May 16, 2024 • 36 mins
DNA results rock Jo’s world as she continues to search through more and more branches of the Piazza family tree.
New revelations lead her to the world’s leading genealogy influencer, The Barefoot Genealogist who has some new plans for how to solve this murder.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
I'm Joe Piazza, and this is the Sicilian Inheritance, Chapter six,
my big fat Sicilian family. Okay, the DNA results are
in this Email's so funny. It says, it's the moment
(00:35):
you've been waiting for. All right, I'm gonna click it.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I'm gonna click it.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
In the middle of investigating my family story, I finally
did it. I took a DNA test.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Fuck.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Of course, I don't remember the password. It was this
ancestry dot com kit. They sent me a little tube.
I spit in the tube. I mailed them my spit.
And then one day, many weeks later, after I had
forgotten that I even took this test, I got an
email back.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
With my results.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Oh no, those are right password?
Speaker 4 (01:10):
All right?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Huh. Ethnicity estimate thirty one percent Ireland, twenty eight percent
Sweden in Denmark. That's my mom's side of the family.
No surprise is there. But my dad's Southern Italy is
only ten percent. To my knowledge, he was half Irish,
half Italian. With how intensely proud he and my family
(01:36):
members are of their Sicilian background, I was definitely expecting
at least a quarter Sicilian, not quite Northern Italy six percent,
and then Cameroon Sardinia two percent and Jewish one percent,
but Southern Italy only ten percent. Your ethnicity estimate is
(01:57):
ten percent, but it can range from zero to twenty
seven percent. That's so interesting. Break my dad's goddamn heart.
All right, So what else does this tell us viewed
DNA matches? Now, besides breaking down your ethnicity from a
few drops of spit, ancestry also gives you a bunch
(02:18):
of other people who spit into a vial, and maybe
your family members.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
It's like magic.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Some of these people I definitely know. We have six
hundred and thirty eight. Fourth cousins are closer. Gail Caputo, Yes,
that's my aunt Sharon. All right, there's Laura. I think
that's Laura. All these people I don't know where they are. Second,
third guys, I don't know any of these names. So
I guess what we want to do is go through
(02:45):
literally all of these people and figure out if there's
anyone we can contact that has, you know, any more information.
All of these people might just have one more little
piece of the puzzle that adds up to Therenza's life
and death.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
That's the thing.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
About this investigation. It might just take one little detail
buried in some distant cousin's memory to unlock the entire mystery.
For us, this is I mean, this is just a
lot of people I don't recognize. This feels really daunting.
I think this feels really daunting. Looking at my expanded
(03:25):
family tree, I've got to tell you, I was a
little bit overwhelmed. So I called up a woman named
Krista Cowan. I think you're one of the biggest genealogy
influencers on the interwebs. Yeah, probably, Christo works with ancestry
dot com, but she's also better known as the barefoot genealogist.
(03:46):
I took the DNA test. I am only ten percent Sicilian,
when we thought it was a full robust quarter.
Speaker 5 (03:54):
Sure, sometimes when you start digging into family history, your
perception of your identity shifts. Your identity always was what
it was, but your perception often is confronted.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
I had this very neat and tidy vision of my
family tree on my dad's side. You will recall I
even made a poster of it. But I can see
now what a tiny sliver of the whole family that
is so far out of Lorenzo's whole family. We've only
been talking to people in Santo's line of descendants, but
(04:28):
she had seven children, So these are six other branches
and rabbit holes that I can go down.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
Yeah, it's interesting. And when you think about it, like
we're called ancestry because most people want to climb up
the family tree, right, They're looking for the ancestors your parents,
your grandparents, your great grandparents. But then back in twenty twelve,
when autosomal DNA kind of burst on the scene.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Quick aside here. That's the type of DNA that places
like ancestry dot com and twenty three and me use
to estimate people's ethnicity percentages. It can also identify possible
relatives through their partial DNA matches.
Speaker 5 (05:09):
What we were doing was we were connecting living people
who share a common ancestor. So people started climbing back
down the family trees looking for those descendants.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
I can now go out and seek cousins who are
descended from other children of Lorenza's I also realized talking
to Christa, who I love by the way, that I
can broaden out even more than that. What about the
descendants of mystery man Nicolo Martino? He may have been
married to Lorenza's sister, and that's just another branch of
(05:44):
the family. Did Niccolo Martino have children of his own? Grandchildren,
great great grandchildren? Where are they and what do they know?
Speaker 5 (05:54):
You know, what I am most curious about is who
else knows the story and how else it's been passed
down in the different branches of the family tree. And
so you have the story as it's come to you
through your branch of the family tree. And what about
that other gentleman and his family, Like what story was
passed down to them?
Speaker 1 (06:15):
That's exactly where I was gonna go, Krista, That's exactly
where I'm going next.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Okay, what am I writing?
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Am I?
Speaker 1 (06:24):
What am I typping? I started sending messages to every
cousin whose information I could get my hands on.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
God, this is weird.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
This is kind of weird. Do I mention the murder?
I don't want to be that creepy cousin. I'd write
something along the lines.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Of, Hey, I think we're cousins. Weird question.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Do you know anything about this possible murder of our
mutual great great grandmother Lorenzo Marcella in Sicily over one
hundred years ago, no worries if not thanks. This guy
says nothing in detail. I just know that's her in
the picture. I got a few answers, not my no response,
(07:02):
no response, no response. Why does anyone want to talk
to me? I'm so friendly? And then I waited. I waited,
and I hoped that someone else would finally get back
to me with some answers.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
And in the meantime, I.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Started digging into the family's immigration records. Now we all
knew that they'd come through Ellis Island, son by son,
daughter by daughter. I started there first, and I got
a little bit of help from the wonderful director of
the American Family Immigration History Center at the Statue of
Liberty Ellis Island Foundation.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
His name is Stephen Lean.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
He is a history magician, is what he is. Thank you,
Thank you, Thank you, Stephen. He was able to pull
all these documents for me, not unlike the ones that
we saw in Cultamelota. And what we learn is that
my family arrives at the Port of New York in
little clusters year after year. Antonino and Santo Accursia and
(08:04):
veto arriving on the USS Lucagna, the USS Dante Alighieri.
All of them list their last permanent residence as Caltabalota
and their final destination Scranton. There's a column for closest
relative already in the United States, so you can see
all of these webs of relationships between the Piazzas, the Marsalas,
(08:28):
and the Grottos who are already here, and then those
coming from back home. They mostly list the same address
in Scranton as their new home. And I know that
it is unlikely, but as we're going through all of
these pages and pages of documents, this little part of
(08:49):
me hoped that Lorenza would show up here. That Lorenza's
name would be on a boat manifest that she's joining
her family, listing that same address. Stephen looked and in
none of these documents could he find a Lorenza Marsala
as a passenger. But Lorenza does show up in the manifest.
