My father had the most beautiful bible I've ever seen. To date, perhaps a true work of art. The gold on the pages was real gold. Turns out it was stolen from a Catholic Church.
My uncle Flame and he broke into a church and stole it as well as other items. What I can say is that the two of them were what brothers should be! They had a real bond. The loved each other. They were there for one and other.
It wasn't until my father was in his 40's that he started to turn his back on his brother Flame. Flames birth name was Alberto. Belto for short. He was the warlord of the Jesters gang in Brooklyn. He was a dope addict and thief. But he was a tough motherfucker. He was many things but he was tough.
My father may have been good with his hands. Actually, really good. But he never had the heart that his younger brother Flame had. Problem with too much heart means a lot of the time that you don't use your brains.
Flame loved his wife Elvia. They had six children. One day while he was high he had a jealousy fit and beat his wife to within an inch of her life. The DA decided to make an example of him. He was featured in all the New York papers. Along with photos of his beaten wife. He stuck a screw driver down her throat and beat her with a bike rim. He almost killed her. He wound up in Clinton-Danamora Prison. He did five years and as a result of the short sentence the govt out in a law on the books that better reflected the heinousness of the crime. The law was named after him. The Elias law. And nobody except my father takes pride in that it's named after our family name.
The arresting Detective and his now ex wife became romantically involved and he moved them away and the all disconnected from the family. Totally!
It may not be provable, but we all know that the Detective reached out and paid a jail gang to go after Flame and beat him and gang rape him. There were five guys. And he was hospitalized. He would have been better dead. Being beat, raped and torchured like that broke him completely. The whole family figures that Elvia's hate for him and all the years of abuse manafested in such a vendictive contempt that she didn't care that they shared six kids.
I don't pretend to know it all because toward the end he had become a homeless alcoholic who would just deficate himself and walk the streets like that for months without showering.
The saddest part to this whole thing is that my father and his father lived within walking distance from the very streets he lived on. Homeless. My grandfather owned as many as twenty buildings in Greenpoint Brooklyn. Even the building my father lives in was owned by my grandfather. Now they're all owned by his daughter, my aunt and he's dead. At least they didn't let him be buried in Potters field!
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