Back in January, I wrote a blog called “Here’s to the Ladies!” It was a reference to Tony Bennett’s famous 1995 CD—a series of songs by famous American female singers—and also a tribute to talented Chicago women who have been overlooked by history. The Chicago angle was a shout-out to my Chicago roots; specifically, I have worked on two major media projects about the Windy City—a 2007 PBS film (And They Came to Chicago) and a 2025 book (Italian Women in Chicago, Part II: Siamo arrivate!). 

Yet the title of this blog is “Let’s Hear it from the Ladies!” And what, pray tell, are we hearing? In a word, the same old “mafia” bullshit. And who are we hearing it from? Proudly, not from women in Chicago. Alas, more hurtfully, we’re hearing it from two highly gifted and respected female writers with a national reputation, both based in New York: best-selling author Adriana Trigiani and reporter Linda Stasi. 

To use the current lingo: they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.

I used to joke that Hollywood would run out of movie ideas and produce something absurd like “Mobsters on Mars.” I wasn’t far off: We got a 1992 movie featuring gangster vampires (!) called Innocent Blood.  It didn’t start a trend but it didn’t kill off mob movies, either. Seven years later we got The Sopranos. 

Both Innocent Blood and The Sopranos could claim “satire” but that didn’t take the sting out of them. They were yet one more nail-in-our-coffin (no pun intended). Perpetual defamation shouldn’t be a joke.   I then comforted myself with the idea that, “Well, at least Hollywood can’t mob up our women.”   Wrong again. 

What’s stunning is that—once again—the defamation is being perpetuated by our own people; in short, by two strong women in our community, both of whom should know better. (And indeed they do: In the past, Trigiani and Stasi have called out crude Italian stereotypes).

In Trigiani’s case, announced in PEOPLE Magazine as well as in sober TV newscasts across the country, the estate of Mario Puzo (yes, I’ll say it) made her an offer she couldn’t refuse: She agreed to write Connie, a book due out in 2027 seen from the point-of-view of (fictional) Don Vito Corleone’s (fictional) daughter. 

As I go to press, I’ve yet to hear why Trigiani—a loud and proud Italian American; author of positive books about the Italian American experience—chose to degrade her talent by catering to public prejudice.  Money? More access to a mob-loving media? An artistic challenge to “re-imagine” the mob mythos?  With apologies to Desi Arnaz, she’s “got some ‘splainin’ to do.”  (Note: The same media embracing Trigiani’s ode to mob lore would rake me over the coals for allegedly mocking someone’s Hispanic accent. It’s called hypocrisy.)

Stasi’s situation is even worse. She beat Trigiani to the punch last year with her 2025 book, The Descendant, a semi-fictionalized account of Stasi’s family history in Colorado. The book features a very real piece of US history: the 1914 massacre of mine workers in Ludlow, many of them Italian American.  Gallingly, Stasi is trying to push a new phrase into the English language: the “Mountain Mafia.” She uses the term to refer to her Westernized, cattle-raising relatives, who, after Prohibition hit, decided they could make more money by distilling and selling liquor (as, of course, millions of other NON-Italians also did).

If you want to see pure, unadulterated hypocrisy from our literati class, click on the link below. It is a recent interview with Stasi about her book. Please note her utter intellectual schizophrenia. Out of one side of her mouth, she castigates media stereotypes; yet out of the other side, she practically cackles with glee that her own “family structure” (three sons and one daughter) mirrors that of the fictional Corleone family. What neither women seem to realize is that their choice to further deepen mob stereotypes means that, like our “mobstar” actors, they are now part of the problem rather than the solution. 

And this is a problem. How so? A deepening of the prejudice means an ever-deepening hole when it comes to media image. By giving in to the Godfather mythos, Trigiani and Stasi are helping to bury our history.  Readers will read Connie, but will know nothing of Ella Grasso, the first American woman elected governor in her own right (Connecticut, 1974). Or 1950s labor and civil rights leader Emma Bambace.  Or Adriana Caselloti, the voice of Snow White in Disney’s classic 1937 movie. Or the great opera diva Adelina Patti, who sang for President Lincoln in the White House (1860s). Real women. No mob ties. 

Readers will absorb the ridiculous term “Mountain Mafia” but will not know that the lynching of Italian Americans in Colorado is what pushed that state to become the first to establish Columbus Day in 1907. They also will not know the name Sister Blandina (born Rosa Maria Segale). Currently up for sainthood, Sister Blandina ministered to Native Americans in Trinidad, CO in 1872. And readers weaned on Stasi’s blurred, unholy mix of fact and fiction may not know that author John Fante, perhaps one of the finest Italian American writers ever produced in this country, was born and raised in Denver. Fante sought to dignify the Italian American experience—something Ms. Trigiani, to her credit, has also fought to do. 

So why are these intelligent, empathetic women suddenly embracing stereotypes they once deplored? The French writer and philosopher Blaise Pascal gave a reason, to wit: “The heart has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of.” I can’t speak to what’s in their hearts. Only they can do so.  Or, more cynically, perhaps a classic Latin phrase attributed to the Emperor Vespasian might be applicable? He is alleged to have said, after his infamous urine tax: “Pecunia non olet” (Money doesn’t smell). 

To finish, let me be clear: Trigiani and Stasi have a right to write what they want–just as I, as a reader, have a right not to read what they write. And the term “sell-out” is a bit too easy. So many of our organizational and artistic leaders have made so much money either capitalizing on, or flat-out ignoring, anti-Italian media defamation that any sense of shame or disgust has been muted. Pennies before pride!

Yet please note that there were two (count ’em: two) classic Hollywood films about Italian Americans in which the female characters denounced the mafia: The Black Hand (1950) and Pay or Die (1960). 

Modern feminists who embrace patriarchal criminal stereotypes, either for fun or profit, have clearly sacrificed the bracing moral clarity of their hard-working ancestors. Mamma mia, indeed! –BDC

The Descendant: Linda Stasi Reveals a Hidden Italian American Saga