My grandfather, a large and dour man, makes bad wine in the cellar. To see a tree, I have to walk six long, sloping blocks to Prospect Park. Gasping at the stench, we strip the leaves and slash ourselves with thin, whip-like branches.
There are a few sickly sumac trees on the banks of the Gowanus. Johnny the Butcher has a pigeon coop Joey DeSimone, his rose bushes Honey, a wise guy, a circular blue swimming pool where I see him dunk Joey Heatherton.
On Carroll Street below Third Avenue, ours is the only house with a backyard tree. A persimmon tree with shiny, two-tone leaves and fissured, rectangular bark that resembles alligator hide, planted by Vincenzo Coppola, my immigrant grandfather, long before I was born. (Nov.The tree dominates our yard, green, vital, limbs clawing above the grim, windowless, brick and cinderblock walls that enclose our house on three sides like a prison yard. His report shows that in the 1990s, neo-Nazis have invaded ""patriot"" citizens' militias, infecting them with virulent anti-Semitic and racist beliefs and paranoid fantasies. Among those he interviewed were Richard Butler, founder of Aryan Nations, and neo-Nazi Klansman Tom Metzger, head of the White Aryan Resistance. His respondents see themselves as idealistic patriots out to save the nation from ""mud people""-African Americans, Jews, minorities, immigrants many of them preach racial warfare or violent confrontation with a federal government seen as under the sway of Zionists. His chilling report, notable for its crisp, restrained prose, sounds a wake-up call to mainstream America. Former Newsweek reporter Coppola spent the last few years investigating the far-right extremist fringe, meeting white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, ""Identity Christians"" who worship an Aryan Christ, survivalists and paramilitary groups in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Idaho, Colorado, Kansas and California.
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