"The Goodfather: The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio by Stephen Siciliano

 

Stephen Siciliano's novel, The Goodfather: The Rising Fall of the Marvelous Marcantonio (published March 2023), is a historical reimagining of the life and political career of Vito Marcantonio. Marcantonio was a prominent radical leftist congressman from East Harlem and a key figure in the American Labor Party.

Plot & Narrative Style

The novel blends historical events with fictional elements to explore Marcantonio's complex legacy:

• The Catalyst: The story begins on Election Day 1948 with the murder of a Republican ward-heeler by Mafia thugs in East Harlem. This event triggers the "Scottoriggio" investigation, which ultimately leads to Marcantonio's political downfall.
• Perspective: Rather than a standard biography, the narrative is "refracted" through the eyes of the fictional famiglia Fortunato, who are Marcantonio's lifelong neighbors on 112th Street.
• Themes: The book examines Marcantonio's rise as a "working-class hero" and civil rights pioneer. One reviewer described the character as the "good Godfather"—the antithesis of Mario Puzo's Vito Corleone. Author Background & Philanthropy

Author Background & Philanthropy

• Stephen Siciliano is a veteran reporter with over 35 years of experience. [1]
• Charitable Contribution: Upon the novel's release, Siciliano pledged half of the first two months' royalties to the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, supporting a monument for the victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
• Companion Work: Siciliano also published a companion volume titled Marcantoniana: Items from the Life and Times of the Marvelous Vito Marcantonio, which provides additional scholarly context and research gathered during his four-year writing process.
• Service & Strategy
  
  Marcantonio's primary differentiator was his grassroots machine. He operated a "one-man political machine" based on direct constituent service rather than patronage. 
  • Linguistic Connection: In an era of "Americanization," Marcantonio spoke English, Italian, Spanish, and Yiddish to communicate directly with his diverse East Harlem district.
  • The "Lucky Corner": He famously held final campaign rallies at the corner of 116th Street and Lexington Avenue, a hub for Italian and Puerto Rican immigrants. 
  Get it here: https://a.co/d/01TITlfU

Architectural Stories

ARCHITECTURAL TALES

An architect can “read” a city and tell you a story drawn from the assemblage of buildings and streets.

Walking through an urban setting with my late friend Jose Perez de Lama, he would tease out class conflict, cultural conclusions, folkloric formulations, and lifestyles through an assessment of the ways in which the man-made landscape was laid out.

“The city tells its own story,” José would say.

In 1995, we went on an adventure to a mountain range south of Seville, the Sierra de Aracena, which rises from the mantle of provincial Huelva, near the border with Portugal, and slopes down to the Atlantic Ocean.

A professor at the University of Seville, José was adept at securing academic stipends, scholarships, and grants. The assignment was an architectural survey of regional plazas de toros - bullrings - for the academic review of Andalusian culture, “Demófilo,” which was putting out an edition on bullfighting.

Now, beyond the borders of Andalusia, the “barbarism and cruelty” of this ancient rite are what generate the most commentary. Suffice it to say, in a region where “Los Toros” are woven into the culture, such talk is rarely countenanced.

From "Vedette"

In the Seville of Bizet's "Carmen," Los Toros are an inextricable element to life; an industry that employs agronomists who monitor the soil in which bulls feed, veterinarians and specialists in animal husbandry, ateliers that craft the costumes for the spectacle, musicians, cape makers, butchers, cowboys, concessionaires, those who work in the bullrings, the army of scribes who rhapsodize...

I could only be amused at where life had taken me when my lover in Seville, Margarita, upbraided her friend for dating a “banderillero” - one of those guys who do a balletic placing of long darts into the bull’s neck. “Un torerito!” Marga mocked her with the diminutive. “A little bullfighter!”

It’s just a part of things and I learned to keep my mouth shut.

I was there writing “Vedette,” about a flamenco singer who falls in with anarchists as the Civil War breaks out. Spain is that rare place anarchist revolution acquired deep penetration, occupied villages where free love was decreed and the bullfights were banned.

To be “anti-taurino” is an article of faith for Spanish anarchists. But flamenco singers must necessarily have matador lovers and so did Vedette, which provided a device for drafting an anti-bullfight text while still imbuing the book with colorful features of the “fiesta.”

So, I was down for literary reasons and because Huelva is known for the best ham in Spain - Jabugo - taken from the Iberian pig that roams free and feasts on acorns, bits of which you can see in the marbled, burgundy slices it yields.

