Healdsburg, California has become a haven for outstanding food, wine, art and community, and our new TRUE WEST Film Center is serving up a feast of “Big Night” on the Big Screen for Valentine’s Day.

Steve Villano

Feb 10, 2026

(Stanley Tucci’s transformative film, “Big Night,” written & produced 30 years ago, was an ode to life, love, food and art, and his first screenplay. It won the prestigious Waldo Salt Award for Screenwriting at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, launched Tucci’s incredibly diverse acting career, and helped change stereotypical roles being written for Italian-Americans in movies. Pictured with Tucci above are (l. ot r.), Minnie Driver, Tucci, Tony Shalhoub, and Isabella Rossellini.) Promotional photo from Rysher Entertainment.)

Thirty years ago this month, a little film entitled “Big Night,” with a screenplay written by two young Italian guys from New York, Stanley Tucci and his cousin Joe Tropiano, swept the Sundance Film Festival off its feet by winning the career-making Waldo Salt Award for Screenwriting.

This coming Valentine’s Day, Healdsburg’s phenomenal new, 3-screening room cinema arts center, TRUE WEST, (https://truewestfilmcenter.org) is bringing “Big Night” to the foodie haven of Healdsburg, for two Saturday night showings, at 5 and 8 pm. It’s perfectly fitting, because in this small cosmopolitan community which boasts world class chefs like Charlie Palmer and Dustin Valette, and first-rate restaurants such as Single Thread, Dry Creek Kitchen, 106 Mathieson, Folia at Appellation and Le Montage. every night is a big night for culinary delights.

“Big Night” is much more than a moving story about two Italian immigrant brothers struggling to make it on the Jersey Shore in the 1950’s with a small Italian restaurant called “Paradise.” It’s much more than a tale of two talented dreamers, for whom English was not a first language, pursuing their futures in the “land of fucking opportunity,” as their unsentimental competitor, played by the actor Ian Holm, crudely put things.

It’s a love song to food, and art, and longing, and love, directed by Tucci’s life-long friend and fellow actor Campbell Scott (the son of actors George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst), and punctuated by delirious dancing, drinking, eating and the irresistible music of Louis Prima and the pull of a party. From the opening word spoken by Primo (Tony Shalhoub) in Italian, “taste” (which, 25 years later became the name of Tucci’s New York Times best-selling memoir) to the closing, intimate kitchen scene between the two brothers, “Big Night” is an emotional, visual and artistic feast. And, as an added treat, the nourishment joy and tears lavished upon the audience by the screenplay, the film and the entire experience , gives us all front-row seats to Stanley Tucci’s yet-to-take-off career.

Before Stanley Tucci played Caesar Flickerman in The Hunger Games movies; Nigel Kipling in Devil Wears Prada (with a sequel coming this May); Paul Childs, the husband of Julia Childs, in Julie and Julia; or Adolf Eichmann in his Golden Globe winning performance of the HBO film, Conspiracy; and before his string of best-selling cookbooks, or his Emmy winning CNN Food Travel Documentary Series “Searching for Italy,” Tucci found himself stuck in an ethnic acting rut.

I first talked to Tucci about his being type-cast in “mobster” roles, when I interviewed him the year Big Night came out, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan set of Deconstructing Harry, a movie he was making with Woody Allen. The interview was for Ambassador Magazine, and I asked Tucci if he felt that because he was an Italian-American actor he was being stereotyped into many “mafia” roles on television and in movies:

Villano: You’ve played heavies on television and in the movies—Richard Cross in “Murder One,” Lucky Luciano in “Billy Bathgate,” mobsters in television’s “Wiseguy” and tough guys in “Men of Respect”, & “Prizzi’s Honor, and as the assassin stalking Julia Roberts in “The Pelican Brief. Did you feel you were being stereotyped?

Tucci: With Richard Cross, I said specifically to Murder One Director Stephen Bochco that I did not want the character to be Italian…I hate Mafia film characters because Italians have given so much more to this country and to the world. Also in most Mafia films , there is never a reason given for the gangsters behavior: they are just innately evil.

Villano: With Big Night, did you consciously set out to make a movie that would not have any Mafia figures in it?

