TONY MARINO’S JOINT at 3775 Third Avenue in the Bronx was not an establishment one would call classy. It was, in fact, a rather squalid affair, containing four round tables, several chairs, a mangy three-cushioned sofa propped against one wall and a makeshift bar measuring about twelve feet in length. There was a cramped lavatory in the back. All this was kept from view by a partition. Observing the building, the casual passerby would notice nothing more than an empty storefront.
The few regulars Marino’s establishment boasted were of unsavoury character, perpetrators of mischief and violence. Most were unemployed, more interested in a sip of drink than looking for a day’s work. Granted, there was little of the latter. The glitz and glamour of the 1920s had succumbed to the desperation of the 1930s. Shoulders were slumped under the heavy burden of economic depression.
At twenty-seven, Marino was a mess of a man, being not only a shabby dresser, but also syphilitic. By his own account, he was harangued by frequent bouts of the ‘clap and blue balls’. He was not a man who sensed any urgency in receiving treatment for such nagging conditions. He allowed the syphilis to reach ‘a pretty well-advanced’ stage before he sought medical attention and had ‘the marks to prove it’. After coming down with the clap in his teens, he paid a visit to the Board of Health on Pearl Street. A doctor there ‘wanted to ship me over to the Island’ for treatment at Metropolitan Hospital. Having no desire to be shipped anywhere, he simply ‘ran away’ and failed to follow up on any treatment.
The storefront concealing Marino’s speakeasy.
This did not bode well for his young wife, who claimed Marino passed on to her his ‘venereal issues.’ She was unaware of her afflictions until she became pregnant with their child. ‘I went to see a doctor, and a blood test was taken,’ she said. They lived in less than harmonious matrimony