(09:12):
Her children give her name when they're asked who in
their family they're leaving behind. Now, there were a few
things that I hope to learn from these records. They
don't just list the first time that someone comes to
the United States, but every time they enter the country.
(09:34):
So if Lorenza's husband, Antonino, ever went back to Sicily
and then re entered the United States. For example, if
he had returned home and perhaps done something to his wife,
that could show up here. But no, Antonino appears in
(09:56):
the manifest only once. But what about the Suns? Did
they go back? And what about the story of the
son who drew the short straw?
Speaker 6 (10:10):
So the boys drew straws to find out who was
going to go back to that village and kill whoever
killed their mother.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
That's after the break, y 'all.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Joe here, you may have noticed that this show is
a sort of travelog throughout this series. I am truly
hoping that you feel like you've gone on an expedition,
adventure journey with me to solve my great great grandmother's
century old murder. Our true intention is that by the
end you actually feel like you've gone on both vacations
(11:00):
and affect finding mission with me, traveling across the Atlantic
to the gorgeous Mediterranean island of Sicily, all through the
magic of podcasting. For me, Sicily has some real main
character energy, and I hope you feel it too, So
to help drop you even more into that experience, we
want to offer a warning with this podcast. I do
(11:22):
not want you listening to this without some delicious food.
And so what better way for me to continue to
follow in my father's sometimes haphazard footsteps and also be
a champion of one of Sicily's best exports, then by
bringing you some actual Sicilian olive oil. I have actually
(11:43):
partnered with Philadelphia's own Cardinis Gourmet Foods. It is a
woman owned and operated shop to bring you the Sicilian
inheritance olive oil. I like to call it a flavor
journey from the volcanic soil of ancient groves through the
special terhraar that fly secrets and inherited stories provide yeah
(12:03):
with a taste of fresh off the vine tomatoes and
a hint of almonds. It is not only an incredible
olive oil, but we know that it is.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Going to transport you.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
To the beautiful and sometimes dangerous island of Sicily. So
join us get even more into this journey by getting
your very own bottle today at Cardinis tap room. You
can check the show notes for the link and the details,
and of course, thank you, thank you, and remember to
enjoy this podcast with something delicious.
Speaker 6 (12:41):
I don't know how they knew, but they knew that
the United States. All the children knew that their mother
was killed, so they drew straws.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Somebody drew the short straw, figure sagely.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
Literally, I have no idea, and that one would go
back and actually avenge her murder. As we learned earlier
from cousin Laura back in Sicily, this is the second
part to the family mystery. First we have the death
of Lorenza, and then there's the supposed disappearance and reappearance
(13:14):
of one of her sons.
Speaker 6 (13:16):
He went back and he killed that guy.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
I heard it with Uncle Joey who's straw?
Speaker 7 (13:24):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (13:24):
And did you hear is an actual straw?
Speaker 6 (13:26):
Like like an actual like they something? Everyone seemed everyone
seems to think it was an actual straw. We know
how he killed him, I don't know. Don't know how
he killed him. I don't know, but he killed him.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Okay, So just to remind you, in the nineteen seventies,
my great aunt got a call from a VA hospital saying, Hey,
there's this guy here and he claims that he's your uncle,
the mysterious Uncle Giuseppe, now going by Uncle Joe, And
he shows up on my family's doorsteps, senile and definitely unwell,
(14:06):
and he claims that decades earlier, he'd gone back to
Sicily and killed whoever had murdered his mother, and then
he went into hiding, supposedly to prevent a vendetta from continuing.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
Get to hide from the black Hand. And story has
it that he was missing for many, many many years,
and no one knew where he was as he was alive.
If he were dead.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Romance, he didn't return the United States, and for fear
of the mafia trailian he y only kneed himself from
the family.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
He came back to the United States, but he never
rejoined the family.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Now we know for sure that this guy really existed,
and he really did just disappear from the family and
then reappear decades later with a crazy story to tell.
Speaker 6 (15:10):
We used to get him out of the hospital on
Sundays and for calidays and stuff like that, and he said, oh,
I'm so happy to see my family because I was
always afraid to come back to my family because I
know what they would do.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Many of my family members took this strange Uncle Joe's
story as gospel. As yes, of course, he went back
to Avenge his mother's murder and killed those guys and
then returned many decades later. Others take it with a
grain of salt. They say things like, well, he wasn't
(15:46):
in his right mind when he came back. We don't
know what was true. But here's my question. What I
want to know is if anyone knew the story of
Lorenzo's murder before this Uncle Joe reappeared. And so I
asked my relatives that you've already heard from Lorenza's great grandchildren,
(16:08):
most of whom were in their twenties around that time.
I asked them whether they grew up with the story
of Lorenza being killed or did they learn about it
a little bit later, maybe in the seventies, when this
so called avenging son just shows up and plants the
seed of a story. Could that be the first time
(16:29):
that anyone was hearing this. I'm curious about where the
origin story about all of this came from, and did
it come Maybe from that uncle who was unwell right,
So if he was maybe a little bit crazy and
(16:49):
unwell in the mind, maybe the story came from him
and it's not true.
Speaker 8 (16:56):
Yeah, very possible, Joe, right, I from my understanding he
became crazy from running and hiding.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Right, but we also know that he was in He
left America to go to World War One and fought
in World War One, so maybe he was shell shocked
and unwell.
Speaker 8 (17:21):
Yes, yes, absolutely, that could have been a piece event, right,
so interesting?
Speaker 5 (17:27):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
There is one remaining son of Santo still alive, a
grandchild of Lorenza, uncle Polly. He's in his nineties and
he's still pretty sharp. On most days, his hearing isn't great,
and so I asked cousin Sharon to help me ask
him some questions from her house in Rochester. When when
does he think the first time he heard it was?
Speaker 8 (17:52):
When do you think was the first time you heard
that your grandmother was murdered?
Speaker 1 (18:00):
I don't know.
Speaker 8 (18:01):
It's just in a family hit, That's that's what it was.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yeah, yeah, do you hear that?
Speaker 8 (18:06):
Yeah? Yeah, I think when you were a kid you
heard it.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
I knew nothing down.
Speaker 5 (18:16):
And as as I got older, right, I heard that
she was in murdered and so forth.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah, that's all.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
He didn't remember growing up with this story. Polly knows
it now, but he doesn't remember how or when he
first heard it, even though he did tell me that
while he was growing up, he spent a lot of
time with both Santo and Santo's siblings, all of Lorenza's children.
