Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [48]
“The following Sunday, we were in the school building where church services were held. As we waited for Patty’s unit to arrive, Joey positioned himself on one side of the hallway and Philly was on the other. I was in the middle of the corridor. When Patty came in and saw me standing in front of him, it was on. Like a shot out of a gun, Patty came at me. Joey blindsided him and stabbed him twice with an ice pick. Then Philly—all three hundred pounds of him—came crashing down on him. The Irishman had no chance. I was just joining in when the response team was on us. Patty was rushed to the infirmary. Joey, Philly, and me were put in lockdown pending a full investigation. Within two days of the incident, Joey was transferred to Elmira and Philly was sent to the maximum-security Southport Correctional Facility. Mysteriously, again Joey’s ice pick was never found. I stayed at Coxsackie in lockdown. Patty stayed in the infirmary for two or three days and was released back into population.
“The night-shift watch commander tried to get me to cooperate by providing information against Joey and Philly. I told him to go fuck himself with his false promises. I said he didn’t even have the juice to get himself off the night shift, much less make deals for anybody else. They were unable to find a weapon or anybody to talk, so when the investigation was over, nobody got charged. Not me, not Joey, and not Philly.
“Because I wasn’t charged in this case and my previous guilty finding had been reversed, I was automatically eligible for assignment to a medium-security prison. About two days after getting out of lockdown, I was transferred to the Hudson Correctional Facility. I never saw or heard of Patty O’Keefe again.”
HUDSON
The improvement in Andrew’s life after his transfer to Hudson Correctional Facility was dramatic. If a man had to do time in a state prison, he was convinced this was the place to do it.
He realized almost immediately he was actually going to like the place. He was there only a few minutes before he was greeted by some friends he’d made in Coxsackie. After that, he was amazed how much more freedom the inmates had. Within a year he was made secretary of the inmate Italian-American organization. They held fundraisers and he used the money to have festivals during the summer. Each member of the organization could invite his family to attend. Everybody ate together, took photos, and listened to music.
“I was with a tremendous bunch of guys in Hudson,” Andrew recalls. “One of them was a capo in the Genovese family named Danny Pagano. We hit it off really well. He was a gentleman and an all-around great guy. My family and Danny’s sent us hundred-pound packages of food once a month. That was enough for us and our little clique to have nice dinners every night.
“Another one of the guys from Coxsackie named Joey Jacona became a great friend of mine. Once in a while Joey and a few of the other guys would make homemade wine for all of us. We had a lot of fun. It was still prison, but all things considered, it wasn’t that bad.”
Andrew’s life behind bars was tolerable overall and sometimes even enjoyable. However, as the months passed and he got closer to eligibility for work release and then parole, he experienced some disappointments. He also had to start thinking about his other life, as an associate of the Gambino family and a member of Nicky Corozzo’s crew. It was a life he’d be rejoining at some point and all was far from rosy on that front.
In 1992, Andrew became eligible for work release, but he was denied because of the violent nature of his crime. It was frustrating to watch everyone around him getting into the program or out on parole. Also, by this point his relationship with Dina was distant at best. She hadn’t been to see him in months and he’d stopped calling her at all.
In fact, around that time a couple of crew members came to visit and give him some advice.