The last volume in the family trilogy was The Gangs of New York , illustrated with drawings of tough, turn of the century thugs and police, and of the three the book most relevant.
Although Jews don't really have godparents, my parents always called Charlie (to the right of my father in the photo) my godfather. But for me he was an untold story from my father's childhood on the East Side. He was like my grandparents, all of them dead before I was born, but unlike them rarely spoken about, an enigmatic presence from the hidden foundations of my life. His middle brother was shot down in the street, machine-gunned, according to my father, and the youngest brother Natie electrocuted in Sing Sing. My mother said Natie was such a handsome boy, but it was she, from a small town in New Jersey, that put an end to my father and Charlie.
The day that Natie was electrocuted, I was already old enough to take credit in the street for the big blocky letters in the New York Daily Mirror that headlined his death. When I was a little older I read about him in Reader's Digest in an article by Fulton Oursler called the "Reader's Digest Murder Case". Wearing halloween masks, he and two others held up a Reader's Digest Truck and shot the driver. During their trial, they were caught planning an escape by a Yiddish speaking guard. By the end of the appeal process, Natie had had the longest stay of execution in the history of Sing Sing. And that was also in the Mirror.
Charlie himself, it turned out, was in the jewelry business; so in the last years of her life, perhaps so close to the fact of her own death, my mother relented, making way for a reconciliation between Charlie and my father, who had grown up, virtually a brother to Charlie and Natie and their middle brother who had buried his "nose" in books and rose to become a lieutenant in the Delmont Mob.