The Best American Essays 2015 (17 page)

It has to be love, doesn't it? In however many of its infinite permutations?

John and Mary are married for thirty-seven years. They live to see a capitol dome raised and streetcars glide up and down the streets. Out in the world, Coca-Cola and motion pictures and vacuum cleaners are invented.

On May 13, 1900, the page 8 “Local Brevities” section of the
Idaho Daily Statesman
includes the following items:

The rainfall during the 36 hours preceding 5 o'clock last evening was 1.72 inches.

The May term of the supreme court will begin tomorrow.

Mrs. John O'Farrell is lying at death's door. The physicians have given up all hope.

The second stanza of Emily Dickinson's poem reads like this:

And sweetest—in the gale—is heard;

And sore must be the storm—

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm—

Sore must be the storm indeed. John outlives Mary by only a few months. According to his obituary,

Mr. O'Farrell was one of the pioneers of Idaho, having come to this section in the early sixties. He was well and favorably known throughout Idaho and the northwest.

And then there's this:

Mr. O'Farrell's wife died last spring and he never recovered from the blow.

8. What Lasts

Through the decades the house John built for Mary has been softened by lawn sprinklers and hammered by sun. The cottonwood it was built from makes a weak and spongy lumber, nonresistant to decay, prone to warping, and to keep the house from collapsing, Boiseans have had to come together every few decades and retell its story. In the early 1910s, the Daughters of the American Revolution collected $173 to move and reroof it; in the 1950s a dance was held to raise funds; seven hundred people showed up. And at the turn of the last century, folks who live in the houses around the O'Farrell cabin raised $52,000 to help the architect Charles Hummel repair the logs, doors, windows, and roof.

And so it stands, 150 years old, the same age as the city it helped establish.

As unassuming as Boise itself. Invisible to most of us. The first family home in our city. On a given night John might have lain in here on a home-made cot dreaming of his years at sea, Anatolia, cannon fire, the churning Pacific; four or five or six or seven kids might have been hip-to-hip under quilts, breathing in unison, their exhalations showing in the cold; owls would have been hunting in the gulches and dogs barking in town; Mary might have been sitting up, hands in her lap, drowsing, watching stars rotate past her new windows. Out the door was Boise: place of salmon, place of gold, place to buy supper and a saddle and have the doctor stitch you up before heading back out to try to wrench another quarter ounce of metal from the hills.

Fifteen decades have passed. It's late September now, and smoke from a dozen fires still hangs in the valley, hazing everything, as I drive to a windowless gray warehouse not too far from the O'Farrell cabin. Inside, stored in an amber-colored gloom, are rows of fifteen-foot-high shelves loaded with artifacts. There's Native American basketry in here and antique typewriters and a covered wagon, and Nazi daggers, and scary-looking foot-powered dental equipment probably eighty years old. There are prisoners' manacles and nineteenth-century wedding gowns and optometry kits and opium scrapers brought to Idaho by Chinese miners who have been dead for more than a century.

From the arcane depths of these shelves a curatorial registrar for the Idaho State Historical Museum named Sarah retrieves four items and lays them out on white Ethafoam.

A miner's pick. A long metal spike called a miner's candlestick. A tin lantern. And an ornate wooden candlestick painted white and gold.

Each is inscribed with a little black number and looped with a paper tag. Each, Sarah tells me, belonged to the O'Farrells.

Did Mary carry this lantern into town on some winter night? Did her adopted sons carry the candlestick during mass, sheltering its flame with one hand, like the altar boys I knew in childhood? How many times did John swing this pick, hoping to feed his family, hoping to strike gold?

All four objects sit mute in front of me—points of light dredged out of the shadows, incapable of testimony.

What lasts? Is there anything you've made in your life that will still be here 150 years from now? Is there anything on your shelves that will be tagged and numbered and kept in a warehouse like this?

