The girl stepped onto the streets. She looked different from all the well groomed, well worn women of the mafia you're so used to. She looks familiar to some of you, but you don't know her. She starts speaking:

I grew up as a normal little girl in a middle-class family upstate, dreaming of going to the city, with its lights and flashy costumes, and being on Broadway or the pictures.

My father’s parents originally settled in the city along with the other Dutch immigrants of their time, but the expense and competition that came with living there drove them upstate just before my father was born. My father himself has only been to the city once—the time when he met my mother.

My mother never spoke of her past. Her childhood seemed so mysterious that I was beginning to wonder whether she actually existed at all before she met my father.

When I was 17, my father passed away suddenly. A car accident, they said. The day after the funeral, my mother moved us to Boston to stay with my father’s sister, and that’s when she told me about her life before my father:

My mother maiden name was Bateman, Anna Bateman. Her mother, Leiah “Leiahyk” Nathanelle-Petrelli, had been a boss in a Chicago-based family under the Don Iota, later Godfather of New Orleans. Shortly before my mother was born, Leiah relocated along with the rest of her mafia Family to New Orleans following the Godfather’s appointment. My grandmother tried her best to raise my mother and fulfill her duty with the Family at the same time, but before my mother became of age, my grandmother went down along with the rest of New Orleans in a war between families.

My mother was brought back to New York and raised in the Italian neighborhood of the city. At the age of 18, she tried to follow her mother’s footsteps and was kindly taken in by the sotto capo of a Family—the son of a friend of Leiah’s back in her Chicago days. Anna was set to dedicate her life to her Family just as Leiah had before giving birth to Anna. However, before she could fully launch into her career as a member of her family, she met a boy. Richard van Hemel, a Dutch boy from the upper middle-class suburbs upstate who came to the city in search for either work or adventure or love. They fell in love and she became pregnant with me, she knew what happens when a woman tried to balance her two “families” and she knew what it was like to grow up without a mother. So she left, moved upstate with my father and raised me like just another little girl in the suburbs. She never uttered a word to me, or anyone else, about her past or her brief life as a gangster in order to protect me.
“Now,” she told me, “it’s your turn to make something of yourself. You have to pledge your allegiance to a Family and a Don and be loyal to them no matter what happens. You’re almost of age and, without your father, you have to take care of yourself. It’s time for you to be the person I wanted to be, but never had the chance to become.”

So I ventured to the city by train. A young girl--half-Dutch, half-Italian, with a Dutch surname—off to find a family to serve and be loyal to, with nothing more than a bag, the little cash my mother gave me, the clothes on my back and the last words my mother said to me before I left: “Remember, Alessandra, do not make the same mistakes I did. Always put your Family first. Don't make the same mistake as I did.”

Cassi listens as the young woman stands speaking of her history. Once the woman has finished Cassi straightens up.

I wish you the best of luck young lady. I hope you find all in this life that you're seeking.

Cassi reaches for her hand, shakes it and then continues about her way.