Slander in the First Degree

Frank DeMayo: For the Record

A good practice for genealogists is to google the name of an ancestor to see if anything about him has been published on the web. A search for the name Frank DeMayo turned up some rather disconcerting information as to Frank “Chee Chee” DeMayo’s involvement in the Kansas City Mafia. A few of these web sites are mere repeats of the text that comes straight from a Wikipedia article, which cites no sources but offers a link to The American Mafia, "Kansas City Crime Bosses." This web site actually reports that “though some believe he rose to lead the Kansas City Mafia in the late 1920s, it seems unlikely because others had power and prestige in the city during that period.”¹

Now I don’t normally write about the negative things in my ancestors’ lives. However, this allegation of a Mafia connection has been passed off as fact and published to the world. I feel that reference to Uncle Frank’s involvement in the Mafia needs to equally be addressed.

Uncle Frank’s niece, Nancy, knew him when she was a little girl. She had also heard talk of his imprisonment in the Atlanta Penitentiary, though she knew not his crime. A search for Frank DeMayo on Footnote.com turned up an old Bureau of Investigation case in which Uncle Frank had been investigated for bootlegging. It mentioned a prison sentence in the Leavenworth Penitentiary. Nancy obtained a copy of his Leavenworth prison file, which made no mention of the Mafia. I later found newspaper articles out of Missouri detailing his trial prior to his incarceration in Leavenworth. Although the articles report that he was eventually found guilty of violating Prohibition, he was never connected to the Mafia. We still do not know why he was sentenced to the Atlanta Pen.

While it is true that the Mafia didn’t really gain power in this country until the days of Prohibition, when they accumulated a vast amount of funds through bootlegging, the newspaper describes Frank “Chee Chee” DeMayo only as the Bootlegger King of the second largest bootlegging ring in the country. For Wikipedia and its copycat web articles, to report that Uncle Frank was a member of the Mafia is nothing short of slander. This serves to set the record straight.

Nancy concedes, “I just know that the man we read about in those reports is not the same Uncle Frank that I knew. Yet bootlegging is not the worst thing that happened in those days. He must have really repented and changed his life. I choose to remember the man I knew my Uncle to be during my childhood. He was a loving husband to Aunt Bess, a good father to [his son], and a great grandfather to [his grandchildren]. He was generous and kind to my family (and he loved dogs).”

¹http://www.onewal.com/maf-b-kc.html, par. 3.