
Every man in the restaurant stopped breathing the moment I answered the seventy-six-year-old Sicilian patriarch in a dialect he thought no American could understand. Mateo Vitiello—the most feared mafia boss in Chicago—stared at me as though I had just stepped in front of a loaded gun, while his father slowly tightened his hand around the silver head of his cane.
PART 2 Salvatore Vitiello’s cane struck the marble floor with a sharp metallic crack. No one moved. The sound seemed to remain beneath Bellori’s chandeliers long after the…