Most of the 26 structures surveyed were in tiny, white-washed towns consisting of what Vedette called “sugar-cube houses” sprinkled over the sierra's rises and valleys. José would note where a bullring was connected directly to the church, or where its “Puerta Grande” opened onto the main thoroughfare, whether it was placed in the center of town or on the outskirts …and tell stories.

One plaza was from the 1600s.

In “Castillo de Las Guardas,” the “burladeros” which the bullfighters hide behind were emblazoned with large white circles (see image). I observed that these were lunar in aspect. When the article came out, it pleased me that Jose had not only appropriated the characterization (“burladero de luna”), but also credited “el poeta Esteban Siciliano” (see text image).

Page One of the Article.

It’s why he brought me along on such sojourns, despite the fact I never had any money. To his technical assessments I added the metaphors and allegories. He was Narcissus and I was Goldmund, although in Herman Hesse’s book, the latter dies first.

I sketched at a cafe where we enjoyed ham and sherry. Typical of Andalusian villages are street lamps in black or green wrought-iron; the design of each distinct to the locale. During four years of crisscrossing the region, I drafted dozens of these lanterns and applied them as chapter breaks in the novel.

I’ve posted the one I did for Castillo de Las Guardas.

I miss my unique friend, who passed less than a year ago. I think about how much of what we did together was directed toward self-improvement for a future that came, and for him, went too quickly. And what’s it all about anyway? The striving, the achievements...the failings?

These days, when reading “Vedette,” there is a temptation to change things. I write more precisely now, with less sensuality, but too much admire that young man who lived for literature to disturb his vision; and it is only a wisdom gained on the path leading away from him that keeps me from attempting some futile return.

Margarita!

"Run, Jesse, Run!"

No one was saying what Jesse was saying that Democratic primary season.

So, when it was announced he’d be speaking at the Shrine Auditorium, myself, Gilbert D'ambrosio, and John Kiwan marked our calendars.

The Shrine sits at the northern edge of the African American community of Watts, where it overlaps with the University of Southern California. We had places on Estrella Ave. and Elendale Place, were frequenting Raider games at the Coliseum where Marcus Allen was romping, and had been to the venue for a Rick James concert.

Hipsters-about-town.

Thanks to the music of a politically saturated punk band called The Clash, we were hip to the rainforest revolutions in Central America. Jackson was the only Democrat calling for the United States to stay out of the region and we loved him for it.

Although the announcement for the event made it quite clear that it was a "Mother’s Day Church and Community Rally," it didn’t quite register because for us Jackson was a "radical" and we showed up in torn Sandinista shirts, black pants with lots of zippers, and a good buzz on. The crowd, to our surprise, was mostly black ladies - matriarchs - in Easter egg-colored dresses and big floppy hats.

Though not unwelcome, our presence raised a few eyebrows.

Seated down front, we were thrown off by the Baptist-styled mass unfolding around us. They were singing Gospel hymns that had nothing to do with The Clash and we didn't know what all was going on, just standing and sitting with everyone else on cue.

At one point, the preacher said, “please rise” and we three stood up, but only a handful of others followed suit. He looked down at us over his spectacles and said, “So, you boys are pastors at local churches?” And we, you know, weren't and sank back down into our seats. The Shrine is a cavernous affair; it has hosted the Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, Soul Train awards, you name it, and seats 6,400 people. The ensuing eruption of laughter was…never mind.

Jackson was fire that day. He DID condemn U.S. intervention in Central America. "We're wrong!" he declaimed. It was not something you were hearing at the height of the Reagan era and we shook our fists. He brought the crowd to its feet again and again, until they became delirious and started chanting “Run, Jesse, Run!” as he shuffled along the stage in a simulated trot to the delight of all.

You could see something happening in the black community. People went up on stage to shake his hand and make a donation, and they looked good and dropped a LOT of coin into the collection basket. They were ebullient, taking things into their own hands, and Jesse was the catalyst.

"Poor people work. They take the early bus," he told the 1988 Democratic Convention. Not a pure "politician," Jesse Jackson was a storyteller and the story he told was a counternarrative to the pap we’re fed about what goes on in this country, the teller of a different truth, and we will not see the likes of him again.

Happy Valentines Day. Book Report of "Studies on Love" by Jose Ortega y Gasset.

 

The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) made a name for himself in the 1930s with Revolt of the Masses, a book which lamented the industrial era's effect on Western culture. It created, he said, a need for specialization which led to a stunted humanity characterized by mediocrity and the "median man' of which he observed: "This planet is condemned to the reign of the median man. As such, the important task is to elevate the median as much as possible."

