The kingdom begins to crumble

With Elsa back home in Canada, my parents relocated the Cincinnati, Ohio, my mother’s birthplace. They bought a three-bedroom house in a new suburb on Dailey Rd. It was a nice neighborhood and my parents were considered the richer couple on the block. I am not sure why they chose to go to Ohio, but I am guessing it was the only place my mother felt safe at the time. By June of 1958, my mother was pregnant with my brother, Umberto Jr.

For the next year, my father did not spend a lot of time at home, I am not sure what he did or where he did it. I do know that he had taken a vow to find the killers of my grandfather. What he did to see that vow through, I do not know, nor do I want to know. My brother was born in February of 1959 and for the time being, they lived the life of a typical family in the suburbs. While they still fought a lot, my father was gone enough for my mother to deal with the situation. She became pregnant with me in May of 1960 and I was born in January of 1961.

At that time, from the outside looking in, our family appeared to be the perfect American couple. Nice house, nice cars, nice clothes, and lacking for nothing. That was just one view. On the inside, the story was entirely different. The arguments were an everyday occurrence when my father was home. They fought about everything from money to yard care. I am pretty sure though, money was never a real factor. I remember my father driving a new car every couple of month. I also remember seeing cash in the basement wrapped in aluminum foil. We would vacation in Florida and Atlantic City.

As a coping mechanism, my mother began to drink. I honestly cannot recall a time when alcohol did not play an important part in my mother’s day-to-day life when I was a young child. I also remember the escalation of the arguments. The stress level when my father was at home was thick. At the age of four I remember being in the bathtub and hearing my father scream that my brother and I were not his real children and my mother blocking the bathroom door as he threatened to kill us. My mother’s fear was growing and it would be just a matter of time before everything would collapse.

What I did not understand as a young child is that my mother was also being pressured from another source, federal agents. They harassed her to tell them what my father was doing. Not only was she afraid of my father, but she was beginning to fear for her life and the lives of my brother and I. She quietly decided to seek out an attorney.