I'm Giancana's grandchild and proud of it, Coco says

Everybody becomes Italian on Columbus Day just as we all put an O' before our names on St. Patrick's Day and become Irish, right?

But only a few people are fearless enough to declare that they actually share DNA with one of Chicago's most famous Italian gangsters, Sam Giancana.

Enter Coco Giancana, a former model and now owner of a Las Vegas concierge service, who outed herself as a granddaughter of the gangster known as “Mooney" and “Momo."

Coco. Momo. They even rhyme, kind of.

Such a genetic relationship surfaced last week when Ms. Giancana was quoted in a Las Vegas Review-Journal newspaper story about the death of actor Tony Curtis. She identified herself in the article as Momo's granddaughter.

Reading that came as quite a surprise to Antionette “Toni Giancana, who is undisputed as one of the late mobster's three daughters.

Antionette says that many people claim to be related to the notorious Chicago mob family and that Coco is just the latest.

First of all, how many people less than 50 years old even remember Sam Giancana? He was shot in his Oak Park basement apartment 35 years ago. Momo was frying up some sausage and peppers for a late-night snack when he was hit in the head by one bullet; another slug entered up his chin line.

Maybe it's a Vegas thing, but I'm not sure why anyone would fake a relation to a ruthless Outfit boss who signed off on scores of gangland murders and whose name has been associated with the JFK assassination and the death of Marilyn Monroe.

Antionette Giancana, she of pasta sauce fame, doesn't believe it's true. She wants Coco to take a DNA test.

“This has really been upsetting to me and my sisters," said Antoinette Giancana in a Las Vegas Confidential report over the weekend. Ms. A. Giancana moved from Chicago to Las Vegas more than a year ago to oversee construction of a new tourist attraction called the “Las Vegas Mob Experience at the Tropicana Hotel."

“We don't know her or of her," she said. “I'd like to have a DNA test done. I just don't believe it."

According to Vegas Confidential correspondent Norm Clarke, Coco Giancana claims that her grandpa Sam had an affair with a woman from Oak Park who was a film star and that the infamous mob boss came to her family home more than 100 times.

“They had a baby. That was my mother," Coco is quoted as saying. “I know where my mother came from and I know who came to our house and I know where the checks came from."

Coco Giancana, who appears to be a player on the Vegas social scene, drops lots of names of people that her alleged grandfather knew, including Frank Sinatra. She told Vegas Confidential that she kept her grandfather's name because she is proud of it.

She did not identify the name of her father or mother, however, and did not return my message inquiring about that and several other items.

Unlike the Outfit bosses of today, most of whom have been rankled by federal prosecutions and persistent news media attention, Giancana existed at a time when mob bosses seemed to get a pass by more reputable sections of society.

Giancana, who considered himself a practicing Roman Catholic, was honored with numerous good citizenship awards for his charitable giving in Chicago and the suburbs.

If anything, he must have been walking around with dual personalities. According to one biography, a clergyman who interview Giancana for his World War II Selective Service hearing reported “the Mafiosi as a constitutional psychopath."

Of course, that wouldn't necessarily have made Giancana a womanizer. However, after his wife Angeline died in 1954 that is just what he became. “Giancana's countless lovers enclosed Phyllis McGuire, of the McGuire Sisters singing group" recounts Momo lore in one bio. She was followed by “Judith Campbell Exner, a singer who would couple Giancana to an even more absolute man: President John F. Kennedy."

Maybe all this sordid untidiness can be cleaned up by the opening of Antionette Giancana's version of Chicago mob history to be on display at her Las Vegas Mob Experience museum.

If not, when Mayor Oscar Goodman's “official" mob museum opens for business maybe it will deal with Giancana's allegedly illegitimate daughter.

I know that some Outfit sympathizers consider it blasphemy to discuss such a tawdry Italian subject on Columbus Day,

There was another subject choice for today: Canada's Thanksgiving Day, which is today.

But who really masquerades as a Canadian, eh?

• Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ChuckGoudie.