Morris reexamines the infamous case of a former army surgeon convicted of his family’s murder in 1979. Nubar Alexanian

The five-part documentary series A Wilderness of Error, which first aired on FX last fall, stars Oscar-winning filmmaker, author, and former private detective Errol Morris ’69 of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The series was directed and executive-produced by Emmy Award–winner Marc Smerling and is based on Morris’s New York Times best-selling book of the same name. It examines the infamous case of former army surgeon Jeffrey MacDonald, who was convicted of his family’s murder in 1979. The documentary shares multiple viewpoints and addresses the various narratives around the case that challenge the ability to find the truth.

FX Networks

“What’s really interesting about the MacDonald murder case is how many, many, many people have gone back over this,” Morris says at the start of the first episode. “It’s a case that resists definitive explanations. Wandering in that wilderness of conflicting evidence and interpretations, of mistakes, of errors.”

In September, the Hollywood Reporter noted Morris’s and Smerling’s past true-crime works: “If anybody is qualified to discuss the genre and its capacity to bring about justice, but also maybe its ability to obscure facts in a sea of storytelling artifice, it’s these two.” The article says the documentary is “a must-watch for true-crime devotees.”

Morris’s past work includes films such as The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, The Thin Blue Line, and Gates of Heaven. FX’s A Wilderness of Error is streaming on FX on Hulu.

Issa Kohler-Hausmann Sam Hollenshead

In Misdemeanorland, Kohler-Hausmann offers a look at the people whose lives are surveilled by New York City’s lower criminal courts, drawing upon fieldwork, interviews, and analysis. She argues that, under broken windows policing, lower courts have mostly adopted a managerial role in which monitoring and control outside of the courtroom dominate. Although media attention often falls on felony convictions and mass incarceration, Kohler-Hausmann points out that a significant number of people are subjected to police hassle and court scrutiny, even though about half of these cases lead to some form of dismissal.

Kohler-Hausmann writes: “I conclude by arguing that the study of mass misdemeanors — like that of mass incarceration — ultimately points out larger political questions about what role we, as a democratic society, will countenance for criminal justice in establishing social order.”

Brian Stauffer

A psychopath focuses on a goal — no matter how chilling the consequences. But UW researchers have hopeful news about changing that behavior.

Joe Newman has spent much of his life in a place no one wants to go, studying a group of people who few in his field believe can — or even should — be helped.

For more than thirty years, UW psychology professor Newman has been trying to uncover and understand psychopaths, seeking answers to what is happening in their brains that causes them to be so callous, cold, and calculating.

Psychopaths make up about 1 percent of the general population. But their numbers are closer to 20 percent of male prison inmates — and that’s what initially drew Newman to the UW: he saw a chance to gain unprecedented access behind bars through a faculty member who had contacts in the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.

“In most places, it’s impossible to do research in prisons,” Newman says.

But in Wisconsin, the corrections department is a silent, but essential, partner in UW research aimed at discovering brain abnormalities in psychopaths. Newman has worked in the state’s prisons for more than three decades, allowing his team to complete at least eight thousand psychopathy assessments.

Newman’s extraordinary relationship with the prison system and other psychopathy researchers on campus and off has made Wisconsin a leading site for groundbreaking neuroscience research involving inmates. The work is shedding light on the brains of people with psychopathy and building the foundation for what eventually could become a viable treatment for a group of people long considered a lost cause.

“With Joe’s team, the benefits from the actual research are becoming tangible as time goes on,” says Kevin Kallas, mental health director for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. “It’s refreshing, because the standard line has been that people with psychopathy either can’t be treated or it’s difficult to treat them.”

Why try to help people who lack remorse and might do whatever it takes, including manipulation and violence, to get what they want? That question is one of the hurdles to this work and to getting funding for it. Psychopaths are everywhere in popular culture — in books, movies, and TV shows. But Newman believes that our morbid fascination with them and the conventional notion that they are evil to the core could be what is keeping us from tackling a problem that is not fundamentally different from other mental-health conditions.

It’s not just the general public that recoils from psychopaths. Some researchers have suggested that they are a subspecies of human beings, and that it’s unethical to try to treat them, in case doing so somehow makes them worse.

“When people have trouble controlling their thoughts, like in schizophrenia, or their feelings, like they do in depression, our heart jumps out to them, and we want to understand it. We want to offer them treatment, and it’s a priority to spend mental-health research dollars understanding these problems,” Newman says. “But when it comes to psychopathy, all of a sudden we take our mental-health model and we throw it out the window, and we think of this punitive model, where people are behaving poorly because they’re not motivated or they’re nasty, evil people who don’t deserve our help and need to be punished.”

Newman, the founding president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy, and his colleagues are most interested in what causes psychopathic behavior and, more importantly, how they could train a psychopath’s brain to change it for the better.

[fear myths]

Since the 1950s, the most established theory about psychopaths is that their undesirable — and sometimes horrifying — behavior is the result of a low fear IQ. This lack of fear, goes the theory, results in people who don’t worry about being punished for their actions.

