There Really Was a Mafia on the Upper West Side
In the early 1960s, as a recently married City College professor the closest I’d come to the Mafia was in movies and newspaper articles. Back then, New York City was rocked by Mafia scandals as investigations revealed that the police and other municipal unions were cooperating with mobsters in numbers rackets, loan sharking, business shakedowns, and other crimes. In October 1963, Genovese family foot soldier Joe Valachi testified before a U.S. Senate Committee, acknowledging for the first time the existence and activities of La Cosa Nostra. Daily headlines evoked a darker side of the city, a world far apart from mine. At the time, my first wife, Adrienne Rappaport, an artist who painted as Adrian Rappin, needed a studio with north light that was also close to the galleries on... Read more...
