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understand the construction business from the bottom up. Even so, they never knew the hard times that he had. The Capano children grew up in the magnificent gray-stone Colonial mansion Lou built for them on Weldin Road in Brandywine Hundred. It had gabled windows and bay windows, sunrooms, breezeways, and a huge garage. A circular driveway cut a swath through holly, fir, and maple trees, and it was landscaped with shrubs and flowers.
    Marguerite moved with seeming ease from the little house to the mansion, although the change was akin to going from a furnished room to a penthouse. She never worked outside the home, and she knew nothing at all about business affairs or keeping books. She was a wife and a mother. But she was a strong woman who felt her husband and children could do no wrong. “She was one tough cookie,” a woman who knew her then remarked.
    When the boys were elementary school age, Joey Capano once made an anti-Semitic remark to a Jewish boy, and his mother called Marguerite to complain, asking her to intervene and reprimand Joey. Marguerite refused, saying, “Well, my kids get called wops and guineas. He should toughen up.”
    Lou and Marguerite’s boys didn’t resemble one another in looks or personality, but Tommy, Louie, and Joey all had dark hair and their father’s charisma. Tommy was clearly the most scholastically adept. His sister, Marian, remembered fondly, “I can still picture him reading books at his little desk in his little room.” Tommy was also the son who did the dishes and washed the pots and pans without complaint. Louie was charming and funny, and Joey was arguably the best looking and the rowdiest.
    The Capanos loved kids, including the neighborhood kids. Whether in the old neighborhood or on Weldin Road, their home was open to children. When the sultry summer months suffused Wilmington with a blanket of heat and even the tomatoes and peppers growing in front yards drooped, anyone who could afford to headed for the ocean beaches on the Delaware coast, or to the little offshore islands of southern New Jersey, which rested in the Atlantic Ocean as if some giant chef had spattered bits of pancake batter on a hot griddle. In Delaware, vacationers called it “going to the beach”; in Jersey, it was “going down the shore.”
    Marguerite and Lou chose the Jersey shore. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Wilmington across the Delaware River and then through a series of little towns in New Jersey. Lou bought a duplex in Wildwood. They rented out the lower floor and kept the upstairs for family vacations. They took their children, their relatives, and any neighbor child who wanted to go.
    “It was a madhouse,” a onetime tagalong remembered. “Kids and dogs, sleeping on mattresses, running in and out. It was like the old days on Seventh Street. Marguerite was cooking lots of Italian food, and she waited on everyone. Lou was just sitting there reading the paper as if everybody wasn’t running around him. He was very calm, and very kind to all of us.”
    Marguerite and Lou were almost forty in the summer of 1962, Marian was in college, Tommy was in the eighth grade, Louie in the sixth, and their youngest son, Joey, was ten, when Marguerite found she was pregnant. This baby was a surprise, and somewhat worrisome because she had never had easy pregnancies and she was a decade past her last baby. She was confined to bed throughout thispregnancy, and her boys, especially Tommy, waited on her and did the chores she could not.
    But Gerard was born healthy on May 25, 1963, and Marguerite recovered to full health. Still, it was to be a bad year for the family. Lou, only forty, had a serious heart attack and had to stay in bed for weeks. Gerard—Gerry—was taken care of as much by his older brothers, and his sister when she was home, as he was by his parents. Not surprisingly, he was soon spoiled rotten.
    “Gerry had these long golden curls,” a neighbor remembered, “and no one in his