Newman has long pursued another theory. He believes that psychopaths are capable of fear, but when they’re focused on a goal, they — for some reason — don’t shift their attention to consider the consequences, such as hurting other people or going to prison. Strong evidence of this extreme lack of attention was demonstrated in one of his earliest studies involving a gambling task. Psychopaths playing the game continued to lose money because they focused on the next card choice rather than on the bottom line.

“If it’s all about callousness, then why is it that they show the same behavioral problems even when the only cost is to themselves?” Newman asks.

When the subjects were made to take a “time-out” to slow down and reflect before choosing, they made better decisions. “[Psychopathy] helps you pay attention to what’s important to you, what’s primary, but it hurts your ability to attend to what’s secondary,” he says.

In a more recent study, Newman and his team used the threat of a weak electric shock to measure fear response, demonstrating how attention can affect psychopaths’ reaction to threat. The researchers put electrodes on the inmates’ fingers, which gave a shock less intense than a static-electricity charge, and then had them view a series of letters on a screen. The inmates were told that shocks might be administered following a red letter, but not after a green one. Because they were instructed to push buttons indicating whether the letters were red or green, the task focused the inmates’ attention directly on the threat, making it primary.

Contrary to the no-fear theory, the psychopaths in the study showed a fear response when they were directly focusing on the threat. But as soon as the task was altered to demand an alternative focus, such as paying attention to whether the letter on a screen was the same as the one that appeared two letters prior, the psychopaths’ fear response disappeared.

Newman calls this an early attention bottleneck, a specific process in the brain that underlies psychopathy. The theory holds up when researchers use brain scans to look at what parts of the brain become more active or “light up” in inmates who are psychopaths, and those who are not, while performing these kinds of tasks. Scans showed that the amygdala, a region located deep within the brain that responds to fear and threats, was activated as much or more so for psychopaths — compared to non-psychopathic inmates — when they were asked to focus on the part of the task linked directly to threat of a shock.

“Once they commit their attention to something, the things that would normally cause the rest of us to stop and update our understanding don’t happen,” Newman says.

This is why the time-out concept works with psychopaths, Newman says, adding that the same approach is effective with children who misbehave in the classroom. “Use the time-outs not just as a punishment, but as an opportunity to reflect meaningfully — that’s what we did with the psychopathic subjects, and it worked,” he says.

This idea clashes with the popular belief that psychopaths are cold-blooded predators who are not motivated to change. Rather, it contends, they are unable to change their behavior because they react differently to the world and can’t process information that isn’t central to their goals.

And that gives Newman and his fellow researchers something most thought was not possible: a target for intervention and treatment.

[brain training]

Today Newman and his UW colleagues are in the middle of a two-year study designed to train psychopaths to shift their attention from their goals to what is going on around them. At the start, Newman and Arielle Baskin-Sommers MS’08, a PhD candidate who is running the study, were not expecting great success. Past efforts to treat psychopaths through traditional means such as group therapy were failures, and some feared the treatment could result in making them more likely to reoffend.

The UW team assessed Wisconsin prison inmates and assigned them to a six-week, one-hour-per-week training regime. Half of the inmates participate in training that matches their condition while the other half go through training that does not. The inmates aren’t told the reason for the training, and they are tested before and after the study to measure changes.

During their training, the inmates play a variety of games. To perform well, much like the gambling task in earlier studies, they must pay attention to cues that are not central to the main goal. In one task, for example, they look at images of faces and are told to press one button if the eyes are looking left and another button if they are looking right. But if the faces look fearful, they are instructed ahead of time to press the opposite button, which requires them to pay attention both to the eye gaze and the expression on the person’s face — something a psychopath normally would not do.

The idea, says Baskin-Sommers, is that “the brain is plastic, and if you train certain pathways that might be weak, you can build up or strengthen those pathways.”

Three groups have gone through the training so far, with encouraging results: when tested on how well they are paying attention to context, psychopaths who were trained in ways specific to their condition showed improvement.

“We’re excited that, in this very first attempt, we’re seeing that kind of change,” Newman says. “We want to move very quickly to testing the limits of how much we can accomplish by combining this new intervention with a more standard treatment to form a more general treatment protocol.”

With an eye on inmates’ lives outside of prison, Baskin-Sommers has developed real-world scripts to share at the end of a task. The scripts explain the skills the study is designed to build and how those skills might help inmates make better decisions. Having completed about four hundred psychopathy interviews in her research, she knows what kinds of scenarios ring true, such as how they could use the skills they’ve learned to help handle battles with drug addiction or deal with friends who frequently cause them to get into trouble.

“We believe that there are mechanisms [we] can train to improve how they react to emotions like fear or to improve thought,” Baskin-Sommers says. “Maybe they will end up still choosing to do the same thing, but at least now they’re thinking about it.”

