In 1893 Western Sicily, Gaetano DiGiovanni, twenty-five years old, foresees a day when he abandons his turbulent, hard-scrabble life in the Palermo Province hinterlands for the promise of America. His fourteen-and-a-half-year-old wife, Angelina Bucaro DiGiovanni, is at his side. Gaetano becomes an old-style Mafiosi "man of respect," called Don Tano Baiocco in Sicily and New Orleans. For the next half century, "Tano Baiocco" guides his burgeoning...