The Sixth Family Read Free Page A

that the other would remain among family despite their separation. Maria Renda and baby Nicolò would live on the same short street, perhaps even in the same house, as the Rizzutos. For her part, Maria knew that her husband was leaving Sicily accompanied by her brother, Calogero Renda. Calogero was two inches shorter and a year younger than Rizzuto. With a darker complexion and a mole on his left cheek, Calogero appeared to be a man of some means—he owned fashionable clothes and had the ability to travel internationally. (On February 1, 1923, police in Agrigento issued him a passport, #126/241107, allowing him to travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina.) Calogero also lived on Via Ospedale in Cattolica Eraclea, with his mother, Grazia Spinella. By 1924, his father, Paolo Renda, was already dead.

    Vito Rizzuto and Calogero Renda planned their departure during extraordinary times in Italy. Benito Mussolini, the Fascist leader, was turning the crisis over the murder of socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, his most potent political rival, into an opportunity. Matteotti disappeared in June 1924 as he was delivering withering denunciations of Mussolini. A month later, Matteotti’s decomposing body was found in a shallow grave outside Rome. The political storm that followed this obvious assassination at the hands of the Fascists weakened Mussolini and for months there was doubt about his ability to retain power. In December, he promised to reconvene parliament after Christmas to discuss electoral reform. In the New Year, instead of concessions, however, Mussolini seized full dictatorial powers.

    It was at that very time of political uncertainty that Rizzuto, Renda and four close friends planned their departure, heading north past Rome. By December 1924, they had crossed the border into France. A few days after arriving in Boulogne-sur-Mer, a northern port city near Calais on the English Channel, the six friends bought third-class tickets for passage to America. It was a meandering trip, more a tourist cruise than an immigrant steamer. The S.S. Edam left Rotterdam, its home port with the Holland-America Line, and stopped in Boulogne-sur-Mer on December 14, 1924, to collect Rizzuto and his pals before crossing the Atlantic over Christmas and New Year’s. The ship arrived in Havana, Cuba, on January 5, 1925, and then left for Tampico, Mexico, arriving there on January 16, before finally heading to America.

    It was a suspiciously unusual and expensive route for supposedly simple laborers from rural Sicily immigrating to America. Rizzuto and Renda, however, seemed to have unusual reasons.

NEW ORLEANS, JANUARY 19, 1925

    When the S.S. Edam drew into port at New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. immigration officials were far more concerned with two Cuban stowaways who had crept aboard the ship in Havana than with Vito Rizzuto and his entourage, all of whom presented American officials with the required paperwork and visas. The rules for immigrants from Italy had recently changed as the United States grew increasingly concerned about the continuing waves of new arrivals. As of July 1, 1924, a quota system was imposed on Italian immigrants, sharply limiting the number that could legally enter America. Every Italian émigré needed an immigrant quota visa issued prior to their departure by the U.S. State Department.

    As Vito Rizzuto led his small group off the S.S. Edam , Immigration Inspector J.W. McVey examined the quota visas and identity papers for each of them.

    Giving his occupation as “laborer” and falsely declaring himself to be single, Rizzuto listed his next-of-kin as his father, Nicolò, in Cattolica Eraclea. He said he was able to read and write in Italian and was arriving in America for the first time with the intention of becoming a citizen. As required, he declared he was not a polygamist, an anarchist or an advocate of overthrowing the U.S. government; he had not been in prison or an insane asylum and was not “deformed or