Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History [Paperback]

Helene Stapinski (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 12, 2002

With deadpan humor and obvious affection, Five-Finger Discount recounts the story of an unforgettable New Jersey family of swindlers, bookies, embezzlers, and mobster-wannabes. In the memoir Mary Karr calls “a page-turner,” Helene Stapinski ingeniously weaves the checkered history of her hometown of Jersey City—a place known for its political corruption and industrial blight—with the tales that have swirled around her relatives for decades. Navigating a childhood of toxic waste and tough love, Stapinski tells an extraordinary tale at once heartbreaking and hysterically funny.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fans of Mary Karr's groundbreaking memoir The Liars' Club will relish the similarly funny, tough-minded tone of Helene Stapinski's recollections centering on her family's petty criminal history in the sordid precincts of Jersey City. But Stapinski is nobody's clone; her autobiography has a tart, distinctively urban Northeast flavor that will ring a bell with anyone familiar with America's aging, deteriorating cities. You can practically smell the soap suds from the local Colgate factory and the stink of the bone-rendering plant in nearby Newark; people didn't settle in Jersey City, writes Stapinski, "they settled for Jersey City ... they settled for less." She was 5 years old in 1970 when her Italian American grandfather was arrested for threatening to shoot her whole family, capping a long career that included armed robbery and beating his children. The Polish American relatives on her father's side included a bookie and an epileptic prone to fits of rage who nearly killed a sibling by breaking his back. None of this was a big deal in Jersey City, notes Stapinski, who deftly interweaves her family's story with the rancid saga of Hudson County's corrupt political machine. She fled to college in Manhattan and a career in journalism without ever really escaping the ties of blood and loyalty; her frank rendering of her mixed feelings as Jersey City was slowly upscaled reminds us what is gained and lost through gentrification. Stapinski's salty, savory account conveys the gritty, enduring legacy of Jersey City: "so tough, I was always prepared for what might come my way." --Wendy Smith --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"The night my grandfather tried to kill us, I was five years old, the age I stopped believing in Santa Claus, started kindergarten, and made real rather than imaginary friends." This chatty and often engaging memoir of growing up among a rogue's gallery of tough characters may leave readers thinking Stapinski might have been better off with an imaginary family. Reminiscent of Michael Patrick McDonald's highly praised All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, but without that book's overwhelming moral force, this is the sad, often funny story of Stapinski's extended family of grifters, con men and women and petty crooks. At its best, it's a vivid portrait of working-class life in Jersey City, N.J. But too often it veers uneasily between disarming anecdotes (Stapinski's grandfather steals books from the public library where he works as a security guard) and terrifying details of lives out of control (her father almost loses his legs because of untreated but obvious diabetes), and doesn't sustain dramatic intensity. Stapinski, who has written for the New York Times and New York magazine, can be funnyAas in her descriptions of attending New York University, where she meets Jews, punks and lesbians, and reads the Village VoiceAand even illuminating, as when she describes the Machiavellian, if mundane, workings of the multitude of patronage systems that have corrupted Jersey City politics. Though she has a good eye for the details of family and community life, too often the emotions in this memoir feel imagined, not real. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 258 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; First Trade Paperback Edition edition (March 12, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375758704
• ISBN-13: 978-0375758706
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #509,279 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars An enjoyable, non-taxing read December 26, 2001

By Jessica Ferguson VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I am not a huge fan of memoirs but I found Helene Stapinski's family history to be an interesting and well-organized read of life in Jersey City, as she and her family lived it. I am surprised at other reviewiers taking offense to her descriptions of her hometown and her views - while I found Ms. Stapinski to be opinionated, I also found that she did an excellent job of maintaining an emotional distance from the "story". I enjoyed peering into this life, with its stolen luxuries and potential for destruction - I don't imagine that this memoir is much different than what many others remember, or are experiencing now. While the book is not very cheerful, it is an honest and poignant view of a memorable childhood. I recommend Five Finger Discout for both its historical interest and its unique ability to draw the reader into the world of petty crime and abuse and for its understanding of family dynamics and loyalties. Not everyone grew up in Mayberry!