What does not last, if they are not retold, are the stories. Stories need to be resurrected, revivified, reimagined; otherwise they get bundled with us into our graves: a hundred thousand of them going into the ground every hour.

Or maybe they float a while, suspended in the places we used to be, waiting, hidden in plain sight, until a day when the sky breaks and the lights come on and the right person is passing by.

Outside the warehouse, the air seems smokier than before. The sky glows an apocalyptic yellow. Beneath a locust tree at the edge of the parking lot, doves hop from foot to foot. My hands tremble on the steering wheel. I start the engine, but for a long minute I cannot drive.

It's not that the stuff is still here. It's not that the house still stands. It's that someone keeps the stuff on shelves. It's that someone keeps the house standing.

MALCOLM GLADWELL

FROM
The New Yorker

I
N
1964
THE
anthropologist Francis Ianni was introduced to a man in a congressional waiting room. His name was Philip Alcamo. People called him Uncle Phil, and he was, in the words of the person who made the introduction, “a business leader from New York City and an outstanding Italian American.” Uncle Phil was in his early sixties, twenty years older than Ianni. He was wealthy and charming and told Runyonesque stories about the many characters he knew from the old neighborhood, in Brooklyn. The two became friends. “He spoke the lobbyist's language, but with a genial disdain for Washington manners and morals,” Ianni later wrote. “He was always very good in those peculiar Washington conversations in which people try to convince each other how much they really know about what is going on in the government, because he generally did know.”

Ianni was by nature an adventurous man. He had two pet wolves, called Remus and Romulus. He once drove his young family from Addis Ababa to Nairobi in a Volkswagen microbus. (“I cannot tell you how many times we broke down,” his son Juan recalls. “I remember my father fixing the generator by moonlight, and the nuts and bolts falling into the sand.”) Uncle Phil fascinated him. At dinners and social functions, Ianni met the other families in the business syndicate whose interests Uncle Phil represented in Washington—the Tuccis, the Salemis, and, at the heart of the organization, the Lupollos. When Ianni moved to New York to take a position at Columbia University, he asked Uncle Phil if he could write about the Lupollo clan. Phil was “neither surprised nor distressed,” Ianni recounted, but advised him that he should “tell each member of the family what I was about
only
when it was necessary to ask questions or seek specific pieces of information.” And for the next three years he watched and learned—all of which he memorably described in his 1972 book,
A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime.

The Lupollos were not really called the Lupollos, of course; nor was Uncle Phil really named Philip Alcamo. Ianni changed names and identifying details in his published work. The patriarch of the Lupollo clan he called Giuseppe. Giuseppe was born in the 1870s in the Corleone district of western Sicily. He came to New York in 1902, with his wife and their two young sons, and settled in Little Italy. He imported olive oil and ran an “Italian bank,” which was used for loan-sharking operations. When a loan could not be repaid, he would take an equity stake in his debtor's business. He started a gambling operation and moved into bootlegging; during Prohibition, the business branched out into trucking, garbage collection, food products, and real estate. He recruited close relatives to help him build his businesses—first his wife's cousin Cosimo Salemi, then his son, Joe, then his daughter-in-law's brother, Phil Alcamo, and then the husband of his granddaughter, Pete Tucci. “From all accounts, he was a patriarch, at once kindly and domineering,” Ianni wrote of Giuseppe. “Within the family, all important decisions were reserved for him . . . Outside of the family, he was feared and respected.” The family moved from Little Italy to a row house in Brooklyn, and from there—one by one—to Queens and Long Island, as its enterprise grew to encompass eleven businesses totaling tens of millions of dollars in assets.

A Family Business
was the real-life version of
The Godfather
, the movie adaptation of which was released the same year. But Ianni's portrait was markedly different from the romanticized accounts of Mafia life that have subsequently dominated popular culture. There were no blood oaths in Ianni's account, or national commissions or dark conspiracies. There was no splashy gunplay. No one downed sambuca shots at Jilly's, on West Fifty-Second Street, with Frank Sinatra. The Lupollos lived modestly. Ianni gives little evidence, in fact, that the four families had any grand criminal ambitions beyond the illicit operations they ran out of storefronts in Brooklyn. Instead, from Giuseppe's earliest days in Little Italy, the Lupollo clan was engaged in a quiet and determined push toward respectability.

