If you love justice, learn history, starting with your own.
I was writing about the Mafia long before I learned that my great-grandfather kidnapped two teenage girls in New York City in 1913 and forced them into prostitution. It wasn’t his first offense, but on this occasion he was arrested for “white slavery” and sentenced to Sing Sing Prison. This all happened in the years before he married my great-grandmother. I learned about his crimes by reading about them in old newspapers.
I’d read about murder, torture, and gangsters running brothels, and thought I couldn’t be moved the way I was, putting his story together as a genealogist. My great-grandfather was interred in the same plot where my great-aunt, who I knew, was more recently laid to rest. Because he had a common name, Giuseppe Longo, I’d had trouble finding him. His internment record came to me via family channels, allowing me to positively identify him as a Sing Sing inmate. Using the prison admission, I found news reports about my great-grandfather’s crimes.
It was like a gut punch to realize that someone so close to me, whose genes are part of who I am, committed such evil acts. I’m a modern, progressive, educated person with few, if any, supernatural beliefs. I don’t think evildoers are punished after they die, but the trauma they inflict lives after them, and not only in their victims. If I ever wondered how Mafia families lived with what their gangster relations did, I might wonder no more and look at my own family instead.
And what happened to us was… we forgot. The ones who knew didn’t tell the next generation, and so instead of hearing from my grandmother why she never had anything to say about her father, I found out from reading the papers. Who knows, it might have destroyed me to learn it young. Maybe Grandma was trying to stop the damage from leaking into another generation. I don’t blame her for not telling me.
I’ve felt the difference it makes when you recognize the evildoer’s humanity despite yourself, because they’re your family: your blood. I found that I couldn’t sanction or excuse what he’d done—I refuse to—but I can’t refuse my own life, and so I have to live with both our existences. I can’t make that history go away, and I can’t undo the damage it did. What has come down to me because of him, through genetics and family history, are all things I did not, and do not, get to choose. Like other members of my family, I suffer from intergenerational trauma. Those girls he trafficked more than a hundred years ago are like my great-grandfather now, bones and ashes. There’s nothing I can do for them. I can only decide how I want to be, now. I tell their stories for you. You, and our kids.
Without the stories, my family didn’t know what happened to us, so we were not equipped to heal ourselves or make things right. It happens on the national scale constantly: we forget, or someone makes the choice to leave certain stories behind. So we think we know our history, but it’s distorted and incomplete.
A couple years after I started this website, I asked my readers to perform this simple exercise in empathy.
“When you learn about the hurdles that today’s immigrants face in coming here, ask yourself: How would I feel if the story of my family was like the stories on the news right now?”
It was the first year of the first term of the currently sitting US president, the first year of a Republican in the Oval Office after eight years of President Barack Obama. The images these two American presidents showed us and the rest of the world, of themselves and the people they deported, were very different. If masked men were nightly zip-tying and arresting toddlers and herding naked teenagers out of their beds and into unmarked black vans under Obama, no one was taking pictures or talking about it, while the current administration presents their cruelties proudly as if to say, “Who will stop me?”
Let me tell you as an historian of evil: privilege corrupts. It’s what is rotting this country from its core, and it’s always been there, but that doesn’t mean we can’t root it out. I love my life and my friends. And there’s kids here. I think if you love this country there is only one answer. We have to save democracy for them, if not for ourselves.
One of the ways privilege has corrupted my family and the families I study is a stunning lack of empathy. It’s what has allowed the children and grandchildren of immigrants to become, somehow, anti-immigration. A small but pernicious percentage of Americans wants not only to bar the door through which their ancestors came to this country, but to inflict cruelty as we kick people out, to televise it, turn it into memes for the White House to share on Twitter. Is that a fitting legacy for the descendants of immigrants? Is it who we want to be as a country?
Writing about the Mafia by digging into their family trees lets me tell stories about how the Mafia’s power is like that of King Midas, who was granted the power—the curse—to turn every single thing he touched into gold. He tries out his new superpower on his food and with a touch, it becomes solid gold. A bit hungry now, he wanders his kingdom, and one by one his subjects, his courtiers, the roses in his garden, his queen, and his beloved daughter—everything that made his life good and possible, are turned to gold the moment he takes them in his hands.
The same qualities that made mafiosi such successful criminals—their embrace of violence, an “us v. them” approach to the world, unflinching loyalty to leadership, and placing Mafia affairs above everything else—tainted, abused, and alienated their loved ones and friends. Mafia values instill the children of mafiosi with harmful lessons about power, and everyone around them with fear.
For many Italian-American families, a few generations of education, rising wealth, and white privilege have convinced them they are better, more worthy, more human, than the terrified people they see in their social media feeds, being abducted by masked strangers at gunpoint to be taken who knows where. Self-identified Christians call empathy a sin, and white Americans who cannot tell you anything about the 1924 Immigration Act smugly remark that at least their ancestors immigrated legally.
You can only be at ease, watching what’s happening in the United States today, if you are certain it won’t happen to you. Everyone knows that history repeats itself. That means you can only be this relaxed about your government waging war on American cities if you haven’t read the story to the end.
This is why I’m such an advocate for Italian Americans to learn to do genealogy and discover their family stories. Sometimes none of this affects you—I mean really gets you in the guts—until it becomes personal.
Family. Country. Faith.
Corruption destroys what you love most.
Mafia Genealogy 
Well done. Thank you.
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Ciao, A friend of mine was telling us that his father received a Black Hand extortion letter threatening to blow up his house in upstate NY. His father loaded up his young family in a wagon and fled under cover of darkness. Recently I learned that my maternal great grandmother had married Salvatore Arrigo after her husband died. I realized that The Society of the Bananas may have been responsible for the extortion attempt and Salvatore was a past president. Many years after they fled, his mother had dementia and would call the police to report that someone was going to blow up her house. I thought I came from honest, hard working Sicilian ancestors. Bill Shepherd
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Absolutely excellent work, Justin. Finishing up the same for my family as having learned a chunk from you. There’s solid science regarding parental experiences influencing offspring (phenotypes, specifically the mother during the carry period). But recent papers keep reinforcing that environmental factors (e.g., stress, diet, toxins) can induce modifications like DNA methylation, histone alterations, or non-coding RNA changes, which may persist across generations.
Keep it up!
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