The liberation of Anna Domino

The bootlegger’s daughter who fought back against an ancient, humiliating practice.

In September I shared the story of the fatal shooting of Frank Domino, a Prohibition-era bootlegger in Rockford, Illinois. I also hinted at a lot more that I just didn’t get into: that it was research into Joe Civello, the Mafia boss of Dallas, Texas, that led me to the Domino family, and the Dominos’ kin-based network of bootleggers in Rockford. You want to know how Civello and the Dominos are connected. Naturally. So let me start at this end of the family tree in question.

You already know that my “family trees” are more like cypress groves. This one will be no different. I’ve color coded the important families to make it easier to follow. The Civello family are in lime green. The red box to the left in the lime green tree is Joseph Civello.

From left to right, the next thing you might notice is the murder I wrote about in Who shot Frank Domino? Frank was the eldest child in his very large family of origin, drawn here in blue.

Above the family ancestors are color-coded rectangular labels with the families’ places of origin in Sicily. The Civellos were from Salaparuta. Catherine Abene’s family was from Sambuca di Sicilia. The Cuccias, who were in a double in-law marriage with the Dominos, were from Santa Cristina Gela.

The sharp-eyed will see that the green lines of the Civello family just pass through to the right without intersecting any other families. We will continue walking through this cypress grove of family relations. But first, I want you to meet Anna.

Anna Domino. (Source: Rockford Register Star, 1928)

Anna Domino is in this family tree: she’s a younger sister of the slain Frank Domino. Anna was born in Iberville Parish, Louisiana, in 1907, where her father worked on a sugar cane plantation.

You can see in this tree that Frank, Tony, and John Domino, who were all older than Anna, and their brothers-in-law, Joe and Tony Cuccia, all have a three-quarter black fill, which is my usual shorthand for criminality in the family trees I create in GenoPro. In the 1920s, when this story takes place, these brothers and brothers-in-law were all bootleggers along with Anna’s father. She also had a younger brother, Peter, born one year after her, who was arrested with their father on bootlegging charges by the time he was eighteen. Her oldest brother, Frank—the “steam engine”—was still alive.

The Dominos were closely intertwined with several other families that followed a similar path from Sicily to rural Louisiana to Rockford (some by way of Chicago), all within the span of a few years. The men became active distillers and suppliers of illegal alcohol in Rockford. One of the families who married in and joined the Dominos in their trade were the Cuccias. Another were the Ginestra family.

Leonard H. Ginestra (1892-1978) and his youngest brother, Samuel J. Ginestra (1908-1986), were said to be Rockford Mafia soldiers and bootleggers, along with the Domino, Cuccia, and Ingrassia brothers.

The Ingrassia family were related to the Domino and Ginestra families of Rockford bootleggers, as well as to Joseph Civello of Dallas, through marriage. The Civello connections are more complicated so I’ll explain those first: Joseph Civello’s wife, Mary Tominello, had a sister, Frances, who married Frank Ginestra: one of the bootlegging brothers of Rockford. Joseph Civello also had a sister named Frances who married Ross Musso: a Dallas soldier. Their younger sister Phyllis married Sam Ginestra, a Rockford soldier, and youngest brother of the bootleggers Frank and Leonard H. Ginestra.

The Ginestra brothers were born in Chicago and lived in the neighborhood known as Little Sicily. Leonard married Mary Ginestra, their first cousin, around 1912: you can see that union in the middle of the image above, where two red-line families are joined in marriage, and to the left in the image below.

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When Leonard and Mary first married, they lived with her parents and siblings in Chicago.^[1] Mary’s father, Salvatore Ginestra, worked for the Wells-Fargo Company. Leonard H. Ginestra was a mechanic with his own shop. After his garage was robbed, he bought his family a home in Rockford, in 1920.^[2] After Mary Ginestra’s father retired in 1927, they followed her and Leonard to Rockford.^[3] Leonard’s parents and younger siblings followed in 1928.^[4]

Theodore Ingrassia married Leonard’s sister, Marie Ginestra, in 1924.^[5] The following year in December, the first “moonshine rectifier” ever found in Rockford exploded in the Ingrassias’ basement.^[6] Theodore pleaded guilty to owning the machinery, which was designed to re-distill alcohol to get a higher proof output, and reported for his sixty days in county jail the day after Christmas.^[7] 

Tony Domino married Theodore’s sister, Lucy in 1926; her brother Vincent was Tony’s best man.^[8] 