Tucci: My cousin Joseph Tropiano and I co-authored the screenplay and we did not want to have any Mafiosi or gangsters in it at all…Big Night makes a very different, pointed statement that runs counter to the prevailing image of Italian-Americans portrayed in film. Primo & Secondo are bright guys; they’re articulate, not violent; well read, they appreciate art…I’m sick of young directors who want to do that tough, shoot-em up Mafia stuff. Their pictures are completely false and worse, they’re boring. I want to tell them: “You’re not Scorcese; you’re not Coppola. Isn’t there another story you can tell? Scorcese and Coppola told great human stories with tremendous internal conflicts. The only obligation an artist has is to tell the truth, whatever it is. That’s the artist’s obligation. And if artists don’t do that, then they aren’t doing their jobs.”

Francis Ford Coppola’s Scenario Magazine (Fall 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3) which published the complete Big Night screenplay similarly asked Tucci (and his cousin Tropiano) about them intentionally wanting to present a different picture of Italian-Americans from what is usually seen in films:

Tucci: The way these portrayals have evolved into caricatures in so many movies now has really affected how people look at Italians in everyday life. I remember somebody saying to me not that long ago, “isn’t your mother one of those big, fat Italian Mamas?” As a matter of fact, my mother is very slender and looks Irish, if you want to know the truth. All of these stereotypes are really insulting. I’ll do interviews with people who will be shocked when they find out that my Dad is an art teacher, or that Campbell Scott and I grew up together or that my cousin Joe (Tropiano) went to Yale….

Tropiano: So that was definitely one of the driving forces behind us wanting to write this…

It took Tucci and Tropiano six years to collaboratively write the screenplay because they not only wanted to craft the characters just right, but they had so much to say on art, love, relationships, food and family. The constant conflict between an uncompromising dedication to art or craft, and the cloying, annoying, soul-destroying commercial call to compromise to be a “success,” is a persistent tension throughout Big Night.

I asked Tucci about the central role played not only by food in the movie—which he considered as important a “character” as any of the human characters in the film—but also by “the artist’, represented not only by Primo, the chef, but by Louis Prima, the special “guest” at the timpano dinner. Both Tucci & Tropiano saw the musician Louis Prima—who popularized the “jump blues” in the late 1940’s and 1950’s— as having realized “the American Dream,” by successfully combining being a great artist, an excellent musician and a commercial success.

Villano: Your character spells out Primo’s specialness as an artist to Ian Holm’s character, Pascal, a crass businessman only interested in money, who wanted Primo to come to work for him. “You would never have my brother,” you tell Pascal; “he lives in a world above you. What he has, and what he is rare.” You put Primo on a pedestal that only a pure artist could occupy.

Tucci: That’s what I was brought up with. In our family, to be an artist was the highest rung on the ladder, especially when you see your father, whom you admire and idolize, is one.

And Food?

Tucci: We knew that food would have to play a major role, because we were making a movie about an artist, and food is his art. It had to be there.

Just like “Big Night” had to come to Healdsburg.

California’s Prop 50 put us in a new Congressional District #1, and one of the most natural and authentic politicians I’ve ever encountered should become our next Congressman.

Steve Villano

Feb 06, 2026

(Photo by Steve Villano, at Luther Burbank Center, Santa Rosa, for Mike McGuire’s “One Big Night” campaign kick-off rally, February 5, 2026).

I attended Mike McGuire’s kick off rally for his campaign for U.S. Congress (CA-1) last night, and was overwhelmed by a rush of memories going back more than 60 years.

No, not memories of McGuire going back that long, since he’s only 46 years old, and I’ve only lived in Healdsburg for the past 5 years and only first met him a few years ago; not memories of him of being elected at 19 years of age to Healdsburg’s Board of Education, nor of becoming Healdsburg’s youngest Mayor; not memories of McGuire being elected to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, nor of his election to the State Senate. Dozens of Democrats in the audience of the Luther Burbank Center did have those memories, but I was not one of them.

A large number in the friendly crowd of six hundred had grown up with McGuire, gone to high school with him, taught or studied with him at Sonoma State University, and worked on any number of his past campaigns for public office. That friendliness gave the gathering more of the feeling of a Bar Mitzvah, wishing a loved one well, then of a political pep rally. Everyone was sharing in the joy of Mike McGuire’s success.

