The Mafia Curse

About the Book

The Italian-American experience is a saga of tragedy and triumph -- the struggle of proud, religious, life-loving people stained by an unfair curse of criminality that is still perpetuated today by crime writers, TV shows and movies. The Mafia Curse tells how the stigma was born in the late Nineteenth Century when emigrants to America from Italy were terrorized by a small band of their own compatriots and unfairly smeared as criminals by an American press seeking to boost readership by pandering to public prejudice. Every other immigrant group that came before and after brought its own share of criminals, but most were excused on grounds that their lawlessness was bred by poverty and an inability to break into the economic mainstream. Only the Italians were burned with the brand of infamy and reviled by a nation that conveniently ignored the reality that crime infects all races and knows no nationality. Irish heritage was never cited as a factor when gangsters like Chicago's Dion O'Bannion and George "Bugs" Moran shot up Chicago, or when bandit cop-killer Francis "Two Gun" Crowley died in the electric chair after a murderous rampage. The Gaelic roots of bank robber Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd and kidnapper-bootlegger George "Machinegun" Kelly are seldom noted. John Dillinger's German ancestry was an ignored footnote to his violent bank robbing spree through the Midwest. Few people -- even crime writers -- are aware that Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, a member of Kate "Ma" Barker's family-oriented gang, was of Lithuanian background. And forgotten altogether is my own namesake gang, Egan's Rats, who fought for control of bootlegging in St. Louis under the aegis of "Jellyroll" Egan, a professional "legbreaker" for anti-union businessmen. Adopting the great American spirit of hard work and stick-to-it-iveness, the Italians survived the onslaught of hate with a deep devotion to family life that centered on nurturing and educating their children. They rose to the highest levels of academia, government, industry, science and show business, slowly carving out a slice of the American dream. Enshrined in the pantheon of their American accomplishments are names like Alito, Coppola, Cuomo, Capra, De Niro, DiMaggio, Giamatti, Giuliani, Iacocca, LaGuardia, Puzo, Scalia, Scorcese, Sinatra, Stallone, Travolta and Valentino. Yet in 1952, Salvatore Lombino, who authored the best-selling book, The Blackboard Jungle, and later wrote dozens of wildly successful mystery novels and screenplays, was forced to adopt the pen names Evan Hunter and Ed McBain to get the attention of publishers he claimed had ignored his work because of his Italian heritage. Recent surveys show that 78% of teens and 74% of adults in America still associate Italians with blue-collar jobs or with organized crime while the U. S. Justice Department says 67% are white collar employees and less than .0025% are mob-connected. That percentage factors out to 650 bad guys in the estimated Italian-American population of 26 million. This is the story of how the Mafia Curse began in the waning decades if the Nineteenth Century and the exploits of intrepid Italian-American detective named Joseph Petrosino. who loved his fellow Italians passionately and drove himself to the limit to punish their tormentors and preserve their honor and dignity in a newfound land. By the time Petrosino became New York City’s sole investigator of Italian-American crime in 1891, sensational newspaper articles had already tarred the Italians as inherently criminal and either soldiers in or sympathetic to the Mafia. The image was reinforced within months by the worst massacre of Italian immigrants in the nation’s history. Reports of the mass lynching stamped the word Mafia on the consciousness of Americans for a century to come. The flaming prejudice grew over the ensuing two decades, as Petrosino fought a rising tide of murders, muggings, bombings,

About the Author

Mr. Egan. an award-winning crime writer, was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press, the Journal-American and the Post in New York. He covered major news events for nearly 40 years. These included the capture of famed bank robber Willie “The Actor” Sutton, the executions of Atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the mob shootings of Frank Costello, “Crazy Joe” Gallo and other underworld wiseguys, the gangland blinding of labor of labor writer Victor Riesel, the civil rights riots and antiwar bombings of the 1960s and 70s and the Alice Crimmins and Son Of Sam murder cases. An author, he also has written hundreds of articles, many on women criminals. He lives in Tryon, N.C.