On this day in 1886 the New Orleans Family soldier Salvatore Alongi is born in Sutera Italy. His nephew Domonick Alongi, who grew up in NOLA, would become a Genovese Capo in New York.

On this day in 1886, Salvatore Alongi was born in the sun-baked Sicilian hilltown of Sutera, a small comune in the province of Caltanissetta that would prove to be a remarkably fertile breeding ground for men who would find their way into the American underworld. Like so many of his countrymen during the great waves of Italian immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Alongi eventually made his way across the Atlantic and settled in New Orleans, Louisiana, a city with one of the oldest and most deeply rooted Italian-American criminal organisations in the United States.

The New Orleans crime family, sometimes referred to as the Crescent City family, traced its origins back to the brutal Matranga-Provenzano war of the 1880s and the notorious assassination of Police Superintendent David Hennessy in 1890, an event that sparked a mass lynching of Italian immigrants and drew national attention to the presence of Sicilian organised crime on American soil. By the time Salvatore Alongi found his footing in New Orleans, the family had evolved into a sophisticated criminal enterprise operating beneath the radar of the broader American public. As a soldier within this organisation, Alongi was part of the backbone of the family's operations, carrying out the day-to-day work that kept the machinery of organised crime running.

What lends Salvatore Alongi a particular footnote in mob history, however, is the trajectory of his nephew Dominick Alongi. Born and raised in New Orleans, Dominick carried the family name northward to New York City, where he rose through the ranks of the Genovese crime family — widely regarded as the most powerful and secretive of the Five Families that would be formally recognised following the 1931 restructuring of the American mob under Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Dominick's ascent to the rank of capo within the Genovese organisation represented a remarkable journey, from the bayous and back streets of New Orleans to the corridors of power in one of the most formidable criminal empires in American history.

The story of the Alongi family illustrates how deeply interconnected the American Mafia truly was, with bloodlines and loyalties stretching from the villages of Sicily to the streets of New Orleans and ultimately to the boardrooms of New York's underworld. Their legacy is a reminder that behind every major crime family stood generations of men whose roots reached far across the Atlantic.