Unsure where to begin, Walter scanned the note and photo and sent them to an online historian specializing in Italian-American wartime records. Hours later, the historian replied, explaining the tone resembled messages left by dockside couriers involved in illicit war-era shipments, men who ran goods through Mafia-controlled waterfronts.
Many of those couriers vanished during the 1940s, he explained. They were either punished for skimming off smuggling profits or disappearing while trying to escape the criminal networks that controlled them. Their families were often told vague stories: they died overseas, they never came home, they were “lost to the war.”