I’ve been around, met and worked with lots of politicians, public officials and public figures during my lifetime, starting with the real Robert F. Kennedy in 1964, when he was running for U.S. Senator from New York State, one year after his brother was assassinated.

I was 15 years old then, and spent two-days painting a huge “Hello, Bobby” banner on a bedsheet, which I brought to a rally RFK held in Sunset City Shopping Center in North Babylon, L.I., New York, the town in which I grew up. My jumbo banner got me to meet Bobby Kennedy, and, I like to think, helped persuade a few Long Island Republicans to vote for him. Kennedy’s energy and passion for humanitarian issues was palpable.

I worked on the campaigns of three powerful New York State women: Congresswoman Louise Slaughter’s first campaign for public office (Monroe County Legislature) in 1973; Mary Ann Krupsak’s campaign for Lt. Governor of NY in 1974, and Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman’s campaign for US Senate for New York State in 1980. Each candidate had her own charisma and ability to connect with voters personally and on a wide range of local, state or national issus.

In the 1980’s I worked in public service with Mario Cuomo, an individual of great integrity, and one of the most gifted public officials and public speakers of our time. For me, as an Italian-American battling a lifetime of negative stereotypes, Cuomo was a transformational leader: so much so, that I wrote a book about my eight years of working with him when he was New York State’s Governor (Tightrope: Balancing a Life Between Mario Cuomo and My Brother, Heliotrope, Books, New York, NY., 2017).

I stood a few feet away from Mike McGuire at his “One Big Night” rally in Santa Rosa, and was transported back to a night 19 years ago, almost to the exact date, when I stood a few feet away from Barack Obama launching his Presidential campaign inside a big New York hotel, and knew that I was part of history being made.

This collection of experiences are what make observing Mike McGuire, a leader of the California State Senate, and candidate for Congress in California’s brand new 1st Congressional District, a real joy and revelation.

More than Bobby Kennedy, more than Mario Cuomo, more than Barack Obama, McGuire is the most naturally gifted and genuine politician I have ever encountered. I know that’s saying a great deal since RFK, Cuomo and Obama are often used as the standard for “charismatic candidates” among political practitioners and consultants.

Mike McGuire’s “charisma”, and I hesitate calling it that, is something far different. He connects with people on an entirely different and much more personal level. Mike McGuire is us, and he is our sons, daughters and grandsons. While RFK, Cuomo and Obama inspired us on emotional, spiritual and intellectual levels, McGuire is unafraid to unabashedly love us, and we love him back for his openness and vulnerability.

Sure, working with Cuomo was an instruction in integrity and humanity each day; witnessing and backing the rise of Barack Obama in the early days was exhilarating and restored our hope in each other.

But, Mike McGuire is all of us. He is reachable, and he reaches each of us. There is nothing aloof about him. He is right there; all the time, right there. And he is one of us.

I first I encountered McGuire in person at a dinner for the Common Ground Society, a non-profit serving children with a wide-range of special needs in the North Bay area of San Francisco. The organization’s Founder Larkin O’Leary asked McGuire, then the highest ranking member of the California State Senate, to not only attend the event but to act as the “Auctioneer” for the organization’s biggest fundraiser.

Few politicians I’ve ever known, occupying such powerful public offices would have put themselves in that position, ripe with room for embarrassment. McGuire, a skilled auctioneer with legitimate rural roots, embraced it, and was off and running, raising a record amount of money and the spirits of everyone within earshot. McGuire’s unabashed enthusiasm for the cause and for what he was doing made everyone in the room feel good about being part of something far bigger than ourselves.

But that’s not his only gift. Two years ago Mike McGuire spoke before our Congregation Shomrei Torah in Santa Rosa and talked about a wide-range of topics, each of which he knew thoroughly. Insurance rates (particularly home insurance) in California were skyrocketing and he listened to each of us, and described every action he was taking in Sacramento to mitigate the damage to our families and come up with solutions. Many of us urged him to run for State Insurance Commissioner, since it was clear he knew all facets of the crisis better than anyone, and we were delighted when McGuire emerged as the logical choice to become our new Representative in Congress. Mike McGuire was us, and no one understood our concerns and our lives better.