Ortega abhorred the dehumanizing effects of science and its handmaiden, reason, upon the life of this world. Nonetheless, as editor and publisher of the El Sol newspaper, and as the leader of his own political party in the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War, Ortega was a logical voice in an era when violent passions would ultimately prevail. 

While not nearly as seminal a work as Revolt, a collection of Ortega's essays edited from El Sol, and packaged as "Estudios Sobre El Amor" (Studies On Love)(1939), is certainly his most charming. In this collection, Ortega, a professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid, takes reason and trains it upon that greatest of human mysteries: Love.

Here are the results:

Ortega sets out, as a good philosopher, to define his concept and debunks the equating of love with happiness. "Who doubts that the lover can receive joy from the beloved? But is it no less certain that love is at times sad as death, a sovereign and mortal torture?"

He quotes the letters of a Portuguese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, to her untrue seducer: "I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the desperation you have caused me and detest the tranquility in which I lived prior to knowing you."

Love's hypothetical happiness disproved with an example, Ortega bores into his subject. Love, he maintains, is incitement. "Through a pore opened by the arrow launched from an object of affection springs love, actively directing itself toward them...It flows from the lover toward the beloved -- from me to the other, in a centrifugal direction."

As an emanation toward the object, love is not unlike hate, the difference being that love flows toward its target positively, whereas hate proffers negativity. Both, however, generate heat produced in varying degrees. "All love," he notes, "passes through phases of diverse temperature and, subtly, the language of love talks of those relations which 'cool,' and the lover complains of the beloved's tepid responses, of their coldness."

The third aspect to love's definition must naturally, perhaps hopefully, take into account the point at which lover and beloved are united.

Perfect Projection

Ortega insists that love not only errs upon occasion but is essentially an error. "We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies."

The idea, like so many around us, is born with the Greeks: Plato to be specific. Ortega points out that for Plato, all love resides in the desire to unite the person who loves to another being blessed with perfection, in the volition of our soul toward something excellent, better and superior. "Let the reader try generating a state of enchantment -- sexual enchantment -- in an object which provides not a single aspect of excellence, and see how impossible it becomes."

Sexual instinct, he points out, may preserve the species, but does not perfect it. Throw love into the sexual mix, however, and enthusiasm for that other being, for their body and soul in union indissoluble, and what you get is a gargantuan effort to improve the breed.

"With the erotic process barely initiated, the lover experiences a strange sense of urgency to dissolve their individuality into the other, and vice versa, to become absorbed by the beloved...This recalls the doctrine of the Saint Simonians, according to which, the true human individual is the loving couple."

Our world, Ortega says, is cluttered with innumerable objects whilst the field of our conscience is very limited. The details of this world engage in a kind of fight for our attention, which supplants one object with another, according to its importance. "Mania," consequently, is a condition of focus extended beyond the limits of normality. Ortega suggests that all the great thinkers have been maniacs. "When they asked Newton how he was able to discover his mechanical understanding of the universe, he responded, 'By thinking about it day and night.'"

Love, our philosopher says, works the same way, represents an anomalous focusing of attention upon another person. "It does not constitute enrichment of our mental life," he points out, "just the opposite. It grows rigid and fixed, prisoner to a single being. Plato called it Theia mania (divine mania). Nonetheless, the person enamored has the sense of life being much richer. In the reduction of their world, it seemingly grows more concentrated."

For a lover, then, the world ceases too exist, having been supplanted completely by the beloved.

Loves Fatal Machinery

Curiously, the evolution of enchantment lacks spirituality, depending as it does upon the paralyzing of our attention -- that which regulates mental activity -- leaving the lover dependent upon a series of automatic, mechanical processes. Love, Ortega reasons, is an imposition which mocks free will. The great heartbreakers know this, that once they've managed to affix someone's attention to them, total preoccupation is possible with a simple tightening and loosening of the string attached to their romantic prey.

The lover falls under a "spell," an "enchantment." These, he notes, are words which point to love's extraordinary character. We resort to religious terminology when trying to describe it.

"The curious sharing of lexicons between love and mysticism leads one to suspect common roots." For Ortega, mysticism is also a phenomenon of attention. In the mystic, "God permeates the soul to the point of becoming confused with it, or the inverse, with the soul becoming diluted in God. Such is the union the mystic aspires to. The ecstatic perceives said union as something definitive and perennial, just as the lover swears eternal love.