Newman’s team expects to finish training the remaining inmates in the study by spring 2013. If preliminary results hold up, the researchers hope to attract funding to scan the inmates’ brains before and after training to identify any changes. Down the road, they would like to test inmates weeks and months after their treatment and follow up again after they return to the community.

“I actually feel like we have a better understanding of this mechanism than most other disorders,” Baskin-Sommers says. “I think we’re a lot further along, certainly on the psychopathy front, than [we are with] disorders such as depression or anxiety.”

[mental pictures]

For their work with inmates, Newman and UW psychology professor John Curtin partnered with other researchers trained to do brain scans, including Michael Koenigs ’02, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and UW–Milwaukee psychology professors Christine Larson ’93, MS’99, PhD’03 and Fred Helmstetter. Through a program aimed at promoting research partnerships between the two schools, they won a grant in 2010 to scan inmates’ brains.

But there was one wrinkle. While prisons are convenient places to find psychopaths, the risks and security concerns involved with transporting them from prison to a campus facility for research purposes were deemed too prevalent and too complicated.

Enter Kent Kiehl, a psychology professor from the University of New Mexico. Kiehl, who happened to grow up in the same Tacoma, Washington, neighborhood as serial killer Ted Bundy, solved the problem with a mobile MRI he uses to scan psychopathic inmates in New Mexico prisons for his own research projects. He committed more money to expand the effort in Wisconsin and gather more data; concrete pads have now been installed at medium-security Fox Lake and Oshkosh correctional institutions for parking the semi-trailer that carries the scanner.

Since acquiring the scanner five years ago, Kiehl has used it to collaborate with other top psychopathy researchers around the country, giving them access to scans and populating his own research with more inmate data. “They can answer their questions, and I can answer my questions,” Kiehl says.

Newman’s track record with state prisons also paved the way for the arrangement in Wisconsin, says the Department of Corrections’ Kallas. “He’s been in the prisons for so long, and his research has gone so smoothly, that members of the department could feel good about going these extra steps and allowing an MRI imager within the perimeter of the prison,” he says.

Baskin-Sommers says that the inmates take their voluntary participation seriously. One study participant, she recalls, wrote a note that read, “I’m going to miss my appointment. Can you reschedule it?”

UW researchers are exploring what’s happening in the psychopathic brain and whether psychopaths can learn to shift attention from their goals to what’s going on in the world around them. The research is based on plasticity — the notion that, with training, critical pathways in the brain can be strengthened. Brian Stauffer.

[an unexpected path]

Prison is not the place Koenigs expected his research to take him when he began studying patients with brain injuries as a neuroscience graduate student at the University of Iowa. He was fascinated by cases of patients who didn’t lose motor function, language, or memory, but did experience a striking change in personality.

His work focuses on the part of the brain located above and between the eyes, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and how damage to it affects social behavior, emotion regulation, and decision-making.

On the wall of Koenigs’s office in University Research Park on Madison’s west side hangs an artistic rendering of a skull with a metal rod going through the frontal lobe. The unsettling and intriguing image — created for Koenigs by his sister-in-law, a graphic designer — is a nod to Phineas Gage, the most famous case in neuroscience. Gage was a foreman on a Vermont railroad crew in the 1800s when a freak accident sent a four-foot-long metal rod blasting through his face and out the top of his skull.

“He survived with virtually no motor or sensory impairment, and never lost consciousness, even though he had this gaping hole through the front of his brain,” Koenigs says. But Gage was so “radically changed” after the accident, according to the doctor who treated him, that friends said he was no longer himself and his employer would not take him back.

“He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows,” the doctor reported.

These kinds of brain injuries don’t turn patients into psychopaths — they don’t go out and engage in criminal behavior — but they resemble them on one key point. “They seem not to care as much about the feelings of other people,” Koenigs says.

That behavior sparked Koenigs’s interest in psychopaths and motivated him to learn more about dysfunction in that part of the brain and how it might explain why psychopaths do the things they do. He knew about Newman’s work when he first came to the UW four years ago, and the two started talking and comparing notes. Koenigs asked Newman, “What’s a psychopath really like?” Newman, in turn, asked, “What are these frontal-lobe patients really like?”

Those initial conversations led to joint research projects in Wisconsin prisons. So far, their work has shown that psychopaths’ decision-making is similar to that of patients with damage to the frontal lobe: both are less able to control their frustration, and both act irrationally more often. And in a follow-up study, using the mobile scanner, they found that in psychopaths the connection is weaker between the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, two parts of the brain involved in empathy, fear, and decision-making.

“These areas aren’t communicating with each other to the same degree that they do in the non-psychopathic brain,” Koenigs says. “This was exactly the kind of thing I hoped to find.”

Kiehl has been studying psychopaths for two decades and scanning inmates since 1994. He believes the more brain scans researchers can do, the more they will come to understand. Staying on prison grounds, where they can do as many as eight scans a day, allows researchers to study a population size that wouldn’t be possible if inmates had to be transported from prisons and back again.