This week, when the US Supreme Court upheld California’s redistricting plan, Trump declared that “holding onto” the First CD in California was among his “top priorities,” and he was going to pour resources into the district to win it. Let him come. Let him unleash Elon Musk’s millions of dollars, or Peter Thiel’s millions of weirdo musings. Let Trump come into our district himself, and try to spread his flatulent favoritism to the billionaire class and his congenital, corrosive corruption.

We’re ready for them, and we’ve got a true “natural” public servant in Mike McGuire who we’ll fight for and who will work around the clock and around this vast new district, for working families from Santa Rosa to the Nevada border.

Mike McGuire is all of us; and, this “natural” has the kind of experience and commitment and reciprocal love and humanity that no amount of money can buy.

I always have. I see him for the low-self esteem, self-hating, gun-posing runt that he is and has always been.

Steve Villano

Feb 02, 2026

((Gregory Bovino’s HS graduation photo, 1988; Gun-toting Greg Bovino’s Instagram photo)

I know Greg Bovino.

From the days of the boys in our Italian ghetto,

When we played imaginary games like “hide the stiletto,”

Or, jumped on each others backs in “Johnnie Rides-the-Pony,”

I knew guys like Greg Bovino. Such a phoney.

“Buck, Buck, How many people can we fuck up?”

The saddest, most sadistic, shortest among us,

Would make the most noise, to get a laugh from the other boys,

Shielding themselves from getting sussed. . .

Yep, I know Greg Bovino.

A runt of a kid in a North Carolina hill country high school, who tried out for the wrestling team to look tough, but instead came off the fool.

Beaten down by his alcoholic father, tiny Greg Bovino was 11 years old when his father killed a 26-year old woman, crushing her with his truck. No bother.

“I was dead drunk,” Michael Bovino told the Charlotte Observer (NC), in 1981, and his 18-month prison sentence was reduced to 4 when he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of “death by motor vehicle,” nothing more.

“I’ve got a dead woman on my hands,” Michael Bovino said to anyone who would listen at the time. His son Greg, did’t want to hear it, for fear of becoming just like his father, which he did, despite his frantic attempts to bury his old man and that sorry past, the “dead woman on his hands,” reared her head, haunting him as best she could, in the person of Renee Nicole Good. And, little Greg, running in circles as fast from his father’s fate as he could, perversely accused that Good human of using her vehicle as a weapon, just like his father used his truck 45 years earlier, to commit “death by motor vehicle.” Some lessons never leave the mind of an 11-year old boy.

Too bad Greg Bovino didn’t learn a lesson from his father’s depraved indifference to human life, which ended up getting Michael Bovino imprisoned and then divorced from his hill country wife, when little Gregory Kent Bovino was only 14.

I know Greg Bovino.

I’ve seen him all my life, growing up in Italian enclaves of tiny little men with shriveled souls acting tough to strut and preen for the self-esteem they knew they lacked and feverishly hiding their heritage, of which they were ashamed.

His ancestors, like mine, were immigrants from Italy, and unlike mine, took 15 years to file their papers for citizenship, forced to do so after the virulent anti-Italian, anti-immigrant law of 1924, written by the KKK, the Stephen Miller of today.

Bovino’s blood line came from Calabria, Sicily, where Italians were not considered “white enough,” because their sun-drenched dark skin made them suspect on sight—like Mexicans, Puerto Ricans or Blacks—day or night, by the MAGA Supremacist Vampires of that time, and of today, all White.

But, I’m not the only one who can spot the screaming, self-hate that lurks under that faux SS Officer’s coat, taller than Bovino, which he wears as his talisman of inhumanity and sadism, which he’s vowed to once again, make great.

The Director of Academic Programs at the Calandra Italian/American Institute at the City University of NY, Joseph Sciorra, told the Chicago Sun Times, back in December, when tiny Greg Bovino, hiding in his oversized trench coat, was terrorizing Chicago’s immigrant families that it was astonishing that “a person whose grandfather was an immigrant was engaging in such abhorrent and violent treatment of contemporary migrants.”

Yes, I know Greg Bovino, and know that his self-hatred translated into beating migrants, kidnapping kids from the driveways of their homes, and having a “dead woman on his hands” —-just like his father—as well as a few dead men.

