Vincent Coppola on ‘Gowanus Crossing’

I first met Vincent Coppola in 1961 when we were high school freshmen at St. Augustine High School on Park Place in the Slope. After a career in journalism and some notable books, he’s now ensconced in Savannah, a city which, like Vinny, acknowledges the presence of ghosts. The interview has been edited to leave out the boring bits. Full Disclosure: Retired from the FBI before it became a political football, I was asked to fact-check Vinny’s memories as he wrote this book to minimize the lawsuits.

In your first chapter you get belted in grammar school by Sister Mary Malachy after writing something creative. And yet you persisted.

And that was the same nun who told me, “Coppola, you’re gonna make headlines – criminal headlines!” I think at some level, after that, I just wanted to prove her wrong.

But allow me to read from the Table of Contents: “Chapter 16: I’m Arrested for Murder.”

Yeah, I got beaten up by a beefy cop in the 78th Precinct determined to get me to confess to a street gang murder until somebody told him they had the real killer in the next room. 

Your Gowanus was a real tough working-class environment, but it seemed to have a lot more tolerance for the eccentric and vulnerable in its midst than I expected.

That’s exactly right but only if you lived within the magic circle—if you were part of the community, you were accepted. It was a sealed snow globe. That’s what I think is moving people when they read these stories, an unexpected compassion and crazy humor. 

You know, Vinny, every time I parked on your block back in the ‘70s, there were these middle-aged women sitting outside and as I got out of the car they’d give me the evil eye, and invariably one would say, “You live around here?” 

Neighborhood watch! That was the thing. If you lived in that circle, they would have protected you and accepted you but no outsiders were ever welcomed off the bat. You were never “a friend we haven’t met yet.” 

I appreciated that you didn’t glorify the mobsters, growing up as you did around the Colombo family. 

The wise guys were our only real authority. They came from the same families and again, existed

in the snow globe. They’d joke around, be free with money, they had women, and beautiful clothes. They hung out at Monte’s Venetian Room and they were funny as shit—when they weren’t killing people. I did a lot of day labor in the neighborhood, mostly unloading trucks. One day I walked into a whole other level of criminality—union busting—and it made me sick to see the damage that they were doing. 

On the other side of the fence you’ve got the cops, a lot rougher on you than Malachy. 

The nuns and the Irish cops looked at Italians as basically barbarians. Sister Mary Malachy called us “vulgarians” and the police were a corrupt army of occupation, dropped into the neighborhood to try and control the worst of it. They were very rough. My own cop relatives were probably just as rough on other people.

Speaking of violence, the blast at the Bush Terminal pier at 35th Street and its unexpected aftermath that you describe is particularly vivid.

I was nine years old. Until the World Trade Center, it was the biggest explosion in New York City history. It literally shook the ground—I thought it was an atomic bomb. The night of the explosion, I ran home with all these night owl newspapers and said, “Daddy, look how big and how bad this is!” He chased me out of the yard and I went upstairs to my room and I looked out the window. Four men, family members whom I loved, were pounding themselves with hammers, drinking whiskey, biting on rags to muffle their screams as they beat themselves so they could go back to the site and claim they were hurt in the explosion and get disability.

Did you ever  find yourself crying—not when you were getting hit by nuns or cops—but when you were writing about so many of these heartbreaking memories?

Honestly Joe, I’m reading the book now trying to figure out why reviewers like it. Crazy enough, it still makes me cry. I wrote it while I was battling Stage 4 throat cancer, so I was letting go of everything. It struck me if my life was gonna end, I’d rather it ends in Gowanus.

Let’s talk about college. 

My “dese and dose” accent was so bad that even at Brooklyn College my classmates laughed when I answered a question. I almost flunked out from embarrassment.

Then a 5,000-word cri de coeur as an Automotive High teacher somehow gets you into the Columbia School of Journalism and you become a hotshot Newsweek reporter, even getting offered the New York Bureau Chief job. Along the way you write some great books about white supremacists and Special Forces. But then cancer came calling?

‘Never give up, never surrender.’ That’s the code the Special Forces guys live by—that made the difference in my life. I’d been radiated, operated on, endured chemotherapy. I’d lost 40 pounds and I’m sitting in Atlanta half-dead. It’s 2013 and I start writing these stories, half-convinced I’m going to die. When I started Gowanus Crossing, I wanted to go back to where I came from, simple as that, right? And what was most important to me? It was these Italians on Carroll Street strangely enough.

A lot has been written lately about the Gowanus rezoning that’s creating thousands of new “dwelling units” as the planners call them. What’s your take on the new Gowanus?

Joe, Italians tend to stay in place. Gowanus, in a sense, was a southern Italian village dropped in the middle of NYC. When the monied interests swooped in, we could no longer afford to live in the houses we grew up in. That’s what struck me most: no one could afford to live where they and their parents had always lived. They didn’t particularly want to go, but they had no choice. One of the things that drove me to write this book—I wanted to bring that world back to life because there were good things about it. Forget the mafia, it was a sense of community where everybody knew everybody else, where people looked out for everybody else. My strongest memories of Spring in Gowanus were crowds of people, outside in front of their houses, eating, boys running around, girls playing hopscotch. And when I went back last week, I saw all these newly planted trees and soaring condos sprouting up but it was dead quiet. Not a soul walking around. Is that an improvement? 

Well, at least nobody would be bugging me about parking.

True, but from what I could see, there’s no longer any place to park around Gowanus.

Do you think the toxins from the Canal might have played a part in your cancer?

No one ever did a CDC survey about the incidence of cancer among Gowanus families. I’m sure it’d be a catastrophic number. We lived right on that canal, it would flood our basement. My mother, three aunts and a brother all died of cancer. I’m sure that’s where mine came from. By the way, my editor Sarah Crichton told me if you mention Gowanus in Europe they know about it. How can that be? 

I think they’ll have a lot more to know and remember for a long time once they read your book. 

Gowanus Crossing can be purchased at Books Are Magic (225 Smith St. and 122 Montague St.), Community Bookstore (143 Seventh Ave.), all B&N branches, and Greenlight (686 Fulton St.).