The Godfather’s Daughter

“Who?” she asked.

“Frank Sinatra,” he said. “He showed up in the same bar I was in.”

“Oh, Daddy!” Jean responded. “Did you go up to him and say hello?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” her father replied, “he came up and said hello to me.”

But growing up in a house filled with secrets, as Jean Bruno did, leaves a mark. For the children of career criminals, “There is an understandable wish to not let in the heinous details,” says Frederic Reamer, a professor at the Rhode Island College School of Social Work in Providence who has studied thousands of inmates and their families, including members of organized crime. “The challenge is in reconciling all of the inherent contradictions. ‘My father was so loving toward me, but what was he when he left the house?’”

According to Reamer, the parent’s dual life can often lead a child to seek out a lover with whom he or she can play out the same dynamic of secret-keeping. Jean Bruno did. Ralph Puppo, her husband, preferred sex with men, and died of complications from AIDS.

When I ask her about this, Jean visibly stiffens and tries to change the subject. But later, she will tell me Puppo waited a year to kiss her, and that he declined to have sex on their wedding night. “I was naive,” she says. “My parents were very protective.”

Jean Bruno keeps her many photo albums in a series of wooden cabinets. Worn and faded, they nevertheless preserve vivid, archival images of a man who held his grandchildren like treasure. It is this Angelo Bruno that Jean wants to remember. So she tends to side with her father’s most ardent admirers, who claim, for instance, that Bruno’s organized crime family either did not commit murder or was loathe to do so, employing assassination only as a last resort. “He was never convicted of a murder,” she says. “And he was the most investigated man in the United States.”

The idea that he rose above murderousness seems ridiculous: Author Celeste Morello, whose Before Bruno documents the Philly mob’s early days, pored through FBI files to pin him with at least four homicides before he even became boss. Morello says Bruno rose to the top post by 1959 largely because he’d spent years sending a share of his bookmaking and gambling profits directly to New York, making lifelong allies of the Gambino family in the process. And he was just as shrewd about murder.

Coming home every day for dinner and helping his daughter with her homework, he didn’t kill the way he was killed — in a public blood-letting. He made people disappear, murdering them out of sight and dumping their corpses in remote locations. “All that ‘gentle Don,’ ‘docile Don’ stuff really only came up because of who came after him,” says Inquirer reporter George Anastasia, who has covered organized crime in Philadelphia for almost two decades. “You hear that stuff around South Philadelphia: ‘When Bruno was here, this was the safest street in the city.’ I don’t think that’s true. I think people want to spin that because it plays into the whole Godfather mystique. But that was fiction. They were gangsters, thieves, crooks, bandits. Bruno was probably a lot smarter than most of these people. But he was what he was.”