Here is the top of a long-form piece I’ve been writing for the past few months (while doing my day job, of course). I played around with trying to sell it to various publications, but I just don’t have the stomach for begging people to run something that’s very important to me: A part of my life story I didn’t know existed until now. The rest of the piece—some 19k words—will be coming shortly likely on @substack in a more professional format. Stay tuned I never met my grandfather, Vincent "Vinny" Pica. What little I knew about him through snippets of conversation wasn't good: He was a degenerate gambler and a deadbeat dad who wanted nothing to do with my mom and grandmother when he left their tenement in a South Bronx to shack up with another woman. But he was more than that, as I only recently discovered. My grandfather was a close friend and business partner of the American Mafia’s boss of all bosses, the infamous Vito Genovese. The business Vinny Pica fronted for with the namesake of the most powerful organized crime outfit in the country was an important cog in the family’s vast criminal enterprise for decades. In fact, based on my research, Vinny Pica was pretty famous, or shall I say infamous, for a time. His ties to the highest levels of organized crime were investigated by the FBI, numerous grand juries and covered in The New York Times, The Miami Herald, and newspapers throughout New Jersey in the late 1960s, 70s and ‘80s, my research shows. They all detailed his varied relationship with Vito Genovese, the money he made from that association, whispers of his own membership in the Mob, and how his shipping business was able to corner dock-work in the mobbed-up NYC area ports. Again, I didn't know any of this until recently, when a chance conversation led me to find out more about the grandfather I’ve never met, and his association with organized crime. For the past year or so, I’ve been combing through public census records, divorce papers, newspaper articles, and interviewing long lost family members. What I've been unraveling is more than a story of a man who ran with gangsters during the heyday of the American Mob. It’s also a morality tale: How poverty, family dysfunction, and greed motivated Vinny Pica’s life choices and damaged some of those who came into his orbit, most of all his children. It all begins in the Italian enclave of New York's Greenwich Village at the height of the Great Depression….