The Godfather’s Daughter

Jean was there the day representatives of the Gambino family joined the Brunos for a late-’70s Easter dinner. They ate baked lamb, antipasti and macaroni on the family’s best china. They drank anisette after dinner. Then they started speaking Sicilian, of which Jean knew enough to understand words like “detective.” She left the room.

Years later, she realized she’d witnessed what law enforcement circles consider a historic summit — the day her father gave his permission to the Gambinos to sell drugs in his South Jersey territory. “This was the boss of bosses who was asking,” she says. “Some requests you can’t say no to.”

As it turned out, her father was probably dead from the moment the Gambinos came through his door. His assassination seemed likely if he refused them permission to sell drugs; the plot that killed him allegedly came from within his own crime family when he ceded such a profitable operation to New York. After his death, organized crime in Philadelphia was never the same. Joey Merlino stood Bruno’s old “Make money, not headlines” credo on its head, swaggering down Broad Street and turning himself into a kind of celebrity gangster as Angelo — and Jean — slowly faded from view.

On a chilly November morning, Jean Bruno turns up in her attorney’s office wearing a mischievous grin and a wildly colorful jacket screened with Andy Warhol prints of Marilyn Monroe. Today she means business — her lipstick rouge rubbed all the way into her cheeks, her blond hair whipped perfectly into a crest, like a dollop of butter. It seems almost strange to see her outside the walls of her Snyder Avenue home. But it is somehow fitting that today she’s shuffled out to a Center City high-rise only to deal with the past.

Jean’s brother Michael, her only sibling, died in 2000; her mother, Sue, died this past July, meaning the final dispensation of her father’s fortune is under way. But according to Jean, an independently managed trust fund that she says should total at least $1.2 million holds only $650K. Jean is due half of whatever money’s available; the other half goes to her brother’s heirs.

Then there is the matter of Marilyn Monroe.

One day, when Jean was around 18, she found her mother sitting in front of a mirror, trying on jewelry. The jewels, Sue told her, had once belonged to Monroe. They included sapphire and diamond bracelets, aquamarine rings and emerald earrings. Jean’s father, Sue said, got them from Joe DiMaggio; the retired baseball great and by then heartsick ex-husband of Monroe had a friendly relationship with Philadelphia’s godfather. If the story Jean tells is true, it seems DiMaggio sold the blond bombshell’s baubles to the mob boss under the agreement he could buy them back if he and Monroe remarried. “My mother told me that all the jewelry would be mine when she passed,” Jean says.