Like an addict getting high on his hits, each assault Bovino ordered was meant for his drunken father, who defied his wife’s admonition to “stay off the sauce,” guzzling down a few six-packs of beer, and murdering by vehicle, a young woman, and killing, as well, the early dreams of little Gregory Bovino’s life when he was 11 years old, forcing the underdeveloped child’s mind to fashion new fantasies of himself. And, so he did.

So, that very same year, 1981, little Greg escaped by discovering the Jack Nicholson movie, The Border, which was all about corrupt Border Patrol Agents who made money from a human-trafficking ring operating out of El Paso—a place where Bovino would later serve as a Border Patrol Agent, as if, in his narcissistic, immature mind, his life became a movie script. That movie influenced his life’s choice of an occupation; it’s too bad Bovino didn’t beef-up on his learning about his Italian immigrant ancestors and how they were brutalized for being different, not being “White enough”, and not speaking the language. But, his murderous, drunken and divorced father was dead to him, and the Italian immigrant part of his family history—his father’s story— had to be erased.

Instead, if Bovino had the slightest interest in the human story of immigrants, he might have learned of the historically important 11 Italian immigrants—all from Sicily, where his ancestors originated—with names like Joseph Macheca, Antonio Marchesi, James Caruso, Rocco Geraci, Frank Romero, and Charles Traina—tortured by White Supremacists for being different. Michele (later Michael Bovino), his great grandfather, was another Sicilian immigrant who came to American for a better life, in 1909, only 18 years after the massacre of 11 innocent Immigrants in New Orleans. It would be another 18 years, in 1927, when Bovino’s great-grandfather became a naturalized US citizen, the same year Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were executed for a crime they did not commit. The history of brutality against Italian immigrants in the America was intertwined with the history of immigrants in the Bovino family, but nothing stuck with little Greg.

Later in his career as he rose in the ranks of Border Patrol, Bovino had a professional duty to learn New Orleans’ history of anti-immigrant violence when he was made Chief of the Border Patrol Sector of New Orleans. Instead, Bovino decided not to educate himself, but to elevate his alter-ego, by posing in military drag all over social media. For the tiny man with the fey little voice, it was another chance to pose with guns, and tough guys, and appear bigger than his 64 angry inches. The only history of immigration Bovino knew, was being made up daily by the sadist Stephen Miller and guided by the Jim Crow laws of 30 states, just as Nazi lawyers used those laws—and the racially discriminatory US Immigration Act of 1924—when they drafted their Nuremberg Laws against Jews.

Bovino simply didn’t care, or he might have learned that these 11 innocent hardworking Italian immigrants, who spoke no English, and were unjustly accused of killing a New Orleans police captain—a murder planned and executed by the White Citizens Council running the City in 1891.

Had Bovino not been shopping for Nazi paraphernalia online, he might have learned that these 11 innocent Italian immigrants were jailed for their own safety after their full jury trial—by an all White jury—exonerated them. Despite their official “protection”, these 11 innocent Italian immigrants were pulled from the New Orleans prison by a mob of some 20,000 armed White Supremacists—like the ones who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021—who beat, kicked, tortured and hanged them, and then shot the 11 innocent Italian immigrants repeatedly, in one of this country’s most deranged, inhumane and lawless campaigns of anti-immigrant violence, until the recent actions of Bovino, Miller, Noem, Honan, Trump and ICE in the second Trump Administration.

But, I know Greg Bovino, and have seen the kind of self-hate that drives him.

Little Greg would allow nothing to interfere with his personal vendetta against his Sicilian father’s blood, or his own rock-bottom low personal esteem, growing up in a town called, prophetically, Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Bovino’s swagger, self aggrandizement and seething self-importance, were all costume jewelry, designed to hide who he was.

I grew up with lots of Greg Bovinos, pygmy-like, morally-stunted people who picked on anyone’s differences to try to make others smaller than they were. But that never worked, no matter how many times they tried or lied. Diminishing others just never made them grow.

Bovino tried lying his way past Chicago area Federal Judge Sarah Ellis, who caught him, finding that the Federal Official lied to her in her courtroom when he claimed to have been “hit in the head by a rock” by an immigrant, to justify his use of excessive force. Bovino still had Blowing Rock on his brain, not rocks hitting his head.

