The Simone Domilici Investigation

A live, ongoing investigation into family lore vs. the documentary record. This is the flagship long-form piece for the 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.

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 (the grandmother of the researcher) 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 (see notable-connections.md, "Ruled Out").

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, but a living link to family memory who died within the last decade. His own children/survivors, if locatable, may hold direct oral history never captured on paper.
• A possible living relative: Nunzio Domilici Jr. — son of a Nunzio Domilici (b. 1925, Bagheria — same hometown, plausible generation match to a cousin of Sadie's) who died in Brooklyn in 2017. Public professional profile exists; not yet contacted.

Editorial note for the site

This page should stay honest about the unresolved question rather than resolving it either way for dramatic effect. The value of this piece is that it shows real primary-source methodology — census records, death certificates, naturalization petitions — being used to test a family story, landing on "partially confirmed, partially still open" rather than a tidy ending. That's more interesting and more credible than a neat answer would be.