For Anna Domino, growing up in a big, interconnected family was just normal life, no different from thousands of other Italian Americans. Her father ran a grocery store. As a young woman, Anna managed a location of the National Tea Company, a chain store. Her brothers and sisters worked with their father or held factory jobs. The Ingrassia family was similarly headed by a patriarch who owned a grocery. The men in her family being arrested for bootlegging and stealing cars were also regular occurrences in Anna’s childhood.^[9]

In January 1928, a raid at the farm of Frank Gulotta led to the seizure of 33 gallons of high-proof alcohol, a still with a 100-gallon tank, and 1200 pounds of corn sugar. Anna’s little brother Pete was arrested along with Jerry Schiro and Leo Ginestra.^[10] This was Leonard H., the former mechanic shop owner who had moved to Rockford to get away from crime. I know which of the cousins it was by his address. Leo was an active Republican politician in his new home ward in Rockford.^[11] Leo Ginestra’s children wrote letters to Santa Claus—they were published in the Rockford Daily Republic with their home address—years before Leo’s same-name cousin started his family.^[12] His address appeared in the newspaper again when a fire in his garage was put out in February 1926.^[13]

In April 1928, Anna’s sister, Margaret got married in Rockford to a man from Cheyenne, Wyoming. It might be through this wedding that Anna Domino met her future husband, Leonard D. Ginestra (1905-1987), an older brother of Mary: Mrs. Leonard H. Ginestra (the first cousin Ginestra-Ginestra marriage).

Anna attracted the attention of another young man in town: one who would not take “No” for an answer. Peter Scifo proposed marriage to Anna Domino on multiple occasions but she always turned him down. In the fall of 1928, she began being courted by Leonard D. Ginestra. She confided to him that she was afraid of Scifo. As the papers put it, Scifo “forced his attention” on her until she feared leaving her house unattended. Her new boyfriend began escorting her home from her workplace. One afternoon, after weeks of walking Miss Domino home, Ginestra had a competing dentist appointment and arranged to call on her at home afterward.^[15]

Scifo stole the opportunity. His friends Jasper “James” La Rosa and Carlo Caltagerone, along with Scifo’s aunt, Assunda Terara, forcibly took Anna from in front of her house as she was arriving home from work. She screamed and fought but no one in her home who heard her thought they were her.^[16] Anna was shoved into Scifo’s car and driven across state lines into Janesville, Wisconsin, about forty miles north, where Scifo and his friends and relatives tried to make Anna agree to marry Peter. Eventually she was brought to Mrs. Terara’s home, where Scifo’s aunt had prepared a bridal room for the couple, with the evident plan for Anna to spend the night with him.^[17]

Anna was held overnight by her captors before getting to a phone and calling for aid. Her captors panicked when they realized help was on the way and fled, abandoning her. Even reading between the lines, it doesn’t appear from the reporting that Anna was assaulted. Instead, Peter Scifo genuinely intended to make the young woman marry him. At least one of the news reports hinted at an “old country” tradition in which young women were taken and threatened with the loss of their reputations if they did not marry their abductors. This was a real practice. It was called “fuitina” in Sicily. A young woman who spent the night away from home was considered “ruined.” A “reparative marriage” to her abductor restored her reputation. Anna refused all of this.

And her loved ones stood behind her. A year after her kidnapping by Scifo’s henchmen, Anna married her sweetheart.^[18] Her choices to marry a man she liked, and to continue pressing charges against Scifo and his accomplices, were lauded in the news as “very American.”^[19] The newlyweds lived with her parents in the 1930 census.^[20]

Anna’s older sister Margaret Domino moved to Cheyenne with her husband, Michael Pollare, a railroad employee and native of Camporeale, Sicily, after their marriage in Rockford. The address where they would live was published in the wedding announcement.^[21] They and their children appear at that address in census records.^[22] 

Social columns of the 1940s tell us that the former Margaret Domino made frequent, long trips to Rockford with her children and stayed with one of her married sisters.^[23] At least one mention in 1950 in which she is a hostess for a bridal shower makes it sound as though she were still a Rockford resident.^[24]

Margaret and Mike had three children: two born close together, shortly after their marriage, and a third born ten years later. Their last child was born in Rockford in 1938.^[25] 

Mary Frances Pollare, the second born of their children, lived with her aunt and uncle, Leonard and Ann Ginestra—the subjects of the abduction story—before her marriage in Rockford to Clyde Harris, Jr of Beloit, Wisconsin in 1950.^[26] The Harrises made their home in Rockford.

When Margaret died in 1964, her Rockford address, local church affiliation, and the Rockford hospital in which she’d died at 59 after a long illness all appeared in her obituary. It even said that Margaret had lived in Rockford for most of her life.^[27] Margaret Domino Pollare was buried near Rockford, while her husband, who died ten years after her, lies in Cheyenne.^[28] 

Sources