In Our Blood by Justin Cascio has been sitting on my shelf for about a year before I finally managed to get through it. I actually got halfway through it last January, intending to write a review, only for my free time to get derailed by work and life in general which made me put a pause on this “hobby”. My activity level dropped to zero and that is the reason why I haven’t published all year until very recently. Hot after finishing Mike Campi’s book, I was in the mood for more reading and having stared at it for so long (and to satisfy my completionist urge), I picked up Justin’s book again, this time in Kindle form (more on that later). In most ways, this book was almost the complete opposite of Campi’s. Whereas Mafia Takedown focused on recent Mafia history, In Our Blood took us to the beginning. The former was written informally, while the latter was an academically styled study. In all, this was a very thought-provoking book that challenged a lot of commonly-held beliefs about what the Mafia really is. The focus on genealogy, and not criminality, was a unique and fresh angle not commonly discussed in most mainstream publications, and together with Critchley’s book and some of the Informer journals continued to stress the importance of families, kinship, and heritage as foundations for the flavour of organized crime founded in Sicily. I did have my issues with it, but we can talk about it later.

The effort Justin put into the book was evident from the get-go. Having to sift through thousands of birth certificates, marriage licenses, baptismal records, and ship charters, an untold number of hours had to be put into piecing together a cohesive data set to detect the patterns that form the bedrock of this book. The reward of all that hard work was the dozens of detailed family trees of the most important Corleone-rooted mafiosi that stretch back centuries, revealing the familial and ritual kinship that underpinned the Mafia and which allowed it to endure, expand, and ultimately thrive on two continents. Compiling such a detailed ancestry base helped further narrow down the timeline and origin point of the Mafia, its interaction/role in revolutionary Italy, and why the leaders of Corleone’s Fratuzzi were who they were. Turned out it’s not randomness, and there was a method to the madness. I think people interested in the origins of the Mafia, both in Sicily and the U.S., will find this very interesting, especially as Justin dedicates chapters to explore elements of the early Mafia in cities other than just New York, such as New Orleans, Byron (and Texas as a whole), Los Angeles, and Chicago. Given the establishment of a distinct set of prominent Mafia families (as in personal families/clans), the author also put the Navarra-Leggio war (precursor to the establishment of the Corleonesi as the leaders of the Sicilian Mafia) in a new light of inter-dynastic struggles between different lineages vying for dominance.

This is not an easy book to read. Given its academic nature, it was dense with facts, scholarly literature summaries, and analysis. Given its genealogical angle, the book was also essentially a list of names with small biography blurbs for minor characters, and longer sections for more important characters. Speaking of all the names, it was hard (at least for me) to keep track of everyone, and how they related to each other, especially when a name popped up of a person from previous chapters in a different city. Justin did his best by including genealogical trees, providing short reminders of recurring characters, and referencing the chapters where you could read about them again to refresh your recollection, but still, it was a struggle at times. I originally got this book in hardcover, and I found myself having to flip pages back and forth to keep track of the narrative. I usually don’t recommend or talk about the exact platform I read the book on, but given my initial difficulties, my second go at the book came in the form of a Kindle version on my computer. I found this suited me much better, as I could quickly hit the search button whenever I encountered a name I knew I was supposed to know, but couldn’t remember why. If you want to get this book, at least get a copy of it in a Kindle version due to the search function and because the book has working hyperlinks that can take you straight to WikiTree.

Given the book’s reliance on certain foundational theories about the nature of the Mafia, I think readers would benefit from some background reading to get more out of this book, especially Herner Hess’s work. I’m saying this without actually having read Hess’s book, but without that, I felt like I came away with some confusion and in some ways understood less of what makes someone a Mafioso. One of the big driving points of the book was that instead of being intrinsically a hierarchy, the Mafia is a flat (or flat-ish) network of men connected through blood, marriages, or ritual kinship and that these men also happen to have large personal networks which they can leverage to become brokers and middlemen. On top of trying to grasp the foundational material, Italian words were used such as “cosca” and “cosche”, interpreted through an academic lens, and it all became a bit messy for me. Is “cosca” equivalent to a “capital F crime family”? Sometimes they were used interchangeably, but at times the Frattuzi which I understand to be essentially the “Corleone Crime Family” was not really described as a cosca. If a Mafioso is essentially a padrone that comes from a family with Mafia heritage, would Guisseppe Morello be considered a Mafioso even if he wasn’t formally inducted in the Frattuzi? He would still have the same birthright and network (at least initially).

It is a minor gripe, but I also took a bit of an issue with the constant use of rankings. If the Mafia is not inherently a hierarchical organization, why were so many people described as having positions in a hierarchy that shouldn’t be there? Paolino Streva was described multiple times as a lieutenant or capo, all the way back in the 1880s, which shouldn’t have been the case since I came away with the assumptions that those terms were imposed on the organization by the McClellan Committee/law enforcement. I thought the author’s constant use of these titles somewhat undermined a key point of their conclusion. Finally, while the genealogical research is awesome, I did groan at obvious errors such as a reference to the formation of a “National Crime Syndicate”. Given the meticulousness and rigour of the primary research, it is a disservice to the book and the author’s effort to include errors and dubious myths such as these.

Critchely’s book paved the way for Informer Magazine’s 2014 edition, which really put on the map this idea that the small “f” family mattered in the Mafia and one’s heritage was instrumental. Justin’s efforts with In Our Blood continued to reinforce that message and he has done us all a great favour by undertaking the Herculean effort of putting so many important members of the early Mafia and their families on ancestral trees to help us understand how it is all connected. This book makes you wish someone would undertake a similar project with Palermo and Castellammare del Golfo.