If that was Bovino’s 11-year old’s interpretation of becoming a better Border Patrol agent inspired by the movie The Border 45 years earlier, it amounted to nothing more than the never-ending Bovino Border Bloviation of lies, fabrications and make believe. So many words, so little meaning; a perfect Trump Administration team player.

After a life-time of lying to himself, it was child’s play for Bovino to lie as he breathed about the excessive violence he and his BP team used in Kern County, California in their “Operation Return to Sender,” in early 2025, which amounted to his audition for a prime time appearance in the Trump Horror Show of Human Rights Violations.

Again, Bovino was called out on his lawless, tough-guy tactics by California AG Rob Bonta, along with 17 other State’s Attorney Generals, in a legal filing on December 31, 2025:

“The unscrupulous tactics used by Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino and his team of agents during raids in Kern County, Los Angeles and across the nation threaten basic civil liberties afforded to all who call this country home.”

So what if he lied and got caught? Bovino LOVED the attention, as all of the Greg Bovinos I’ve ever known do. Deep down they know they’ll always be small and the slightest whiff of attention puffs them up. In Greg Bovino’s case he craved it, since he knew that without such self-image inflation, he would always be struggling to see above the steering wheel of the truck his father drove when he killed an innocent woman, back in 1981—an indelible dress rehearsal for the killing of Renee Good on his command.

Just this past week, Bovino mocked the Jewish faith of the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota, Daniel N Rosen, an Orthodox Jew. As the New York Times reported in its’ January 31 story entitled “Bovino Is Acused of Mocking Prosecutor’s Judaism:

“According to several people with knowledge of the telephone conversation which took place on January 12, Mr. Bovino made derisive remarks about the faith of the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota, Daniel N. Rosen….Mr. Bovino used the term “Chosen People,” in a mocking way….. He also asked sarcastically whether Mr. Rosen understood that Orthodox Jewish Criminals don’t take weekends off…”

The Times went on to report that in an interview last month with an on-line news outlet, Jewish Insider, US Attorney Rosen explained what the motivation was for him to seek his current role, so he could combat:

“the rapid escalation of violent anti-Semitism in the United States. Jewish history tells us that Jews fare poorly in societies that turn polarized, and where that polarization evolves into factional hatreds in the non-Jewish societies in which we live.”

Silent throughout Bovino’s and ICE’s terrorizing of immigrants around the country, is Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League. Doesn’t the ADL know anti-Semitism when it sees it? Will they finally go after Greg Bovino, the way they went after Ivy League schools for allegedly allowing anti-Semitism on campus?

Who is more dangerous to Jews, a heavily armed, extreme right-wing government official with enormous fire-power at his command, or a lone college student with a protest sign? Why do Greg Bovino, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and the Heritage Foundation all escape ADL’s examination? Why aren’t smashed car windows—Bovino’s preferred method of grabbing people from their cars in violation of their basic constitutional rights—seen as the 2026 version of the rolling Kristallnachts that they are, aimed at terrorizing and intimidating innocent people?

Judges, Attorney-Generals, and even former co-workers are beginning to hold Bovino and his gang of ICE bullies accountable.

Bovino’s former co-worker, Jenn Budd, a Border Patrol Senior Agent for the San Diego area on the California/Mexico border Region, told the Chicago Sun Times this December, that :

“Bovino was the Liberace of the Border Patrol, with all of his flamboyant behavior and the camera crews that followed him.”

In her book Against the Wall: My Journey from Border Patrol Agent to Immigrant Rights Activist, (Heliotrope Books, NY, NY, June, 2022), Budd writes:

“The Border Patrol is like a cult, and we say we bleed green and we always protect each other. The majority of agents are people I characterize with very low self-esteem…They follow a pattern and practice of making false accusations against the people you just beat up.”

Jenn Budd knows Greg Bovino; she worked with him, and she’s not afraid to call him out on his illegal, unconstitutional, bullying, attention-seeking behavior, and to call out ICE and the Border Patrol for creating an above-the-law para-military force, and an “institutional culture of sexism, racism and corruption”.

Just the perfect place for the tiny little Greg Bovinos of the world to hang out and hide behind gun barrels bigger than many of their physical organs.

“Buck, Buck, how many people can we fuck up?”

Elie Wiesel’s lessons, his relentless bearing of witness, and the fire to fight for humanity burning in his soul, never leaves me.

