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(My book “Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother” Heliotrope Books, N.Y.—available on Amazon—and my brother Michael Villano, as I remember him.)
I can’t believe that’s it’s been 10 years since my brother, Michael, died.
The confluence of what would have been his 84th birthday this weekend, and the death, also by pancreatic cancer, also at 74 years old, of Congress Member Sheila Jackson Lee has brought my brother back to the front of my thoughts.
My brother Michael was my first hero, a calm gentle presence in my chaotic early life, the opposite of my father whose temper could explode as quickly as the steam boilers he worked on in the bowels of the basement of a rich man’s office tower in mid-town Manhattan. Gifted with patience, my brother would assemble all of my toys that my father had no patience, or time, for putting together.
I always saw my brother through my mother’s eyes, and that view was rose-colored, gentle and perfect, even when my brother’s life veered into a far different direction in later years. To my mother, to me, my brother was always there, ready to help, to calm the waters.
He could build anything—a four-poster bed, a bicycle, a house. I once watched him cook a meal from scratch for two dozen people, each ingredient carefully chosen, each choice delicately considered, each course, better than the one before. I was mesmerized by his short, stubby fingers and how much they looked like our mother’s.
My brother’s life and mine, diverged sharply over the last several decades of his life. As I detailed in my book “Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother,” (Heliotrope Books, N.Y., 2017) Michael began working with the Gambino Crime family and John Gotti as a “bagman,” during the same time I was working with New York State Governor, Mario M. Cuomo—the most prominent Italian-American public official in the United States, a model of integrity who revered the Rule of Law.
I knew, first-hand, that Mario Cuomo had no connections to the Mob, because I did. And my brother and his organized crime associates talked openly how “Mario Cuomo was unreachable,” and how Donald Trump—who relied upon them in New York’s construction industry– was a cash-cow they loved to bully, because he would do anything they demanded.
My idolization of my brother Michael turned into sadness, anger, sorrow and then, in the end, love again. He had lost his way, made a cascade of mistakes, and got sucked into a whirlpool of debt and obligation and personal loyalty he could not, or didn’t want to, escape.
On my brother’s 70th birthday, in 2010, we met for lunch at a waterside restaurant in Northport, Long Island, facing Crab Meadow beach. I told him I was working on my book, and had been since 1988, when he was sentenced to 90 days in prison for income tax invasion.
“Just like Al Capone,” he would joke, referring to the tax evasion convictions, which I didn’t find too funny because of the pain it put so many of us through.
Each time Donald Trump compares his 34 Felony convictions to the 23 that Capone had, as if to prove he was tougher and more of a criminal outlaw than Capone, I am reminded of my brother’s braggadocio, and my blood boils.
I told Michael I was the only one who could tell this story, and the only one who would do justice to it. He agreed, and was very supportive, even enthused about it.
“Just don’t rat anybody out,” he said to me, in typical New York mob fashion.
I smiled at him.
“That would be kind of hard, Michael, since everyone is dead,” I said.
John Gotti was dead 8 years already, at age 61, and my brother was no longer involved with the Gambino Crime family. It was 17 years since I worked for Mario Cuomo, and I was now running a non-profit organization and living with my family in Northern California.
In early Spring, 2014, I learned that my brother was battling pancreatic cancer. I no longer had an unlimited amount of time, nor did he. I wanted to finish this story I had been working on for nearly 30 years, so he could read it before he died.
I could not write fast enough. In November, 2014, my brother Michael lost his 9-month long battle with pancreatic cancer. My manuscript now had an added purpose: to give new life and meaning to the memories of my brother, complicated as they were, and to our relationship.
Then, within 60 days of my brother’s death, Mario Cuomo died. I had run out of excuses for not finishing my book. All of the principal characters were dead, but me. And no one else had written the story to give me a final reprieve, so the only option left was for me to tell it; to excise this growth from inside me.
Ironically, after my book was published in the summer of 2017, there were a number of people who wished it had never been written. Sure, as Pete Hamill noted when he wrote “A Drinking Life,” family members hate when “one of their own,” tells the stories everyone was trying to hide.
My family was no different than Hamill’s. My mother died 10 years earlier so I didn’t have to worry about her being upset about “airing our dirty laundry.” In fact, I postponed telling the story as non-fiction for 14 full years before my mother died.
In 1992, I had lunch with the great writer Gay Talese, at one of his favorite restaurants around the corner from his E. 61st townhouse in Manhattan. Talese had asked Mario Cuomo to write a book-jacket blurb for his autobiography Unto the Sons, and the Governor delegated the task to me since he knew I loved Talese’s writing and his journalistic courage.
Talese and I talked a bit about his book, his family, and about the difficulty Italian-American writers experienced in revealing family secrets. As a probing journalist, Talese wanted to know what my family secrets were. I proceeded to tell him that I had written two fictionalized versions of the story—each one, approximately 500 pages.
Talese looked straight at me and told me that such a powerful and unique story begged to be told as non-fiction, a form or writing he favored. He challenged me to do a 10-page outline for a non-fiction book over the next few weeks.
When I got back to him, my “10-page outline” had grown to a 154-page annotated and detailed outline, complete with quotes, contemporaneous notes and sources. Talese took one look at the tome and told me: “You’ve got the book right here.”
“There’s only one problem with it, “ Gay, I said. “I won’t publish this story in non-fiction form while my mother is alive, and while Mario Cuomo is still Governor. It would kill my mother, and it could be distorted to be used against Cuomo.”
So, I sat on the story for years, work-shopping it as fiction, as a stage play, or as a screenplay. My brother Michael may have been fine with the non-fiction story of our lives—even a little titillated by it– but his surviving family was not, despite my painstakingly portraying my brother as my life-long hero, and as a good man, who simply lost his way.
The Cuomo family hated it, and expressed to me through confidants that “the book should have never been written.” They were not happy with having Mario Cuomo’s name in the same book as someone affiliated with “the Mob.”
“Why,” I responded, “Only Cuomos are supposed to write books? Only their versions of stories are to be told?
It did not matter how much I explained that the book was written as an eye-witness account of how Cuomo had NO mob connections; that I wanted to definitively dispel the vicious, ethnically prejudiced rumors that because Cuomo was Italian he must be “mobbed up.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, and I wrote the book to give first-hand evidence to that.
To the Cuomo’s none of that mattered. They were worried about the headlines linking the name “Cuomo” with any mention of the Mob, even if it was to prove those rumors were all lies. Astounding.
In settling on “Tightrope’s” full title, I rebuffed the suggestion from marketing people to put “The Mob” in the book’s title, to sell many more books. I rejected that suggestion, not just to protect Mario Cuomo from malevolent screen shots, but because my life was not torn between me and The Mob, but between me and my brother, who happened to work for the Mob.
In the end, it was my story; nurtured inside me for more than three decades; told over years in parts to therapists, friends and colleagues; recorded in dozens of notebooks, memos and papers kept contemporaneously from my years of working with Mario Cuomo; and from my endless days of witnessing my brother’s criminal record unfold in Federal court, and, finally, watching him get sentenced to prison.
My brother is dead 10 years now, and each time I go back and re-read a portion of my book about him, he is still alive, and, I’d like to think, wishing his life had been more in tune with the kind, good person I loved.