"Once initiated, the process of enchantment develops with an exasperating monotony," Ortega points out. "What I mean to say is that all those who fall in love do it the same way - the smart one and the dope, the younger and the elder, the bourgeois and the artist. This fact confirms love's mechanical character."

The only exception to this mechanistic rule is found in the question of precisely what attracts the attention of one person to another. Ortega does not shrink from the challenge.

Naked in Love

By demonstrating an interest in someone, we expose much of ourselves that is hidden. "In the election of his mate, the male reveals his essence, in the election of her man, a female does the same," notes the philosopher. "The type of humanity we prefer in one another being sketches the profile of our own soul. Love is an impetus that emerges from the subterranean reaches of our person, and in traveling to the surface dredges the algae and shells of our interior with it."

Ortega posits that not unfamiliar situation which pairs a gregarious woman of beauty with a man considered low and vulgar. The judgment is usually an optical illusion because of the distance involved. Love, Ortega asserts, is the business of minute detail and the fact is that, viewed from far away, authentic love and false comport themselves in a similar manner: "But let's say the affection is genuine," he asks. "What are we to think?" One of two things: Either the man is not quite so vulgar as we thought, or the woman not so select."

The great error, vigilant since Descartes and Renaissance, is that which views human being as living by the dictates of conscience, "that small part of ourselves with which we see clearly and which operates according to our will." The greater volume of our being, he asserts, is neither free nor rational. "In vain does the woman who would be viewed as exquisite try to fool us. We have seen she loves Joe, and Joe is clumsy, indelicate; caring only for the perfection of his tie and the shine to his Rolls."

Ortega argues that a man likes most women that pass within his periphery, but this instinct rarely strikes at the depths of his person. When it does, when that aforementioned emanation springs forth and toward the other, that is love. "If it is an idiocy to say that love between man and woman contains no sexual element, it is a bigger stupidity to suggest that love is sexuality. The sexual instinct has an ample sampling of objects to satisfy it, but love is exclusivity, selection."

Beauty

Beauty is that which invites selection and Ortega tackles the concept with particular relish. "More than acts and words, it is best to focus on what appears to be less important: gesture and physiology. Because they are spontaneous, they permit the escape of profound personal secrets and do so with exactitude."

He says that society has its "official beauties," those whom people point to at parties and in the theater, as if public monuments, which in a sense they are. Ortega suggests that such women may pique a man's desire to possess, but rarely gain his love. Their esthetic beauty sets them apart as artistic objects and the distance prevents love.

"The indifferent find beauty in the grand lines of the face and in the figure -- in what we typically call beauty. For the enamored, they do not exist, the grand lines and the architecture of the person which beckon from afar, have been erased. For them, beauty is found in the scattered features, the color of the pupil, the curve at the corner of the beloved's lips, the tone of their voice."

Boys and Girls

Ortega believes that woman is more capable of this all-encompassing, almost mystic state of love. He argues that the feminine psyche is less concentric, more cohesive and more elastic, thus better lending itself to the singular pursuit, or attention, required for love. "The feminine soul tends to live by a single axis of attention and each phase of her life rests upon a single matter.

"The more masculine the spirituality, the more dislocated the soul, as if divided into separate compartments," says Ortega. "Accustomed to living upon a multiple base, and in a series of mental fields with only the most precarious connection, conquering the attention of one achieves nothing since the rest remain free and intact."

Ortega points out how the woman enamored is frequently exasperated by a sense that she never has the entirety of the man she loves before her. "She always finds him a little distracted, as if, in setting out for their rendezvous he has left, dispersed across the world, entire provinces of the soul."

For this reason, even the most sensitive of men is shamed by his inability to attain the perfection a woman is capable of lending to love.

To Be Frank

 

My widower’s walk for the day was a pilgrimage to the former home of writer Bruno Frank at 513 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills.

Homes on the street boast the scale and dimensions of the Italian palazzo. The location is a block away from the city’s commercial center. Sweet.

Frank was born in Stuttgart, Germany and worked as a dramatist-novelist until the Reichstag fire, after which he thought it best to get he and his wife, Liesl, to the far edge of the Western world. As he was Jewish, that turned out to be the right call.

He worked productively in the L.A. film world during its Golden Age, most notably penning the script for RKO Radio Pictures', “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” starring Charles Laughton.

