A few months ago I asked my Facebook followers for suggestions of topics and questions about Mafia families they’d like me to tackle. One came from New Orleans Mafia writer Ronald Rawson. “I’ve heard that Theresa Ferrara, Tommy DeSimone’s squeeze, was related somehow to Carlos Marcello.” Was it possible to confirm or refute this claim?
On Patreon: DeSimone, coast to coast. Were Tommy DeSimone and Rosario DeSimone related?
Theresa Ferrara was more than just somebody’s girlfriend. She was a gang boss in her own right and a daring thief. Ferrara was killed in 1979 for being an FBI informant and for stealing from the Lucchese Family. True to form, she was killed for what she knew. Her body washed up in New Jersey and the remains were identified by her breast implants. A character based on Theresa appears in the popular film, Goodfellas.
Carlos Marcello was the powerful Mafia boss of New Orleans. And when I say he was powerful, I don’t just mean that he dominated politics and the underworld of Louisiana. The Mafia bosses of New Orleans wielded far more authority than their contemporaries in northern cities, particularly after the inception of the Commission. Marcello made men, and he could make them disappear — and he required no one’s permission for either. In any good JFK assassination conspiracy theory, Carlos Marcello is at the center.
I didn’t think my research into Rawson’s question would get very far, because of how recently Theresa Ferrara lived, but the fact that she has died opens up some of her records. She was born the year after the most recent available US census, and armed with the names of her parents, I was able to make some progress on her family tree. Her maiden name was Fiorenza: I haven’t seen anyone mention her having been married, but it’s in the New York City Marriage Licenses Index, and an unmistakable match for her Social Security Numerical Identification File. Ferrara’s paternal line goes back to Petilia Policastro, in Calabria. Her father’s mother was from Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, in Campania. And her maternal grandfather, who lived with the family in New York City in 1950, was born in the Dardanelles, in Turkey.
Turning to Carlos Marcello’s family, his ancestors and those of his wife are all from Sicily. Marcello was born in Tunisia to recent migrants from Ravanusa, a comune in Agrigento province. Marcello’s wife’s family, the Todaros, were from San Cipirello, in the neighboring province of Palermo. It does not appear at all likely that Ferrara shared a common ancestor with either Carlos Marcello or his wife, Jacqueline Todaro, simply because I can’t find their ancestors living close enough to meet and marry.
Presuming the rumor is true and Marcello and Ferrara are distantly related… let’s say Ferrara knew about the relationship to the powerful New Orleans mob boss, and said something about it to one of her friends. (How else would a true story of a distant relationship begin to spread? The claim seems to derive from people who knew Ferrara, not from Marcello’s orbit.) How distant a relationship would it be possible for Theresa Ferrara to know about? Would she know if one of her cousins had married a cousin or in-law of Marcello? I think she probably would. She might even know if one of her second cousins was connected to Marcello through marriage. Beyond that, it seems doubtful that Theresa would know who her own third cousins were, much less Marcello’s.
As for what kind of connection to Marcello would have been useful to a criminal like Ferrara, weak ties can be better than strong ones, according to the science of social networks. It might even be possible to chain a couple of weak ties together, like the in-law of a second cousin. Think of tapping your network to find a job in a new city and all the people you’d reach out to, and of those, who would work their own network on your behalf.
Beyond the second degree (a “friend of a friend” for example, or the cousin of an in-law), the power of weak ties is almost impossible to harness. That’s because there’s no single person to mediate between you and a third degree contact, someone who can vouch for both of you, and has any reason to take the risk of mediation upon themselves. The answer to the question of what is the weakest tie of kinship Ferrara might have called upon to get a meeting with Carlos Marcello, has to do with the strength of each link in the chain, as well as the number of links.
Mediation is valuable because without trust, you might as well deal with strangers. A connector in a social network provides a service. They introduce new pools of candidates, and mitigate some of the risk of doing business. The successful mediator enjoys the benefits of being the hero by bringing two parties together, like an unemployed worker and a hiring professional, endearing themselves to both of their shared social networks. If the meeting fails spectacularly, the mediator will have to deal with the fallout. If it simply doesn’t go well, someone might still be mad about it.
When I first wrote for this blog on how to find your family connection to the Mafia, I gave some suggestions on how to use heuristics to narrow down the thousands of possible contact points in your extended family, and explore the most likely scenarios that would bring your family and the Mafia together. For instance, there’s geography. Where am I going to find a marriage between two extended families that have never lived in the same state or province at any time in known history? One of Carlos Marcello’s brothers married a woman named Penny Yvonne Valentine who, after they divorced, lived for many years in New York City, where Theresa Ferrara lived all her life. However, I haven’t found any of Valentine’s relations, including her second husband, who ever lived in New York City. Since that’s where all of Ferrara’s known siblings and, as far as I know, her cousins lived, it seems unlikely the families are related through this ex-sister-in-law of Carlos Marcello. To rule it out I’d have to look at all of Penny’s siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, to see if any of them married someone whose name occurs in Theresa Ferrara’s family tree, and vice versa.
An obstacle to making a complete search, other than the sheer number of people whose lives I’d have to research, is how recently Theresa lived. Her older siblings are probably living, and she may have younger siblings whose names I don’t know. I know her husband’s name, but it’s so common that I haven’t been able to identify him as a unique individual. Like Theresa’s siblings, who are all somewhere in the neighborhood of 60-80 years old, her husband is probably still alive. He may have been previously married, or it may be one of his siblings or cousins who connects Theresa Ferrara to the Marcello family.
I have a lot more work to do on Ferrara’s tree, even within the limits of what is possible today with public records. At first, I put more time into Marcello’s tree, since it is likely to tell me more than one story.
The Marcello family tree may show us how a more traditional Sicilian Mafia family is structured. Carlos’ many brothers’ close business ties to his criminal empire, double in-law marriages in the Todaro family — Marcello was sponsored by Frank Todaro into the local Mafia Family — and reinforcing marriages between the Marcello and Todaro families, who were in power before Carlos arrived, are all classic indicators of Mafia families. Which branches engage in these practices can tell me where in a large extended family the tradition came from and who’s carrying it into the future.
I did find a family connection to the Marcello family tree, but not one leading to Theresa Ferrara. It turns out I’m distantly related to Carlos Marcello through marriage. One of the Marcello sisters married Sam Loria, who Mafia writer Thom L. Jones describes as an honest businessman. Sam’s father, Paul, was a New Orleans produce dealer from Roccamena, in partnership with his brother-in-law, Biaggio Cascio. (Cascio is likewise from Roccamena and of no relation to me.)
Paul Loria married twice, both times to women named Filippa. Carlos Marcello’s brother-in-law Sam Loria and his siblings have one older half-brother from the first marriage, Frank Leo Loria, who married Pauline Quaglino in 1924. Pauline’s father, Filippo Quaglino, was born in Corleone in 1866, and is my second cousin, five times removed. He was my immigrating ancestor Angela Grizzaffi’s second cousin, once removed.
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