And did they talk about Lorenza? I mean, did you
(18:46):
know her name or did no one talk about her?
Speaker 3 (18:49):
No?
Speaker 8 (18:49):
They never, I never talked about it ly.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
So Polly couldn't confirm exactly when this story started circulating
around the family and if people were talking about it
before Uncle Joe's arrival. It's strange. I tried reaching out
to more cousins and asking them about this mysterious Uncle Joe.
(19:19):
I heard back from one on Instagram who told me
that she remembered that her mom didn't want him around
the kids because she found him kind of scary, and ultimately,
she says they took him to the local mental hospital.
Uncle Polly confirmed that too. This cousin that reached out
to me on Instagram, she's been listening to the podcast
(19:40):
and she told me that she talked to me on
the phone. She was very excited about it, but then
five minutes later she wrote back and said she couldn't.
She said that some of her other family members told
her not to talk to me. Just seems like our
family is good at keeping secrets, lol, she wrote back.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
M M.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
But lucky for us, there are some things we can
actually fact check with Ellis Island. I asked Stephen to
look a couple of things up for me. Does this Joseph, who,
as we said, was originally called Giuseppe, does this Joseph
Giuseppe Piazza show up more than once in the ship manifests?
(20:24):
Did he come to the US and then leave again
and then return? In other words, is there a way
that in these old documents we could actually see if
he was the son who drew the short straw? Now,
Stephen pointed out something very important. Lorenza died during World
War One, and during that time it would have been
(20:47):
very difficult for people to travel back and forth from
Europe to the US. But then Stephen found a record
for me. A Giuseppe Piazza born in eighteen eighty seven,
died in nineteen seventy one, and it says that this
Joseph Piazza served in World War One January to May
(21:11):
of nineteen eighteen. He entered the war really late, and
he was a little bit old to be a soldier.
He was thirty one. Now, remember the uncle Joe, who
resurfaced in the late sixties or early seventies. He had
been in a VA hospital and he did eventually have
(21:34):
a military burial according to records, So it seems like
this is the same guy. This Joseph Piazza has a
much spottier census record than the rest of his family.
While other members of the family show up dutifully every
ten years in American records, as you would if you
(21:54):
are being counted by a census, if you were getting married,
having kids, applying for drivers license or Social Security numbers,
Joseph doesn't show up for decades. So could it be
that this Joseph the possible drawer of the short straw.
Could he have enlisted in World War One just as
(22:15):
a way to get back to Italy, just to get
revenge for his mother's murder. The timing is definitely suggestive.
But even if he did go to Sicily around this time,
it doesn't mean that he killed anyone. But there's something
(22:37):
else here, There's something that pokes a hole in the
entire story. Stephen found evidence that another one of Lorenza's
sons went back to Sicily right before she was killed,
and he stayed there for six years. Vito Piazza, Lorenza's
second son, the second oldest he all, also went back
(23:00):
to Italy to fight in World War One, but he
was fighting on the side of the Italians years before
his brother Joseph enlisted to fight for the United States.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
According to these records.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
That Stephen found, Veto was definitely in Cultabalota on and
off between the years nineteen fifteen and nineteen twenty one.
He got married there, he was having babies there. Those
babies are listed in the record books.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
So here's my question.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
If Veto went to Europe in nineteen fifteen, if he
was in Sicily in nineteen sixteen when his mother was killed,
why would another son in the United States have needed
to draw a straw at all? One son was already there,
wouldn't veto have carried out the revenge killing. And if
someone carried out this vendetta at all, would veto really
(23:54):
have chosen to stay in the same town where his
mother was murdered for five more years until returning to
the United States in nineteen twenty one.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
That is, if a revenge killing actually.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Happened at all, he had to go over and curing
the vendetta by killing the murderer or murderers. I don't
know why were too.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
My uncle Jim has always claimed that someone or some
ones were in fact arrested for Lorenzo's murder.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
There wasn't a trial and they were acquitted if the
trial was in Shaka, which is down the mountain on
the coast.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
A trial, he claimed in the nearby mafia run town
of Shaka. Uncle Jim said that the murderers got off
scot free, and that's why one of Lorenza's sons had
to go and get justice on his own.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
I'd love to read the trial script then, of course,
should know the whole story, at least you know their
account of it.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
If that trial happened. If those records exist, then we
could learn who was accused of Lorenzo's murder and how
they supposedly killed her, and maybe we could also figure
out which of her sons might have tried to get revenge.
But I'm gonna need those court records, and I had
(25:27):
to figure out how to get them all the way
from my house in Philadelphia. Since our trip was cut
short because of the wildfires, I didn't get a chance
to go to the courthouse myself, so I had to
enlist some boots on the ground.
Speaker 7 (25:43):
Okay, so my name is Laura and I'm a third
generation Italian American.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
After making a bunch of phone calls, I found a
woman named Laura Lee. Laura's an American who lives in Sicily,
but she's also a researcher, a really good one. She's
Nancy Drew, living in Calabria, and over the past few
years she's taught herself how to navigate Italian bureaucracy in
order to help Americans find documents about their families.
Speaker 7 (26:12):
I would run into people who would just be lost
and wandering around these little small towns and they're trying
to find people. And so that's how my business started up,
which is called Digging.
Speaker 6 (26:21):
Up Roots in the Boot.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Laura is one of the best researchers that I've ever met.
We are so lucky to have her to start. She
went back to Caltabolota to get us an official copy
of Lorenzo's death certificate. So far, we were operating with
the sneaky photo in the commune that I was definitely
not supposed to take on my phone.
Speaker 7 (26:39):
I got not only Marsala's but I got the one
for Nicolo Martino. Yeah, oh my gosh, yes, yeah, so
I sent those both to you. But basically what the
translations are is that the Cadabignerti were called out because
they found these two bodies.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
The Carbagnari are the Italian military police, so.
Speaker 7 (26:58):
The Cadabignerti did whatever they do when they find bodies,
how they handle it, and two days later it was
brought to the attention of the vital Statistics department and
that's when they registered it on the twenty sixth of
February nineteen sixteen. But when I was talking with the
(27:19):
man in the commune, he told me that if it
was handled within two days and reported that quickly, he
doesn't see the likelihood of it having been a homicide,
because he said, if it was a homicide, there probably
would have been an investigation and autopsy and further information
before they reported the death.
Speaker 9 (27:38):
Wouldn't they just report the death either way and then
potentially keep investigating.
