WTI Magazine #2    2013 Oct,25

Author : Paolo Battaglia      Translation by:

October 15, 1924 - Birth of Lee Iacocca
Lee (born "Lido") Iacocca (below) has demonstrated extraordinary skills, resilience, and fortitude in business and management. He became president of the Ford Motor Company in 1970, launching the popular models Mustang and Pinto. Eight years later he took over the ailing Chrysler Corporation, which was near bankruptcy. He rescued the company, in part through his personal television ads, which made his face instantly recognizable to Americans: an image of an Italian American very different from the one Americans held one hundred years ago.

October 17, 1931 - Al Capone convicted of Tax Evasion
Alphonse Capone was born in Brooklyn in 1899—one of his most famous quotes was "I'm not Italian. I was born in Brooklyn"—but he established himself as a crime boss in Chicago in the 1920s. Through violence and the unscrupulous use of his wealth, he became one of the most powerful men in the city. It was only in 1931, when federal authorities charged him with tax evasion, that his criminal career ended with a sentence of eleven years served at the Eastern State Penitentiary and Alcatraz.

October 18, 1928 - Death of Charlie Siringo
Charlie Siringo was born Angelo Siringo to an Italian father and Irish mother in Texas. He became famous in the 19th century for writing about his adventures in the American West.
Siringo's books on cowboy life sold nearly a million copies. Beginning in 1886, he had a second, twenty-one-year career as a detective for the famous Pinkerton Agency. Siringo worked the West from Alaska to Mexico City. He was one of the first undercover agents—posing as a gunman, he infiltrated Butch Cassidy's infamous Wild Bunch gang. At age sixty-one he joined the New Mexico Rangers to capture cattle rustlers, his last dangerous occupation.

October 19, 1883 - Joe Petrosino joins the NYPD
Too often forgotten by history, New York detective Joseph Petrosino was a positive hero in the struggle of Italian Americans against the stereotype that they were all connected to the Mafia. The New York Police Department did not encourage Italians to join until the turn of the 19th century, when the so-called Black Hand was thriving; they formed an Italian Squad to fight it, with Petrosino appointed as its leader.
On the one hand, choosing an Italian to fight the Black Hand implied that only an Italian could understand the deeds of these criminals, but on the other, it led the way to the integration of Italians in law enforcement.

Thanks to his excellent police work, Petrosino became a very popular personality, until he was killed in March 1909 in Sicily, while carrying out a crucial mission against the Mafia.