By 1970, Ianni calculated, there were forty-two fourth-generation members of the Lupollo-Salemi-Alcamo-Tucci family—of which only four were involved in the family's crime businesses. The rest were firmly planted in the American upper middle class. A handful of the younger members of that generation were in private schools or in college. One was married to a judge's son, another to a dentist. One was completing a master's degree in psychology; another was a member of the English department at a liberal arts college. There were several lawyers, a physician, and a stockbroker. Uncle Phil's son Basil was an accountant, who lived on an estate in the posh Old Westbury section of Long Island's North Shore. “His daughter rides and shows her own horses,” Ianni wrote, “and his son has some reputation as an up-and-coming young yachtsman.” Uncle Phil, meanwhile, lived in Manhattan, collected art, and frequented the opera. “The Lupollos love to tell of old Giuseppe's wife Annunziata visiting Phil's apartment,” Ianni wrote. “Her comment on the lavish collection of paintings was ‘
manga nu Santa
' (‘not even one saint's picture').”

The moral of the
Godfather
movies was that the Corleone family, conceived in crime, could never escape it. “Just when I thought I was out,” Michael Corleone says, “they pull me back in.” The moral of
A Family Business
was the opposite: that for the Lupollos and the Tuccis and the Salemis and the Alcamos—and, by extension, many other families just like them—crime was the means by which a group of immigrants could transcend their humble origins. It was, as the sociologist James O'Kane put it, the “crooked ladder” of social mobility.

Six decades ago Robert K. Merton argued that there was a series of ways in which Americans responded to the extraordinary cultural emphasis that their society placed on getting ahead. The most common was “conformity”: accept the social goal (the American dream) and also accept the means by which it should be pursued (work hard and obey the law). The second strategy was “ritualism”: accept the means (work hard and obey the law) but reject the goal. That's the approach of the Quakers or the Amish or of any other religious group that substitutes its own moral agenda for that of the broader society. There was also “retreatism” and “rebellion”—rejecting both the goal and the means. It was the fourth adaptation, however, that Merton found most interesting: “innovation.” Many Americans—particularly those at the bottom of the heap—believed passionately in the promise of the American dream. They didn't want to bury themselves in ritualism or retreatism. But they couldn't conform: the kinds of institutions that would reward hard work and promote advancement were closed to them. So what did they do? They innovated: they found alternative ways of pursuing the American dream. They climbed the crooked ladder.

All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated. Irish gangsters dominated organized crime in the urban Northeast in the mid- to late nineteenth century, followed by the Jewish gangsters—Meyer Lansky, Arnold Rothstein, and Dutch Schultz, among others. Then it was the Italians' turn. They were among the poorest and the least skilled of the immigrants of that era. Crime was one of the few options available for advancement. The point of the crooked-ladder argument and
A Family Business
was that criminal activity, under those circumstances, was not rebellion; it wasn't a rejection of legitimate society. It was an attempt to join in.

When Ianni's book came out, there was widespread speculation among Mafia experts about who the Lupollos really were. One guess was that they were descendants of the crime family originally founded by Giuseppe Morello and Ignazio (Lupo) Saietta in the early 1900s. (Lupo plus Morello equals Lupollo.) If that is the case, then the origins of the Lupollos were distinctly unsavory. Morello and Saietta were members of the Black Hand, the name given to bands of southern Italian immigrants who engaged in crude acts of extortion—threatening merchants with bodily injury if protection money wasn't paid. Saietta was thought to be responsible for ordering as many as sixty murders; people in Little Italy, it was said, would cross themselves at the mention of his name.