A beautiful bride in ivory silk and pearl standing beside her handsome groom outside Sacred Heart Cathedral in Chicago’s Little Italy, surrounded by family members dressed in their finest clothes for what appeared to be the social event of 1931.
But when antique dealer Katherine Romano examined the photograph under her restoration lamp in her vintage shop on Taylor Street, something in the background made her stomach turn cold with recognition and dread.
The photograph had been discovered 3 weeks earlier in the estate sale of Maria Benadetto, an elderly woman who had lived alone in a Bridgeport Brownstone for 60 years, surrounded by memories she never shared with neighbors or friends, among boxes of china, jewelry, and handwritten recipes in Italian.
Catherine had found this single wedding photograph wrapped in white lace and stored in a rosewood box that also contained a pearl rosary and a letter written in fading ink that simply read, “Some blessings become curses and some curses become the only way to survive.
” The inscription on the photograph’s ornate silver frame engraved in elegant script identified the couple as Antonio and Isabella Benadetto, June 14th, 1931.
United in love, protected by faith, surrounded by family, the bride’s dress was clearly expensive, made from imported silk with intricate bead work that caught the afternoon sunlight streaming through the cathedral’s stained glass windows.
The groom wore a perfectly tailored morning coat with a white rose bineer.
His dark hair sllicked back in the fashion of successful young men who had prospered during Prohibition’s golden years.
Dozens of wedding guests filled the frame.
Elderly women in black dresses and elaborate hats, children in sailor suits and white Mary Janses, men in dark suits who carried themselves with the confident bearing of those who controlled their own destinies.
Everyone was smiling, laughing, celebrating what appeared to be a perfect union between two families who had found prosperity and happiness in their adopted American homeland.
But standing directly behind the groom, barely visible unless you knew where to look, was a figure that shouldn’t have been there.
a man whose presence at this joyful celebration would have been impossible if the official records were accurate.
The man wore a dark suit identical to the other wedding guests, but his face was partially obscured by shadow, and his eyes seemed to be watching something beyond the camera’s range, as if he was expecting trouble that only he could anticipate.
Catherine had spent 15 years dealing in vintage photographs from Chicago’s Italian-American community, but she had never seen anything that made her hands shake the way they did when she realized who was standing behind Antonio Benadetto on what should have been the happiest day of his life.
The man in the shadows was Salvatoreé the ghost Torino, Vincent Torino’s older brother, who according to every newspaper account and police record Catherine could find, had been shot dead outside the Biograph Theater 6 months before this wedding took place.
The date stamp on the photographers’s studio mark confirmed Catherine’s worst fears.
Benadeto Castiano wedding, June 14th, 1931.
Sacred Heart Cathedral captured exactly 6 months and 12 days after Salvator Torino had supposedly been gunned down in a hail of bullets outside the movie theater where John Dillinger would meet his fate 3 years later.
Yet here he stood very much alive, his distinctive profile unmistakable, despite the careful way he had positioned himself to avoid direct exposure to the camera’s lens.
Catherine pulled out the manila folder she kept filled with newspaper clippings from Chicago’s Prohibition era violence articles she collected to help authenticate the vintage photographs that occasionally passed through her shop.
The Chicago Tribune’s front page from December 2nd, 1930 featured a dramatic headline, Torino brother slain in theater district ambush with a photograph showing Salvatore’s bullet riddled Cadillac and blood stains on the sidewalk outside the biograph.
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