I am reading Frank’s “A Man Named Cervantes” about the writer of “Don Quixote,” Miguel de... My edition is in Spanish as I am prepping for the court interpreter’s oral exam and because Cervantes was, you know, Spanish.

I learned about the book while reading Georg Lukács’ “The Historical Novel,” which has maintained a long ascendance over my writing philosophy. Lukács was a Marxist literary theorist who asserted that, “what matters in the historical novel is not the retelling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events.”

He urged the novelist to engage with “popular life,” with the thoughts and desires and sufferings of those whom the grand historical narrative necessarily overlooks.

In discussing my novel, “Vedette,” the literary review “Margin” observed, “most impressive was the way in which Siciliano drew for his readers the portrait of revolution through the lives and experiences of the villagers. There is something of a grassroots nature to his worldview…”

In “The Goodfather,” the events of Congressman Marcantonio’s career reported by the “New York Times” are refracted through the experiences of his humble neighbors on 112th Street, la famiglia Fortunato.

Lukács singled out Frank’s book as a work that achieves this granular approach to historical science.

Frank knew something about persecution from on-high and, in the book, depicted that of Roman courtesans by Pope Pius V during young Cervantes’ Vatican residency. In 1967, it became a feature film, “Cervantes,” directed by Vincent Sherman.

He was one among other German writers who made the trek to the Left Coast. Here, he joined his friends Heinrich Mann and Thomas Mann. Playwright Bertolt Brecht had a similar set-up in nearby Santa Monica.

In 1989, I attended the Writers Guild awards dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel with actress Monique Salcido. As part of the event, the Guild screened updated credit sequences to films scripted on the sly by blacklisted writers - with their actual names - remedying an injustice of McCarthy-era Hollywood.

Still living and present was Ring Lardner Jr., a member of the Hollywood Ten, who recalled Los Angeles of the ‘30s and ‘40s as a place not yet overrun by cars, where writing work was plentiful and well-remunerated, the air redolent with jasmine during a good portion of the year.

One draws a blank trying to imagine the German literary titans in sunny, palm-leafy surroundings but, however removed from the gritty urban/industrial environments in which they had formed, the Warm Orange must have represented a welcoming safe harbor from Nazi terror.

What would they make of this current Southern California in which masked and armed jackals cruise about in unmarked vans kidnapping people off the street? We can be pretty sure of what they would call them.

Frank died in June 1945, just after the official surrender of the Third Reich to Allied commanders and just before Hollywood scribes would suffer their own witch hunt. We can only speculate on how persecution, forced displacement, and homesickness contributed to his untimely passing at 58.

Bruno Frank is interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, far away from Stuttgart.

https://thegoodfatheranovel.blogspot.com/.../now...

Released

This is my attorney friend John Kiwan's legal assistant who was detained in May by ICE upon returning home from visiting his son, who serves with the U.S. Air Force in Japan.

Victor had all his papers in order and had lived in this country since 1967.

Well, it took this long, but he was freed tonight, nine months later. John wrote me to explain, "Victor was released in Fresno. ICE kept him until the last possible minute and released him 200 miles from the Bakersfield detention center, causing his wife and daughter to drive that additional distance to pick him up."

The point, as we have all learned, is the cruelty. Victor had his hearing a few weeks ago.

The judge determined there was no cause to detain him, but the immigration process does not permit judicial release. Victor had to spend some more time in a place he should have never been, while the prosecutors decided whether to appeal a case that would not hold water. Thankfully they did not.

Victor was well-situated, unlike others. He was the employee of a prominent San Diego attorney who was able to drum up media coverage and amass a decent GoFundMe account for the legal battle. The good attorney, John said, "was crucial."

He told me Victor looked terrible at the hearing, his hair turned gray, his body emaciated, his demeanor downcast. The judge who made the ruling runs the risk of reprisal. So do I, for that matter.

Ours is not a functioning democracy at the moment. The administration has fired hundreds of immigration judges nationwide. In San Francisco, there are four remaining to address a backlog of 120,000 cases.

The woman who wears big cowboy hats in charge of the Department of Homeland Security thinks that "habeas corpus" is the "president's right to detain people," so the antipathy toward judges is understandable.

It is important to remember there is not much repatriation going on. These are indefinite detentions in privately owned jails to which the federal government is shelling out between $300 and $500 per detainee, per night.

Your money.

Anyway, this is a win. There are counterwinds blowing against the authoritarian drive of the government. It's you. Your voice, your contacting of elected representatives, your demonstrations.