June 15–22, 2000
on media
Mob Family Values
Jeanne Bruno’s father, Philadelphia mob boss Angelo Bruno, always told her there was no such thing as the Mafia.
"Out of respect, when I was growing up, I’d say there was no such thing," she recalls. "But the minute somebody agreed with me, that there’s no such thing, that was a tipoff.… I knew they must be connected." By the upside-down logic of La Cosa Nostra, only a true Mafiosi would deny the Mafia’s existence.
It’s been 20 years since Angelo Bruno, the city’s "Docile Don," was assassinated in front of his house at 10th and Snyder. Now his 59-year-old daughter, who lives in that same house, is talking to the public for the first time about being brought up within the Philadelphia mob.
The occasion is the publication of Before Bruno, a scrupulously researched history of the local underworld written by Jeanne Bruno’s close friend, South Philadelphia historian Celeste Morello, herself a descendant of old-time local wiseguys. Today at noon at Brentano’s in Liberty Place, and on Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m. at Tower Books on South Street, Bruno and Morello will regale bookstore audiences with their inside stories of the years before the Philadelphia’s goodfellas became the gang who couldn’t shoot straight.
Bruno remembers the late boss as a loving father who spoke four languages and rose to the top of the local crime family without being a "made" member of the Mafia because he had never killed anyone. "He didn’t extort money from people, he was against prostitution and drugs." He made his money first in bootleg alcohol and then gambling — two businesses the government would later enter on its own. "He was a man ahead of his time," she says.
Still, there was a dark side that she also remembers. "When I was 5 years old, I had no friends to speak of, because who needs kids running around," she says. "There was a nameless fear, you’re wondering, ‘Oh my God, suppose my father gets hurt.’"
Family is what the Sicilian mob is all about, says Morello, who calls her book a "social history of conveyance — of cultural ideals and cultural practices." Her own family legacy includes a great-grandfather who ruled a mob branch in Norristown and died leaving each of his 10 children with his or her own house.
Jeanne Bruno was not so fortunate. "I know where it went, but I didn’t get it," she says of her father’s ill-gotten gains. "It seems the ones who love the most get the least."
