Tufted Mafiosi of Little Italy

by Ben D'Andrea

This is a factual report, not a story. It summarizes my investigation into what happened to that band of pals who got dubbed, as a gibe at their Italian descent, the Farabutti: the crooks. Now just a faint brushstroke on the vast jumbled canvas of collective memory, they were once as famous as crime boss Don Vito Corleone, who was only a character in a novel.

The very real people of my field study crashed into the news cycle during the national vaccination campaign against that first coronavirus disease that rampaged worldwide thirty years ago — quaintly described back then as a once-in-a-century emergency. My report sets out for the first time the whole truth about their bizarre predicament. Three decades and twice as many viral pandemics since then, I found each of the Farabutti where I expected: in the immigrant quarter I grew up in. That’s where I began my quest for the truth long buried under the rubble of conspiracy theories.

Sure enough, recurring pandemics have emptied out my old neighborhood. At the once-bustling crossroads of Little Italy, Panificio Vesuvio stands empty and dilapidated. The bakery and café closed for good after either the third or fourth epidemic of zoonotic disease. I’ve lost track. (I could tell you a dozen stories about that bakery but this is a report, not a stroll down nostalgia lane.) Like a ghost trapped between now and the hereafter, as they say in stories, I walked past that old haunt to the end of the buckled street where a walkway bordered with full-blooming petunias and zinnias led to the front porch of the only well-kept house on the block.

Well acquainted with the old ways of the neighborhood, I knew better than to expect someone to answer a knock at the front door. I took the walkway along the side of the house to the backyard where Giuseppe (Joe) Zisconucci was surveying his vegetable garden. Now in his seventies, my main informant was whistling a tune among climber beans. Careful not to step on the zucchini, I introduced myself.

“I recognized you right away even after decades,” he said with a wrinkled smile. He remembered me as a rude ragamuffin, un ragazzaccio sgarbato, always talking back to the adults, probably, he conceded, to impress the ringleaders of my gang. “Why pretend we’re strangers?”

I was surprised at his insistence that I’d taken part in raids on his beloved cherry tree. But I’ll say nothing more about that since this report isn’t my defence against false accusations. It’s a record only of what really happened after Joe and his buddies got vaccinated during that first coronavirus pandemic. We chatted, and no sooner than politeness would allow, I turned his attention to an absurd allegation once levelled against him: as an Italian sorcerer he murdered his enemies simply by chanting a magic formula.

“I never mastered the correct spells even to ward off snow storms or aphids,” he said. “A single mispronounced word can bring on even worse disaster.”

Experienced investigators avoid the trap of going along with a joke as a substitute for a truthful answer. I pressed him: “You never practised the dark arts?”

“Like any respectable gardener, I whistle tunes to rev up the vegetables.” He raised a leathery workman’s palm to the green beans dangling from their vines. “Mainly Verdi choruses.”

Joe was front man for the Italian buddies who claimed that the coronavirus vaccine had caused a nasty side-effect. They accused public-health officials — immunologists, virologists, epidemiologists — of playing down the risks. I asked Joe to tell me his story from the beginning.

“In italiano o in inglese?” he asked.

“Yours to decide.”

I was relieved when he spared me the effort of translating his answers into English. In honor of the ethnographers of yesteryear, I scribbled down his replies long hand in a spiral-bound booklet instead of typing them out on a tablet or phone. And to be frank, Saturday-morning lessons in the basement classroom of an elementary school had pushed this reluctant boy up the bilingual ladder no higher than that low rung labeled Itinglish. Never was a more reliable means devised by well-meaning parents of pitting Italian syntax against its English counterpart. As in a battle between two crippled roosters, there could be no final victory, only a bloody draw. But I digress.

Joe and I sat at a small table in his basement kitchen. He poured me a tumbler of homemade wine, and offered me a peach. To refuse would have offended that most obliging of extroverts, Good Fellowship. Ethnographers must establish trust.

Sipping from his own glass of wine, Joe began his account back at the turning point of the global pandemic when a new vaccine brought hope that millions of lives worldwide could be saved. “Director Tony told us to get vaccinated, so we all did.” He was referring to advice from the leader at the time of the national institute of infectious diseases.

