Blue-Eyed Outlaw:

My Search for the Truth in a Tight-Lipped Sicilian Family

I grew up in an intact family and assumed everyone else did, too—until I married Gar.

Five years later, I stumbled on a shocking secret: his great uncle and godfather, the highest honor in Sicilian culture, was Underboss of the Chicago Mob and helped arrange Gar’s hush-hush adoption.

Pass the chianti, please.

What started as a romp through long lost stories of a Mafia hitman became my thirty-year obsession with his mysterious connection to Gar’s birth. BLUE-EYED OUTLAW braids together the profile of this once powerful Mobster and the corrupt city he ruled with my mission to give Gar his birthright: the unvarnished truth of his ancestry. But the misguided loyalty of four gatekeepers—omerta, the ancient Sicilian oath of silence—threatened to take the secret to the grave before I could untangle it.

This coming-of-age memoir-plus examines the search for personal identity, a daughter’s profound grief, the unveiling of a hidden family history, the generational wounds of adoption. And the sometimes comical quirks of Italian American life: basement holidays, sign of the horns, one-cheek kisses, and food as a religion in this man-on -top, woman-in-the-kitchen family with too many Franks and Helens.