Speaker 7 (27:42):
Well, I asked him that question, and this is only
his opinion, right, he doesn't know, he's not an expert,
but that was his opinion, and he confirmed the information
that you had where it was at that little crossroads
intersection where the bodies were found.
Speaker 9 (27:57):
And there was no details about oh there was a
lance or there was no.
Speaker 7 (28:02):
And I asked if they knew of anything that had
happened during that period, if there was some kind of
natural disaster or something that could have happened, and he
wasn't aware of anything that happened during that time.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Next up, Laura actually got access to Cultabolota's criminal files,
but nothing on murders. We'll get to that in a second.
But she did find a bunch of Marsalas engaging in
different kinds of crimes.
Speaker 7 (28:31):
I did find some of the documents that I found,
I think are related to your theory of the land
struggle between the Marsalas.
Speaker 9 (28:39):
Oh you do, like, let's talk about that.
Speaker 7 (28:42):
So in nineteen sixteen, Giuseppe Marsala, who was a son
of Jocomo and Paula Coctone, and he was sentenced because
he was carrying a knife illegally an the illegal weapon.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
I won't bore you with every little detail here, but
basically it's a timeline of all these petty Marsala on
Marsala crimes. And I don't recognize most of these names.
They seem to be second and third cousins. People in
Lorenzo's generation are maybe even older.
Speaker 7 (29:12):
In nineteen eighteen, there was a Serafino Marsala who was
found guilty of land encroachment. In nineteen twenty one, the
Giuseppe Marsala, son of Jacomo, was found guilty of grazing
his sheep illegally on somebody else's land.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Marsala's carrying illegal knives, Marsala's letting their sheep graze in
places they're not supposed to be grazing. Marsala is encroaching
on each other's land, Marsala's encroaching on other people's land,
and sometimes it escalated pretty dramatically.
Speaker 7 (29:47):
So this Vincenzo Marsala, whose Jacobo's brother, went to Jacomo
Marsala and Paula Cartone's home with a gun in his
hand and threatened to kill them, and that's nineteen nineteen,
that was nineteen twenty.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Nineteen twenty, took a gun and threatened to kill them.
Speaker 7 (30:07):
So this was an internal family dispute, an internal family
dispute within Marsalis. So who knows how long the encroachment
was going on before was actually brought to the courts.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Right right, it can be going on for a long time.
Speaker 9 (30:22):
Yeah, this feels kind of fruitful, especially if we can
find where that encroachment was.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
All of this raised some big questions. Was this the
land that Lorenzo was supposedly killed over? Was this the
land where she died?
Speaker 9 (30:38):
Basically the follow up questions definitely being like who owned
the land that those.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Bodies were found on? H where was that land?
Speaker 9 (30:47):
And like how close or not close was it to
where they were found. I just feel like here now
we have much more a potential contextual understanding of what
could be a motivation HM.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Another thing that I think a lot of this research
makes clear is that land disputes were clearly a thing,
clearly an issue, like probably one of the biggest issues.
Speaker 7 (31:11):
Well it wasn't, though it was one of the biggest
issues with the Marsalas.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Laura said that in the timeframe she was searching in
Culta Balta's criminal records, most of the theft was of firewood.
There were also a few charges for letting your sheep
grays on other people's land, but there were not a
lot of people stealing each other's land except the Marsalas.
Speaker 7 (31:37):
In those six years that I searched, the only land
disputes that I found were with these Marsala names.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
That's kind of interesting.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
That is interesting.
Speaker 7 (31:46):
Yeah, so there was a big dispute or some kind
of divide in the family at some point or another,
or there were two separate Marsala families that just didn't
get along.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
For some reason.
Speaker 9 (31:56):
When you described the situation in which someone arrived with
a gun, it made me think, wow, like, how common
was it to even have a gun?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Then you know, it would.
Speaker 7 (32:05):
Be common to have a rifle for hunting, but it
wasn't common to have a pistol exactly. So that to me,
is very uncommon. And for it to get to the
point where you show up at your brother's home with
a pistol tells me that this is a feud that's
been going on for a while.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Not to have it.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Messy, messy, these Marsalas.
Speaker 7 (32:30):
But for some reason, there were no homicide records in
the archives at all.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
Here's the frustrating thing. Laura could only get her hands
on non homicide criminal court records, no murders. If there
is a court case related to Lorenzo's murder, Laura couldn't
see it. She was told it had to be requested
by a lawyer or someone connected to the case, maybe
(32:57):
a descendant. So it sounds like I need to go
back to Sicily. But before I do, all right, So
I found this guy on ancestry. He has the most
complete Piazza family tree on ancestry dot com. One of
(33:18):
my many messages to my many random cousins actually paid off.
I reached out to him like a year almost a
year ago.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
This is me telling my husband about it.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
They are also a great great grandchild of Lorenzo Marsala,
and I said, hey, I want to talk to you
about what you know about our family stories. But they
do not want to be identified, and they were like
real shady about it. This cousin, I won't name him
(33:49):
because he didn't want to go on the record for
kind of a ridiculous reason. He told me that his
grandfather also talked about Lorenza and he would say, you know,
that was over there and she was helping helping people
get paid. And I'm like, what does that mean? And
(34:10):
he said, my grandpa said, I think she was mixed
up in collecting money for the Black Hand. Could it
be was Lorenza not a victim of the mob, but
maybe a.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Part of it.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
And this guy goes I think one hundred percent she
was collecting money for the black hand. You don't just
get killed out of nowhere. They don't just happen to
murder innocent old ladies.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
That's next time on The Sicilian Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
The Sicilian Inheritance is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with
iHeart Podcasts. The series is produced by Jen Kenney, Kate Osborne,
Derek and me Joe Piazza, with key help from Laura
Lee Watson of Digging Up Your Roots in the Boot
and Chiro Grilow of Sicily Roots. Many thanks to Julia
Paraviccini and the ancestry dot com research department. You can
(35:14):
get your copy of The Sicilian Inheritance the novel right
now at Truly anywhere that you get your books, anywhere
you get your books. It's got the same name as
the podcast, but with more food, wine, and sex. Also,
do not forget to get a taste of Sicily in
the form of delicious Sicilian olive oil at Cardena's tap room.
(35:35):
Make sure to check out our show notes for a
link to buy it or if you find yourself in Philly,
just stop by. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangashtikador,
Costas Linos, and Oz Wolloshan. From iHeart, executive producers are
Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Etour. We also want to thank
(35:56):
Will Pearson, Connell Burn, Bob Pittman, and John Mary Napolis.
