We had been married about three years. A man had come into the Cleveland police department and started to clean everything up. There had been too much money sloshing around Cleveland, and Joe said there was a lot of officers and detectives on the take from the Italians. Mike was an Italian, and a Sicilian at that, but from the northeast part of the island. The first night he had supper with us, and I astonished him by serving ‘the best plate of fish’ he ever ate, he showed me a tattered but treasured photograph, not only of his grandmother and grandfather, who he had never really known, but also the old farmhouse where his family had farmed for hundreds of years. ‘I don’t know, Lilly,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s a ruin now. I heard it was all right.’ Mike didn’t like Mussolini much, but otherwise the Italians worshipped him. We could drive through Little Italy and see banners with the great man’s face on them. There was even a hope that Mussolini would come to America.
