In the Godfather Garden: The Long Life and Times of Richie "the Boot" Boiardo

Chapter 7. Castle Cruel

100 2 In the summer of 1939, the Boot bought twenty-nine acres on Rikers Hill in Livingston, about fifteen miles from Newark, with views facing west, away from the city toward farmland that rolled gently toward the distant Delaware River. The property sat on a geographical and social divide where, at the time, the suburbs ended and rural Jersey began. Using materials salvaged from Boiardo Construction demolition jobs in Newark, including large blocks of stone from the old Post Office building, the Boot built a self-contained compound of four homes, an aviary, a barn, swimming pools, a hunting lodge, an orchard, picnic grounds, and tennis and basketball courts. In a panic during the Cuban missile crisis in the early sixties he also built a bomb shelter. (Ironically, the U.S. military became the Boot’s first immediate neighbor when they built a Nike air-defense base right next to his estate in 1955, during the height of the Cold War. The base was a radar-control site that was paired with a launcher area in East Hanover, where Ajax and Hercules missiles stood poised to protect New York City from a Soviet strike.)1 c h a p t e r 7 CASTLE CRUEL It gave heart to the cavalier to find a strange adventure here. Beyond the first door was another and through it was a verdant garden, in which a knight was standing, armed, as if it were his work to guard a sepulcher, which had been set beyond the second portal’s sill. —Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato, 454 Castle Cruel 101 In 1945 the family moved from Newark to the estate, which the clan took to calling “the farm.” Tony Boy and his wife lived in the main house with the Boot for a few years, and then they moved to a modest house in suburban Verona and finally to the WASP-y enclave of Essex Fells, the home of the exclusive Essex Fells Country Club, the oldest country club in the state. Thomas Edison, the Chubb family, the Colgates, and the Mercks had been members. Theodore Roosevelt had played golf there, as had Sam Snead and many other top-ranked professionals. Tony Boy never became a member; in the sixties the club was hard to join, especially for arrivistes from Newark. Three of the Boot’s daughters, Agnes Crescenzi, Rose Hanos, and Phyllis Balestro, and their families lived on the farm; each had her own home. The houses were clustered in the back of the property, like a European hamlet. Each house had a cast-iron fountain in the front yard, forged in the Eiffel foundry in Paris, depicting herons with spread wings. The houses had solid walls, at least a foot thick; the exterior stone was backed up by an interior layer of cinderblock, which was coated with a thick crust of plaster ; the houses were virtually impenetrable, bulletproof. Stone-block walls seemed to be everywhere on the farm, along with gargoyles and grottoes sheltering likenesses of saints, knights, and serpents. The gardens of the compound were elaborate. Besides the Boot’s beloved vegetable and flower garden, which was behind the main house, there was a statuary garden of painted busts of his grandchildren, including a likeness of Roger at sixteen, looking serious in a field of half-smiling faces frozen in mortar. The busts flanked a grand equestrian sculpture of the Boot in a jaunty porkpie hat in the saddle of a prancing white charger, a likeness of Chief, his favorite horse. He loved to ride through the property on Chief, sometimes emerging from the woods in suburban neighborhoods in Livingston and Roseland. Residents there still remember him trotting down streets with an entourage of men also on horseback.2 For the grandchildren, growing up on the Boiardo estate was like living in a fantasy land, a kind of Eden and a retreat from the rest of the world. It was hidden behind woods and protected by fences and gates. Roger Hanos 102 In the Godfather Garden grew up there with his younger brother, Darrel; his sister, Lillian; and his cousins Maurice Crescenzi, Michael Balestro, a somewhat quiet boy, and his older brother Mario Jr., who was gregarious. Their parents, Phyllis and Mario Balestro Sr., doted on the boys, buying them extravagant playthings such as a miniature motorized Thunderbird car, which the boys raced up and down the...