I'm Joe Piazza, and this is the Sicilian Inheritance, Chapter six,
my big fat Sicilian family. Okay, the DNA results are
in this Email's so funny. It says, it's the moment
(00:35):
you've been waiting for. All right, I'm gonna click it.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
I'm gonna click it.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
In the middle of investigating my family story, I finally
did it. I took a DNA test.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Fuck.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Of course, I don't remember the password. It was this
ancestry dot com kit. They sent me a little tube.
I spit in the tube. I mailed them my spit.
And then one day, many weeks later, after I had
forgotten that I even took this test, I got an
email back.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
With my results.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Oh no, those are right password?
Speaker 4 (01:10):
All right?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Okay?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Huh. Ethnicity estimate thirty one percent Ireland, twenty eight percent
Sweden in Denmark. That's my mom's side of the family.
No surprise is there. But my dad's Southern Italy is
only ten percent. To my knowledge, he was half Irish,
half Italian. With how intensely proud he and my family
(01:36):
members are of their Sicilian background, I was definitely expecting
at least a quarter Sicilian, not quite Northern Italy six percent,
and then Cameroon Sardinia two percent and Jewish one percent,
but Southern Italy only ten percent. Your ethnicity estimate is
(01:57):
ten percent, but it can range from zero to twenty
seven percent. That's so interesting. Break my dad's goddamn heart.
All right, So what else does this tell us viewed
DNA matches? Now, besides breaking down your ethnicity from a
few drops of spit, ancestry also gives you a bunch
(02:18):
of other people who spit into a vial, and maybe
your family members.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
It's like magic.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Some of these people I definitely know. We have six
hundred and thirty eight. Fourth cousins are closer. Gail Caputo, Yes,
that's my aunt Sharon. All right, there's Laura. I think
that's Laura. All these people I don't know where they are. Second,
third guys, I don't know any of these names. So
I guess what we want to do is go through
(02:45):
literally all of these people and figure out if there's
anyone we can contact that has, you know, any more information.
All of these people might just have one more little
piece of the puzzle that adds up to Therenza's life
and death.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
That's the thing.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
About this investigation. It might just take one little detail
buried in some distant cousin's memory to unlock the entire mystery.
For us, this is I mean, this is just a
lot of people I don't recognize. This feels really daunting.
I think this feels really daunting. Looking at my expanded
(03:25):
family tree, I've got to tell you, I was a
little bit overwhelmed. So I called up a woman named
Krista Cowan. I think you're one of the biggest genealogy
influencers on the interwebs. Yeah, probably, Christo works with ancestry
dot com, but she's also better known as the barefoot genealogist.
(03:46):
I took the DNA test. I am only ten percent Sicilian,
when we thought it was a full robust quarter.
Speaker 5 (03:54):
Sure, sometimes when you start digging into family history, your
perception of your identity shifts. Your identity always was what
it was, but your perception often is confronted.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
I had this very neat and tidy vision of my
family tree on my dad's side. You will recall I
even made a poster of it. But I can see
now what a tiny sliver of the whole family that
is so far out of Lorenzo's whole family. We've only
been talking to people in Santo's line of descendants, but
(04:28):
she had seven children, So these are six other branches
and rabbit holes that I can go down.
Speaker 5 (04:36):
Yeah, it's interesting. And when you think about it, like
we're called ancestry because most people want to climb up
the family tree, right, They're looking for the ancestors your parents,
your grandparents, your great grandparents. But then back in twenty twelve,
when autosomal DNA kind of burst on the scene.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Quick aside here. That's the type of DNA that places
like ancestry dot com and twenty three and me use
to estimate people's ethnicity percentages. It can also identify possible
relatives through their partial DNA matches.
Speaker 5 (05:09):
What we were doing was we were connecting living people
who share a common ancestor. So people started climbing back
down the family trees looking for those descendants.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
I can now go out and seek cousins who are
descended from other children of Lorenza's I also realized talking
to Christa, who I love by the way, that I
can broaden out even more than that. What about the
descendants of mystery man Nicolo Martino? He may have been
married to Lorenza's sister, and that's just another branch of
(05:44):
the family. Did Niccolo Martino have children of his own? Grandchildren,
great great grandchildren? Where are they and what do they know?
Speaker 5 (05:54):
You know, what I am most curious about is who
else knows the story and how else it's been passed
down in the different branches of the family tree. And
so you have the story as it's come to you
through your branch of the family tree. And what about
that other gentleman and his family, Like what story was
passed down to them?
Speaker 1 (06:15):
That's exactly where I was gonna go, Krista, That's exactly
where I'm going next.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Okay, what am I writing?
Speaker 3 (06:24):
Am I?
Speaker 1 (06:24):
What am I typping? I started sending messages to every
cousin whose information I could get my hands on.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
God, this is weird.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
This is kind of weird. Do I mention the murder?
I don't want to be that creepy cousin. I'd write
something along the lines.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Of, Hey, I think we're cousins. Weird question.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Do you know anything about this possible murder of our
mutual great great grandmother Lorenzo Marcella in Sicily over one
hundred years ago, no worries if not thanks. This guy
says nothing in detail. I just know that's her in
the picture. I got a few answers, not my no response,
(07:02):
no response, no response. Why does anyone want to talk
to me? I'm so friendly? And then I waited. I waited,
and I hoped that someone else would finally get back
to me with some answers.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
And in the meantime, I.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Started digging into the family's immigration records. Now we all
knew that they'd come through Ellis Island, son by son,
daughter by daughter. I started there first, and I got
a little bit of help from the wonderful director of
the American Family Immigration History Center at the Statue of
Liberty Ellis Island Foundation.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
His name is Stephen Lean.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
He is a history magician, is what he is. Thank you,
Thank you, Thank you, Stephen. He was able to pull
all these documents for me, not unlike the ones that
we saw in Cultamelota. And what we learn is that
my family arrives at the Port of New York in
little clusters year after year. Antonino and Santo Accursia and
(08:04):
veto arriving on the USS Lucagna, the USS Dante Alighieri.
All of them list their last permanent residence as Caltabalota
and their final destination Scranton. There's a column for closest
relative already in the United States, so you can see
all of these webs of relationships between the Piazzas, the Marsalas,
(08:28):
and the Grottos who are already here, and then those
coming from back home. They mostly list the same address
in Scranton as their new home. And I know that
it is unlikely, but as we're going through all of
these pages and pages of documents, this little part of
(08:49):
me hoped that Lorenza would show up here. That Lorenza's
name would be on a boat manifest that she's joining
her family, listing that same address. Stephen looked and in
none of these documents could he find a Lorenza Marsala
as a passenger. But Lorenza does show up in the manifest.
