Who shot Frank Domino?

Frank Domino came from a large family of bootleggers who were active in Rockford, Illinois during Prohibition. He was big and mean and could handle himself. So why don’t we know for certain who shot him in the back?

Joe Domino

Frank’s father, Giuseppe Domina, and George Cuccia were farmers in Louisiana in the 1910s when Frank’s sister married George’s son. Giuseppe Domina (later, Joe Domino) was a plantation worker from Roccamena, and George Cuccia, a truck farmer from Santa Cristina Gela. Their home comuni in Palermo, Sicily, were about 25 miles apart through winding mountain roads. 

Roccamena is a small village near Corleone. Santa Cristina Gela is an even smaller, Arbëreshë comune near the city of Palermo. This 1900 map of western Sicily is from Antonino Cutrera’s book La mafia e i mafiosi and shows the comuni with known Mafia cosche in red.

Before the first World War began, the Dominas and Cuccias were both raising large families—nine and seven children, respectively—in Louisiana. Giuseppe Domina worked on a plantation in Iberville Parish, and 85 miles away, George Cuccia and his family were farmers in Tangipahoa Parish. 

Iberville Parish, where Joe Domino worked on a plantation, is to the west of Tangipahoa Parish, where the Cuccia family were farmers. This 1910 map of parish borders comes from Randymajors.org.

Both kinds of agricultural labor were common in Louisiana, and so were Italian immigrants working in agriculture. The state’s sugar growers had made a concerted effort to recruit Italian workers, and New Orleans was the port through which most of the Italian immigrants to the United States entered the country.

There were thousands of Sicilians like the Domina and Cuccia families in Louisiana, and with the distance between them, it’s hard to say how they might have met. George’s son Joe married Frances, the eldest Domina girl, sometime around 1917 or 1918. Around the same time, Joe Domino moved his large family to Rockford, Illinois. By 1924, the Cuccias had all joined them.

From rural Louisiana outside New Orleans to Rockford, Illinois is a straight shot north of about 975 miles. (OpenStreetMaps)

Rockford is about ninety miles west of Chicago. In the 1920s, it was a rapidly growing industrial city that drew new immigrants to work in its factories. Between the 1920 and 1930 censuses, Rockford’s population grew by a third, from about 65,000 to over 85,000.

Before national prohibition even began, Frank Domino, who was the eldest of Joe Domino’s children, was arrested for illegal sale of alcohol in January 1919. Joe Domino and his sons, as well as a number of in-laws and brothers of in-laws, were all involved somehow in the bootleg trade.

Sambuca di Sicilia was called Sambuca Zabut until 1928. It’s about 20 miles from Roccamena.

Frank Domino married Katherine Abene in Chicago in 1924. Like Frank, Katherine grew up in rural Louisiana. In 1910, Katherine’s parents, Michele Abene and Angelina Cacioppo, headed a farming household in what would later be incorporated as Independence, Louisiana, in the same ward of Tangipahoa Parish as Joe Domino and George Cuccia. The Abene family moved to Chicago’s Little Sicily in 1915, a couple of years before the Domino and Cuccia families moved to Rockford. Possibly, Frank and Katherine knew one another from childhood.

One article on the shooting claimed that Katherine Domino, 29-year old wife and mother of two, was a native Italian with a “fiery Latin temperament” who only spoke broken English. This was an unfair characterization, besides containing at least two factual errors. Katherine Abene was born in March 1901 in Independence, Louisiana, the daughter of immigrants from Sambuca di Sicilia. In the 1930 census, the census enumerator reported that both Katherine and Frank could read, write, and speak English.

As for Katherine’s temperament, it was not hers that was the problem. Their marriage was troubled from the start because Frank Domino was abusive. He was a big man, weighing 200 pounds, and described as a “steam engine” full of violent fury. On one occasion he threw his wife down a long flight of stairs. She left him on a number of occasions, each time returning to her father’s home in Chicago. The last time Katherine left her husband, friends of his went to Chicago and strongly persuaded her to return. A few days before his death, she got a warrant for his arrest for non-support from the local police. 