I bit into the juicy peach, my first in years. Nonstop rain and a mysterious fungus had recently destroyed the country’s stone-fruit orchards. The peach tree lovingly tended in a corner of Joe’s yard had dodged the fungus, but it had also escaped being torched, just for the thrill of it, by the gangs now terrorizing the neighborhood. His cherry tree, likewise unscathed in its own secluded corner, was never in mortal danger three decades ago from that band of schoolboys hungry not so much for ripe cherries as for the thrill of stealing them.

I took another sip of red wine. “You trusted the fellow Italian-American, the paesano, who rose to the top rank of his profession as Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States.”

“Esatto,” he said. Exactly. “He made good as the nation’s numero uno immunologist.”

“Though your good opinion changed.”

“We never resorted to name-calling or revenge.” Joe raised his right hand as if to swear an oath. “It wasn’t me and my friends who compared him to a certain Italian dictator.”

After taking another sip of delicious wine, I reassured him that my duty was to get to the naked facts, not to recycle rumors. My report would quote him verbatim. “What happened after you got vaccinated?”

“I woke up in the middle of the night with a crazy itch on my back. ‘It’s a tuft of prickles,’ my wife Connie said. ‘I warned you.’”

“Your wife’s also Italian?”

“Mm-hmm, but she was dead set against the vaccine, rest her soul, and no medical expert to the President, even if he happened to be a paesano, was going to tell her what to inject into her arm.”

Within days, three bristly tufts had fully sprouted on Joe’s back — spaced apart like the points of a triangle, not, as rumored, in the shape of a diabolical rune symbol. Back hair wasn’t listed in the vaccine leaflet as a side-effect, so he went to his doctor.

Doc Contagocce and Joe grew up together in Little Italy. Their folks hail from the same mountain town in Abruzzi. They call the good medico Trivu, short for Trivulzio. Is that a crazy name to get saddled with in America? I leave that to the honest reader’s discretion.

After inspecting the delinquent tufts of hair on his friend’s back, Trivu delivered a patient-friendly diagnosis: “Unusual.”

“Agreed,” said Joe. “But is it the vaccine?”

“Unlikely,” said the doc, under the spell of that proverb that counsels saying as little as possible to avoid lawsuits. Then, as a shadow fluttered across Joe’s face, Trivu risked two full sentences in that beige tone perfected by physicians far and wide, regardless of ethnic background: “Except for the sudden hair, you’re doing fine. When there’s a change, come back.”

The three tufts of hair on Joe’s back gradually thickened into mounds like sheep’s wool, soft yet springy. His hairdresser wife fought the good fight against them with scissors, razors, tweezers. Exhausted by the punishing duty, Connie eventually gave up: “Try electrolysis.”

At the dermatology clinic, a clutch of electrologists in pandemic masks took turns poking at Joe’s tufts. He felt like a freak in a carnival sideshow. Their verdict delivered by the chief electrode-wielder did little to encourage hope: “Try laser removal instead.”

Embarrassed by the freakish clumps on his back, Joe avoided the gym where he worked out with his paesani buddies. Instead of lifting weights, he took to wandering the streets. On one such journey he faced up to a hard fact: any chance of a solution to his humiliating condition meant stepping out of the shadows. He would have to go public.

As that realization sank in, Joe caught a glimpse of a familiar face. It was Guido hailing him from inside his barbershop. Joe had only just stepped in the door when the barber immediately spotted the tell-tale bumps under his friend’s shirt. He’d been taking panicked calls from the other paesani who’d also been vaccinated. They needed back trims.

“What about you?” asked Joe.

“I’m Italian on my babbo’s side only.”

Until then, it hadn’t occurred to Joe that his improbable hair growth could be related to ethnicity. But he knew, even without a university degree, how nebulous a concept that was. It might be a remote question for later. What mattered was that he was no longer alone. From then on, he’d be facing his woolly predicament together with his closest friends.

“I went for electrolysis — they won’t touch it.”

“Laser, waxing, tweezing, the drugstore depilatories — the guys have tried everything,” Guido said. “It sprouts again overnight.”

That evening in the basement of Guido’s Barbershop, Joe and his bodybuilding chums held a meeting. Though dressed in loose and loud Hawaiian shirts, they weren’t their usual swaggering selves. They’d adopted that festive style only to hide the mysterious bulges on their backs. In the unusually tense atmosphere, the long-time friends started arguing over what to call their advocacy group.

Good fellowship finally reestablished itself after a late-night vote on a compromise name: Paesani Against the Vaccine on Some Occasions, or PAVOSO. The main objection had been that pavoso means unlucky in Spanish, not Italian. Regardless, in just weeks PAVOSO enrolled thousands from across the continent, all men of Italian descent suffering from the same hairy after-effect.