(09:12):
Her children give her name when they're asked who in
their family they're leaving behind. Now, there were a few
things that I hope to learn from these records. They
don't just list the first time that someone comes to
the United States, but every time they enter the country.
(09:34):
So if Lorenza's husband, Antonino, ever went back to Sicily
and then re entered the United States. For example, if
he had returned home and perhaps done something to his wife,
that could show up here. But no, Antonino appears in
(09:56):
the manifest only once. But what about the Suns? Did
they go back? And what about the story of the
son who drew the short straw?
Speaker 6 (10:10):
So the boys drew straws to find out who was
going to go back to that village and kill whoever
killed their mother.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
That's after the break, y 'all.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Joe here, you may have noticed that this show is
a sort of travelog throughout this series. I am truly
hoping that you feel like you've gone on an expedition,
adventure journey with me to solve my great great grandmother's
century old murder. Our true intention is that by the
end you actually feel like you've gone on both vacations
(11:00):
and affect finding mission with me, traveling across the Atlantic
to the gorgeous Mediterranean island of Sicily, all through the
magic of podcasting. For me, Sicily has some real main
character energy, and I hope you feel it too, So
to help drop you even more into that experience, we
want to offer a warning with this podcast. I do
(11:22):
not want you listening to this without some delicious food.
And so what better way for me to continue to
follow in my father's sometimes haphazard footsteps and also be
a champion of one of Sicily's best exports, then by
bringing you some actual Sicilian olive oil. I have actually
(11:43):
partnered with Philadelphia's own Cardinis Gourmet Foods. It is a
woman owned and operated shop to bring you the Sicilian
inheritance olive oil. I like to call it a flavor
journey from the volcanic soil of ancient groves through the
special terhraar that fly secrets and inherited stories provide yeah
(12:03):
with a taste of fresh off the vine tomatoes and
a hint of almonds. It is not only an incredible
olive oil, but we know that it is.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Going to transport you.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
To the beautiful and sometimes dangerous island of Sicily. So
join us get even more into this journey by getting
your very own bottle today at Cardinis tap room. You
can check the show notes for the link and the details,
and of course, thank you, thank you, and remember to
enjoy this podcast with something delicious.
Speaker 6 (12:41):
I don't know how they knew, but they knew that
the United States. All the children knew that their mother
was killed, so they drew straws.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Somebody drew the short straw, figure sagely.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
Literally, I have no idea, and that one would go
back and actually avenge her murder. As we learned earlier
from cousin Laura back in Sicily, this is the second
part to the family mystery. First we have the death
of Lorenza, and then there's the supposed disappearance and reappearance
(13:14):
of one of her sons.
Speaker 6 (13:16):
He went back and he killed that guy.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
I heard it with Uncle Joey who's straw?
Speaker 7 (13:24):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (13:24):
And did you hear is an actual straw?
Speaker 6 (13:26):
Like like an actual like they something? Everyone seemed everyone
seems to think it was an actual straw. We know
how he killed him, I don't know. Don't know how
he killed him. I don't know, but he killed him.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Okay, So just to remind you, in the nineteen seventies,
my great aunt got a call from a VA hospital saying, Hey,
there's this guy here and he claims that he's your uncle,
the mysterious Uncle Giuseppe, now going by Uncle Joe, And
he shows up on my family's doorsteps, senile and definitely unwell,
(14:06):
and he claims that decades earlier, he'd gone back to
Sicily and killed whoever had murdered his mother, and then
he went into hiding, supposedly to prevent a vendetta from continuing.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
Get to hide from the black Hand. And story has
it that he was missing for many, many many years,
and no one knew where he was as he was alive.
If he were dead.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
Romance, he didn't return the United States, and for fear
of the mafia trailian he y only kneed himself from
the family.
Speaker 6 (14:51):
He came back to the United States, but he never
rejoined the family.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Now we know for sure that this guy really existed,
and he really did just disappear from the family and
then reappear decades later with a crazy story to tell.
Speaker 6 (15:10):
We used to get him out of the hospital on
Sundays and for calidays and stuff like that, and he said, oh,
I'm so happy to see my family because I was
always afraid to come back to my family because I
know what they would do.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
Many of my family members took this strange Uncle Joe's
story as gospel. As yes, of course, he went back
to Avenge his mother's murder and killed those guys and
then returned many decades later. Others take it with a
grain of salt. They say things like, well, he wasn't
(15:46):
in his right mind when he came back. We don't
know what was true. But here's my question. What I
want to know is if anyone knew the story of
Lorenzo's murder before this Uncle Joe reappeared. And so I
asked my relatives that you've already heard from Lorenza's great grandchildren,
(16:08):
most of whom were in their twenties around that time.
I asked them whether they grew up with the story
of Lorenza being killed or did they learn about it
a little bit later, maybe in the seventies, when this
so called avenging son just shows up and plants the
seed of a story. Could that be the first time
(16:29):
that anyone was hearing this. I'm curious about where the
origin story about all of this came from, and did
it come Maybe from that uncle who was unwell right,
So if he was maybe a little bit crazy and
(16:49):
unwell in the mind, maybe the story came from him
and it's not true.
Speaker 8 (16:56):
Yeah, very possible, Joe, right, I from my understanding he
became crazy from running and hiding.
Speaker 1 (17:08):
Right, but we also know that he was in He
left America to go to World War One and fought
in World War One, so maybe he was shell shocked
and unwell.
Speaker 8 (17:21):
Yes, yes, absolutely, that could have been a piece event, right,
so interesting?
Speaker 5 (17:27):
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
There is one remaining son of Santo still alive, a
grandchild of Lorenza, uncle Polly. He's in his nineties and
he's still pretty sharp. On most days, his hearing isn't great,
and so I asked cousin Sharon to help me ask
him some questions from her house in Rochester. When when
does he think the first time he heard it was?
Speaker 8 (17:52):
When do you think was the first time you heard
that your grandmother was murdered?
Speaker 1 (18:00):
I don't know.
Speaker 8 (18:01):
It's just in a family hit, That's that's what it was.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yeah, yeah, do you hear that?
Speaker 8 (18:06):
Yeah? Yeah, I think when you were a kid you
heard it.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
I knew nothing down.
Speaker 5 (18:16):
And as as I got older, right, I heard that
she was in murdered and so forth.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah, that's all.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
He didn't remember growing up with this story. Polly knows
it now, but he doesn't remember how or when he
first heard it, even though he did tell me that
while he was growing up, he spent a lot of
time with both Santo and Santo's siblings, all of Lorenza's children.
