Charleston County Public Library

A lie will suffice, a DiGiovanni family history

eng

non fiction

A lie will suffice

1327552804

a DiGiovanni family history

"In 1893 Western Sicily, Gaetano DiGiovanni, twenty-five years old, foresees a day when he abandons his turbulent, hard-scrabble life in the Palermo Province hinterlands for the promise of America. His fourteen-and-a-half-year-old wife, Angelina Bucaro DiGiovanni, is at his side. Gaetano becomes an old-style Mafiosi "man of respect, " called Don Tano Baiocco in Sicily and New Orleans. For the next half century, "Tano Baiocco" guides his burgeoning family through Atlantic Ocean crossings, murder, extortion, vendetta, bootlegging, hostage-taking Fascists cracking down on Sicilian Mafiosi, labor influence on the New Orleans banana docks, two criminal trials, a secret interment in the family burial vault, the Great Depression and World War II. Employing a culture-based nineteenth-century Sicilian mindset, including omerta and deception, Gaetano "Baiocco" DiGiovanni, his wife, children, and son-in-law, Natale Guinta, largely conceal the dark aspects of the family history from their offspring and following generations, who by the early twenty-first century have established themselves as pillars of their American communities. Then one day in 2009, one of Gaetano's many upright American granddaughters, distraught over her discovery of the truth about the 1921 Mafia assassination of Gaetano's oldest son, her Uncle Domenico, presents a few old newspaper articles to her own stunned son, the author of this book. She obliquely challenges him to dig out the whole truth of the family history. "One day, you're gonna write a book about my family, " she says, "and it won't be so pretty. Why all the secrets? Why all the lies?" A Lie Will Suffice is the result of twelve years of research, cited in detailed endnotes and an extensive bibliography, that attempts to answer a mother's questions, to unravel and explain the sometimes difficult-to-discern, complex, but ultimately triumphant DiGiovanni-Guinta family history. It ends with the opaque revelation to the author by his Godfather, ten months before his Godfather's death, of the most closely held family secret." - Cover, p. [4]

Prologue -- Chapter 1: Western Sicily 1893 -- Chapter 2: Ciminna -- Chapter 3: Madonie Mountains 1893 -- Chapter 4: Castelvetrano, Trapani Province -- Chapter 5: Mezzogiorno, the Sicilian Diaspora -- Chapter 6: New Orleans Early 1900s -- Chapter 7: Lower Ninth Ward -- Chapter 8: The Cipolla-DiGiorgio Link -- Chapter 9: Cipolla Captured -- Chapter 10: Friday the 13th -- Chapter 11: Vendetta and the "Good Element" -- Chapter 12: The Missing Wife -- Chapter 13: Charged -- Chapter 14: Mistake 1921 -- Chapter 15: New Orleans-St. Louis-Chicago 1922 -- Chapter 16: Return to Sicily 1922 -- Chapter 17: New Orleans Riverfront 1923 -- Chapter 18: Irish Channel October 9, 1923 -- Chapter 19: La Mano Nero (The Black Hand) -- Chapter 20: San Cipirello Redux -- Chapter 21: Frenchmen Street 1924 -- Chapter 22: Don Tano Baiocco Versus Il Prefetto Di Ferro -- Chapter 23: Atlantic Crossing 1929 -- Chapter 24: Bootleggers -- Chapter 25: The United States Courthouse -- Chapter 26: Exoneration -- Chapter 27: Elysian Fields November 26, 1934 -- Chapter 28: Tulane and Broad March 25, 1935 -- Chapter 29: Tchoupitoulas Street -- Chapter 30: War Years -- Chapter 31: Portella Della Ginestra May Day 1947 -- Chapter 32: Final Migration -- Chapter 33: Widowhood Part 1 -- Chapter 34: Marengo Street -- Chapter 35: Widowhood Part 2 -- Chapter 36: Six Angies -- Chapter 37: Widowhood Part 3 -- Chapter 38: My Cousin Paolo -- Chapter 39: My Godfather, Uncle Joe -- Epilogue -- Index -- Bibliography -- Endnotes