Here is what John Dapolito said about this project.

It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity really, you put a project like this together because you know the power it possesses to heal.

Where I got the courage to call my father and ask him if I could record him on VHS tape while he was dying from AIDS, I don’t know, especially since we were complete strangers. I had heard about him of course, and had read about him in the local papers, he was often FrontPage news. And there was also this one time when I was 12 years old I had seen him live on television holding up a pharmacy in Bayonne, NJ, taking hostages and having a shoot out with the police. Well that’s the way channels 2, 4, 7, 9 and 11 were covering the story anyway. I would find out different later.

As far as filmmaking is concerned I’m lucky because the story spans decades and my father was a local legend best known by the people of Jersey City, Union City, Hoboken, West New York, and North Bergen. They revered, admired and feared the man for decades, everyone from the police to the mob. I’ve always said to friends, “You don’t want to get into a fight with a man who wishes he were dead; and my father wished he was dead.” And still to this day, in the oddest of places, an ice-cream parlor, or some movie house someone will over hear my last name and say, “Dapolito? Did you know an Augie Dapolito?” And of course I say, “Yes, he was my father”, and they just have this look on their face, this look as if they witnessed something rare, like God or Satan, or an Angel, it’s the look of awe in their eye’s that tells the story of my Fathers life best. He was different that’s for sure. A very unusual kind of being, he was.

When I think of him now, I think of him with a great deal of love and fondness for the brief hours we spent together. But mostly I think of him as a warrior born out of time, a warrior with nothing in particular to war about but for the fact that he had been born.