Family Secrets Revealed in Never Tell Our Business to Strangers

Author:  Jennifer Mascia
Title:  Never Tell Our Business to Strangers
Publisher:  Villard

Assuming you live long enough, there will come a moment when you realize that, no matter how nosy you were as a child, there are things you do not know about your parents. Jennifer Mascia found that out with a vengeance—and it's the theme of her memoir, Never Tell Our Business to Strangers.

"I was five when the FBI came for my father," her story begins. Children don't know any better, so when her mother explained to little Jennifer that they had a new last name and her father would now be known as "Frank" outside the house, she just accepted it. It wasn't until years later that Jennifer realized her family was "on the lam" and the name change was part of their attempts to avoid arrest.

As it turned out, Jennifer's father was "connected" but a Mafia princess she's not. Well, there was the time Jennifer's mom took her to the mall to max out their credit cards, since they weren't going to pay the bill anyway. "You're going bankrupt? Isn't that bad?" "Well, it can be ... but we've been using fake Social Security numbers." Larceny, fraud, drug dealing—it was all part of everyday life for the Mascias.

For the most part, though, crime didn't pay … at least, not very well. As Jennifer described it, "… money came into my parents' lives in big, unaccounted-for bundles and flowed between their cigarette-stained fingers like fine Long Island sand." Sometimes Johnny Mascia tried to be a law-abiding citizen, running a carpet cleaning business or working as a painter. But when times got tough he shipped boxes of cocaine to Jennifer's aunt in Miami (by FedEx, of all things!) and received boxes of cash in return. It was a hard life, full of insecurity and always teetering on the edge of disaster.

Jennifer, now with the Metropolitan News desk of The New York Times, tells her story well. Her parents, both now deceased, leap off the page in all their larcenous glory. The extended family, too—that's family with a small "f" not "Family" as in The Godfather—are drawn with a reporter's eye for detail and shaded with affection. Regardless of their habits, crimes, or affairs, these people were (and are) the author's real family.  However much they swear (which they do a lot, by the way), scream, fight, slap, and stomp out the door, they love each other. As Jennifer's mother wrote in her last letter to her daughter (after explaining in detail how to defraud Social Security, the landlord, and various credit card companies), "I hope you remember that we three were a family, a real one that sat down to eat dinner together, that explored and traveled together, even if we didn't go to the Grand Canyon, and showed each other the real love we felt."

Not only did Jennifer remember, she shares her memories of that love with her readers. While she was warned as a child to Never Tell Our Business to Strangers, doing so resulted in a curiously fascinating tale.


**This review first published on March 9, 2010.