The Secret Early Life of Brother Casey Ferlita

A chance encounter in Nashville sheds light on what our feared and beloved prefect of discipline left behind

I’ve said it before and will say it forevermore — you didn’t really graduate from Strake Jesuit unless you were there when Brother Casey stalked the halls. That is not the correct word for his rolling gait, a sort of swagger not dissimilar from those you see from strutting convicts and other hard cases out in the streets, a style some call the “pimp roll.”

It seemed out of place on a man wearing a priestly dog collar, but definitely of a piece with a man who’d accumulated so many legends. We knew he was from Tampa, where he was born Castenzio Angelo Ferlita, only son of Angelo Ferlita and Rose Therese Noto Ferlita. The Ferlitas were from Santo Stefano di Quiscinia, a Sicilian village which practically migrated entirely to Tampa en masse, its former residents comprising 60 percent of the Sicilian immigrants to Tampa and a smaller but still substantial number to Jacksonville.

It was said he’d been a boxer of some note as a youth, and he had the mashed cauliflower ears to prove it. I once saw him throw hands at a smartass student — though he was in his 60s, that smack across this kid’s face was a blur, and don’t get me started over his heroics in the 15 minute on-field brawl that punctuated a disastrous football game between us and Galveston’s O’Connell HS. He fearlessly waded into those Galvestonians, pads and helmets or not, coaches, players, refs or fans, and was throwing haymakers like a champ, all in protection of his guys, the guys in green.

For some reason I cannot fathom, we Crusaders of 1985 were shown this grainy, Zapruder-like film in the run up to our renewal of the rivalry against O’Connell, one that followed a ten-year cooldown period. (I was unable to find clippings for his boxing career, but I found a few regarding his athleticism — one praised him as an outstanding tackle for Tampa’s Jesuit HS football team and a great fisherman to boot.)

That onfield brawl was in his dual role as athletic trainer, which is how I first got to know him….We were playing against Waller High School. I was a running back, and at the end of a moderate gain up the middle, I was stacked up and made the mistake of letting up just a little before the ref blew the whistle. A Waller safety took the opportunity to come flying in helmet first and nail me in the ribs, knocking all the breath out of my body. Not wanting to give him that victory, that he had effectively knocked me temporarily out of the game, I staggered back to the huddle and tried to play through, but I collapsed there, and the next thing I knew, Casey was in my face.

“What happened, b’woy? Where’d he get you?”

I could not speak. No wind had returned yet to my lungs.

“I think he got racked,” he announced to the student trainers. “Did you get racked, b’woy?”

Still I couldn’t speak, and to my horror, Casey was attempting to open my football pants and have a look at my junk. Yeah, Catholic school, man of the cloth, young boy and all that, but Casey was most definitely not one of those….and finally I was able to speak and tell him what was up and I got off the field for a few plays and the game went on.

Most of the time I had dealings with him were more adversary than that. This was in his role as “prefect of discipline,” aka “campus cop.” Casey was not the most erudite man. Most of his fellow Jesuits — the priests — and the lay teachers had multiple degrees from elite Catholic schools. Somewhere along the way, Casey had picked up a PE degree from Loyola but that was all he had.

But he was a past master at divining the mind of the campus delinquent. You’d think you found the perfect spot for you and your buddies to steal a smoke only to have this hulking Sicilian appear at your elbow from a totally unexpected angle of attack, scribbling your names in his little breast pocket notebook containing those of us most freshly assigned to “penance hall,” as detention was known at Strake.

He has been described, in this role, as having been both omnipotent and omniscient. We lived in fear, a fear that cycled through loathing, and then respect, and finally, love. As our brains developed, we finally realized that he was pulling for us, that he wanted us all to succeed.

He’d let some things slide — one night he walked up on us in the Safeway next door to school, and his residence, and saw us buying a case of beer with a fake ID. Or pretended not to see us, at least there, but the next day, he admonished us for drinking on a school night. If it happened off campus, it was out of his jurisdiction, you see.

