But like, how did your grandfather's experience become the mafia versus the Klan? Like, how did it become that?

Yeah, so the original, like, idea didn't start.

I mean, it started, I knew there was some information.

It all started off as we'll say, like, we all have our family lore.

Like, so-and-so caught this shark 50 years ago, and then it turned out it's, like, a little bass or whatever.

Like, you never know how stories are going down within, oh, this person met the president.

It's like they met the president of, I don't know, like, the local...

What was, what was the hardest part research in like this world? Like, so I like, or, or actually, so you kind of touched on that, but a better thing would be what was something that surprised you in the research? Was it the, the murder?

Yeah.

That was one of them.

I was like, uh, not pushback in like the wrong way.

It was like pushback like well this is what I think works for the story because this is why the guy wants to go after the Klan and, you know, the elements work and this and that.

However, at the same time, it's like yeah that's true, but there's other impacts and there's other ways that you can do it and making it right.

I think that's one of the things that I've definitely learned as a writer over the years.

Um, you got to be willing to make edits, and you got to listen to your editors, you got to take input, and you have to be okay.

Mm-hmm.

You'll say, okay.

gotta listen to them though it's like oh you know i just i did a little research you know like it's it's undersold as far as like the events that happened so that i like i heard a lot from that and the one story that kind of stuck of the little that he did tell was that his restaurant apparently got picketed or boycotted by the kkk like clan suit kind of thing at some point in time because of the restaurant him interacting and i was like That's like the crust of the mafia versus the clan element of the story.

Now, the big fictional side of that is my grandfather was never in the mob.

He was never part of the mafia.

He knew...

Mafioso.

He knew people adjacent to the Mafia.

I've wanted to work with them.

Wow.

So this started do- down this, like, rabbit hole thing of, like, newspaper.com and all these different things.

I found out that it was, like, this massive event in South Philadelphia history, in Philadelphia history at the time, as far as murders go, in all these newspapers going up to, like, Pittsburgh, other places in, in Pennsylvania.

It was a big event in Pennsylvania as far as murders go and coverage.

And I found all these details about how the individual who murdered my aunt, uh, he, he was renting a room out in the same house that they lived in.

My armchair historian, you know, whatever you wanna call from the outside, I think what happened was is my great-grandfather Eduardo passed when my grandfather was, like, two or three.

My great-grandmother Felicia, she spoke next to no English up until the point that she died in, like, the '70s or '80s, so she's an Italian-American immigrant.

Right.