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars What a family ! May 22, 2003

By Beverley Strong VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Helene Stapinskis story of her Polish immigrant family is a real eye-opener into the way of life of a New Jersey family of crooks. Tony Soprano eat your heart out ! Almost without exception, the males in the family are either in jail, going to jail or coming out of jail and are into every lurk and perk possible.The boys in the extended family have no hope from childhood, growing up in a depressed neighbourhood amongst ugliness in the old buildings and deserted factories. Getting food and "swag that fell off the back of trucks"is a way of life and conditions them to thinking that stealing is ok if you're not caught, right from childhood. I found it an interesting read as it exposed a world totally foreign to me and almost nonchalantly recorded the chicanery of the local political systems. It could have been a very depressing story except for the way that she describes the strength and weaknesses of the women of the family who hold the whole structure together.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars wrenching, fascinatng,intimate memoir of Jersey City youth March 7, 2002

By Bruce J. Wasser

Format:Hardcover

How easy can it be to write a memoir about your childhood when one of your earliest memories is of your grandfather's attempt to murder you and your family? How pleasant can it be to write about your childhood home given its now ubiqitous reputation as America's citadel of crime and corruption? The enormous moral and social courage alone Helene Stapinski had to muster to describe her life in Jersey City in the last third of the twentieth century make her memoir "Five-Finger Discount" worth reading. At times maddening, frightful, depressing and hilarious, the memoir magically brings us into the Stapinski family -- with its heritage of crime, violence and family abuse -- while simultaneously providing us with an enormously readable history of Jersey City, a place so corrupt, so venal, so thoroughly crooked, that its moral taint seems to rub off, along with sundry industrial residues, on its population. Indeed, theft is so common, that swag, as it is called, is not even considered wrong; it is simply a way of life. Thus, Stapinski's subtitle, "A Crooked Family History" is appropriately accurate, both a description of of her own personal circumstances, but as that of the larger political community, whose criminality looms everywhere.

As a child, Helene never considers her family anything but normal. Living upstairs from a neighborhood bar, she accepts the arrest of her abusive grandfather Beansie (a nickname derived from the fact that he stole some beans from a truck earlier in his life) as normal, the most recent of "a string of family crimes and tragedies, which I thought most people experienced on a regular basis." The diminuitive Beansie, nothing more than a small-time bully and crook, becomes the central lens through which Stapinski examines her family history. Not an intellectual crook, like some of her other relatives, Beansie "was more of a freelance criminal, committing crimes whenever the opportunity arose." An abusive husband and father, Beansie's welcomed disappearances into jail provide the family with its only opportunity for coherence and sanity.

As she grows, Helene prefers attending well-fed funerals than going through the Holland Tunnel to New York City to play with new toys in the showrooms of Macys. She relishes watching the numbers game, which to her was a community activity, and rejoices at the number of people who "hit" on her birthday. She learns from "my mother to stand up for myself and to dislike careless and unfair people. There were quite a few of them living in Jersey City." This linkage with Jersey City and family identity emerges as one of the strengths of the memoir.

Stapinski's portrait of Jersey City will stagger the uninitiated. Literally staring at the backside of the Statue of Liberty, this city, pillored as once and always "ugly," was the debarcation spot for millions of immigrants who passed through Ellis Island. Jersey City, howeve, became a place "settled for," inhabited by settlers "of a different kind, the kind who always feel cheated, because they settled for less." It is a place where "people were actively illiterate and proudly went around saying things like 'I never read a book in my life.'...I wanted to say, 'Well, good for you, you idiot. Look where you are. You're still in Jersey City.'" It is a city where spring is not announced by "tulips or crocuses," but by the first "floated or dead body to wash ashore" from the Hudson River. The author gracefully ties the political corruption of the notorious Democratic Mayor, Boss Hague, to the personal corruption of her grandfather, Beansie.

The adult Helene Stapinski returns to Jersey City, despite an incomplete attempt at personal liberation through university life and intellectual freedom. Working in the "knewsroom" of the city's newspaper, the Jersey Journal, Stapinski grows more reflective on her family's place in this morass. Anger, disgust and outrage over civic graft intertwines and conflicts with family shame and a need to protect her mother. Uncovering family involvement in a civic scandal, Stapinski upbraids her own silence. "I told myself that journalistic ethics were for people more fortunate than I...They were for people whose parents could afford them, whose families didn't have to rely [on politically connnected public jobs]. I was rationalizing, but it beat ratting out my mother." She comments immediately after that if Stapniski were to report of "courthouse swag, I would have to get rid of at least half of my wardrobe. Then I would have to find Ma a new job, because she would be fired, or worse, ostracized from her circle of swag-buying friends."

"Five-Finger Discount" never preaches, never loses its humanity, never pinches its nose in disgust. It is a dirty, messy, bloody, grinding work. Its majesty derives from the lucidity of its writing, the moral vision of its author, and its bold personal and historic intent. This memoir is personal history at its best. The memoir preserves a scarred city's battered, ugly past and gives it life for current and future generations; it captures a trapped family -- limited by poverty, hopelessness and resignation -- and gives it the dignity of its own self-definition. Helene Stapinski's work will emerge as a treasured addition to not only urban history, but to the growing body of literature of the very nature of the American family.