s, for Frank DiMatteo, that meant the Mafia.
“When I was a kid, I didn't just dream of growing up and being a gangster. It was the only ambition I had and the only path in life I could envision.” he and co-author Michael Benson write in Red Hook – Brooklyn Mafia, Ground Zero (Citadel).
DiMatteo previously told the Post that he witnessed his first mob murder when he was 5 years old and quickly learned that killing people was “just business.”
Red Hook has long been one of Brooklyn's most stigmatized neighborhoods, rife with crime and extreme violence.
For example, in the early 20th century, Red Hook's docks were controlled by the Irish gang the White Hands. “At first they blinded everyone and robbed them, but there was little violence,” DiMatteo writes.
“[But then] Things got rough. Young, savage White Hand thugs, with scars on their shoulders and clenched fists, ready to crush at any moment. ”
But soon Italians outnumbered Irish, and fierce competition for control led to greater violence, especially during Prohibition, when both groups moved illegal liquor. “While there was cooperation between Italian and Irish mobs in later years, they could not have been in the same room in the early 20th century,” they write.
However, the problem for the Irish was that they could not compete with their rivals.
“When big money came into the Prohibition underworld, some Whitehanders developed ambitions far beyond their capabilities,” DiMatteo added.
“The occupation of the pier by Italy was inevitable.”
The new rulers of Red Hook called themselves La Mano Nera – The Black Hand – and it had no shortage of voluntary conscripts.
When local youth were sucked into the underworld, it was usually because alternative jobs like labor meant long, exhausting hours with little reward. “You'd better rob a cargo truck,” DiMatteo added. “It's more profitable, and it's a lot easier later on.”
It also meant that Red Hook had the worst rate of juvenile delinquency among New York City's five boroughs.
Violence was the universal language in Red Hook.
Fights and gunfire were common, and bodies regularly appeared on the docks, some mutilated and decapitated.
The trial was also swift and merciless.
When Black Hand's Francesco 'Frankie Ale' Loere ran the docks, he had his fingers in many pies. “Yale looked over everything in Red Hook. If you ran a brothel, Yale would collect. When you paid for the ice in the icebox, Yale would take a cut. ” explains the author.
He also took protection to a new level. “All Italian immigrants were under threat of death if they did not pay protection money to Yale. All paid. Those who did not were angry,” they wrote.
“Yale University Killed Dozens of People Before They Turned 21.”
But when his colleague Al Capone discovers that a liquor truck heading from Chicago to New York has been hijacked by Yale University, Capone sends a four-strong hit squad to assassinate him.
On a Sunday afternoon in July 1928, they ambushed Yale as he drove by. “The gunmen opened fire as they approached,” the authors wrote.
“After Yale's car crashed and stopped, a lone gunman pulled Yale from behind the wheel, stretched him out on his back on the sidewalk, and fired a .45-caliber automatic gun into Yale's head as a precaution.”
When police arrived at the scene, Yale was shot in the head, almost separated from his body. “A massive shotgun bullet blew off most of his neck,” the authors added.
As an aside, the authors note that “The Yale hit is credited with being the first mob hit to feature the Tommy gun, seven months earlier than the Valentine's Day massacre that spread the weapon into the public imagination.” It goes back more than half a year.”
The Red Hook neighborhood boasts cobblestone streets, spectacular views of the Statue of Liberty, and was a thriving port center in the 1920s.
However, by the '60s most sea freight had left and the Gowanus Expressway (now the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) was built, expanding traffic to six lanes and effectively cutting off the area from the rest of Brooklyn. I did.
Red Hook still has abandoned warehouses and undeveloped land. Gentrification is said to be here to stay, but the process is slow. Red Hook has long been touted as the next bustling area, even though soaring rents have displaced most of the traditional blue-collar households, including neighboring Carroll Gardens and nearby Park Slope. It has never been as successful.
In May, the city pledged $80 million to rehabilitate three piers and “plan” a major overhaul of the 122-acre Port of Red Hook, but the benefits have yet to be felt.
Born into a family from Naples, Italy, Frank DiMatteo says he was surrounded by career criminals, or, as he likes to call them, “gods of the demon world.” Many of them have moved from the area or lost their lives.
He also has a gang led by “Crazy Joey” Gallo, whose father is one of Red Hook's most brutal con artists, and two brothers who routinely pinch their father hard in the cheek to make him cry and get tough. He revealed how they ran together.
“He was the embodiment of fear,” he wrote of Gallo. “He could make a guy take his pants off with a snap of his fingers.”
But despite all the violence he witnessed in his youth, DiMatteo wouldn't trade his unique upbringing for anything. “It didn't matter that neighborhood life sometimes looked like an imitation of an old Western or a Prohibition-era gang shootout.”
He currently lives in Gerritsen Beach with his wife Emily, the mother of his three children.
“If you had told me when I was a kid that I would grow up to be a writer, a publisher, and the head of a large family, I would have told you you were crazy.
“[But] I grew up.
“A lot of people didn't have a chance,” he added.
