Joey Vento is a man of many partsBy Michael Currie Schaffer
Inquirer Staff Writer
Wanna know what Joey Vento doesn't like? Whiners, that's what.
The whiners who got corporal punishment taken out of schools. The whiners who call him a racist because there's a rebel flag tattoo on his forearm. The whiners who turn every last thing that happens in this country into a potential lawsuit.
Go ahead - ask him what he thinks. Everyone else is.
"I grew up where they called me every name in the book: Wop! Dago! Guinea! Midget! But come on! You've got to roll with the punches," says Vento, the 5-foot-5, 66-year-old impresario of Geno's Steaks. "My attitude is, if you're 6-foot-6, I'm 6-foot-7."
It's breakfast time on a sunny Thursday morning, two weeks into the media circus outside Vento's legendary South Philly sandwich shop. In the gleaming kitchen, Vento has just turned on Kate Smith singing "God Bless America," as staffers and cousins and friends mill about.
A clutch of television cameras is waiting outside. They'll have to wait a bit longer: Vento's monologue is in full swing.
"Guess what? Sticks and stones! These days, there's no humor. Everyone sues. They walk into a pole, they sue you! Way back when, we'd say, 'Look at you, you dumb son of a bitch! You walked into a pole!' And that would be it. No one would say, 'Oooh, I've got a lawyer.' "
Of course, the TV guys aren't waiting to hear what Vento thinks about litigation, or education, or the Confederacy. They've descended on Philadelphia's most famous culinary corner to talk about the postcard-size sign in Geno's window, the one advising patrons: This is America. When ordering please speak English.
Somehow, the sign has become a laminated cardboard battlefield in the culture wars.
As far as Vento is concerned, the only people upset about that sign are an especially whiny class of whiners: The immigrants - or, more often, their self-appointed advocates - who, he is convinced, don't want to force newcomers to learn English.
In fact, the only formal complaint about the sign came not from an immigrant group but from the independent city Human Relations Commission. The Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission on Friday added its support.
Wherever it's from, though, Vento doesn't like that attitude one bit.
He's spent most of June talking about it, an experience that has left him hoarse, excited, and deeply suspicious of the media folks he says have turned him into a caricature.
"Sometimes, I'll be honest with you, you get frustrated. You get forced to say something. It's always 'they're right, we're wrong.' "
Friends say Vento is a bit more complicated than all that.
The man cast as the Neanderthal of Ninth and Wharton is the same guy who last summer forked over $100,000 to support an Elton John AIDS-awareness concert - a donation that Philadelphia Gay News publisher Mark Segal says was "the tip of the iceberg."
"They had been very touched by the issue and are very involved," Segal says of Vento's family. "They have been extremely supportive of the entire community."
Like most stories, Joe Vento's is one of contradictions.
He's the son and the brother of violent criminals. But he's raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for police charities. He's a wisecracking everyman from the streets of South Philly. But he lives on a 13-acre Camden County spread with a stable for horses. He's made more than enough to retire to a sunny golf course. But he still pulls a daily 4 a.m. to 11 a.m. shift at a neon-lit sandwich shop.
And he insists he wants to save immigrants from dead-end jobs in linguistic ghettos. But he has a way of saying things - with constant references to "these people" - that makes a lot of those people somewhat queasy.
Ironically, when protesters raise those concerns - or contradict his assertions - Vento himself can sound a bit, well, whiny.
"Look, I don't want to speak Spanish, OK?" he says. "That's my right."
Ask Vento about the world, and the conversation has a way of circling back to the South Philadelphia of his youth.
The grandson of Italian immigrants, Vento was a hellion of a kid, bouncing through several schools and dropping out of ninth grade. He spent time working for his father, a small-time restaurateur whose steak shop lay across the street from where Geno's now stands.
The pair clashed over how to run the business, Jim's Steaks.
"I would tell him how to beat the guy across the street," Vento says. That would be Pat's Steaks, whose name Vento can't bring himself to say.
"In those days, in the Italian way, it was about discipline, about getting smacked," Vento says.
Vento, naturally, says he didn't go whining about it. Instead, in 1957, for the only time in his life, Vento moved away from the area. He joined the Army and was posted in Hawaii.
"Drinks were $3.50 there," he recalls. "We only made $58 a month! You couldn't do anything - it was just sitting in the barracks." His future wife, Eileen, wrote him every day.
The sitting around came to an end 14 months later, when Vento's father, James "Jimmy Steaks" Vento, was convicted of contracting a murder.
The elder Vento arranged the death of numbers writer Frank Angella, 38. Angella had crossed him by not following through after being hired to kill another man, Joseph Petruzzi. Petruzzi, the initial target, had committed the sin of squealing that Jim's sold horse meat.
The son got a hardship discharge, he says, and headed home to help the business.
Jim's didn't make it. But in 1966, the same year his father died in prison, Vento started his own shop with a $2,000 loan from his father-in-law. Because another store was already named Joe's, he chose the name Geno's. He named his son, born in 1971, after the restaurant.
Steaks cost 45 cents apiece at the time. But Vento had a knack for business: "If they put three pieces of meat in there, I put five," he says. "I never took a backward step."
Pretty soon, business was very good.
Vento says the success has erased the stain of his father and his late brother, Steven "Steakie" Vento, a convicted drug trafficker and mob associate.
"My family history wasn't that great," Vento says. "But I reversed it. I brought the respect back. My father and my brother are laughing now - they're so proud of what I did."
Over the years, Vento has poured his fortune back into the community - donating to charities that include autism, fallen firefighters, scholarships, and random unfortunates that he reads about in the press.
"I have to get him to stop reading the paper," says Diana Vergagni, Geno's bookkeeper and Vento's sister-in-law.
After 9/11, he says, he held a 76-hour fund-raising marathon, taking in $120,000.
Last winter, says the Rev. Gary Pacitti, pastor of Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church and School, three blocks from Geno's, he got a call from Vento after his school's snowplow had been swiped. Vento offered to buy a new one. Which wouldn't be unusual, but for one fact:
"We threw him out of the school," Pacitti says. "He was expelled years ago. And he has given thousands of dollars over the years. And as far as the race thing goes, go into our school: It's Spanish kids, Asian kids, black kids, everything."
Indeed, Pacitti is even thinking of adding Spanish-language Masses at the church.
Still, even Vento's charitable activities don't quite steer clear of the live wire. For instance, there are the thousands he has spent to honor the memory of Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, slain in 1981. Mumia Abu-Jamal was convicted of the murder.
The case is one of Philadelphia's racial and political fault lines. But Vento has danced all over it, outfitting staffers in shirts that say Abu-Jamal belongs "six feet closer to hell."
"I don't care," Vento says. "He's a cop-killer."
Ditto Vento's own recreational pursuits. At age 57, he took up motorcycling. On the face of it, it's an unobjectionable pastime. But the gleaming Harley-Davidsons he keeps across the street from Geno's are festooned with Confederate flags.
Another rebel flag sits alongside the panther, snake and tiger he's had tattooed on his arms since he started biking.
Vento says it's an homage to Johnny Yuma, a TV cowboy of his youth. The only people offended by its racial symbolism, he says, are those who want to be.
"Aw, come on," he says. "It was a cowboy show! It's not what they think. Plus, when you're a biker, you're a rebel."
Anyone who doesn't like it, in other words, should quit whining.
"I say things that offend people - what are you going to do?" Vento says. "I still sleep like a baby."
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/14842951.htm
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