By KIMBERLY ACEVEDO
Based on a true crime, City by the Sea, featuring Robert DeNiro and James Franco, is scheduled to be released on Friday, Sept. 6, though not without its share of controversy over several inaccuracies and the film's portrayal of Long Beach as a rather seedy beachfront town.
The movie is based on the LaMarca family. Vincent LaMarca was a detective in the Long Beach Police Department for 20 years. But when he was a child, his father Angelo LaMarca, was convicted of kidnapping and murdering a baby and given the electric chair. Vincent LaMarca youngest son of two sons, Joey, was charged with the 1996 stabbing and death of James Winston in Rockaway. Winston was known as a floater but was a frequent Long Beach resident.
While the film is based on the Winston murder, several inaccuracies are apparently in the movie. In the movie, Vincent LaMarca is an NYPD detective investigating his son's crime. But in reality, LaMarca was retired for six years from the LBPD and living in Florida. While the movie portrays an emotional encounter between the father and son when the son was a fugitive, according to the father the meeting never happened. And in the movie, Joey LaMarca has a child which, in reality, he does not. But one major change in the movie that has Long Beach Police upset is that LaMarca's victim is a cop.
As far as the crime, it's nowhere near accurate, Long Beach Police Executive Officer Michael Tangney said. The movie portrays Joey as killing a cop. A cop was never killed.
And Tangney feels that the portrayal of the crime is so inaccurate that it doesn't resemble the actual crime. It's more fiction than non-fiction.
With the movie releasing this week, Long Beach City officials are concerned with the negative portrayal of the city in the movie and have hired a public relations firm to help combat that portrayal.
I'm very pleased to say that the producers of the movie weren't able to film in Long Beach because they were looking for a dilapidated seaside community and, as everyone can see, Long Beach is thriving and healthy, city council member Leonard Remo commented.
With the new construction and renovations within the city, Remo believes tourists will see the city for what he feels it is: a positive and beautiful community.
Councilman Scott Nigro agreed. They obviously thought about filming here but when they got here they didn't find what they were looking for, he said.
Nigro believes the director was trying to embellish the story line with the scene.
Obviously Long Beach didn't fit the bill, he said.
Still, Councilman Denis Kelly said, Long Beach has had to fight the reputation for being a run-down and difficult city to fit in. The reality, he said, is that it's not.
Murder 40 years apart
A financially-desperate Angelo LaMarca kidnapped Peter Howard Weinberger just 33 days old, on July 4, 1956. After two ransom notes and a 55-day man hunt by Nassau County Police, the infant was found suffocated face down in a honey suckle patch off exit 37 of the Northern State Parkway. LaMarca was tried, convicted and executed.
It was Angelo LaMarca's son Vincent, played by Robert DeNiro in City By the Sea, that grew up to become a Long Beach Police Department detective and served the department for 20 years. LaMarca married the stepdaughter of the Long Beach Police Commissioner and they had two sons the youngest named Joey.
In 1996, Joey LaMarca, 24, and Willie Davis, 28, were arrested for the brutal stabbing of Long Beach resident James Warlock Winston. According to news reports, LaMarca and Davis lured Winston to Rockaway by asking his assistance in a planned rip-off of a drug dealer. Both LaMarca and Davis were armed with knives. On Wednesday, Oct. 9, Winston's body was found with his throat slit and approximately 80 stab wounds.
LaMarca pled guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 to 25-years at an upstate prison.
