Joseph P. Berumi |
| Posted 2008-08-02 by Edward Peed |
| Joseph P. Berumi 95, born May 26, 1913 entered into eternal rest on July 25, 2008. Survived by wife, Sarah; and her daughters, Sylvia (David) and Diane (Ralph); children, Maria Elena, Joe (Eva), Edmund (Helga), Lorena (Mike), Marlene (Ben), Gerard, Melanie (Rod), Melissa (Bernie), Angelica and Mike. Also, survived by many, many loving grandchildren, great-grandchildren, family and friends. Memorial service will be held at St. Margaret's Church, 801 N. Grande Ave on Monday, August 4, 2008. Rosary at 10:00 a.m. Mass at 10:30 a.m. Interment following at Schieffelin Cemetary in Tombstone, AZ at 3:00 p.m. Heartfelt thanks to the wonderful staff at Desert Life Care Center for their loving care the past nine months. As "Tata" would always tell us, "I've seen it all, done it all, and lived my life to the fullest." Notes: Going undercover as an opium addict to bust up a drug den or nabbing a shoplifter with $1.18 worth of frozen fish stuffed in his shirt — it didn't matter. The law was the law, and Joe Berumi enforced it. Yet he easily could have lived life on the other side of the law. Abandoned at an orphanage when he was 7, living on the streets and riding the rails by age 10, doing time at Fort Grant Industrial School for Boys — Berumi survived on street smarts and self-determination. But he used the skills to become a respected member of the law enforcement community. At a memorial service Monday, friends and family will remember the dapper man who never failed to help the homeless and those down on their luck. The service will begin at 10 a.m. at St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church, 801 N. Grande Ave. Berumi died July 25 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He was 95. He was born in Douglas in 1913 to a Mexican mother and an Italian father. For most of his life he spelled his surname Berumé. It wasn't until he applied for Social Security benefits that he learned the true spelling. Berumi's father died when he was 2. Joe and his younger sister lived in Tombstone with their mother, who beat her son when he misbehaved. In 1920, his mother drove Joe and his 6-year-old sister, Concha, to Tucson and left them with the nuns at St. Joseph's Orphanage. She was getting remarried and didn't want the encumbrance of two small children. It was an abandonment from which Berumi never recovered. In a delirium the day before he died, Berumi engaged his long-dead mother in a final conversation, said his wife, Sarah. "He said, 'You were mean to me. You made me cry,' " she heard her husband say as he lay in his hospice bed. He also had a welcome visitor in his last days. Berumi was greatly pleased by the ethereal encounter with his beloved sister, who died in 1992. The greatest hardship at the orphanage was being separated from his sister. Boys and girls lived in separate wings and weren't allowed to mingle. Sometimes, though, the Berumi siblings shared whispered conversations in the schoolyard. "We would stand there and talk for a little while and maybe cry a little together," Berumi said in a 1992 Arizona Daily Star article. He decided to run away after the nuns severely beat him when they caught him sneaking into the girls' dormitory to visit his sister. The 10-year-old made a home for himself on the streets of Downtown Tucson, collecting tires, soda bottles and other discards he could sell to scrap dealers. He slept in the desert under an old cardboard box, and when the weather turned cold, he moved to an abandoned car. After a year, his mother and his uncle found him and hauled him back to Tombstone. She kept him chained to an iron cot so he couldn't run away. But the clever boy, who never achieved more than a fourth-grade education, soon freed himself and headed back to Tucson. At age 13, Berumi hopped a freight train to California and stowed away on a ship headed for Italy, where his paternal grandparents lived. All he had was a scrap of paper with the name of their hometown. "I went to San Francisco, and found some Italian seamen on the dock. I told them I wanted to get to Marsala, Sicily, where my grandparents lived," Berumi recounted in 1992. The sailors hid him in a lifeboat, gave him water and food, and sneaked him off the ship when they docked in Naples. He found his grandparents in Marsala, where he lived for six months until immigration officials shipped him home. When Berumi ran away from his Tombstone home yet again, he landed in reform school. "I spent six months in Fort Grant. It was the six happiest months of my life. They gave me clean clothes, a place to sleep, three square meals," he said. When he was 20, Berumi found a job with the Civilian Conservation Corps working on Colossal Cave. In 1939, he began his life in law enforcement as a jailer for Pima County. From there, he moved up to sheriff's deputy. But he wasn't satisfied. For reasons not even Sarah — the last of five spouses — or his nine children and two step-children know, Berumi was determined to be a Marine. He badgered the recruiter daily, but, at 30, was considered too old. It was a feat of heroism that finally persuaded the recruiter to change his mind. Deputy Berumi had arrived on the scene of an out-of-control fire at an oil plant. Though one of the tanker trucks was ablaze, Tucson firemen wouldn't cross a municipal line to render service. So Berumi jumped in the burning, oil-filled tanker and drove it to them. Impressed by his quick thinking, the Marine Corps welcomed him into their ranks. He served in the South Pacific until the end of World War II. Back in Tucson, Berumi resumed his law enforcement career, working as a Tucson police detective, a Border Patrol agent, an undercover narcotics investigator, a federal customs officer, a process server, and a private investigator. It was his undercover work as a narcotics officer that gave him the most satisfaction. In the 1950s, Berumi went undercover disguised as a beatnik — dark glasses, a goatee and a newsboy cap. "I was the first to work drug cases in the barrio," he said in the 1992 article. "I got into the groups through an informer I had the goods on." Berumi was so adept at playing the part of a junkie that he was invited to participate in opium "mainline parties." His informant would "go around and give each guy a shot. When he got to me, I would have my arm down on my leg. He would take the needle and shoot it between my skin and my pants leg. It would trickle down my pants leg," he said. "Occasionally an informant would say, 'I'm gonna stick you tonight.' I'd say, 'If you do, I'm gonna stick you with a .38,' " Berumi said. During his decades in law enforcement, Berumi had been threatened, shot at and, on a few occasions, knifed, but it never dissuaded him from his mission. In addition to narcotics cases in Tucson, he worked with law enforce- ment agencies in Mexico and Los Angeles. "When I was with the intelligence unit with the Tucson Police Department, I could call Joe regarding certain activities," said retired Tucson Police Chief Bill Gilkinson. "We were working narcotics and vice and organized crime. This goes back to the early '60s. He was always kind enough to share information with us without, of course, violating any confidentiality agreements with clients. "On occasion he would wear some of these (undercover) outfits. I said, 'You've got a lot of nerve going out on the street, wearing some of these outfits,' " Gilkinson recalled. "I did appreciate the man. He was an honorable individual in a rather important profession." Melanie Romo, a daughter from Berumi's fourth marriage, worked at her father's detective agency in the '70s while she was in high school. Mostly she managed the office, but occasionally she joined her father in the field. He tracked cheating spouses, found runaway kids, located stolen property, served summonses and conducted lie-detector tests for local employers. Business was good, and Berumi shared what he had, giving food and spare change to the homeless, work to the unemployed and financial assistance to parents who couldn't provide for their children. "At one time he could walk Downtown and people would know him everywhere — judges and lawyers, the homeless people, barbers," Romo said. In retirement, Berumi tended to the fish in his homemade koi pond, remained active in local Marine Corps veterans activities, spent time with his grandchildren and turned a zeal for junk collecting — honed by his years of scavenging while living on the streets — into art projects. He combined gnarled tree limbs with old glass jars, rusty tools and other discards to create sculptures for his yard. "He was always determined," said his wife, Sarah. "No matter what, he was going to get what he wanted" |
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