During an interview with No Fuckin’ Regrets With Robb Flynn, Anthrax bassist Frank Bello shared the details of his upcoming autobiographical book ‘Fathers, Brothers, and Sons: Surviving Anguish, Abandonment, and Anthrax.’ Bello revealed that he planned to find and kill his brother Anthony’s murderer because of his unbearable agony, pain, and anger.
As you may know, Frank Bello co-wrote his first memoir entitled ‘Fathers, Brothers, and Sons: Surviving Anguish, Abandonment, and Anthrax’ with Joel McIver. The book reflected Bello’s life story which was full of pain, suffering, poverty, and losses. He also shared the story of how his brother Anthony was murdered and the killer got away with the murder in detail.
Frank Bello’s brother Anthony was shot by a man after they had argued about something in a coffee shop, in the Bronx. Both Frank and his mother devastated because of the tragic death of Anthony and he tried to support his mother even if he was feeling terrible too. Even though the eyewitness was found, he withdrew his testimony and disappeared before the trial.
In the recent interview, Bello stated that it was so hard to open up about his brother’s death because he can’t still forget the time when he saw his brother’s dead body lying on the crime scene. He revealed that he even thought about searching and killing his brother’s murderer to take his revenge. However, Bello highlighted that he wasn’t that kind of a person and he gave up the idea when he realized that he could lose his wife and mother forever if he was killed or went to jail.
Describing what he had been through Bello said:
“March 25th, 1996, I’m in my house with my friend, Paul, he’s upstairs sleeping. We were doing some Anthrax stuff, and I hear somebody running up the stairs banging on my door.It’s Charlie Benante, Anthrax drummer – my uncle Charlie who’s in the band Anthrax – screaming, ‘Frank, open the door!’ – just freaking the fuck out. I open the door, I said, ‘What the fuck is going on?! You OK?’ He goes, ‘You got to come with me!’… I’m sorry, it’s still hard to talk about it, even after 1996 – it was 25 years ago…
Anthony’s been shot, my brother Anthony has been shot. He’s dead… I fell, on the floor. I didn’t see it coming – nobody sees that coming. I didn’t see me passing out and just fucking freaking out, I just went down, they picked me up, crying… the whole thing.
Charlie drives me down to the scene, and this is in the Bronx, New York. It happened where we grew up, I was in Westchester in my townhouse at the time. So he drives me down, I’m crying – I didn’t know how to take this. So we go to the scene, and it looks like a ‘Law and Order’ scene – if you’ve seen the show. Cops everywhere, ambulances, a crowd of people, there’s a sheet, I see it from afar when I get out of the car…
And it’s my brother underneath the sheet. I only knew it was my brother because I saw the sheet didn’t cover his shoes, and I knew his shoes. So I knew it was him, and that was my validation of what was going on, and reality check was right there.
I turned over, I turned around and I see my mom, who’s at the scene. I didn’t know she was there – just, everything you can imagine… Just, sorrow, the face of sorrow, just beaten, just beating down, crying, she’s in disbelief.
There are no other words for that, so I just go and hug her, and really, there’s nothing you could say, you just hug. There’s no verbalization, there’s nothing you can say verbally that comes out. I don’t know what to say, so I guess we just hugged for a long time… Here’s what happened. My brother had some words with some guy at a coffee shop – I guess that this guy, they had words before.
Long story short, it hurt this guy, he knew he was gonna be there – I can’t mention names – they had some words again, and he took out a gun, put three bullets in him on the street. There were no witnesses, it was outside a coffee shop in the Bronx, as simple as that sounds, yeah.
I get down there, I’m asking, I’m screaming at this point after I hug my mother, ‘I want to know fucking answers!’ I’m screaming at the top of my lungs, I’m yelling at every cop there, every detective. Finally, the detective who’s in charge of the case comes up to me, tries to calm me down, and all that shit, I said, ‘Who the fuck..?’ – all that shit, everything you can imagine you would do.
You want answers. ‘What the fuck happened here?!’ There are no answers, there are no witnesses. Anthony’s taken away, all that, they bring him to the hospital, so we had to go away because they won’t let us at the hospital – can’t do that – so we had to go home and deal with this shit.
A week goes by, there’s a witness, they found a witness – OK, good, they saw the murder happen, blah-blah-blah… I’ll cut to the chase because this is all in the book, we go through the court system in the Bronx, New York…
Long story short, going through all these preliminary things, through this court system, and you find out the next time the witness disappeared. Witness disappeared, they can’t find him, he disappeared… Now, what I hear off the street is there was another story. He didn’t disappear, he ran away. You can read between the lines there, right?
It was a definite hard thing for somebody to actually have seen it happen and leave and not talk about it because he said it beforehand, he said he saw it, we couldn’t do anything about it, you’re powerless, just so you know, the side of the family, the victim’s family, is powerless.”
He continued:
“Next thing you hear, the detective comes to us and said, ‘We lost the witness, we’ll keep trying.’ But as of now, it’s still a cold case that burns through your heart and your stomach every day of your life. So I don’t know if I put that in retrospective for you, just a taste of it, but it’s in the book – and I don’t want to have to sell the book like this, but that’s just a part of it, so what people don’t know is I kind of snapped.
Anthrax was off-tour and all that stuff, so I kind of snapped, to be really honest with you. I didn’t know me anymore. You know when you think there’s a dark side, I didn’t know this dark side I had, I didn’t know I had this dark side.
Weeks after that, to be really blunt, nobody knew what I was doing, I went looking, I hunted, and very discreetly – I didn’t tell anybody, I didn’t tell my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing. I never touched a gun in my life, but I went to people I shouldn’t have talked to back then, all the things you can think of.
It came to fruition where I had this thing come up to me where I was talking to my wife, and after a couple of weeks of doing that searching for the killer discreetly, I had a realization, I said, ‘Look, if I do this, I’m gonna lose my wife and my mother’s gonna lose another son.’
Either way, either I’m dead or I go to jail, I don’t want to do that, and something came back, a realization, ‘I can’t do this.’ I can only be honest with this shit because it’s very real, and it’s very from the heart. I was gonna avenge my brother, and I don’t want to say it like that because I’m not that guy, but I snapped for a little while.”
You can watch the interview below.
