Anna Genovese (formerly Vernotico, née Giovaninna Petillo; 28 October 1905 – January 1982) was an Italian-American businesswoman in the Italian mob and the second wife of mobster Vito Genovese of the Genovese crime family and the Costello crime syndicate. She played a key role in Manhattan's drag bar scene in the middle of the 20th century.
Early life
Genovese was born Giovaninna "Anna" Petillo, the eldest child of Italian-Catholic immigrants, Aniello Vincenzo Petillo from Risigliano, Naples, and Concetta y Cassini Genovese, a cousin of Vito's. His brother Carmine lived with the Petillos after immigrating in 1910. Her siblings were Nicolas, Peitra, Ferdinand, and Mario Petillo. She has been erroneously listed as a sibling to mobster David Petillo; they were cousins. In the spring of 1924, at age 19, Genovese married her first husband, Gerard "Gerry" Vernotico. According to Kate Harmon, Genovese's great niece, to whom the Mob Queens researchers spoke and have on record at 10:55 in Chapter 1 of their podcast, Anna's marriage "was not looked upon kindly" by her family as Vernotico was considered a man of little means; a census record notes that he was a carpenter, though in reality he was a baker in New York City's Little Italy. In 1927, Genovese and Vernotico had a daughter, Marie, and moved a few blocks north of Anna's West Houston Street home to a tenement apartment next to an elevated train on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. In a 1930 census, she is listed as a housewife, and Gerard as a carpenter, though grand-niece Harmon states that Gerard was in fact a baker at a bakery in Little Italy and "had nothing." Court records show that at the same time, Anna had been working evenings in one of the clubs in the Washington Square Park neighborhood, near or in Greenwich Village.
Marriage to Vito Genovese
It is thought that Vito Genovese, a fourth cousin of Anna's, was responsible for or involved with the murder of Gerard Vernotico in March 1932. Two weeks later, Anna and Vito, whose first wife had also just died, were married. Anna was six months pregnant. The couple's first luxury apartment was located at 43 Fifth Avenue, a decadent Beaux Arts building, completed in 1905, with limestone pillars, a marble lobby, and wrought-iron balconies. The building would later be a place of residence for Marlon Brando.
Two years into their marriage, Vito killed gangster Ferdinand "The Shadow" Boccia. A year later, in 1935, Vito bought Deep Cut, a 1928 mansion on a property in Middletown Township, New Jersey. Around the same time, New York Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey started cracking down on organized crime, which bode poorly for Vito once Boccia's body was pulled from the Hudson River in 1937, as one of the hit men he hired for the job admitted to police that the commission had come from Vito.
Standing accused of the Boccia murder and other crimes, such as racketeering, Vito decided to flee the U.S., leaving the bulk of his business up to Anna. She was left to help formulate a source of revenue for the crime family at a time when most in the nation were struggling severely, as it was mid-Great Depression.
At this vital time, Anna's path intersected with an unexpected set of social phenomena: the repeal of Prohibition, but the institutionalization of "Gay Prohibition," during which it became common practice for law enforcement officers to stalk, harass, entrap, and arrest people in—or suspected to be in—the LGBTQ+ community. It was not uncommon for queer people or those suspected as such to be removed from bars, and, moreover, for bars to be raided when suspected homosexual activity was being condoned. Bars could even lose their liquor licenses for serving gay patrons. It was all the more risky and rebellious for Anna to create havens for queer people, but she took on the effort, ultimately effectively blocking police efforts to persecute the LGBTQ+ community, her means being the power and influence of the mob.
Business ventures
While raising three children (her biological daughter with Gerard, Marie; Nancy, Vito's daughter with the late Donata Ragone; and Phillip, her son with Vito), Anna also ran nightclubs and gay and drag bars in Lower Manhattan, whose profits she siphoned to the crime syndicate and Vito, exiled in Italy, who invested in Benito Mussolinin's fascist party and cocaine for Mussolini's son.
Club Caravan
Anna's first club, Club Caravan, opened in 1939 at 578 West Broadway. Singers and other kinds of performers provided the entertainment, individuals like drag king Malvina Schwartz, also known as Buddy "Bubbles" Kent, whose 1983 Lesbian Herstory Archives oral history chronicles her time spent there.