Red Hook is best known to today’s New Yorkers for the blue and yellow glow of its IKEA store, pulling in urban furniture shoppers from all five boroughs.
But the hardscrabble dock area has played a pivotal part in Brooklyn’s history, as a place where goods – and, of course, contraband – first enter the city.
This naturally attracts society’s underbelly, and as a youngster growing up there in the 60s, for Frank Dimatteo that meant the Mafia.
“When I was a kid, I not only dreamed of growing up to be a gangster; it was the only ambition I had, the only life path I could envision,” he and co-author Michael Benson write in ‘Red Hook – Brooklyn Mafia, Ground Zero’ (Citadel).
Dimatteo says he witnessed his first mob murder aged five and quickly learned killing people “is just business,” he previously told The Post.
For so long Red Hook was one of Brooklyn’s most stigmatized neighborhoods, dominated by crime and extreme violence.
In the early twentieth century, for instance, Red Hook’s docks were controlled by an Irish gang, the White Hand. “At first they robbed everyone blind, but there was little violence,” writes Dimatteo.
“[But then] things got rough. Young, savage White Hand goons, chips on their shoulders, fists clenched and ready to bust.”
Soon, though, Italians would outnumber the Irish and with intense competition for control came much greater violence, especially during the years of Prohibition when both groups moved illicit booze. “In later years, there was cooperation between Italian and Irish mobs, but at the turn of the twentieth century, they couldn’t be in the same room,” they write.
The problem for the Irish, however, was that they were no match for their rivals.
“When big money came to the underworld of Prohibition, some of the White Handers developed ambitions way out of what whack with their capabilities,” adds Dimatteo.
“The Italian takeover of the piers was inevitable.”
The new Red Hook rulers called themselves la Mano Nera – the Black Hands – and it had no shortage of willing conscripts.
When local young men were sucked into the underworld, it was usually because any alternative jobs, like laboring, meant long hours of exhausting work for little recompense. “Better to rob cargo trucks,” adds Dimatteo. “It was more lucrative and a hell of a lot easier on the back.”
It also meant that Red Hook had the worst percentage of juvenile delinquency in New York City’s five boroughs.
Violence was the universal language in Red Hook.
Fist fights and outbreaks of gunfire were daily occurrences and dead bodies routinely turned up on the docks, some mutilated or even decapitated.
Justice was swift and merciless too.
When the Black Hand’s Francesco ‘Frankie Yale’ Loele ran the docks, he had his fingers in many pies. “Yale skimmed everything in Red Hook. If you ran a whorehouse, Yale collected. When you paid for ice for your ice box, Yale received a cut,” explain the authors.
He also took protection to a new level. “All Italian immigrants were under the threat of death if they didn’t pay Yale protection. Everyone paid. Those who didn’t were offed,” they write.
“Yale had killed dozens of men by the time he had turned twenty-one.”
But when his associate Al Capone discovered Yale was hijacking his booze trucks as they made their way from Chicago to New York, Capone sent a four-strong hit squad to assassinate him.
And on a Sunday afternoon in July 1928, that’s what they did, ambushing Yale as he drove in his car. “The shooters pulled up close and opened fire,” write the authors.
“After Yale’s car crashed and came to a stop, one shooter pulled Yale from behind the wheel until he was stretched out on his back on the sidewalk and emptied a .45 automatic into Yale’s head just to make sure.”
When police arrived at the scene, they found Yale’s head shot almost away from his body. “A load of shotgun pellets had blown away much of his neck,” add the authors.
As an aside, note the authors, “the Yale hit is given credit as the first mob hit every to feature a tommy gun, predating by seven and a half months the Valentine’s Day massacre that popularized the weapon in the public’s imagination.”
The neighborhood of Red Hook has retained cobbled streets, boasts great views of the Statue of Liberty and in the 1920s was a thriving port hub.
However, by the 60s most sea freight had left and the Gowanus Expressway (now the Brooklyn Queens Expressway) was built and widened to six lanes of traffic, effectively cutting the area off from the rest of Brooklyn.
Red Hook still has abandoned warehouses and underdeveloped tracts of land today. Although gentrification is said to have taken hold, it’s been a slow process. Red Hook has long been billed as the next buzzy area, yet despite rents skyrocketing and pushing most of the traditional blue collar families out, it has never quite made it in the same way as neighboring Carroll Gardens or nearby Park Slope.
In May the city pledged $80 million to repair three piers and for “planning” of a massive overhaul of the 122-acre Red Hook port, but the effects of that are yet to be felt.
Born into a family hailing originally from Naples, Italy, Frank Dimatteo says he was surrounded by career criminals, or “Gods in a world of devils” as he prefers to call them, many of whom have moved out of the area or lost their lives.
He also reveals how his father ran with a gang ran by ‘Crazy Joey’ Gallo, one of the most brutal crooks in Red Hook, and his two brothers, who would routinely pinch his cheeks so hard to make him cry and toughen him up.
“He was fear personified,” he writes of Gallo. “He could make a guy s—t his pants by snapping his fingers.”
For all the violence he witnessed as a young man, however, Dimatteo wouldn’t have swapped his unique upbringing for anything. “It was okay if sometimes life in my neighborhood seemed to mimic an old Western movie, or a shoot-em-up gangster picture taking place during Prohibition.”
These days he lives in Gerritsen Beach with his wife, Emily, the mother of his three children.
“If you’d have told me when I was a kid I would grow up to be an author, a publisher and patriarch of a great family, I’d have said you were nuts.
“[But] I grew up.
“A lot of guys never got the chance,” he adds.