New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is reportedly seeking solace from his political agony with the Black community, rather than the Italian American community – so reports the NYTimes.

The irony is that Letitia James, his own Attorney General – a Black woman – initiated the investigation into Cuomo’s nursing home scandal.  And it has been the Black leaders in the state Senate and Assembly, all Democrats, who have called for his resignation.  Still, he has a few defenders in the Black community who identify with his pain in facing a ‘lynch mob’ even before investigations are done.

So, where are Cuomo’s paesani?  It’s not just that there are many Italian American Republicans who relish his demise.  Even many Democrats have little sympathy for him, due to Cuomo’s abrasive personality or policies that veered from conservative Italian values.  Cuomo signed bills that allow illegal aliens to obtain drivers licenses, that charge penalties for mentioning the race of a perpetrator when reporting a “false” crime, that eliminates bail, and pronounces the state a sanctuary for illegal aliens.  These are minority benefits, which would explain Cuomo’s faith in Black redemption rather than Italic.

However, Andrew Cuomo doesn’t deserve to be bashed as an Italian American.  Some pundits on FOX News have called him Andrew “Corleone,” and compared his looks to characters in GoodFellas.  Today’s [Sunday] Newsday, the ultra-liberal regional newspaper of Long Island, has published a letter comparing Cuomo to crime boss Vincent Gigante, referring to the now viral photo of Cuomo wearing a shawl while outside the Governor’s Mansion.  Gigante was infamous for parading on New York City streets in his bathrobe to feign dementia.  Newsday not only published this pointless letter but made it prominent with two large photos of both men.  Is this journalism?

I have enough grievances against Newsday in its treatment of Italian American issues to label it systemically anti-Italian: the 9-page obituary for John Gotti, the 15-page obituary for second string mobster Sonny Franzese, to name two examples.  It never reported the double murder of Paul and Lidia Marino by a Black shooter in a Delaware cemetery last May – such stories are available to local papers from the Associated Press news service.  Black-on-White crimes are rarely identified as such, for fear of racial backlash.  But White-on-minority crimes are easily labelled as such, in the name of social justice.  The recent bloodbath at an Atlanta massage parlor is a case in point.

The media has already framed it as a White-on-Asian hate crime.  In fact, the crime could be framed in any number of ways.  The shooter, himself, told the police that he was a sex addict who wanted to destroy the evil that daily tempted him.  He denied it was anti-Asian.  Why lie at this point?  With six of the victims Asian women, a case could be made for either a racial crime or a gender crime.  But, two of the dead were Whites – one a male.  Another victim that was wounded is a Hispanic woman.  We also know that the killer is a religious fanatic whose church vilified non-marital sex, and had previously enrolled the troubled man in a sex-addiction program.  What would you believe?

When I first wrote of the execution-style murders of elderly Paul (86) and Lidia Marino (85) in a Delaware cemetery, while visiting their deceased son in May, 2020, no motive was known because the Black shooter was killed by Delaware state troopers.  There was no robbery and no connection between the victims and the shooter.  At the time, it was suggested that the shooter may have wanted to avenge the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, the Black jogger who was killed by Whites in Georgia two months earlier. That case made bigtime media, with Oprah and Al Sharpton inciting nationwide outrage. 

Now however, almost a year later, Delaware still has not labeled the Marino murders a hate crime.  The shooter’s relatives now say that he had become “extremely paranoid” about contracting Covid-19 and had developed a “doomsday-like” attitude.  (I found this information in the Washington Post…in the Health Section!) Which motive would you believe:  to avenge the racist Arbery murder or to spare the Marinos death from Covid?  Mind you, the shooter did not kill himself on “doomsday.”

Will we ever know what’s really going on in this country? -JLM