The Godfather’s Daughter

Jean wants to write a book, and the story she wants to tell is that her father never wanted to be the head of organized crime in Philadelphia. He only took the position because he knew he could keep the violence to a minimum and drugs out of the city. He briefly retired from control of the family, taking the reins back when his former underlings started dealing narcotics. He did not, she says, ever commit murder.

That’s her story, anyway, which she tells sitting in the living room that was once her father’s. She keeps the room dark, the front windows covered in paper designed to look like stained glass. “I want to clear my father’s name,” she says, her normally weak voice shaking with defiance. “Maybe then I can move on.”

For Jean Bruno, the moment innocence turned to suspicion came on the day of her First Holy Communion, when she was seven years old. She was standing outside her house with her cousin Marie, who didn’t usually wear dresses. When young Jean commented on this, Marie took it as an insult. She pointed to a nearby police car. “Maybe,” she shot back, “they’re going to arrest your father.”

It was the first time Jean wondered what her father did for a living. So she went inside and asked her mother. “He’s a broker,” Sue Bruno replied airily.

“There was always a free-floating anxiety around the house,” Jean says today. “I always had the sense that something was wrong. I remember in our first home, on Broad Street, some of the windows were painted black. I thought it was normal, but later I realized it was because he was running numbers.”

The Florida trips seemed normal, too, and it was only in later years that she realized all of the sudden family vacations were connected to her father’s “business.” Angelo Bruno endeavored to keep the truth of his life a secret from his only daughter for as long as he could, taking her for drives and serenading her with songs like “Bluebird of Happiness” as she perched giddily in the passenger seat. Sometimes, when he arrived home late at night with fellow gang members, he’d wake her. “Jeannie,” he’d say, “do you want to come downstairs and eat with the boys?”

She’d sit on his lap as he fed her macaroni. Then she’d scramble upstairs to bed and lie awake listening to the men’s conversations waft through the narrow halls. I may not understand what they’re talking about now, she’d think to herself, but someday I will.

She came to realize his power. “Honey,” he said one night when he came home, “you’ll never guess who I just saw.”