“There’s really no end to the number of [scans] I’d like to collect,” Kiehl says. “I don’t really see a moment where I say, ‘I’m done.’ ”

[the bottom line]

Evidence-based treatments for people with psychopathy would be a huge benefit to states, since many have doubled their prison populations in the last decade or so, Kiehl says. He estimates that the national cost of psychopathy is ten times the cost of depression, amounting to $460 billion a year. A main reason for the difference is that psychopaths get arrested frequently.

“I’m not a bleeding-heart liberal about this stuff … [but if you] take these high-risk guys, put them in appropriate treatment, and do the best you can, everyone benefits. We all benefit economically; we all benefit because they won’t come back to prison,” he says. “That’s what we all want, but you can’t just have a tacit kind of, ‘They should just get better because they should.’ You have to help them.”

Kiehl points to the efforts of Michael Caldwell, a lecturer in the UW psychology department who also serves as senior staff psychologist at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Facility in Madison. The young patients there, ages thirteen to seventeen, are among the most violent in the juvenile corrections system, and many display substantial psychopathic traits, including extreme callousness and lack of empathy.

“They don’t understand why you would not use a gun to get a basketball if you could have just asked the person,” Caldwell says. “They don’t really see the difference.”

Caldwell and the staff employ intensive, lengthy individual and group therapy, along with a rewards-based system in which patients earn privileges for relatively short periods of good behavior. The offenders who end up at Mendota have typically responded to punishments or sanctions with more violent and illegal behavior, so this method is aimed at breaking that cycle. The center was established in 1995, and part of its mandate from the state was to study the effectiveness of its treatments.At the start, Caldwell admits, he was somewhat skeptical.

“The research on treating kids who are this severely criminal in a secured corrections setting was pretty dismal,” he says.

Yet their methods worked. In one study, Caldwell followed up with two groups of potential psychopaths: 101 had been treated at Mendota, and another 101 received less-intensive, conventional treatment in juvenile prisons. About half of each group had hospitalized or killed someone prior to being confined.

But after their release, none of the offenders treated at Mendota were charged with murder, while those in the control group went on to kill sixteen people over time. And in the two years following their release, youths who had been treated at Mendota committed half as much community violence overall as those in the other group. The result is a program that saves $7 for every $1 invested.

Caldwell and his team initially hoped that the effort would — at most — achieve patients who fought less with staff and had an easier time adjusting to the treatment center, which would keep their confinement from being extended. So when the results were in, he couldn’t quite believe them. He devoted two years to checking his data with other researchers, making sure he had not made some kind of mistake.

“It seemed to work the way we had planned it to work,” he says. “Even though when we were planning it, I think we all thought, ‘Well, this is the best Hail Mary pass, but realistically, it’s not very logical.’ ”

The treatment program doesn’t focus on empathy. It goes in the opposite direction, with staff working to change the young men’s behavior first, then starting to see changes in their basic character downstream — what Caldwell calls “going through the back door.”

“The best way to treat them may not have that much to do with what’s the core central feature [of psychopathy],” he says.

Are there people in the field who think it’s already too late for kids like these? “Oh, yeah,” Caldwell answers, “there are lots of them.”

[interview with a psychopath]

Just a few days earlier, Caldwell evaluated a teenager who, despite facing sixty years in prison, was grandiose and self-centered — key markers of psychopathy. He thought his moods controlled the weather.

“Do you think you have any personal problems at all?” Caldwell asked the boy.

“No, not at all. I’m perfect,” he replied, adding that he was more intelligent than the police who arrested him and the judge presiding over his case, even though he scored 80 on an IQ test.

While people throw around the “psycho” label in casual conversation to label a variety of actions and behaviors that don’t come close to the real thing, there is an established practice for identification. Experts such as Caldwell do interviews to assess whether someone is a psychopath, using a test devised by Canadian researcher Robert Hare. Hare’s checklist of twenty criteria covers antisocial behaviors including impulsivity and sexual promiscuity, and emotional traits including pathological lying, superficial charm, and lack of remorse or guilt.

Koenigs says that absence of emotions was the most striking for him when he first began to speak with psychopathic inmates in prison.

“Non-psychopathic inmates, if they’re talking about how they have a daughter they haven’t seen in years, you can see that it bothers them that they’re in there. … In psychopathic prisoners, in some respects, that’s the most revealing part of the interview — that they seem not to have these connections,” he says.

After the interview, researchers also review other official records, such as court and police reports. “We’ve had these experiences where we conduct a full interview, we think this person is this really nice person who’s had this particular life experience — and then we open their file,” Newman says.

In one inmate’s case, his only truthful response was to the first question asked: “What are you like as a person?” His response? “I am a chronic liar.”

Psychopaths are not all the same. The condition is a complex and heterogeneous cluster of symptoms, and it has enough variability to suggest there may be subtypes. This is another area of research the UW team is pursuing.

