Books: Goddaughter

MAFIA PRINCESS by Antoinette Giancana and Thomas C. Renner Morrow; 304 pages; $15.95

When Chicago Mobster Sam Giancana was executed gangland-style in his Oak Park, Ill., home in 1975, FBI agents were gleeful. At last they had a chance to search the house that Giancana used as his command post for Mafia operations. But when they swung open the front door, the investigators were astonished. Instead of the expected depot of pistols and machine guns, they found a cache ofobjets d’art and religious mementos, including a photograph of Giancana having a private audience with Pope Pius XII. Later, when this trove was sold at auction, Giancana’s daughter Antoinette told prospective bidders: “Just look at these beautiful things. They show what a warm, sensitive person my father was.”

Still, as Antoinette has recounted to Co-Author Thomas Renner, growing up as a Mafia princess was scarcely an elevating experience. Her first taste of the savagery that pervaded Giancana’s world came when she knocked over his pet objet, a kitschy female figurine clutching her wind-blown skirt. Giancana’s response was to beat his young daughter with his belt.

Though Giancana was responsible for untold murders, he was a stickler for social form. Dinner guests were ceremoniously presented to Antoinette. She was introduced, for example, to a “Mr. Humphreys,” although “the rest of the world might know him as Murray the Camel.” Giancana offered a silent prayer before the lavish meals the family shared with notorious killers. Few guests could be counted on as regulars at Giancana’s table. Some periodically vanished into penitentiaries. Others were removed by hired guns. Yet Giancana never failed to bring his family to the wake of a fellow mobster, even when the deceased had fallen victim to one of his own enforcers.

The playboy mobster conducted a decade-long affair with Entertainer Phyllis McGuire while the FBI tuned in via bugs in the bedroom. When he was not playing, he proved a puritanical father. He told Antoinette that “only whores go into modeling” when she tried to become a model. He halted her love affair with a Greek doctor by ordering his enforcers to beat him up.

Though such glimpses into Mafia domestic life are rare, they appear eerily familiar. Indeed, the Mafia princess bears a family resemblance to another victim of unbounded evil, the princess of the Kremlin. In Svetlana Alliluyeva’s 1967 memoir Twenty Letters to a Friend, Stalin’s daughter tells similar tales of disappearing family friends, and her father often made a show of mourning those he had ordered killed. Svetlana too was forbidden to pursue her chosen career, in this case, literary scholarship, and was denied her first lover, a Jew. Though both daughters ultimately escaped from their palatial prisons, they remain damaged women, their reminiscences suffused with the anguish of unrequited love. Most pitifully, Antoinette has dedicated her lamentable life story “with loving remembrance” of Sam Giancana. —By Patricia Blake