Maybe one day I will try my hand at l’amore but for now I can say my mind tends to go toward criminal activity. My Sicilian family can’t be blamed for any of this. In my family tree, there is not one person going back to the 1700s that was a criminal, to my knowledge. None of the Miceli family and the many other family surnames did in jail or prison one day, so far as I can tell. They were all hard-working family people with little or no education who suffered greatly as any of the millions of immigrants had.
My book Carusi, the Shame of Sicily, has a love story within the weaving of the history of the sulfur mines in western Sicily. That’s as close as I’ve come to a true love story.
However, my Italian side of the family had a couple of criminals. From what I can garner, my biological grandfather was a bad guy who fled from New York, likely to save his life, deserting my dad and his own family. One of his brothers was in Sing, Sing prison, likely for armed robbery back in 1930. I’m working on finding out the details. Perhaps this part of my DNA is why my writing goes to the rough stuff.
I can say without a doubt that my true crime books—and I will admit they are the most difficult to research and write—have fueled my fascination with the criminal mind.
When I met Gene Borrello, a mob enforcer and turncoat whose life I wrote about in Born in the Life, I was taken by his want to beat up people, shoot them, and torment them to collect debts owed to the Bonanno crime family in New York.
When I sat with John Alite, another mafia informant, I was intrigued that he had killed dozens of people. A seemingly nice man who made murder his stock in trade. He seemed to enjoy his work.
My new book, Trust and Betrayal, will be out soon. Levit Fernandini, the subject of the book, had a similar attraction for me. Here is a family man who seems calm and reserved. Underneath his placid demeanor is a drug dealer who was given a life sentence for murder and trafficking.
I killed a turtle when I was a teenager, and it literally has haunted me for over 60 years. How can these men commit these heinous acts for power and money and, in Alite and Borrello’s case, at the behest of others?
Having spent countless hours on the telephone, in person, at lunch or dinner, on Zoom calls with these three criminals brought me as close to pure evil as I ever wanted to be. Writing about my fictional character, John Deegan, in the Vic Gonnella series is just what it is. It’s fake out of my imagination. No one in real life gets hurt, not even a paper.
Friends and family have told me I was crazy to be with these characters, but the more time I spent with them, the more they intrigued me.
Perhaps growing up in Catholic schools with a sense of guilt and morals and heaven and hell has made my psyche long to know about what makes a person intrinsically bad.
I have turned down 5 or 6 criminals who want their story told. They are not looking to cleanse their souls in a mea culpa but likely looking for a TV. series or movie. I’ve decided to sit it out, at least for the time being.
Instead, I’ll stay with fictional characters who seem to write their own dialogue.