Hare’s checklist allows for a score of 0, 1, or 2 for twenty different traits. A 30 is the threshold for being psychopathic. But as Koenigs notes, “There are a lot of different ways you get to 30. More subjects would help us disentangle psychopathy from other related issues — [for example], antisocial personality disorder, violent and aggressive tendencies,” he continues. “The more prisoners we can scan, the better able we’ll be to disentangle this complex interplay of issues.”

That remains a possibility, as long as Newman and his research partners can maintain their good relationship with state corrections officials — something they have done during multiple administrations from both parties, thanks to the trust they’ve built over the years.

“They’re optimistic and interested in it,” Newman says. “There’s a long history of prisons being these kind of dead places with people who are not motivated by science [or] by helping people who are in the prisons. And what we see is an agency that says, ‘Learn some more, tell us about it.’ ”

As compelling as the financial arguments are for devoting more research dollars to studying psychopaths, Newman remains dedicated to changing public perception, too. That’s a tall order — perhaps as tall as finding answers to the questions that guide his work.

“It’s one thing to talk about these adult psychopaths who do these horrible things,” Newman says. “It’s another thing to talk about a five-year-old child who seems to have these traits, and he or she has a whole life ahead. … What could we do for them that would change the way they process information that would lead them down a different path? That has been my question for thirty years.”

Jenny Price ’96 is senior writer for On Wisconsin.

Fred Gardaphé. Photo: Jeff Miller.

Fred Gardaphé ’76 knew that if he didn’t get out of the Mafia-dominated neighborhood where he grew up, he could wind up dead. UW–Madison provided a way out.

The topic of social class doesn’t come up often in social conversation or in the halls of academia. That’s why journalist and first-generation college graduate Alfred Lubrano decided to address the issue in his book Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, which looks at upward mobility through vignettes of individuals who have grown up in working-class families and moved on to white-collar jobs. The author focuses on how many of these “straddlers,” as he calls them, confront social mores of a middle-class world that is dramatically different from the one in which they grew up — and how, even after making the transition, they can’t seem to shake a lingering sense of isolation and of not fitting into either world. The following excerpt tells the story of one such straddler, Fred Gardaphé ’76.

Melrose Park, Illinois, is near enough to O’Hare Airport that a person can read the logos of planes roaring not far overhead. It can get to you after a while, knowing that those people above you are going places, and you’re stuck in this.

The landscape on the main thoroughfares is eye-unfriendly, with barely a tree to offer a break from the character-free, suburban/industrial tangles: a Ford plant, a Sherwin-Williams plant, a Denny’s, a strip mall — it’s as though someone forgot to write a zoning code, allowing fast-food restaurants, factories, and big-box retailers to nest one next to the other in disjointed disarray. Acres of stained, gray parking lots thwart rain from penetrating soil, and rivers of oil-ruined water flow toward Lake Michigan in toxic torrents. Surviving on jet exhaust and industrial stink, Armageddon-ready weeds grow unchallenged and unmowed in the cracks of buckled concrete islands that separate endless flows of truck traffic. Pedestrians are scarce. Nothing is of human scale; it’s a place for machines and buildings, hard and impenetrable. How tough it must be to live here.

Fred Gardaphé did, and it almost killed him. His godfather, his grandfather, and his father were slain here in Melrose, the place some people call “Mafia-town.” They were connected in ways to the Outfit, which is how they refer to the Mob in Chicago. It was a gypsy who saved him: “The third Fred in the family will die,” she foretold, if he didn’t get out. Actually, it was a gypsy, a Dominican priest, and the University of Wisconsin that saved Fred. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

These days, Fred is a Distinguished Professor of Italian American Studies at Queens College at the City University of New York. That shouldn’t have happened. Guys like him finish high school, maybe, then scratch out a working-class life never more than a few miles from the hospitals in which they were born. But Fred had things chasing him: fear is a great rocket fuel. “It was like being in Plato’s cave,” Fred says, “then walking out.”

Fred Gardaphé, right, poses in a 1963 photo with his mother and father at a family celebration.

He returns every summer to see his mom and his friends, buddies who didn’t go to college but remain close. Lately, the reunions have become even more important. Fred’s actually been contemplating moving back to the area. “It’s to be near what is known, and it’s also being known,” he says. “To not have to introduce myself to new people all the time.”

Can a white-collar person do that — return to his blue-collar beginnings and live a new kind of life? For some straddlers, the middle class gets to be a burden, its rituals and requirements forever foreign. There’s an ease to slipping back to old ways. Another reason Fred comes is to find out more about his father’s unsolved murder more than thirty years ago. People must know what happened, Fred believes. But no one ever says. “I need for things to make sense. Because they don’t.” He’s come this time with his daughter, to help her see who he was once.

One thing is for sure: professor or not, he still looks like a neighborhood guy. Stocky and thick, Fred has a goatee and receding gray hair he keeps close-cropped. He wears black shorts and a blue, sleeveless T-shirt to show off arms he used to throw around in boyhood fights. He sort of reminds you of Billy Joel in a distant way. Tonight, he’ll meet his boys for drinks at a sports bar, then maybe go to dinner. They’ll bust his chops about his ride, a 1993 Mercury Sable. They’ve become plumbers and restaurant suppliers, and they all make more money than Fred, without education. Fred’s son once asked him why, with his PhD, he has the crummiest car among friends who never went beyond high school.

