Unfortunately, America seemed not to want Joey’s family to feel like they belonged. They settled in Bensonhurst, a quickly growing Italian and Jewish settlement so far south in Brooklyn Joey grew up joking it was easier to go down around the South Pole to get to work in Manhattan than it was to fight the traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. The community was insular; they hardly left; they found themselves unwelcome in any area where the majority population was not Italian. Joey’s father took a job on a construction crew that spent more time hanging precariously from ropes in the air than digging in the earth. When they dug, it was to chisel out the landscape, to tame and iron flat the hills of Manhattan and the bigger Brooklyn settlements. Progress in New York was to be industry: buildings covering every square inch of the already-bursting islands.

Joey, though his parents filled his head with their dreams for him—be a doctor, be a scientist, own a business, bring us grandchildren—found that though he had grown up there, America accepted him only under strict conditions. Stay with your own kind; take the jobs we do not want. The American dream would have to be gleaned, bought, or stolen.

As soon as he was sixteen, Joey joined his father and a team of other barrel-chested, foul-mouthed, big-hearted Sicilian men who spent their days constructing the city. Joey finished every day caked in brick dust. He walked home with his father through the rows of immigrant homes and each day he could feel the disappointment rising off his father like a fever.

Over the course of those walks home Joey grew into his adult form, which would be tall and broad, with straight shoulders and arms crisscrossed with ropes of hardworking muscle. Joey’s nose lengthened and his eyes sharpened. And as they did, he began to evolve out of his little boy’s empathy for his father. You brought us here, he imagined saying. This is your fault!

Joey’s ears also began to pick up more sound; he started listening to the hum of rumors that sustained the construction crew as they raised roofs and dug foundations. It was said that there were organizations in Manhattan; small hubs of Italian men with real power, who walked where they wanted. Who ate at beautiful restaurants; not just Italian ones, but American steakhouses; small cafés where the owners served delicacies from their own homelands: spiced meats wrapped in pastry, raw fish with gingered dressings. These men did not live in poor facsimiles of the villages back home. They lived in America.

Because Joey was young and shimmering with potential, it was not hard for him to wend his way into the good graces of Tommy Fianzo, who recognized in Joey a combination of determination and canniness that would serve him well in the intestinal New York streets.