“My mother was making espresso out of that old cast iron pot,” he remembers. “The fucking espresso was coming out of there like motor oil. You have to imagine these people, okay? It’s eight o’clock at night, they’re smoking cigarillos, and the whole house is like an inferno. Could you imagine their heart rates?”
His father cashed in a life insurance policy to pay for his son’s first year of college, and then he got him a part-time job in the sand business. Well, Joe Margiotta got him the job.
“It was old school Long Island patronage. I love Joe Margiotta,” he said, referring to the Nassau County Republican boss of the era. “I mean, he ended up going to jail for mail fraud or some shit like that. I don’t give a shit. I love Joe Margiotta. Joe Margiotta got me into that union.” Margiotta also made Scaramucci a Republican, because everybody in the union was a Republican. And that, with just a few twists in between, is how he came to pledge allegiance to another Republican occasionally accused of financial improprieties, the one he thought would deliver for the folks back in Port.
“You can smell the bay, right? Look at these houses,” Scaramucci says as we walk down the little street. On either side, there are small, shingled beach cottages packed into a tight grid. Earlier, he’d called it “a little Italian fishing colony.” Everybody here knows everybody. The ice-cream truck arrives at four every afternoon. “You want kids to be in the neighborhood,” he says. “You don’t want them being like that.” Presumably he means shut off behind towering hedges in Southampton Village, “The Estate Section.”
“You’re in the Hamptons,” he says of his area, “but you’re away from the hoi polloi. Like I’m not ‘south of the highway’ and all that stupid shit.” We keep moving down the road towards the bay.
“I bought this,” Scaramucci says, motioning towards a little cottage set back from the street. “I’m gonna knock it down and build another house so my adult children can hang out, just down the block.” As we near the beach access, he points out two ultramodern white structures with smooth concrete walls. “See, this is more gentrification. They were little tiny beach cottages. They got bought up. My houses are bigger than they were, but they’re hopefully still in line with the architecture of the area.”