Right now, he drives the gas-slurper through Melrose Park, once all Italian, now largely, if not mostly, Mexican. “When I come back, I expect things not to have changed. At least there are the same [jerk] drivers. But you see the changes and have to ask yourself, ‘Who [messed] this up?’ I expect people to still care about the things I’ve stopped caring about.” As we drive, sweet songs like “You Didn’t Have to Be So Nice” pour out of the oldies station Fred programmed onto the car radio after his daughter left to hang out with friends. The audio syrup is the wrong flavor for what Fred’s telling me. “I come from a long line of violent things. My godfather was killed robbing a golf course.” The statement hits you sideways, with its odd juxtaposition of disparate words that rarely work the same sentence. It’s awful and absurd. Do things like that happen? Somebody shot the man as he ran off with duffer money, then his buddies scooped him off the lovely grass, drove him to the hospital, and threw him out on the lawn, where he died before ER doctors could stop the bleeding.

Life was so awful that Fred could easily have become a gangster — so many of the adults in his life were. This was, Fred says, “mythic Mafia land,” with nefarious traditions tracing back to Al Capone, whose turf this once was. “There are people who still consider Melrose Park the place where the Mafia in America comes from.” The Gardaphé family was into laundering stolen money and fencing stolen goods, he said. Their pawnshop was the perfect front. “They were distributors of the stuff that fell off the backs of trucks, essentially.”

Fred passes Dora’s Pizza and has to stop. He used to deliver for Chucky, the owner, and now the two catch up, as Fred eats a sausage sandwich and drinks an RC standing at the counter. Today the news is not good. Turns out everybody Fred used to know is either dead or on dialysis. “Whaddya gonna do?” Chucky asks, and the two men contemplate the question, so very blue collar in its dual implications that everything is out of your control, but you’ve got to learn to live with it. “Whaddya gonna do?” practically qualifies as a working-class philosophy of life.

There’s a break in the conversation, then Chucky looks at Fred and says, “God, Fred, I remember the day Shadow didn’t come in for lunch.” That shuts Fred down, and a pall hangs over the men. Shadow was Fred’s father. They say their good-byes and in the car, Fred tells me that Chucky has his facts wrong. Shadow wasn’t supposed to go to Dora’s for lunch. Fred was supposed to bring his father some food at the pawnshop that Monday afternoon. But he didn’t want to because he knew Shadow would make him work. So Fred sent his younger brother with the lunch; Shadow took the food and sent the boy home.

“I always felt guilty about that. Maybe the killer would have seen me working there and not gone in.” Somebody stabbed Shadow to death. Fred believes it would have been someone his father knew; nobody else could have gotten close enough for a knife assault. And it wasn’t robbery because nothing was taken. “It’s one reason I keep coming back home, to keep replaying it in my mind. It was the most primal scene in my life and the reason I left this place. When I come back, I look at the people and wonder if they remember. It’s not for new leads, really. But to see if his murder has an impact on others’ lives as well.”

After the slaying, people started telling their kids not to hang around with Fred. He became adept at spotting the FBI surveillance cars on the block, and once put a potato in a fed’s tailpipe. Bad times seemed to follow him. When he was fifteen, Fred was on the phone with his grandfather, who was at the pawnshop. By then, Fred was working there more regularly, but he had stayed home that day. Suddenly, he heard gunshots pop over the phone. He and his mother jumped in their car and sped to the shop, only to see his grandfather lying on the floor, bleeding to death. Fred grabbed his grandfather’s gun, saw a guy limping away, and raised it to fire. But before he did, a cop came up from behind and yelled, “Drop it.” The shooter was caught and sentenced to twenty-five years for the murder. It was robbery, pure and simple. But Fred’s grandfather wouldn’t have died if he hadn’t resisted. The only reason he had, Fred claims, is that he was a racist and couldn’t bear the idea of being robbed by a black man.

Mired in hatred and ignorance, steeped in death, Fred was growing up hard. Desperate for Fred to have a man around, his mother asked a neighbor to take an interest. As it happened, he was related to the Genovese crime family in New York. He, in turn, was murdered. Things were not going well for the males in Fred’s life.

One day, Fred’s grandmother saw a fortune-teller, who foretold his demise unless he sold the pawnshop, which had fallen to him. The family believed, and Fred liquidated the place when he was sixteen, selling, he said, to the Jewish Mafia in town. By then, he was attending an expensive Dominican prep school, for which his grandfather had paid. On the streets, he was brawling, getting into fights with black kids, and proving he was a man. In the classroom, he was studying philosophy and Latin, being shown another way to grow up. Fred would do his homework on the sly, sneaking books to the park or rec centers. “Around that time, I started realizing that I was trapped in Melrose. But you didn’t want people to know that you were escaping.” The process was going slowly. Fred got into drugs — speed and acid, mostly. “It was my way of getting out of where I was mentally, because I couldn’t do it physically.”

