Jersey City was – and is – an ugly place.
— Helene Stapinski, “Five-Finger Discount”
It is the classic “local-girl-makes-it-big” kind of story, the one everyone likes to read about in their local newspaper. Sort of. Although author Helene Stapinski has appeared on the “Today” show and public radio to promote her new book, “Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History,” about growing up in Jersey City, some people wish she’d never written it.It is a book that, regardless of opinion, continues to cause a stir. Ever since its publication in March, the Hudson County tell-all has been a staple of conversation in local stores, campaign headquarters and street corners. “When it first came out,” said Bill Bromirski, a man whose funeral parlor plays a prominent role in the memoir, “Everybody ran out and got the book.” He had to venture to Nutley to get a copy for his own. It is a book that seems to be re-animating an image that the city’s leaders have fought hard of late to squash. Dirty. Tired. Corrupt. Letter-writers and family members alike have excoriated the book. The current mayor, who comes off well in the pages, has his misgivings. “The suggestion that this is a corrupt city…we did have some corrupt leadership,” said Mayor Bret Schundler recently, “but we had some good honest people in this city.” Stapinski asks that anyone who wishes to criticize the book first read it. And most acknowledge that the historical references, warts and all, are true. For some, like Larry Cappoli, 49, a guitarist and former housing inspector who grew up and still lives in Downtown, the book is dead on. “Well, it’s funny, I read a letter in the Jersey [Journal] from her aunt,” Cappoli said recently. “I can see why relatives get pissed off. But the way [Stapinski] sees Jersey City, she’s absolutely on the money about it. Everyone’s pissed off because it’s true.” He’s familiar with many of the characters in Stapinski’s book, like those who worked at the Department of Motor Vehicles with Stapinski’s mother. Drug dealing and crime were rampant around town. “The streets were filthy,” Cappoli said. “It was an easy place to get robbed.” For him, there are two reasons for the vituperative response. “Ignorant is one word,” he said. “Uneducated is another. Let’s put it this way; there were no book stores in Jersey City.” The family
The author’s gallery-of-rogues family often entwines with this city’s shifty history. Stapinski’s Uncle Leo, a Grove Street barber, incurred the wrath of infamous Mayor Frank Hague when Leo refused to let him cut in line for a haircut. Her great Uncle Frank steered couples away from City Hall to perform cut-rate sham marriages, her Uncle Henry was a bookie whom she helped run the numbers, and her grandfather – a man who dominates the book – tried to kill her and her family when she was five. Stapinski was born in Jersey City, raised in Downtown, and got her start as a reporter for The Hudson Reporter before moving to the Jersey Journal. She now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son. Her book has been reviewed favorably in The New York Times and Vogue, among others. Perhaps the most oft-quoted line comes in the early pages of the book. People like her great-grandparents, she writes, who “came to the Hudson’s west bank, did not settle in Jersey City. They settled for Jersey City.” That’s not to say that other Hudson County towns get off easy. Secaucus, North Bergen, Kearny and Union City all take their hits. Shaped like a “semiautomatic handgun,” North Bergen “had toxic waste just like us, and their mayors were no better either.” And the kids there, she writes, were “lost in some kind of netherworld – not urban and not suburban, but the worst of both worlds.” Tour of tragedy
On a recent visit to Jersey City, Stapinski impishly asked, “Do you want to take the tour of tragedy?” She pointed to a house at 173 Grand St. where her great-grandmother was beaten to death. She motioned to a rooftop on Warren Street where in 1996 her cousin George died in a shootout with police. “There’s my Uncle Henry’s house,” she said of another Gammontown location where the bookie relative ran numbers. She gazed up at her old apartment on the corner of Grove and Mercer, across from City Hall, where she watched the parade of scoundrels pass in and out. The summer Stapinski graduated from kindergarten, in 1971, Jersey City Mayor Thomas Whelan was convicted and thrown out of office. By the first grade, she had learned how to spell indictment and subpoena, she writes. It wasn’t all bad. Stapinski recalls the smell of soap from the nearby Colgate plant and chocolate from the Van Leer factory, or on bad days, the bone-rendering plant in Newark. And then there’s swag. “Swag,” she insists, “wasn’t out-and-out stealing. It was an unwritten rule in Jersey City – and all of Hudson County – that you could take as much merchandise as you could carry from your job.” Stapinski enjoyed books from the “free” public library (courtesy of Grandpa) and lobster tails from her father. “For a while,” she writes, “I thought lobster and steak were staples in all working-class homes.” It is often a laugh-out-loud book, but, still, Stapinski wrangled over whether to write it at all. Toward the end of the memoir, she concludes that many of the stories that her family had laughed about, were in fact, not funny at all. Nonetheless, it became clear to her after taking a creative writing class that this was a story she had to tell. “All these people were writing stories about their families and fathers who were playing golf on the weekends,” she said last week. “And I was just like, ‘this is really boring.'” She worried about the family reaction, but with the exception of a cousin she barely knows in Connecticut, the response has been positive. Her mother celebrated her 70th birthday in April. “While we’re planning the party, I’m like, oh man, nobody’s going to come, it’s going to be a disaster,” Stapinski said. “I even offered not to go. It turns out people came to the party with the book for me to autograph. These are my relatives who I see all the time, and they want my autograph!” Yuppies, or drug dealers?
She notes subtleties like how to refer to the local daily. If you’re born-and-raised, it’s the Jersey, but if you’re a newcomer, it’s the Journal. When Loew’s (pronounced “Low-ees”) Theater, was in danger of the wrecking ball in the late-80s she began writing stories on its fate. Stapinski is shopping the book around for a potential movie deal, but hasn’t gotten any takers yet. She likes what she sees in rehabilitation of the city, but she harbors ambivalence towards the upscaling of the town. “I wasn’t sure which made me more angry,” she writes, “yuppies or drug dealers.” She explains that anger erupted in Jersey City and Hoboken when mysterious fires destroyed buildings of low-income tenants, replaced quickly with high-income homes. Jersey City isn’t completely cured, she said. On a recent visit, Stapinski nearly had her car stolen – her mother and son still inside and the engine running. But aside from the wild tales, her final motivation, she said, was to talk about people who rarely get attention. “My family were losers, in a way,” she said, “and nobody writes those stories.”