He could be maddeningly irrational. I remember one day my friend Kirk and I were smoking and cussing in the parking lot after school and he rolled up on both of us characteristically out of nowhere and announced that I had been assigned a PH but Kirk had not. Evidently Kirk had dumped his smoke in time to avoid getting rung up on that charge, and as for the foul language? “He can’t help hisself, b’woy,” Casey explained. “It’s that red hair of his.”

That was the Casey of my Strake experience. I got a glimpse of the Casey before he took Holy Orders when I lived in Nashville. There I fell under the sway of Michael Scrivner, aka Moses, a gnomic, hard-living former member of the Outlaws MC, Tampa Chapter, who had reinvented himself as a renowned Music City luthier. His shop doubled as a sort of bourbon-and-weed-infused salon with a daily round of drop-ins ranging from street urchins and skate punks to John Prine, Hoyt Axton, and Doug Dillard.

Back in Tampa, Moses’s dad had been a union leader, and thus had certain working relationships with certain Sicilians. I’d not known of Tampa’s mafia heyday — under the decades-long leadership of Santo Trafficante, Tampa’s outfit was one of the most profitable and successful in North America.

And powerful — some of the more plausible “the Mafia killed JFK” theories have Trafficante playing a key role, second only to Carlos Marcello of New Orleans, both of whom hated the Kennedys primarily because of the Cuban debacle. They’d invested very heavily there and were more than a little miffed over the Bay of Pigs. And they also shared an attorney, one Frank Ragano, who shortly before his death (natural causes) was telling anyone who would listen that he had ferried orders back and forth between Trafficante and Marcello regarding the assassination of the president.

Moses, at left, presents Harlan Howard with a tiny playable guitar at the legendary songwriter’s annual birthday bash.

That came out shortly after Moses died after one too many nights of hard liquor and cocaine, both of which were found on his nightstand the morning his body was found. But before he died, I idly asked him his thoughts about the Kennedy assassination and his answer stunned me.

“He needed killin’,” he told me. He’d betrayed his people, Moses explained, turned his back on those who put him in office. He went on to say that his HS was abuzz with rumors of the president’s impending doom in the weeks before it happened. So, basically, Moses was giving me the plot of Scorsese’s The Irishman.

And somewhere in all this talk of mob lore I mentioned the one Tampa Sicilian I knew. “Oh yeah, how the hell do you know Casey?” he erupted. “Solid dude. Bagman. He was in my dad’s office all the time. If you gave him a job you could just consider it done. Honest as the day is long. So wow, he ended up a priest?

A brother, I corrected.

Well, Moses said, turning his gimlet eye back on a stubbornly wayward fretboard, that’s one way out, I suppose.

And what a wonderful way out. The atmosphere he created at Jesuit was one of near-complete tranquility. Over four years, in a school of 700-800 boys, I saw only one very brief fight. No cultures of bullying festered; nor any hazing scandals in clubs or on sports teams. And in four years he went from someone I hated, to someone I hated to love, to someone I loved to hate, to someone I just plain loved.

A funeral mass is set for January 7.

PS: Found this on Facebook — a sweet memorial from a Tampa cousin.

We were saddened when yesterday I received news from St Louis, MO & had to tell our family of the passing of our beloved cousin Brother Casey Ferlita, S.J…Flo Ciaravella Roberts & I shared a special childhood with him & his sister Josephine “Sis” Ferlita Meuse. Family gatherings were an adventure but nothing like the times he tried to give us girls a hair cut or disrupt the underside of the card table when playing Canasta & he was losing. Not many knew of his mischievous ways. We missed having him around after he joined the Jesuit order in 1960 but always special to have him home on visits. He spent a special time of his ministry at Strake Jesuit College Preparatory in Houston, TX, where he was loved & honored for his dedication to his students. Casey shared a special bond with his older cousin, Polly Papia Zambito who mourns his passing along with his extended cousins. We were blessed with loving memories. A Memorial Mass will be held at a later date.