Still, the Dominicans were having their effect. He was reading Cicero and Plato. In an irony not uncommon in quality Catholic educations, Fred was being taught to question authority — how, in essence, not to be a good Catholic boy who hangs around and does only the family’s bidding without question. “That was the bomb that blew everything up,” he says. “They taught me I had to get out of this place. It was getting hard to remain in the world in which I was born while being nurtured out of it by school. The question became, when do you leave?”

Motivated to go, but without direction, Fred went to a junior college to escape the draft. When the government did finally send a notice, it was a 4-F deferment, in essence a judgment that Fred had failed his physical exam and could not become a soldier. Good news, right? Well, like a lot of things in Fred’s life, there was a mystery to that as well. Fred had never taken an army physical. To this day, Fred believes his family had any potential draft notice quashed through their long-standing connections to organized crime. But no one at home owns up to it. Whaddya gonna do?

On a recent visit home to Melrose Park, Gardaphé pauses by an honorary street sign that says Fred Gardaphé Way, named after his late father. Photo: Jeff Miller.

One of his college teachers, a white guy, called all the neighborhood guys in the class “racists.” He explained how he’d fallen in love with a black woman. He had his students read Richard Wright and other black authors. He showed his ignorant white charges how they’d been getting it wrong their whole lives. “The bad thing about realizing you’re a racist is that it means everyone who ever taught you anything or told you anything you believed was a racist, too. It’s such an unraveling of all the things that you protected yourself with.”

Enlightened and now totally out of step with the neighborhood, Fred transferred to the University of Wisconsin — “where all the good radicals go.” Language was the big difference. Suddenly, he was in rooms with people whose English was superior to his. Making things tougher, women were befuddling, too. “I went up to girls and said, ‘What are you chicks doing tonight?’ and they’d say, ‘Why do you cocks wanna know?’ My working-class notions about women were they were to be protected. I opened a car door for a girl in Madison and she was insulted. I kind of got dragged into feminism kicking and screaming. You don’t know how deeply working-class you are until you’re in these situations.”

Scholarship lit a fire in his head and Fred straightened out. Now he’s a full professor, but he still worries about the clock at work. Is he keeping enough office hours? he wonders. He has a sense the boss is looking over his shoulder somehow. “But,” he keeps having to remind himself, “I have tenure. I can’t be fired.”

Saturday night and time to meet the fellas. Fred drives to a sports bar in nearby Elmhurst, where he hooks up with the old crowd — Anthony, Patsy, and George. They hug like working-class guys do — a quick embrace, hard backslaps, then release. Gotta do it fast, before anyone thinks you’re gay. Insults soon follow — jabs about weight, baldness, and creeping old age. That done, the boys are ready to settle in for chicken wings and beers. Balding and in great shape, blue-eyed Anthony works construction. Patsy, who’s a little overweight and struggling with the Atkins diet, is national sales manager for a restaurant-equipment company. George the Greek, unique among the group because he still has his hair, is an insurance investigator. All three are fifty years old. Fred is the only one of the four to have graduated from college.

They start with the old stories. Like a vocal group from the 1950s, the guys know all the words.

Back in the day, there were girls, furtive tries at oral sex, and fights. These guys were in a lot of fights.

“The blacks pulled Fred out of the car one night, then they beat the [crap] out of all of us,” Anthony says.

“I had no business being there in that neighborhood,” says Fred, the reformed racist.

“We had state troopers called out,” George says. “There were race riots. I tell my kids it made me a person.”

“We all looked out for each other,” Anthony explains.

“And we’ll do it till we die,” George declares.

George has to go, and the others decide to hit an Italian restaurant in a neighboring town. As O’Hare planes roar overhead, Fred reflects. “Back in those days, we would have died for one another. Once reason I come back each summer is I want my kids to spend time with my friends. They’ll say things about me that give my kids insight into me.” The reminiscing reminds him of the crazy years of violent deaths. “Therapy made me realize how strange my life was back here,” Fred says. “My life after education, from age thirty on, was boring. Good thing, because it’s going to take me the rest of my life to mitigate everything that happened before thirty.”

The men find a spot they promise has good tomato sauce. On the sound system, Frank Sinatra, with his mellow voice, tells the world he did things his way. The waitress brings three Crown Royals for the guys. Fred, the white-collar one, orders veal, and his two working-class friends protest. That’s a switch.

“Fred, they leave ’em in little pens,” Anthony says.

“It’s bad, Fred,” Patsy adds.

“Hey, I like veal.”

The men talk about their wives, past and present. “We didn’t marry Italians,” Fred observes, “because they’re too much like our mothers.”

“Marrying, we all broke the bloodline,” Anthony allows.

I ask Patsy what it was like to hold down the Melrose Park fort while Fred went off to college.

