I read Newsday every day.  It’s Long Island’s only regional newspaper, the 8th largest newspaper in the nation and the highest in suburban readership.

It is an ultra-liberal newspaper with a keen eye for “mafia” news.  When John Gotti died in 2002 the paper published a 9-page obituary on the mobster’s life and times.  Just last week the paper had a half-page story on a 77-year-old “captain” in the “Colombo crime family” who attempted to extort funds from a local union.  The old crook was aptly nicknamed “Vinny Unions.” 

One bit of news that escaped Newsday’s mafia sleuths was the death of Richard Gambino, surely the surname alone should have sounded alarm bells – one of the “Five Families.”  Actually, Richard was an intellectual and life-long critic of the media (including Newsday) hyping Italian American criminals.  And Richard lived on Long Island.  He died in January at age 84.

There are many Italian American giants that are little known by the community at-large.  Richard Gambino should not be one of them.   He ranks with Giovanni Schiavo, John La Corte and a handful of individuals who spent their lives preserving our heritage here in America, often at their own expense.  Richard Gambino, like Schiavo and LaCorte, traced his roots to Sicily; yet each of them saw only one people – Italian Americans.  Each was inspired by the greatness of our people but tormented by the apathy and ignorance of their brethren in America.  Schiavo’s great deed was his Four Centuries of Italian American History (1952).  La Corte restored the names Verrazzano (explorer), Meucci (a pre-Bell telephone) and Charles Bonaparte (founder of the FBI) to American history, no small feat.  For Richard Gambino the quest was to understand the psyche of being Italic in America and to document the ultimate clash of cultures.  His books, Blood of My Blood (1974) and Vendetta (1977), are must-reads for anyone who wants a truer understanding of our undervalued people. 

I call him Richard because I considered him and friend and comrade-in-arms.  We came from the same neighborhood in Brooklyn, although different decades, both lived on Long Island, both fair skinned with blue/grey eyes (he beat melanoma at an early age).  He taught at Queens College, part of the City university system, and earned a Ph.D.  He founded the first college-level program in Italian American studies, now called the Calandra Institute.  Over the years he was recognized in academia and New York politics as the intellectual face of our community.  His greatest feat was in publicly explaining our “dilemma” as a classical people who found themselves awash in stereotypes and “the old ways.”  It was in Blood of My Blood that Richard laid it all out.  The most disturbing quote from that book was reportedly uttered by a Yale professor in 1969, “If Italians aren’t actually an inferior race, they do the best imitation of one I’ve seen.” It was disturbing because I believe it’s still true.

I linked up with Richard a number of times on the eastern end of Long Island where he lived and I have a second home.  In 2012, when our Institute was suing Columbia University for hijacking the mission of La Casa Italiana, conceived, built, and utilized daily by the Italian American community before it was purchased by the Italian government, I asked Richard’s help in the fight.  Columbia was refusing to seat an Italian American on La Casa’s Board or allowing Italian American students daily access to the 32,000 s.f. building.  We planned to bypass Columbia and appeal to the Italian Consul General who appointed half the Board members.  Richard agreed to us submitting his name.

We thought it would be a slam dunk—Richard, a Ph.d and author of books on Italian history and culture; plus the government of Italy which we supported in Congress and through massive imports—what could go wrong?  We didn’t count on Italian disdain—the Consul General didn’t have the courtesy to respond.  So much for ‘blood of my blood.’ Even Richard learned something new.

Lately, there are efforts by other groups to raise a host of young Italian American leaders who will hopefully continue the work of our generation.  Before they do, the books of Richard Gambino must be required reading. -JLM