The memoir began as a compass to my secretive and criminal family history. This is the story of a woman whose survival is wedged between shameless love and immobilizing fear of her father.
As Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's best friend and business partner from 1937 until his death in 1947, my father, Allen Smiley acclaimed Ben Siegel. He was seated next to Ben the night he was murdered.
Faced with an identity meltdown ten years after Dad died I implored his friends, associates, historians, FOIPA, Immigration and Naturalization Agency, and Archives of the Department of Justice, to build the branches of my family tree. Along with this irreversible journey, I suffered disgrace, rage, and Dad's ghostly disapproval as I delved into the FBI files and discovered the family secrets: his gambling addiction, criminal activities, imprisonment, attempt at reformation, and the vendetta the government placed on him for not cooperating as an informant. I could be mute about the subject, or expose what I know because I've made the family history mine.
Incorporated within stories of discovery are government surveillance records, newspaper articles, court testimony, and criminal activities that defamed his reputation and our family. As the research escalates, the reader is taken inside the transformation of my identity. Once liberated from Dad's paranormal disapproval of my investigation, the book is written.
After convincing the Mob Dad wasn't going to cooperate with the government when they offered him immunity, the Mob honored and protected him using amusing, violent, and illegal means. Dad served the organization until he took his own life in 1982. It's taken twenty years to publish the book. This is a startling, yet inspirational look inside the struggle of a gangster's daughter to understand her father's allegiance to the Mob.
I hope you will consider my point of view; men in organized crime bare a life and death burden as fathers.
