Bishop Ford Central Catholic High School 500 19th Street, Brooklyn NY 1993 News Coverage. Brother Luke doing some damage control for the cameras. The student interviews are the best part. 'My mother pays $5000 a Year. ''This school is a joke.' Ahh.. the halcyon days of a Catholic Education. Home Schooling and GEDs never looked so good.
Any guesses how long the combined rap sheets are of the 'students'? I'm guessing using them for wallpaper isn't out of the question.
Hard luck lives here
by Amy Pagnozzi
NY Daily News
You look for the sign that something's wrong in the home.
Nothing.
Anne Mancusi's house in Bensonhurstis clean and well -tended. The cupboards are full. The bill box is empty. The grandchildren Danielle and Michael play in the above-ground pool urn her tiny backyard.
Still. you figure something must be wrong somewhere to explain the last few years.
1992: Mancusi's son Steven. found dead in a car trunk at Avenue O and W Seventh St.
1993: Daughter Diana. a drug addict, fatally shot by an off-duty cop, who has been charged with murder.
1994: Son John. convicted of burglary, lingering with AIDS in an upstate prison.
Mancusi herself still looks for a reason. Wonders whether she should have worked part-time. "But my kids always stayed with my mother, I didn't go to Aruba or buy furs, everything I worked for is here in this house.
"They were all taken care of," she says. "They went to school. They all got good grades. I have their report cards from St. Athanasius and BISHOP FORD.
"Still. when I get up in the morning I ask myself. 'God, what have I done wrong?'"
The grandmother's eyes tear as she strokes the hair of 3-year-old Danielle, slight and shy as her mother Diana, at that age. The girl lives in the room her mother grew up in. Seven-year-old Michael lives in the room of his uncle John.
"Sometimes I get this feeling I'm doing everything all over again," says Anne Mancusi. "But I am capable of handling this."
You wonder how anybody manages to keep this many plates spinning.
On her retirement pension from 25 years as an administrator at Met Life, plus her Social Security check, she takes care of the house, the bills, the children and her 83-year-old mother, Mary -- and sends $50 to John in prison every two weeks, and accepts his collect telephone calls.
There are battles to fight with inlays over both grandchildren in the wake of her daughter's death.
In two weeks, there is the murder trial to attend of 27-year-old cop Michael Garcia, charged with using his service revolver to shoot Diana in the mouth and back during a dispute.
And there is the crusade to get her last surviving child out of Clinton Correctional Facility on a special parole - the reason Anne Mancusi is talking. "I'm not trying to justify what John did - I'm not just asking for mercy," she says. "I just need John to be home."
It figures that when a Mancusi cops a plea he gets as much time as if he'd gone to trial and been found guilty. John, now 35, has served 41/2 years of his 13 to 26 years for two grocery store robberies. He was sentenced consecutively.
He used a water pistol. No one was hurt. His prior felony - possession of a .357 magnum - occurred in 1979, when he tried to kill himself with it but fell asleep instead. The gun was pointing at his stomach when cops nabbed him.
"One [of the officers] had a brother who killed himself, and they were nice," says John.
He went to South Beach Psychiatric Center for a time. Where he should have gone was into rehab. Instead, he went awry.
""It's tough now, being here, not knowing how long I'm going to live, knowing my mother has to handle everything alone," he says.
Does he deserve a break? I could;t tell you. But his mother does.
Retired Army veteran Ray Bethmann and his lawyer wife, Hollie, are fighting for John's case for free. They are applying for parole based on his medical status and attempting to get his sentence halved, by making the terms concurrent, should the parole application fail.
In the meantime, so that his mother can visit him, they'll try to get him moved to a prison closer to her home.
"John got incredibly hard time for someone who isn't dangerous, but this is not a fortunate family," says Ray Bethmann. "You want to say, stop the insanity - give this poor woman a break."
Nobody wants to believe that so much bad luck could befall a good woman, but there you see her, suffering. The sight makes you want to choke these idiot legislators who would punish parents for the sins of children who sometimes, whatever you do for them, still go wrong.
Anne Mancusi's mantle is filled with pictures of the two children who are dead and the one who is dying. She fondles them as she asks you over and over whether John will be freed: "What are the chances?"
She got unlucky. She could get lucky. Chances are chances.
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