Steve Villano

Jan 28, 2026

(Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel speaking at the White House, April 19, 1985, challenging President Reagan’s decision to visit the German Military Cemetery at Bitburg, where Nazi SS Officers were buried)

I watched PBS’ Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire this week, the biopic of the Holocaust survivor and author of 47 books whose whose rich, wrenching collection of writings, essays and interviews have borne witness to the Nazis extermination of 6 million Jews, and millions of non-Jews.

The documentary aired as part of the Public Broadcasting Series of “American Masters” during Holocaust Remembrance Week. Ironic, I thought, since the anti-Semites who wrote Pogrom 2025—declaring the US to be a “Christian Nation” (non-Jewish) and their apologists on the Extreme Right and within the Trump Administration—who accuse everyone else of anti-Semitism—worked mightily to erase PBS from American consciousness and culture.

Wiesel’s life, and his life’s work, have been an instruction and moral guide for many of us. His writings, particularly in his seminal work Night which described his life as a Jewish teenage boy first deported to Auschwitz with his family, and then sentenced to Buchenwald, where he watched his father die in front of him, were a powerful part of my personal education on my path to converting to Judaism 46 years ago.

While I didn’t agree with Wiesel on everything, particularly on the rights and legitimacy of Palestinians, and the future of Jerusalem, I shared his deep outrage over President Ronald Reagan’s decision in May, 1985, to visit Bitburg Cemetery in Germany, where Nazi SS Officers were buried.

I was 5 years into my life as a Jew than, and only five months into my work with then-Governor of New York State, Mario M. Cuomo.

Immediately after Reagan’s decision to visit Bitburg, and Elie Wiesel’s nationally televised appeal in the White House for Reagan not to go, I accompanied Mario Cuomo to a public presentation at John Glenn High School on Long Island, just a mile from my home in East Northport, where he spoke to 1,500 high school students about “Human and Civic Values.”

Cuomo was his usual eloquent self explaining to the mostly-white, middle class students about how his immigrant parents, who spoke no English, had such a profound influence upon his life.

“They just showed us by living every day in that grocery store, by working, they taught us what strength was; they taught us what commitment was, “ Mario Cuomo said to the students. “They came from other parts of the world and had nothing…It can only happen here.”

The students, filling every bleacher seat in the gymnasium and covering much of the hardwood floor, applauded wildly. Then, Cuomo asked for questions from the audience.

A young, sandy-haired female student rose to her feet, cleared her voice in front of the standing microphone, and looked straight at Mario Cuomo, whose gravitas and deeply-lined face could often be intimidating.

“Governor,” she asked, “If you were President, would you have gone to Bitburg?”

Cuomo, rarely at a loss for words, bought some time by explaining about President Reagan’s recent visit to Germany’s Bitburg military cemetery. He described the intense feelings on “both sides,” and then, in a long apologia for Reagan, expressed understanding for the President’s difficult decision.

“I probably would not have gone to Bitburg,” Cuomo said, “but I can respect the President’s decision to do so.”

In heavily Republican Suffolk County, which Reagan won overwhelmingly in 1984, not a murmur was heard from the crowd. I cringed.

As a relatively new convert to Judaism, I was furious with Cuomo for sounding like he was pandering to Long Island Republicans on a matter of moral clarity, as articulated brilliantly by Elie Wiesel to President Reagan on April 19, 1985, just a few weeks before:

“That place, Mr. President, is not your place,” Wiesel said turning directly to Reagan at a White House ceremony. “ Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

I fumed all afternoon on the way back to our World Trade Center office about Cuomo’s cavalier comments, knowing that if I swallowed my anger over his answer I would dislike myself, and him. I was determined not to be silent on something which struck me to the core.

I took the Long Island Railroad back home that evening and dashed off a three-page memo—there was no internet or email in 1985—written like a legal brief, which was Cuomo’s preferred way of reading information:

“In your effort to be fair to President Reagan, you may have unintentionally been unfair to Jews and Gentiles whose deep feelings about the Holocaust I know you share,” I wrote.

