1979

1979 is the year Frank Minna drew four boys out of St. Vincent’s Home for Boys and into the orbit that would become the Minna Men. Their recruitment began not with an explanation of a job but with a padlocked van; months later, Frank Minna brought them into a nervous errand involving Matricardi and Rockaforte. In retrospect, these first outings mark both the beginning of the boys’ attachment to Frank Minna and the early formation of the ambitions that would divide them.

Selection and Recruitment

One sweltering August weekday after classes, the four boys chosen were the four white boys at St. Vincent’s Home for Boys: Lionel Essrog, Tony Vermonte, Gilbert Coney, and Danny Fantl. The fifth white boy, Steven Grossman, was left behind. Their teacher, Mr. Kassel, knew Frank Minna from the neighborhood and invited him to borrow the boys for the afternoon. The selection reflected Frank Minna’s assumption that his clients preferred white boys, as well as his own prejudices. For Lionel Essrog, the incident also revealed the favor network surrounding Frank Minna: a man who knew somebody could turn that connection into a condition of life, while the boys, who knew no one, had no such advantage.

Frank Minna gave the boys no assignment or explanation. He opened the rear of his dented, graffitied van, told them to climb inside, then slammed and padlocked the doors without asking their names. The boys were startled but thrilled to be taken somewhere beyond the Home. Lionel Essrog was already struggling to contain his constant physical agitation; instead of kissing the other boys, as he wanted to, he made a repeated chirping sound. Tony Vermonte told him to stop, though without much force. The boys’ excitement and Lionel Essrog’s vulnerability sit beside the blunt fact of their confinement: their first step into the outside world came on Frank Minna’s terms.

The Boys and Their Expectations

Frank Minna was twenty-five that summer, gangly, with a small potbelly and a carefully combed pompadour. The hairstyle seemed out of step with 1979, carrying a Carroll Gardens version of an older Frank Sinatra era. To the boys, he already seemed like a man of authority; in reality, he was only just beginning to assemble the group that would serve him.

Tony Vermonte, fifteen, was two years older than Lionel Essrog and Gilbert Coney and one year older than Danny Fantl. His confidence rested on the belief that he did not belong in the Home and would eventually be claimed by the Italians. He imagined his father as either a mobster or a police officer, seeing no contradiction between the two possibilities, and took Frank Minna’s arrival as the rescue he had been expecting. Tony Vermonte had previously lived with a Quaker foster family and attended Brooklyn Friends, but returned to the Home. He cultivated an older, worldly reputation there, and his earlier experiences helped make him the boy most ready to read Frank Minna’s appearance as destiny.

Gilbert Coney was Tony Vermonte’s right hand, stocky and sullen, and tough on Steven Grossman. He was more tolerant of Lionel Essrog, with whom he shared an unspoken secret from a visit to the Museum of Natural History: they had slipped away beneath the great blue whale and found a small brass door beside the penguin display that opened into the scene behind the glass. The detail gives the boys a history of private curiosity before Frank Minna gathered them together. Their group was not made from identical loyalties; it brought together distinct friendships, rivalries, and hopes.

The First Errand and the Future Group

Frank Minna noticed Tony Vermonte first. The account suggests, without claiming certainty, that Tony’s longing for an Italian rescue may have helped Frank Minna imagine a group of boys he could cultivate and command. Tony Vermonte, in turn, may have helped animate the vision that became the Minna Agency. The boys’ recruitment thus begins as more than a practical errand: Frank Minna sees potential in them, while Tony Vermonte sees in Frank Minna a figure who might fulfill his own fantasy of belonging and power.

Four or five months after their first meeting, in the fall, Frank Minna took the four boys to meet Matricardi and Rockaforte at their brownstone on Degraw Street. He again gathered them in the van without explaining the assignment. His agitation was pronounced enough to intensify Lionel Essrog’s own tics. Frank Minna drove across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan and then down to the docks near Fulton Street. While waiting in the wind beside the East River, Lionel Essrog imitated Frank Minna’s nervous head movements and counted the bridge’s suspension cables. Tony Vermonte and Danny Fantl, in thin plaid jackets, kicked and cursed at him; Gilbert Coney, insulated by a bulky fake-down coat, tossed corroded concrete into the river. When two yellow Ryder rental trucks arrived, Frank Minna directed the boys to move their contents into his van. The episode’s incomplete instructions and hurried labor extend the pattern of their introduction: they are brought into adult dealings before they know what those dealings mean.

What 1979 Foreshadows

The boys learned how to read Frank Minna by watching him. Lionel Essrog later recalled the women Frank Minna knew around Court Street: he teased them, treated their bodies as part of his performance, and presented old neighborhood familiarity as intimacy. The boys studied his manner and stored it away. His example offered them a model of masculine authority built from confidence, sexual bravado, and control of the social scene, even as the women’s indifference and eye-rolling exposed the limits of that performance.

The year also becomes a point of origin for Tony Vermonte’s later ambition. Looking back, Lionel Essrog understands that Tony Vermonte wanted not simply to inherit Frank Minna’s position but to take over Frank Minna’s share of the Fujisaki Corporation scam and to become a more efficient, more brutal version of him. Lionel Essrog speculates that Tony Vermonte’s ambition may have begun on the day the boys unloaded guitars and amplifiers and met Matricardi and Rockaforte, or even earlier. That uncertainty matters: 1979 supplies a plausible beginning, not a complete explanation. What is clear is that Tony Vermonte read Frank Minna’s world as a route to power, while Lionel Essrog came to see the same world through the bonds and vulnerabilities Frank Minna had gathered around himself.

A Retrospective Time Marker

The novel’s later scenes return to the boys’ first encounter as a measure of how much time and experience have accumulated. When Lionel Essrog sees Gerard Minna again at the Yorkville Zendo, he recognizes that Gerard Minna had left behind the twitchy boy at the schoolyard fence nineteen years earlier. That recollection makes 1979 more than a background date: it fixes the length of a relationship and the persistence of the identities formed around Frank Minna’s recruitment.

The later Zen scenes also place the boys’ early, uncontrolled bodily habits beside practices intended to discipline the body. Cleaning is described as a treasured act in Zen practice, and Zazen as its heart; at the Zendo, Lionel Essrog tries to silence a phone and set Frank Minna’s beeper to vibrate before a monk strikes him with a paddle. Later still, after the Fujisaki Corporation men urge him toward a long sesshin because of his utterance problem, he finds himself clapping each man’s shoulder and repeating phrases as he circles the table. These later episodes do not change what happened in 1979, but they sharpen the contrast between imposed discipline and Lionel Essrog’s involuntary repetitions. The year remains the starting point: the moment Frank Minna gathered the boys, before they understood the work, the loyalties, or the consequences that would follow.