Mafia Princess

The Tough Times are finally over for Antoinette Giancana, daughter of Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana. And it hasn't been easy from the very beginning, as she'll be the first to tell you. Family life just isn't all that much fun when your father is someone Time magazine summarized as "cruelly violent," with "the face of a gargoyle and the disposition of a viper." That description appeared in June 1975, the week after Giancana was found in his Oak Park home, shot in the face and neck with seven slugs from a .22 pistol. At the time, he had been implicated in a conspiracy between the CIA and the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro and had recently been questioned by a Federal grand jury probing Mob activities in Chicago. In the year after his death, Antoinette, the oldest of Giancana's three daughters, hit rock bottom, and she'd been headed down for a long time. She'd already divorced her husband, lost custody of her children, been denounced by Sam, cut out of his will and fought a losing battle with drugs and alcohol. Even Sam's old friends in the Mob avoided her. She was finally reduced to living in a cheap room over a bar and grill in St. Charles, Illinois, surviving on hard liquor and hamburgers. Then, one rare sober morning, she had a liberating insight: "I realized that all of my life, I'd defined myself as Sam's daughter but never just as myself, Antoinette. But now Sam was gone--all his power and also all the pain he caused me. And the life I'd lived as a Mafia princess suddenly seemed like a game to me. And I said to myself, 'OK, the game's over. Now I have to find out what I can be on my own.' And right then, I started to get myself together again." Part of getting herself together was a health-and-fitness regimen that she's been working at for eight years. It began with her quitting drinking and smoking and progressed to a nearly meatless diet and a six-day-a-week exercise routine that includes an hour on Nautilus equipment and an hour of aerobic exercise every session. But perhaps the most important part of her rebirth was getting the big load of being Sam Giancana's daughter off her chest in her best-selling autobiography (written with Thomas C. Renner), Mafia Princess: Growing Up in Sam Giancana's Family, which hit the bookstores in 1984 and was immediately made into a prime-time television movie starring Susan Lucci.

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Not that Antoinette was totally thrilled with the TV movie. She first asked the producers to let her play herself and, when they refused, asked to play her mother, the part that eventually went to Kathleen Widdoes. Finally, all Antoinette got was a one-line role as a guest at her own first Communion. She complained publicly but has since gotten over her pique. Unlike her father, she says, "I can't hold a grudge for a long period of time."

So how did she feel when she saw her life portrayed on prime-time television? "It came off pretty well. It was the number-one-rated show in its time slot. Kathleen Widdoes did a decent job as my mother, Tony Curtis did a fine job as my father, and most of the other actors were good. My only problem was with Susan Lucci, as me. She overacted. Also, she came off as a Hollywood woman, not as a Chicago girl. She talked all wrong for a Chicago girl. If she'd called me, I would have helped her get a feeling for my life; but as it was, she barely spoke to me."

Which is too bad for Lucci, if only because Antoinette is a walking storehouse of anecdotes and observations about the unsavory men she refers to as either "the boys" or "the outfit." For instance: "Frank Sinatra says he was never controlled by the outfit. But my father opened a night club called the Villa Venice in Wheeling, Illinois, in the late Sixties. It had gambling in the back, which was how it made its real profits, but my father needed some big acts to open the place, to get it off the ground. He wanted Sinatra. Sinatra didn't want to come, Said he had another booking. Besides, the Villa Venice was a very small club compared with the places he usually worked. But my father got word to him: Sing or else. Sinatra was there."

On the subject of gangsters and their women, Antoinette has a wry sense of humor. "The outfit isn't an equal-opportunity employer. The boys don't think women should be involved in the business, but that's a mistake. If the women had been trained to handle responsibility, a lot of the guys who've been indicted in Kansas City lately would have fewer worries about running the day-to-day business. Things are beginning to change, though. I understand that in Italy [where dozens of Mafia chieftains have been indicted and imprisoned since 1985], the guys are turning to the women and the women are taking over.

"But, for the most part, these men feel that their women should be saints. If they want hot sex, they go somewhere else. A wife isn't supposed to know about hot sex. My father viewed my mother as a saint. She never talked about sex. Hell, I don't even talk about it. It flusters me, even now. I get all nervous."

In Mafia Princess, Antoinette described how protective Sam was of her virginity. So how did she manage to have "many, many affairs" without his knowing about them?

"Sam wouldn't let me go out at night, so I adjusted my schedule. I was working most of the time, either as a secretary or in a doctor's office [she's a practical nurse and lab technician], and Sam couldn't keep track of me during the day. So I took long, long lunches. If I went for a four-hour lunch during the day, Sam didn't mind. But if I went out for four hours at night, he couldn't stand it."

Now that she's settled down, she looks back on her younger days fondly but not without regrets. "Women are always attracted to men with power and money, and I certainly was. The problem is, the more you get, the more you want. I wound up treating men just like my father treated women. I used men for my own glory. I wanted the candlelit dinners, the flowers, the pieces of jewelry. I liked to be seen with men who looked good and made a good presentation in public. But I rarely let my feelings get involved. I learned that from my father, too. Mobsters are all great actors. They put up a brick wall around their emotions, so that nobody--not even they--knows what they're feeling."

However, as Antoinette also admits, she's never been hardhearted, so it wasn't easy for her to numb her feelings. She needed assistance from a bottle to do that. And it is her long affair with alcohol that she now regrets most.

"If there's one thing I'd like to say to any young people who may be reading this, it's 'Hey, you may think that booze is sophisticated, but it can throw your whole life off track before you ever get started.' I know. It nearly killed me. It certainly cost me my reputation. Drinking too much makes people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do. I think if I hadn't drunk so much when I was young, I wouldn't have messed up my life. If anyone who reads about my life is prevented from going to the depths of hell the way I did, then my telling my story has been worth it."

Now that things are looking bright for her for the first time in years, Antoinette says she finds herself becoming more conservative. "It seems as if the older I get, the wiser I get--the more I find myself appreciating those old values that I rebelled against when I was young. Not the outfit's values, of course, but the old-world Italian values: respect for the social institutions like family, home and Church. I think the reason I rebelled when I was young was basically to get my father's attention. I always felt he didn't love me and that I was the ugly duckling in the family. Now I realize that Sam didn't love anybody except my mother, so I've stopped punishing myself.

"I'm finally more relaxed with who I am, and I'm happier being me than ever before. I've even learned to like my emotions and my intensity, which got me into so much trouble in the past. I like being around people now. Being interviewed by the media has given me a lot of confidence and self-esteem I didn't have before. Now I feel I can get some of the things I've always wanted out of life. It may be a little late, but it's better late than never."

" 'Sam wouldn't let me go out at night, so I adjusted my schedule. I took long, long lunches.' "