Even as news of Little Italy’s advocacy group spread around the world, U.S. public-health authorities did nothing. “Their silence was a slap in the face,” Joe said. “To them we were just clowns, buffoni.” The mockery on social media turned dark and threatening.

Before I could refuse, my host had refilled my glass with his remarkable wine. I crammed a last quotation onto a page, then flipped to the next blank in my ethnographer’s notebook. The best part of Joe’s story was still to come. To steer him, I asked, “When did the insanity reach a point of no return?”

“Scaraffia was arrested for allegedly stealing a depilatory chemical from the slaughterhouse where he worked.”

One of the bodybuilding paesani, Scaraffia became famous as the Don of the Depilatory on account of his job dressing out beef carcasses. Allow me at this point to fill in what’s missing from Joe’s account with my own research. After being charged, Scaraffia made a public statement in his own defense: The only way to get rid of the “fluffy tufts” was to “murder [emphasis mine] the hair follicles.” That unfortunate joke counted as proof on social media of a criminal conspiracy: Scaraffia was diverting jugs of the slaughterhouse chemical to mobsters who then used it to strip off their own problem hair.

Joe’s advocacy group fought back with the facts. The supposed beef-carcass depilatory was really a Venetian treacle of medicinal herbs and molasses, which had been in Scaraffia’s family for over a century as an antidote to poison.

“How well did it work on your backs?”

Joe put his empty tumbler back on the table. “About as effective against sudden hair,” he said, “as wearing your clothes inside-out for three days.”

The day had grown hot. Joe asked me to pause the interview until after his nap. The wine had gone to my head. I lay down on a patio lounger under the shade of the cherry tree.

When I woke up, it wasn’t Joe’s face staring down at me.

“I’d know you anywhere,” said the elderly stranger, a straw hat perched on his head. “You’re one of the cherry bandits.”

“I never stole from this tree,” I said, defending myself sleepily against an accusation still circulating thirty years on.

“You’re Peppeddu — crazy name for a kid even in Little Italy,” he said. He claimed to have chased me down the street a dozen times in that first summer of the pandemic. “Unlike the other boys who only stuffed their pockets with cherries, you’d fill your lunch pail.”

“You’re mistaken,” I said. The shade of the cherry tree had relocated while I napped. I looked up at my accuser, squinting.

“‘Peppeddu, run!’” your buddies shouted back at you. “You always lagged behind because of your weight, if you’ll excuse my bad manners in mentioning it.”

He lent a hand to help me out of the lounge chair. Surprised at his strength, I learned later that Mr. Mimmo Finocchiaro wasn’t the only one of Joe’s workout buddies in their seventies who still lifted weights.

By sunset, all the rest of the once-tufted Farabutti had joined Joe and Mimmo in the backyard, their decades-long hangout. We sat on lawn chairs arranged in a circle. As I filled page after page of my field journal with their recollections, we feasted on what are now rare delicacies: peaches and cherries. There was also plenty of wine.

My notes, now digitized for convenience, capture every remembered detail of that most infamous episode of all: the storming of Guido’s Barbershop by a pro-vaccine mob. Days before, the shop had been spray-painted with long-forgotten ethnic slurs. “We knew something was going to happen,” Mimmo said. “We’d been vilified for months as anti-science charlatans sowing fear over a safe vaccine.”

Bodycam footage — later verified by the BBC — shows Mr. Sal Prezzolini facing off with a masked protester. The faceless agitator demands proof that the hair on Sal’s back isn’t sheep’s wool stuck on with superglue. In the jumpy video, a youthful Sal, with impressive musculature and a matinee-idol face, proves adept at defusing the crisis. I hesitate to add this next detail to my report, but the truth is that Sal’s wavy jet-black hair was slicked back like a mobster’s. A fact may sometimes resemble a cliché.

Sal stands squarely at the door to Guido’s Barbershop as the protesters surge forward. They’re waving signs. In the fast-moving, grainy confusion, their messages in block letters are still easy to decipher: “Vaccines for Justice & Peace” and “Mafiosi Go Home.” Calm yet forceful, Sal convinces the crowd that PAVOSO isn’t against the vaccine for everyone — just for some. The crowd slowly disperses.

