Although no official written
documents remain, credible accounts indicate that Leonardo Cerebelli was born
in 1830 in New York ’s
Flatbush community to grocers Enzo and Aurora Cerebelli. Nevertheless, Cerebelli was dogged for much
of his life by rumors he was truly the son of notorious Cosa Nostra mafioso Nunzo
“Il Capo” Tosto, fearsome patron of a post-feudal Sicilian cosca, or crime family. Il
Capo had reputedly sired dozens of illegitimate children and sent them abroad
to appease his domineering spouse.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that Leonardo was spirited out of Sicily as an infant, hidden in a shipment of
castelvetrano olives bound for New
York .
Clever and industrious, young
Leonardo excelled in his schoolwork but chafed at his duties in the family
business. This fractious state of
affairs was typified by one of Leonardo’s earliest experiments, an inquiry into
chaos theory in which the eight-year-old prodigy dropped hundreds of fragile inventory
items to the floor and took detailed notes.
His father was horrified, as was his instructor, who labelled Leonardo’s
pioneering work “unadulterated rubbish.”
Leonardo’s wry humor began to emerge as he coined derogatory Latin
nicknames for regular customers, until his sly linguistic indiscretions were
detected by one of his father’s business associates, after which time Leonardo
took up Ancient Greek.
