New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Similar in name only
The burden of being the grandson — and namesake — of mob boss Sal Annunziato
Sal Annunziato looked out at his expectant audience and said, “This is my story and it’s the truth.”
And then for almost two hours, Annunziato poured out his dramatic account about being the grandson of the notorious mobster of the same name.
Maybe you’re old enough to remember this long-feared crime figure, nicknamed “Midge Renault” from his days as a teenage boxer. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s and into the 1970s, he led a Mafia gang that terrorized the Greater New Haven area. They had the power to do whatever they wanted and they ruthlessly used it.
Annunziato the younger still has deep emotional scars from being raised in such a family. And now, with the help of journalist Chris Hoffman, who has written articles about Annunziato the elder for Connecticut magazine and other publications, Annunziato has begun doing a stand-up show describing what it was like.
His debut came last Monday night at the Best Video Film and Cultural Center in Hamden in front of a sell-out, captivated crowd. He will do a repeat performance there Jan. 14, but that’s already sold out too.
“When I watch movies about the Mob, they really glamorize it,” Annunziato said. “People think the Mob is glamorous or cool. No. It’s not glamorous. It wasn’t cool. It was (expletive) horrible.”
“I don’t need to watch ‘The Sopranos,’ ” he said. “I lived ‘The Sopranos.’ It really messes with your head. Being in that world is mass destruction. No one gets away.”
But he added, “I was born into ‘the life’ and I escaped. I never forget how blessed I am.”
Referring to his father, Frank Annunziato, and his father’s father, Annunziato said, “I’m a typical drug addict and alcoholic, like my dad and grandfather. The only difference is I got sober or I would’ve died young, just like them.”
He is 58 and said he has been sober for 30 years.
“My grandfather’s been gone for 40 years and his name still comes up several times a week,” Annunziato said. “When I’m performing (music) at a bar, somebody will ask me: ‘Hey, aren’t you related to that Sal guy?’ I’ll say, ‘Yeah, he was my grandfather: a ‘made man’ in the Genovese crime family.”
He said having that name was also a burden when he was a kid. “At school, kids would say, ‘I saw your name on the news last night’ or ‘Sal! You’re on page one today!’ I’d throw up before I went to school.”
Annunziato said his grandfather was just 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 120 pounds, although “he ballooned out to 200 pounds at the end.”
But in his prime, “He looked like Edward G. Robinson. He wore a fedora and strutted around like the biggest cock in the henhouse. He’d fight anybody anywhere. The violent streak of this guy was so scary.”
However, Annunziato added, “Midge was a really complicated guy. You never knew who you’d get. He was wildly generous; he’d hand out $100 bills like sticks of gum. He loaned a car to a bartender so he could go on his honeymoon. People said he had a heart of gold.”
“But there was a whole other side. God help you if my grandfather didn’t like you or if you crossed him. He’d crack a barstool over your head and he’d shoot you. He shot a lot of people.”
Annunziato said it was impossible to relax around his grandfather, because “you never knew what would trigger him. It was like being around nitroglycerin. One minute he’d be a fun-loving guy, the next minute he’s beating the (expletive) out
“I don’t need to watch ‘The Sopranos.’ I lived ‘The Sopranos.’ It really messes with your head. Being in that world is mass destruction. No one gets away.”
Sal Annunziato
of somebody.”
“He had an intensity; you could feel it. It was scary. You knew he was getting intense when his nostrils flared.”
This is what happened when a person “crossed” Annunziato: “He hit the guy, ran over his legs forward and backward, hit him several more times, then left.”
But the FBI was always investigating him and his cronies. Sometimes they got enough to send him off to prison for a while. Annunziato showed us the New Haven Register’s front page headline from Jan. 2, 1962: “Annunziato Creates a Furor on Surrender.”
“He shows up a half-hour late,” Annunziato said. “He’s hanging out with a U.S. marshal. A Register photographer takes a picture of him and Midge goes nuts. He bounds down the courthouse steps, screaming: ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll break your legs!’ Then he and the marshal go out to lunch! They have a few belts together. That’s the power the Mob had in those days.”
Six years later, Annunziato was released from prison. “He thinks he’s going to pick up where he left off. But Eddie Devlin had started a gang of Irish and Italian guys. Midge gets out and says, ‘This is my turf, get out of here.’ Devlin says: ‘(Expletive) you.’ So Midge forms a crew and there was a full-fledged gang war.”
Midge put his son in charge of that effort. “It turned our lives upside down. At our house in East Haven, anything was possible. Our attic became a hang-out for these gangsters. My mother (Rita) is cooking chicken cutlets and these guys are running in and out.”
Annunziato recalled being told to ring a buzzer if he saw anybody dangerous approaching the house. “I’m 8 years old and I’m on the look-out for guys trying to whack my father!”
But he said his dad was broken by the constant stress and violence. “He went over the deep end on drugs and booze. He was killing people for my grandfather and he couldn’t handle it. He turned to heroin and became a full-blown junk-
ie.”
Annunziato said his father sometimes became suddenly, unpredictably violent, just like Midge. Annunziato recalled seeing his father beat his mother.
“I don’t know how my mom did it. She was always and still is all about love. Love for her husband, love for her three sons. Without her, I know my brothers and me would never have turned out the way we did.”
He also recalled seeing his grandfather storm into the house and savagely beat his father because he was using heroin. “He cracked open my father’s head with the butt of a gun. My mother’s screaming, my brothers and me are looking on in horror. Seeing your dad beat up, that violence, it scars you. There’s such a fear in you.”
Annunziato said the music of that era “helped us keep our sanity.” He called his brother Frankie
“Then one day ‘Tommy the Blond’ came to pick him up. He knew when they pulled away together, he was going to get whacked . ... They never found a trace of my grandfather.”
Sal Annunziato, above, on his grandfather
out of the crowd and, with Sal playing guitar, they sang nice harmony to the Beatles’ “This Boy.”
But then Annunziato recalled visiting his father at Yale New Haven Hospital. He was terminally ill at 39. “My dad said, ‘Sal, I ruined my life.’ I never forgot that.”
“When he died, I thought, ‘Oh my God, am I going to end up like that? Dead by 40?’”
His grandfather’s death at 59 was also bleak. By June 1979, he had lost his power and self-control. “He knew the end was near. Then one day ‘Tommy the Blond’ came to pick him up. He knew when they pulled away together, he was going to get whacked. He drove off into the sunset with ‘Tommy the Blond.’ They never found a trace of my grandfather.”
Annunziato the younger also battled addiction to drugs for years. But after trips to the emergency room and warnings from doctors and nurses that he would die just as his father did, “I stopped. I knew it was life or death for me.”
Today, working as a yoga instructor and as CEO of a software company, “I use my story as an example of coming out of the darkness and into the light. I made it because of love. That’s really what it’s all about.”
Then he handed out “Love Tribe” wristbands with the message: “Hearts open no matter what!”