Genealogy With a Purpose
Was My Grandmother an Accidental Stereotype or a True Mafia Princess?
It all depends on who tells the story…
It began with a bomb. The extortion letters demanding money had been covered with skulls and coffins, and for two years my great-grandfather dutifully turned them into the police. But the Chicago police department was no match for “La Mano Nera” aka The Black Hand (think Mafia), who had overrun the Italian community in cities across the US at the turn of the last century.
I grew up hearing my grandmother’s story about the bombing. She told us how her sister had “died of fright”, and her father — a labor union leader who helped immigrants get work in the steel mills — was then forced to cooperate with the mob in order to keep his family alive.
That’s how things worked, I was told. In a “corrupt” city like Chicago, no one was going to come to your rescue if you were a low class Southern Italian immigrant. So once the Black Hand bombed his house, my great-grandfather had no choice but to give in to them.
Over a hundred years later, while researching my family history, I connected with a distant cousin, Joe (as I’ll refer to him here). Although we share the same union leader great-grandfather, Joe descends from one of my…
