The night Helene Stapinski's grandfather tried to kill her entire family she was five years old. She had been playing in the family apartment above the Majestic Tavern in Jersey City when, in the bar downstairs, Grandpa Beansie - an ex-con and armed robber- pointed his loaded gun and bragged he had a bullet for each of them. But news travelled fast, and before he made his way past the broken tiles in the hallway, the cops had him in handcuffs. Helene watched from the kitchen window as Beansie went to jail for the last time.
In 1922 Helene's great-grandfather murdered her great-grandmother; she had a mob consigliere for a cousin and a bookie for an uncle; her daily bread was stolen by her father from the cold storage company where he worked and even the books on her shelves were smuggled out of the local bookbinding company in her Aunt Mary Ann's oversized girdle. The family talents were extended to the notoriously crooked Jersey City political machine by Great Aunt Katie, who liked to take a shot of whiskey each morning to "clear her lungs". They emerged in Helene's generation when a first cousin embezzled a quarter of a million dollars through her brother-in-law's bank - tearing the clan apart.
This is a memoir about growing up surrounded by small-time swindlers, crooks, mobster wannabes and eccentrics in a city infamous for its toxic waste, corrupt local officials and ties to the Mafia.
