Forty Italians stood in a round room in the heart of the Capitol as Kirsten Gillibrand, a U.S. Senator from the great state of New York, gestured towards me. She had just welcomed the group to the Capitol; I translated her welcome into Italian for our guests.

They were here to celebrate Detective Joe Petrosino, an Italian immigrant exemplary of the kind of impact Italian Americans have had in our experiment in democracy. In the early 20th century, he had done work that led to the arrest of thousands of mafia-related criminals here and in his native Sicily.