The greatest challenge for Joe and his buddies was maintaining dignity in the face of relentless intimidation and ridicule. The Dante Alighieri Society accused them of mangling the Italian language. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Italian Republic denounced them as vaccine fearmongers. The Italian Embassy released a statement about agitatori risking the health of innocent citizens.

Meanwhile, Director Tony, Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States, ignored PAVOSO’s repeated invitations for a formal meeting with the paesani.

Banished from their local gym because of their revolting back hair, the Farabutti turned instead to group juggling to stay fit. Mr. Pepi Tartarotti had gone to circus camp one summer where he’d picked up the basics. In Joe’s backyard, he taught his chums what little he knew, and in a matter of months they’d progressed to juggling five-pound bowling pins, even knives.

I was among the gang of neighborhood kids who watched them practice in the backyard where the accusing cherry tree flourished. Later, we went to night performances in a parking lot ringed with dim street lamps. Standing in a circle, the paesani lobbed their bowling pins into the fading sky for their partners standing opposite to catch. In a dizzying aerial ballet, the pins sailed in great arcs across the circle from Joe to Mimmo, Pepi to Sal, Guido to Calogero, then back again.

For the finale, all but the three best jugglers stepped back from the circle. Joe, Mimmo, and Sal exchanged their bowling pins for globes lit from within. Up into the black summer night soared the multi-colored orbs, artificial moons illuminating the faces turned skyward. We stood awestruck until, the magic show over, the sound of chirping crickets pulled us children back into the world, scattered us back onto the streets.

That summer of the first coronavirus pandemic marked the start of our post-truth era. The flashing objects spotted above Vesuvio Bakery, twirling in the night sky like bowling pins, provoked widespread panic. Belief in primeval magic sprang back to life as if out of an ancient sepulchre. The Farabutti of Little Italy were undoubtedly sorcerers performing rites to summon evil spirits, accused with the same conviction of being in the pay of gangsters as of Lucifer himself.

The effect of the vaccine on Joe and his buddies slowly waned. The revolting poufs of hair on their backs shrank, disappeared at last without a trace. Welcomed back to their neighborhood gym, pariahs no more, they still kept up the juggling.

May I propose an explanation? Joe and his pals faced humiliation in one of the few honorable ways available to men of limited means: they formed a games club. Accuse me, at your discretion, of being an untrained ethnographer who, to borrow a phrase from an Italian wise guy, digs splendid holes in water — but that’s my theory.

Playing cards being too sedentary for fitness buffs, they learned instead to juggle bowling pins and knives as a way to heal their clobbered integrity. They had to do something to squelch the desire for vengeance. If the Farabutti had lived in our ancestral past, their purification ritual might have been to stick cockatoo feathers in their hair, and dance around a fire while waving streamers of grape leaves.

At the end of my remarkable evening with the paesani, they honored me with a gift: an autographed copy of their book on the art of juggling: L’arte del giocoliere. More than just a training manual, it’s also a guide for combating mis- and dis-information.

A certain delicatezza may have prevented my paesani friends from raising again the touchy subject of thieving schoolboys and ripe cherries. It was no doubt in the spirit of good fellowship that they inscribed their book to Peppeddu, Honorable Bandit.

Gentle amici, I’ve put imagination aside and stuck to the facts as expected in ethnographic fieldwork. Spinning yarns isn’t my vocation. The man free from all bias is of course a fiction, but I’m no more inclined to lie than the noble yet misconstruing jugglers of Little Italy. I love them for the magic they brought to our sorrowing neighborhood — for the enchantment through which a kid first felt redemption. I looked up to them, their heart and courage, during the worst of my dishonorable underworld career whose end I hoped to seal by meeting them again after my long absence from Little Italy. I wanted to be a witness, testify to facts, and restore a little of my own dignity.

Addendum to Report on the Forgotten Farabutti

Further to my research, I found no trace anywhere in Joe’s house of that parrot named Beppo reportedly capable of squawking the first four bars of the “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves.” Disappointing though it will be to those readers whose sentiments recoil from prosaic facts, Joe confirmed that he never owned an Amazon parrot, much less the remarkable vaudevillian of the deepfakes gone viral.

Some say the invented parrot had the real-world effect of humanizing its supposed owner when public scorn for him had reached its peak. A plausible enough view. But interpretive guesses and truth haven’t always enjoyed harmonious transactions. Of course, I have my biased opinion — as tempting to defend as it is impossible to prove. Gentle Friend, let’s put our faith — a risky term, I know, but here unavoidable — in the facts of my investigation.

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