The Simone Domilici Investigation

Family lore says great-grandfather Simone Domilici was a mafioso running numbers in Red Hook. Here is what the primary sources actually show.

A live, ongoing investigation into family lore vs. the documentary record. This is the flagship long-form piece on this site — treat it as a narrative, not a data table. It has a real arc: a family story, primary-source verification, and one question that remains genuinely, honestly open. Simone’s 1913 and 1919 crossings sit inside the southern Italian exodus of 1880–1924; that wave, and what it does and does not prove about motive, is on Why they moved.

The documented household behind Simone — Nunzio, Vincenzo, the Tomasello marriage, and the Carini Mineo line — is in the Family box at the bottom of this page.

The family lore

Family oral history holds that great-grandfather Simone Domilici was "mafioso" — specifically, a capo overseeing a numbers (illegal lottery) operation, with his daughter Sadie working as a runner under him.

Who Simone Domilici actually was, on paper

🟢 b. Feb 11, 1885, Bagheria, Palermo, Sicily
🟢 First arrived NY April 5, 1913 (age 28, departing Palermo)
🟢 Returned to Sicily at some point; re-arrived NY June 14, 1919 (departing Naples aboard the ship Francesca, last residence Messina)
🟢 Naturalized April 16, 1926, Eastern District of NY, residing at 117 Harrison St., Brooklyn — self-declared occupation: Longshoreman
🟢 1930 census: still at 117 Harrison St.; occupation confirmed again as Longshoreman, industry "Pier"
🟢 m. Girolama Tomasello ("Mary" in English-language records); 6 children with documented birthdates: Mary (1910), Lucy (1914), Domenica/Minnie (1916), Casimino (1919), Sadie (1921), Catherine (1924)
🟢 d. May 17, 1940, Long Island College Hospital, Brooklyn — cause: coronary occlusion + terminal bronchopneumonia, 4-day hospital stay, explicitly certified as NOT accident/homicide/suicide/suspicious. Occupation at death listed as Butcher.
🟢 Buried St. John's Cemetery, May 20, 1940. Funeral director: John A. Torregrossa, 161 DeGraw St., Brooklyn.

The occupation timeline (resolved)

1926 and 1930 both independently confirm longshoreman — this validates the core of the family story. The butcher trade only appears at the very end of his life (1940), likely a late-career shift, possibly health-related given his documented cardiac decline.

The neighborhood

🟢 117 Harrison St. sits in what was called "South Brooklyn" in this era — the continuous waterfront immigrant district running from the Columbia Street/Atlantic Basin piers through Red Hook (later split by real estate rebranding into Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Columbia St. Waterfront District). Documented as ILA Local 1814 territory; Columbia Street itself was lined with "bakeries, butchers, and bars" serving dockworkers — the exact trade Simone himself later took up.

🟢 This specific territory was controlled through the 1920s by Frank "Frankie" Yale, a major historical organized-crime figure (gave Al Capone his start in Red Hook) — until Yale's assassination in July 1928. Control of the broader Brooklyn territory then consolidated toward Salvatore D'Aquila and then Manfredi "Al" Mineo — coincidentally sharing a surname with a confirmed direct-ancestor line (Mineo family of Carini/Bagheria), though NO documented link between the historical Mineo and the ancestor Mineo family has been established — ruled out, common Palermo-province surname only.

What's confirmed vs. what remains open

🟢 Confirmed: occupation (longshoreman, in the right era, right pier territory), family composition, cause of death (natural), neighborhood's real organized-crime history in that exact window.

🟡 Plausible but unconfirmed: the specific "capo running the numbers" claim. No arrest record, court filing, or explicit criminal-affiliation document has been found. His documented economic profile — rented tenement, 8-person crowded household, continued manual labor into his mid-40s — does not match the visible economic elevation typically shown by actual capo-level figures of that era (e.g., Mineo's documented "produce importer" front and hotel/apartment-building residences). This argues against the specific rank claim, while not ruling out a smaller, informal role — common for working-class men supplementing wages during this period.

⚪ Unresolved leads, worth pursuing:

The two naturalization witnesses, Ferdinando Di Nunzio (carpenter, 175 9th St.) and Domenico Casimano (tailor, 50 Strong Place) — no further information found on either.
A citation to the Wisconsin State Journal, July 10, 1984, attached to a related record (Mario Majale) — content not yet retrieved (paywalled).
Grand-uncle Vincenzo Domilici (b. ~1931, d. Nov 22, 2020) — Simone's youngest documented child, too young to have been personally involved. Family memory from that generation was not captured on paper.
A possible Bagheria-born cousin of Sadie's generation (same rare surname, same hometown, died in Brooklyn in 2017) — not contacted. Living descendants of that household are not named here.