motorfab wrote: ↑Sat Feb 01, 2025 1:17 pm
Now that it's mentioned I don't recall a non-Sicilian in the Detroit Family.
Thanks for the share Joe (you should be in the blue users man !)
The only one that I'm aware of was Joe Massei. And not only was his father Tuscan, I'm pretty sure, but his mother was Irish. He was an anomaly though for sure. B has discussed before a Detroit CI who noted the unique case of Massei and said that in the past, the Detroit outfit was less selective about ancestry (he also noted at that time, in the 1960s, Detroit guys refrained from discussing Massei's ancestry and that of his non-italian wife, as the topic was uncomfortable). I suspect that after the whole dust-up with Chester LaMare, Detroit was extremely wary about making any more non-Sicilians. The only other notable non-Sicilians that I am aware of with any status were the Di Iorio brothers, who had ancestry from Acerra, Napoli (incidentally a major Chicago hometown and historic hub of provincial Camorra activity in the old Caserta province; this put them in the same ancestry network as men like Diamond Joe Esposito, Vito Genovese, Paul Ricca, and the Ebolis, among others, which is worth noting). I have never seen them identified as LCN members by a member source, however, and don't know that either of them was ever made. It could also be important here that they were affiliated with the Priziola-Quasarano faction, rather than the dominant Tocco-Zerilli Favarottese group.
By all accounts, Detroit was one of the most conservative and traditional Families in the US. Not only did they seem to have excluded non-Sicilians from membership, I am not aware of any Eastern Sicilians in their ranks either, despite there having been some Messinesi etc in Detroit. Sicilian compaesano factions also mattered *a lot* in Detroit, with men from the Favarotta frazione of Terrasini forming a sort of elite group as compared to those from Partinico, Alcamo, Cinisi. A 1960s-era St Louis informant also claimed that the STL outfit restricted membership to men of Sicilian ancestry and we know that STL and Detroit had very close ties both in terms of the formal organization and associated compaesano networks from Terrasini and CInisi.
Now, I would also stress that even if they wanted to, there were also structural factors related to Italian settlement in Detroit that would have limited the recruitment of non-Sicilians. The Detroit Italian community was historically composed, in the main part, of Sicilians and Northern Italians. The same dynamic pertained to cities like STL, KC, Milwaukee, Madison, Rockford. In all of these, there were comparatively far fewer mainland Meridionali, so the dynamics of Italian communities in these places were markedly different than what occurred in cities like NYC, Chicago, Boston, or Philly. I tend to view this (the interplay of structural factors and the local sub-culture of a given Family) as a reinforcing cycle -- there were few Napolitani, Calabresi, Baresi, etc. around, leading to few recruits even early on from these backgrounds in a Family like Detroit and thus a further entrenching of a very traditional and Sicilian-centered culture. When you look at Detroit and STL, they had some powerful Jewish, Syrian, etc associates with them. But it wasn't like they had a bunch of Napolitani running around as associates but not getting made, as there were just few Napolitani found there.
