Neither of my parents were of a religious stripe. My father was naturally baptized in the Greek Orthodox church, but was not an active church goer. My mother, the best we know, was Catholic, but never mentioned religion. Growing up I was sent to an Episcopal church a few blocks from the house, St. John's, for their Sunday school. I went to Sunday school there for several years, and attended services before class in the choir loft.
I liked Sunday school. The teacher took us to the circus once at the old Madison Square Garden on 8th Avenue. I liked the services, even if there seemed to be a lot of kneeling. I liked the music and singing. To this day I like that I'm a bit of a religious mutt.
New York City education was dominated by either the public, or Catholic schools. I had friends in Catholic school and was always envious of them because they got way more school holidays than we did. As I got older I learned my father had a grudge against the Catholics because he wasn't allowed to be the best man at his best friends wedding. He wasn't Catholic.
Decades later, I don't know if the irony ever dawned on my father when he filled in as the best man at the wedding for the Greek delivery boy when he got married. Steve's initial choice was someone more his age, but was turned down by the Greek church because they weren't Greek Orthodox.
When I married my Irish-American Catholic wife we had a civil ceremony in a judge's chambers. It was easier than creating family drama over getting married in a Catholic church. Our two girls however went to Catholic schools and received all the Catholic sacraments. By then, I had long come to the awareness that anyone who wielded any influence in New York City was either Catholic or Jewish. A Greek Orthodox never created much of a ripple in the city's affairs.
The legend goes the midnight Christmas Eve mass at St. Patrick's was never started by the Cardinal until Mayor Koch, a Jewish mayor of NYC for 12 years was seated.
This is a long introduction to the reaction I had when I read the obituary for judge Thomas Demakos, 98, who recently passed away. Demakos was a lifelong New Yorker who still lived in Astoria when he passed away. Imagine, a retired judge still living in Astoria and not Boca Raton.
Mr. Demakos didn't come to a law career immediately. After serving with the Marine Corps in WWII from 1943-1946, he earned a bachelor's degree in accounting and later a master's degree in business. Before all this he was even at the "luckiest man alive" speech by Lou Gehrig in 1939 at Yankee Stadium.
Tiring of accounting, he went to law school at N.Y.U., graduating in 1957. The obit writer Sam Roberts tells us, Demakos "was named an assistant prosecutor in 1962 after the Greek Orthodox Church flexed its political muscle for an appointment of a Greek-American to the district attorney's office. He was made chief assistant in 1975.
And here we have it, the first instance of my reading that a Greek-American attainted any position through political influence.
Mr. Roberts is a veteran reporter for the NYT, covering most things NYC for decades. I suspect he remembers when then the subway fare was 15¢.
That the Greek Church was able to flex any muscle to me is worth including in any obituary. And if Mr. Roberts tell us that's what happened, then it happened.
The obit headline for Mr. Demakos makes reference to a landmark ruling he made as a judge in a marquee murder trial.
But long before the Michael Griffith murder trail where that ruling was made, Mr. Demakos presided as a prosecutor in one of the Alice Crimmins trials, the most sensational trial to ever hit Queens County. It was bigger than Joey Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher by a country mile. The case involved a mother, Alice Crimmins being found guilty of murdering her 5-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter one July evening in 1965.
Ms. Crimmins even took the stand in her own defense in one trial. Talking over the case with my 82-year-old Saratoga buddy Johnny M. last night, he told me that he of course remembers the case well, and remembers that someone he knew who was an assistant prosecutor in Queens District Attorney Thomas Mackell's office at the time of the trial always commented that, "Alice was some cool customer."
There were two trials, appeals, convictions, re-instated convictions, and eventually a parole for Ms. Crimmins in 1977. At 82 she is still alive somewhere, living under an assumed name, and not giving anyone any interviews.
That Alice was an attractive, 1960s cocktail waitress who carried on openly with many men, made the trial tabloid fodder. Her estranged husband even wiretapped her bedroom so he could listen to her having sex. Whether in this era of better applied police techniques any doubt of her guilt or innocence might be better established doesn't matter. The court of public opinion and an all-male jury found her guilty. If she didn't do it, no one else has ever been found who did. The children are no less dead. It is a dead case.
But the marquee case and landmark ruling was the Michael Griffith trial, another Queens case involving three young men who were accused of causing the death of Michael Griffith in 1987 by chasing him one night as he continued to run toward the Belt Parkway, eventually running onto the parkway to avoid pursuit and getting killed by oncoming traffic.
There were obvious racial overtones. The three men who wandered into a pizza parlor in Howard Beach after their car broke down were Black, and the residents of Howard Beach were sensitive to having Blacks anywhere near hem, especially while eating pizza.
A group of white youths from the pizza parlor beat the three guys up, and one of the Black men, Michael Griffith tried to run away. It was then he ran into traffic and was killed.
I remember this case well too. There were comments that went, "well, what were the Black guys doing in their neighborhood anyway?" This elicited a response from a prosecutor, "what, did they need a passport to be there."
Three defendants were found guilty and sentenced to 30 years for manslaughter and assault. The defense tried an appeal based on Judge Demakos denying the defense team their claim that a fair trial wasn't attainted because they weren't allowed to reject jury members who weren't white.
And no less a sage of the era than the reporter Jimmy Breslin praised Judge Demakos that as a man who "had a background that made him seem so predictable (a white man in his mid-60s, a former prosecutor and a product of the Queens Democratic machine), he read a decision that puts him in another place forever." Mr. Breslin added, "Tom Demakos put splendor on his record."
And true to what some would point to his unpredictability, Mr. Demakos, as a retired judge, passed away at his home in Astoria, and not somewhere in Florida.
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