By Daphne Freise
The Lawyer and the Hitman, Part 1
By Daphne Freise “He called me up,” the man with the rich Jersey City accent begins. His deep, clear voice defies decades of cigar smoking and uncountable hours spent breathing through scuba […]
The Hitman’s Protégé
By Daphne Freise You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. –Anne […]
The Blue Room
By Daphne Freise The call to dinner was the regular punctuation at the ends of my days of untroubled 4-year-oldness, which were spent contentedly playing alone in my little bedroom while Lora […]
Harold Konigsberg, the Feared Jewish Hit Man

By Daphne Freise Kayo’s loathsome reputation was solidified long before he arrived in Springfield. He was known for his outrageous demands and zeal for strong-arming anyone who got in his way. He […]
Godfathers
By Daphne Freise Despite Clayton Fountain’s notoriety as a terrifying sociopath, he was not the inmate who had the greatest impact on our lives. I would not learn about Fountain’s ideology, the […]
Reminders
By Daphne Freise I think of my father every time I put on the grey moccasin slippers that I wear around the house, cushioning my arthritic, bunion-blessed feet with the high arches […]
Clayton Fountain
By Daphne Freise Dinner at our house was where I learned the word “President”. It is where Dad furiously ranted about something called Watergate and continued into fuming and venting about “thugs […]
The Lawyer and the Hitman, Part 3
By Daphne Freise David and I continue our conversation about Konigsberg and he reflects on the fate of some other notorious mafia affiliates. I know that Sally Bugs was killed in a […]
The Lawyer and the Hitman, Part 2
By Daphne Freise So, David never had to deal with Kayo again. “Thank God,” he says, with audible relief, before casually mentioning that he was a lawyer for John DiGilio, a high-ranking […]