The Man Between Two Worlds
This book is about family ties, a novel about the Mafia and emigration from an impoverished Campania at the end of the 1800s to America during the Roaring Twenties; but, above all, it's an affectionate and passionate journey in search of one's own roots and in the rediscovered memory that makes itself history; over all this hangs the diffused and looming shadow of Salvatore Lucania in the age of Lucky Luciano, the boss of bosses who marked the passage from American gangs to the "Cosa Nostra", transforming it into an international holding of crime.
Peppe Cioffi, dirt poor, the son of charcoal burners, arrived in New York when he was nineteen, with a cardboard suitcase and lots of dreams, cloaked in bitterness; he had worked in the dockyards of the port in Manhattan, where "business" was managed by organized crime; he had been personally touched by poverty in the neighborhoods and alleys of Little Italy, when the Italians were called "the white blacks"; on the bottom rung of the social ladder, they were even poorer than the Irish.
The boy from the Campania, however, proved right away that he was alert and thoughtful; after an adventurous life, he came into contact with and had acquired the trust of the Black Hand, the Italo-American gangster organization. In the beginning of his "career" he became friends with a young Sicilian called "Lucky" Luciano.
Through the years, Peppe Cioffi, the patriarchal grandfather in author's novel, was able to create a position for himself, return to Italy, get married and earn respect in Cervinara as a draper. His past emerges at times; Lucky Luciano still trusts him from a distance and wants to meet with him when he returns to Italy. They are both keeping a secret, the book's true key, unprecedented and incredible.