On the afternoon of his death he had just returned from a trip, on which he’d been accompanied by another woman. Frank Domino left town with Mrs. Nellie Tullis, a Rockford woman who worked for him at his cafe. Katherine told a reporter that she and Frank had fought about the excursion before he left. Katherine was certain her husband was having an affair. But according to the Domino family, Frank only went with Mrs. Tullis to her parents’ home in the southern part of the state to assess their property’s value for oil drilling purposes. They claimed he’d sent soil samples to state geologists for analysis the previous summer.

Frank Domino (Source: Rockford Register Star)

Frank Domino had several documented occupations. When he first arrived in Rockford in 1917, he worked for a lock manufacturer as a machinist, and then as an insurance salesman. Besides the bootleg trade (or perhaps in support of it), Frank owned a cafe in Rockford called the Silver Moon. By self-report in May 1929 Frank was a real estate agent. This was a turbulent summer for Frank and Katherine. After their son’s unexpected stillbirth, is around the time that Frank would have taken his initial steps toward purchasing drilling rights from Mrs. Tullis’ family, and when Katherine left her husband for the last time, then was persuaded to return. 

The Great Depression began at the end of 1929. In April 1930, shortly before they bought their new home and moved in, the census indicated that Frank was a laborer in the furniture industry. Weeks later, a liquor still exploded in a garage directly in front of their home on Knowlton Street. Frank owned the property that was destroyed in the blast but denied knowledge or ownership of the still that had wrecked it. Two weeks before Frank was shot in November, the Dominos moved about a mile south to a new brick home in the suburbs. 

Frank Domino had a rough time on his business trip with Mrs. Tullis. His car was stolen, and he had to make the return trip by bus. Once home, his wife refused to prepare dinner for him. She was hosting her father, Mike Abene, and Tony Santino: a neighbor from Knowlton Street. Santino described a normal, friendly scene in which Frank greeted his family and visitors and made them a round of highballs. The shooting occurred minutes after Santino left.

Friends of Frank’s, Sam Schiro and Leo Oddo, stopped by just moments before the shooting. Oddo stayed in the car while Schiro, as he would later testify, went inside in time to hear Katherine tell her husband she wanted a divorce. Frank responded in a threatening manner, raising his arm to strike her. 

Frank either drove or pushed Katherine from the living room toward the back of the house, into the kitchen. Katherine’s father had earlier slipped a gun from a bureau drawer and put it in his pocket. He was well aware of the abuse his daughter had suffered at Frank’s hands, and the trip with Mrs. Tullis. Abene believed his son-in-law was about to grievously injure his daughter, possibly even kill her, and that he might be Frank’s next target. Mike drew the gun from his pocket and fired three times into Frank Domino’s back, killing him.

Katherine Abene Domino (Source: Ancestry.com)

Mike Abene left the house on foot. He disposed of the gun on his way to the depot, where he caught a train home to Chicago. In one account given by Katherine to a local reporter, she ran from the house to a nearby grocer, yelling for him to call the police because she had just shot her husband. When Leo Oddo testified, he claimed that Katherine emerged from the house after her father left, carrying her infant daughter and leading her older girl by the hand. She asked Oddo to give her a ride and he refused, so she walked away. She spent the night wandering the streets with her children, eventually taking shelter in a barn.

At first Katherine claimed to have shot her husband. Then her father was arrested in Chicago and brought back to Rockford for questioning. After more than two days of interrogation by police, he took responsibility for the shooting. Katherine once again tried to shield her father by repeating her confession.

Father and daughter went on trial for the murder of Frank Domino, but neither went to prison. Mike Abena was found not guilty of murder in a jury trial. The indictment against Katherine was nolle prossed, a formal declaration by the state that it does not intend to prosecute a charge.

Mike Abene, acquitted of murdering his son-in-law in 1930 (Source: Rockford Register Star)

Katherine and her daughters moved into her father’s house in Chicago. The brick house she still owned in Rockford stood empty. It was reported in January 1931 that plumbing fixtures had been stripped by thieves. Her father, after his acquittal, went into hiding, fearing retribution from Frank Domino’s family and friends. He returned to Chicago, where he died in 1950.

Katherine moved to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and remarried to Felice “Bill” Ventura in 1946. She did not have any more children. Bill died in 1967. Catherine Ventura (she spelled her first name with a “C” later in life) died in 1992.