And did they talk about Lorenza? I mean, did you
(18:46):
know her name or did no one talk about her?
Speaker 3 (18:49):
No?
Speaker 8 (18:49):
They never, I never talked about it ly.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
So Polly couldn't confirm exactly when this story started circulating
around the family and if people were talking about it
before Uncle Joe's arrival. It's strange. I tried reaching out
to more cousins and asking them about this mysterious Uncle Joe.
(19:19):
I heard back from one on Instagram who told me
that she remembered that her mom didn't want him around
the kids because she found him kind of scary, and ultimately,
she says they took him to the local mental hospital.
Uncle Polly confirmed that too. This cousin that reached out
to me on Instagram, she's been listening to the podcast
(19:40):
and she told me that she talked to me on
the phone. She was very excited about it, but then
five minutes later she wrote back and said she couldn't.
She said that some of her other family members told
her not to talk to me. Just seems like our
family is good at keeping secrets, lol, she wrote back.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
M M.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
But lucky for us, there are some things we can
actually fact check with Ellis Island. I asked Stephen to
look a couple of things up for me. Does this Joseph, who,
as we said, was originally called Giuseppe, does this Joseph
Giuseppe Piazza show up more than once in the ship manifests?
(20:24):
Did he come to the US and then leave again
and then return? In other words, is there a way
that in these old documents we could actually see if
he was the son who drew the short straw? Now,
Stephen pointed out something very important. Lorenza died during World
War One, and during that time it would have been
(20:47):
very difficult for people to travel back and forth from
Europe to the US. But then Stephen found a record
for me. A Giuseppe Piazza born in eighteen eighty seven,
died in nineteen seventy one, and it says that this
Joseph Piazza served in World War One January to May
(21:11):
of nineteen eighteen. He entered the war really late, and
he was a little bit old to be a soldier.
He was thirty one. Now, remember the uncle Joe, who
resurfaced in the late sixties or early seventies. He had
been in a VA hospital and he did eventually have
(21:34):
a military burial according to records, So it seems like
this is the same guy. This Joseph Piazza has a
much spottier census record than the rest of his family.
While other members of the family show up dutifully every
ten years in American records, as you would if you
(21:54):
are being counted by a census, if you were getting married,
having kids, applying for drivers license or Social Security numbers,
Joseph doesn't show up for decades. So could it be
that this Joseph the possible drawer of the short straw.
Could he have enlisted in World War One just as
(22:15):
a way to get back to Italy, just to get
revenge for his mother's murder. The timing is definitely suggestive.
But even if he did go to Sicily around this time,
it doesn't mean that he killed anyone. But there's something
(22:37):
else here, There's something that pokes a hole in the
entire story. Stephen found evidence that another one of Lorenza's
sons went back to Sicily right before she was killed,
and he stayed there for six years. Vito Piazza, Lorenza's
second son, the second oldest he all, also went back
(23:00):
to Italy to fight in World War One, but he
was fighting on the side of the Italians years before
his brother Joseph enlisted to fight for the United States.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
According to these records.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
That Stephen found, Veto was definitely in Cultabalota on and
off between the years nineteen fifteen and nineteen twenty one.
He got married there, he was having babies there. Those
babies are listed in the record books.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
So here's my question.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
If Veto went to Europe in nineteen fifteen, if he
was in Sicily in nineteen sixteen when his mother was killed,
why would another son in the United States have needed
to draw a straw at all? One son was already there,
wouldn't veto have carried out the revenge killing. And if
someone carried out this vendetta at all, would veto really
(23:54):
have chosen to stay in the same town where his
mother was murdered for five more years until returning to
the United States in nineteen twenty one.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
That is, if a revenge killing actually.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Happened at all, he had to go over and curing
the vendetta by killing the murderer or murderers. I don't
know why were too.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
My uncle Jim has always claimed that someone or some
ones were in fact arrested for Lorenzo's murder.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
There wasn't a trial and they were acquitted if the
trial was in Shaka, which is down the mountain on
the coast.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
A trial, he claimed in the nearby mafia run town
of Shaka. Uncle Jim said that the murderers got off
scot free, and that's why one of Lorenza's sons had
to go and get justice on his own.
Speaker 3 (24:58):
I'd love to read the trial script then, of course,
should know the whole story, at least you know their
account of it.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
If that trial happened. If those records exist, then we
could learn who was accused of Lorenzo's murder and how
they supposedly killed her, and maybe we could also figure
out which of her sons might have tried to get revenge.
But I'm gonna need those court records, and I had
(25:27):
to figure out how to get them all the way
from my house in Philadelphia. Since our trip was cut
short because of the wildfires, I didn't get a chance
to go to the courthouse myself, so I had to
enlist some boots on the ground.
Speaker 7 (25:43):
Okay, so my name is Laura and I'm a third
generation Italian American.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
After making a bunch of phone calls, I found a
woman named Laura Lee. Laura's an American who lives in Sicily,
but she's also a researcher, a really good one. She's
Nancy Drew, living in Calabria, and over the past few
years she's taught herself how to navigate Italian bureaucracy in
order to help Americans find documents about their families.
Speaker 7 (26:12):
I would run into people who would just be lost
and wandering around these little small towns and they're trying
to find people. And so that's how my business started up,
which is called Digging.
Speaker 6 (26:21):
Up Roots in the Boot.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Laura is one of the best researchers that I've ever met.
We are so lucky to have her to start. She
went back to Caltabolota to get us an official copy
of Lorenzo's death certificate. So far, we were operating with
the sneaky photo in the commune that I was definitely
not supposed to take on my phone.
Speaker 7 (26:39):
I got not only Marsala's but I got the one
for Nicolo Martino. Yeah, oh my gosh, yes, yeah, so
I sent those both to you. But basically what the
translations are is that the Cadabignerti were called out because
they found these two bodies.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
The Carbagnari are the Italian military police, so.
Speaker 7 (26:58):
The Cadabignerti did whatever they do when they find bodies,
how they handle it, and two days later it was
brought to the attention of the vital Statistics department and
that's when they registered it on the twenty sixth of
February nineteen sixteen. But when I was talking with the
(27:19):
man in the commune, he told me that if it
was handled within two days and reported that quickly, he
doesn't see the likelihood of it having been a homicide,
because he said, if it was a homicide, there probably
would have been an investigation and autopsy and further information
before they reported the death.
Speaker 9 (27:38):
Wouldn't they just report the death either way and then
potentially keep investigating.