“You know, it’s funny, because Fred never talked about going to college,” Patsy says. “He felt maybe the rest of us didn’t understand his need to go. I really don’t remember any conversation about it. Me, I wanted to go to college, but my father said he needed me in the [restaurant-supply] business. It was depressing. I not only wanted to go to college, I wanted to travel, which I can do now. But it took me thirty years.”

“You were always a good son to your father,” Fred tells Patsy. “If my father had lived, I would have stayed. But there was nothing for me here. Where was I gonna go? But why did I go to Madison? It was totally non-Melrose up there.”

“But it gave you an education of how it was in the world,” Patsy says.

Anthony chimes in that he actually moved to Madison to be with Fred. For eight months, he painted Wisconsin houses by day, then partied with Fred and his new college friends at night. He never had the desire to actually matriculate, although he once made money by showing up at an ACT test and taking it for a less-smart pal. “I got him a scholarship,” Anthony says proudly. “I actually got a better grade for him than I did for myself, when I took the test.”

Maybe it’s the Crown Royals, but the boys turn sentimental.

“Fred, even with your education, you remained Fred,” Patsy says.

“I never felt you thought you were above and beyond us. You always remained yourself.”

“And you got rid of that stupid earring,” Anthony adds.

“I meet Harvard and Yale people who couldn’t hold a candle to you guys,” Fred gushes.

“Really, there’s been no change in you,” Patsy says.

“And you don’t insist we call you ‘doctor,’ ” Anthony adds.

“That’s the thing I’d never call you,” Patsy concludes.

The evening ends that way. In the parking lot, the guys share more hugs and spine-splintering backslaps. Fred is pleased with this trip home. He’s happy that he didn’t learn anything new about his friends. That means he still understands them, still knows who they are.

“You know, I live in two worlds. I have to come back from the one at the university to make sure this one’s still here. I’m so glad to know that it is.”

Reflections of a UW Straddler

Coming to the University of Wisconsin back in 1973 was an escape from a Little Italy that I felt was choking my creativity and pushing me toward mindless conformity with traditions I didn’t understand. I had graduated from a well-respected prep school and completed two years of junior college, yet I wasn’t prepared for a big university in my home state of Illinois. I felt so disconnected to what was happening in the lecture classes that I dropped out.

If it were not for the Vietnam War, I don’t think I would have returned to school so quickly. I had graduated from high school in 1970, eligible for the second year of the national draft. I needed a 2-S [student] deferment and so found my way quickly to a local junior college, one we used to call a high school with ashtrays. Its unofficial motto was “Better than fightin.’ ”

My prep school training made it easy for me to work full- and part-time jobs without interruption in my social life — rock concerts, festivals, and the other recreational activities of my generation. I breezed through the classes, doing little to further my knowledge, save for an English class run by a radical teacher who helped us form an underground newspaper as part of our assigned work. He said that the school for me could be no other than UW–Madison.

My best friend had an uncle who worked at the Department of Public Instruction in Madison, and we went up there for a weekend to check the place out. One look at the Terrace that early spring day was enough for me. People as serious about fun and learning were hard to come by back home. We made the move the following year. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study, but settled on majoring in English and minoring in communication arts. Each class was an adventure, as was life in the city.

I studied film with David Bordwell and television with Donald LeDuc PhD’70, and my English classes took me deep into literary studies, where I soon found a home in the Mark Twain course of Al Feltskog, the linguistic courses of Charles Read, Jerome Taylor’s pre-Chaucer class, and the writing-for-teachers course of Nancy Gimmestad — where I was first able to establish the validity of my personal story and find my voice as a writer.

The key to all my classes was that I was able to take the streets into the classroom, and apply what I was learning back to those very streets. I did a study of railroad dialect for a linguistics class, and wrote about my neighborhood in my English classes. I learned to integrate the lessons of the ivory-tower Madison campus and blue-collar Melrose Park. That has become the theme of my life and my life’s work over the years.

I took courses in education such as Radical School Reform, and through my volunteer work at radio station WORT, I was able to host alternative music shows and to review books that came out of my classroom studies. Those great experiences prepared me for my early jobs in education, first at traditional and later at alternative high schools in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin; Mason City, Iowa; and Chicago.

My days in Madison seem short in comparison to the life I’ve lived since, but that sense of community — in cooperatives, film societies, campus bars, the Italian neighborhood around Park Street, and in my education classes — gave a working-class kid a sense of belonging. It gave me the chance to work my way into the middle class and to never be afraid to bring my life to my learning, or to use that learning to improve my life and the lives of those around me.

I eventually returned to Chicago for a teaching job and am now a Distinguished Professor of Italian American Studies at Queens College-CUNY. I’ve published eight books on Italian-American culture and have spent a lifetime studying those very traditions that I thought I had escaped when I left for Madison.

Fred Gardaphé

Reprinted from Limbo by Alfred Lubrano. Copyright © 2004 by Alfred Lubrano. Reproduced with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.