Speaker 7 (27:42):
Well, I asked him that question, and this is only
his opinion, right, he doesn't know, he's not an expert,
but that was his opinion, and he confirmed the information
that you had where it was at that little crossroads
intersection where the bodies were found.
Speaker 9 (27:57):
And there was no details about oh there was a
lance or there was no.
Speaker 7 (28:02):
And I asked if they knew of anything that had
happened during that period, if there was some kind of
natural disaster or something that could have happened, and he
wasn't aware of anything that happened during that time.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
Next up, Laura actually got access to Cultabolota's criminal files,
but nothing on murders. We'll get to that in a second.
But she did find a bunch of Marsalas engaging in
different kinds of crimes.
Speaker 7 (28:31):
I did find some of the documents that I found,
I think are related to your theory of the land
struggle between the Marsalas.
Speaker 9 (28:39):
Oh you do, like, let's talk about that.
Speaker 7 (28:42):
So in nineteen sixteen, Giuseppe Marsala, who was a son
of Jocomo and Paula Coctone, and he was sentenced because
he was carrying a knife illegally an the illegal weapon.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
I won't bore you with every little detail here, but
basically it's a timeline of all these petty Marsala on
Marsala crimes. And I don't recognize most of these names.
They seem to be second and third cousins. People in
Lorenzo's generation are maybe even older.
Speaker 7 (29:12):
In nineteen eighteen, there was a Serafino Marsala who was
found guilty of land encroachment. In nineteen twenty one, the
Giuseppe Marsala, son of Jacomo, was found guilty of grazing
his sheep illegally on somebody else's land.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Marsala's carrying illegal knives, Marsala's letting their sheep graze in
places they're not supposed to be grazing. Marsala is encroaching
on each other's land, Marsala's encroaching on other people's land,
and sometimes it escalated pretty dramatically.
Speaker 7 (29:47):
So this Vincenzo Marsala, whose Jacobo's brother, went to Jacomo
Marsala and Paula Cartone's home with a gun in his
hand and threatened to kill them, and that's nineteen nineteen,
that was nineteen twenty.
Speaker 2 (30:04):
Nineteen twenty, took a gun and threatened to kill them.
Speaker 7 (30:07):
So this was an internal family dispute, an internal family
dispute within Marsalis. So who knows how long the encroachment
was going on before was actually brought to the courts.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Right right, it can be going on for a long time.
Speaker 9 (30:22):
Yeah, this feels kind of fruitful, especially if we can
find where that encroachment was.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
All of this raised some big questions. Was this the
land that Lorenzo was supposedly killed over? Was this the
land where she died?
Speaker 9 (30:38):
Basically the follow up questions definitely being like who owned
the land that those.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Bodies were found on? H where was that land?
Speaker 9 (30:47):
And like how close or not close was it to
where they were found. I just feel like here now
we have much more a potential contextual understanding of what
could be a motivation HM.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Another thing that I think a lot of this research
makes clear is that land disputes were clearly a thing,
clearly an issue, like probably one of the biggest issues.
Speaker 7 (31:11):
Well it wasn't, though it was one of the biggest
issues with the Marsalas.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Laura said that in the timeframe she was searching in
Culta Balta's criminal records, most of the theft was of firewood.
There were also a few charges for letting your sheep
grays on other people's land, but there were not a
lot of people stealing each other's land except the Marsalas.
Speaker 7 (31:37):
In those six years that I searched, the only land
disputes that I found were with these Marsala names.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
That's kind of interesting.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
That is interesting.
Speaker 7 (31:46):
Yeah, so there was a big dispute or some kind
of divide in the family at some point or another,
or there were two separate Marsala families that just didn't
get along.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
For some reason.
Speaker 9 (31:56):
When you described the situation in which someone arrived with
a gun, it made me think, wow, like, how common
was it to even have a gun?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Then you know, it would.
Speaker 7 (32:05):
Be common to have a rifle for hunting, but it
wasn't common to have a pistol exactly. So that to me,
is very uncommon. And for it to get to the
point where you show up at your brother's home with
a pistol tells me that this is a feud that's
been going on for a while.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Not to have it.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Messy, messy, these Marsalas.
Speaker 7 (32:30):
But for some reason, there were no homicide records in
the archives at all.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
Here's the frustrating thing. Laura could only get her hands
on non homicide criminal court records, no murders. If there
is a court case related to Lorenzo's murder, Laura couldn't
see it. She was told it had to be requested
by a lawyer or someone connected to the case, maybe
(32:57):
a descendant. So it sounds like I need to go
back to Sicily. But before I do, all right, So
I found this guy on ancestry. He has the most
complete Piazza family tree on ancestry dot com. One of
(33:18):
my many messages to my many random cousins actually paid off.
I reached out to him like a year almost a
year ago.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
This is me telling my husband about it.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
They are also a great great grandchild of Lorenzo Marsala,
and I said, hey, I want to talk to you
about what you know about our family stories. But they
do not want to be identified, and they were like
real shady about it. This cousin, I won't name him
(33:49):
because he didn't want to go on the record for
kind of a ridiculous reason. He told me that his
grandfather also talked about Lorenza and he would say, you know,
that was over there and she was helping helping people
get paid. And I'm like, what does that mean? And
(34:10):
he said, my grandpa said, I think she was mixed
up in collecting money for the Black Hand. Could it
be was Lorenza not a victim of the mob, but
maybe a.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Part of it.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
And this guy goes I think one hundred percent she
was collecting money for the black hand. You don't just
get killed out of nowhere. They don't just happen to
murder innocent old ladies.
Speaker 2 (34:40):
That's next time on The Sicilian Inheritance.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
The Sicilian Inheritance is a Kaleidoscope production in partnership with
iHeart Podcasts. The series is produced by Jen Kenney, Kate Osborne,
Derek and me Joe Piazza, with key help from Laura
Lee Watson of Digging Up Your Roots in the Boot
and Chiro Grilow of Sicily Roots. Many thanks to Julia
Paraviccini and the ancestry dot com research department. You can
(35:14):
get your copy of The Sicilian Inheritance the novel right
now at Truly anywhere that you get your books, anywhere
you get your books. It's got the same name as
the podcast, but with more food, wine, and sex. Also,
do not forget to get a taste of Sicily in
the form of delicious Sicilian olive oil at Cardena's tap room.
(35:35):
Make sure to check out our show notes for a
link to buy it or if you find yourself in Philly,
just stop by. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangashtikador,
Costas Linos, and Oz Wolloshan. From iHeart, executive producers are
Katrina Norvelle and Nikki Etour. We also want to thank
(35:56):
Will Pearson, Connell Burn, Bob Pittman, and John Mary Napolis.
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