A few weeks earlier, I had accompanied Mario Cuomo to Madison Square Garden, where he addressed thousands of Jews and their families at the Warsaw Ghetto Commemorations Service. Cuomo’s voice resonated throughout the high rafters of the Garden:

“For to confront the fact of the Holocaust is to look into the heart of darkness to comprehend the scope of evil in this world, to measure the human capacity to hate and to murder and to destroy. It is to acknowledge the abyss.”

His words were still ringing in my ears when I heard Cuomo’s lame response to the Bitburg question. I could not believe he was sanctioning Reagan’s insensitive trip on the heels of his bringing Warsaw Ghetto survivors and their families to tears with the depth of his understanding and compassion about human suffering and the Holocaust.

I argued to him, in my Wiesel-inspired brief, that as a “new Jew,” I was deeply offended. I knew I had his attention and was in a position few others were privileged to occupy to make my outrage known:

“I am keenly aware of the sentiment of some segments of the Jewish community of reluctance to criticize the President’s Bitburg mistake, for fear of an anti-Semitic backlash. As a Jew, and head of the Social Action Committee at my Temple, I understand that sentiment, but I do not agree with it.”

I went on to write that Reagan’s actions: “are not deserving of your understanding nor your defense. Your public thoughts, public words and public deeds mean too much to Jews and Gentiles alike to be miscontrued as supportive of the President.”

I had already faced down my mother’s fierce Catholicism and latent anti-Semitism on my decision to convert to Judaism. By comparison, discussing Bitburg with Mario Cuomo was easy, and very, very clear.

Shortly after the Governor received my memo, he called me, and we discussed Bitburg and Reagan at length, as well as my decision to convert to Judaism, after a lifetime of being raised a Catholic. The memo transformed my relationship with Mario Cuomo; he thanked me for sending it, and told me to feel free to communicate with him my thoughts on how we could better approach any issue.

Six years, and many such memos later, Mario Cuomo asked me to serve on a task force with Elie Wiesel, established by then-NYC Mayor David Dinkins, called “Increase the Peace.” It was a task force to rebuild Black-Jewish relations in NYC, following a series of racial incidents in Crown Heights Brooklyn, where I was born.

Our first meeting was held in Elie Wiesel’s Manhattan East Side apartment, with Dinkins Administration officials, some corporate executives, and Elie and Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and partner of many years.

I entered the Wiesel apartment as if it were a Cathedral or a sacred Synagogue. Books and bookshelves covered every square inch of every wall that wasn’t a window. They were not decorative books, but books which had visibly been read and re-read over and over again. I thought of the pages of Night, where Wiesel recounted his father calling out his name, “Eliezer,” only to be answered by a Nazi SS Guard giving his father “a violent blow to the head.”

I thought of a young, terrified Elie Wiesel going to sleep that night, January 28, 1945, in the bunk above his father’s bunk at Buchenwald, when his father was still alive, and waking up: “at dawn of January 29. On my father’s cot there lay another sick person. They must have taken him away before daybreak and taken him to the crematorium. Perhaps he was still breathing…His last word had been my name.”

I was enveloped by every book reaching out to me in the Wiesel’s living room, and thought again of Bitburg, and how this wise and fearless witness was compelled to “speak truth to power,” and how he still inspires me, and countless others, to keep that fire kindling in our souls.

What is a bigger “Problem” to solve RIGHT NOW, than the ICE Murders and ICE’s lawless terrorizing of citizens and immigrants?

Steve Villano

Jan 26, 2026

Dear Tom:

I don’t know how else to get through to you, but to appeal to you directly. I lived in your Congressional District for many years, and still have many good friends and family members who live in your Congressional District right now, and voted for you. They were happy to work hard for you to defeat convicted felon George Santos, but many are having second thoughts about your failure to fight the authoritarian excesses of the Trump Administration, which is what they elected you to do.

Some 30 years ago, when you were Mayor of Glen Cove, Tom Germano of Cornell University’s ILR School and Labor Studies Program and I conducted several days of training for your staff, your local unions and you. I have often praised your active participation in that training as a sign of a public official who was open to learning, changing and improving, and to be part of something bigger than yourself. Having worked with New York’s Governor Mario M. Cuomo for eight years, that was very important to me.

But enough history. Let’s talk about right now, and how you are perfectly positioned to change the terrible course this country has taken into autocracy, suppression and the State-sponsored murder and kidnapping of innocents, if you have the will and moral strength to do it. I believe you do.

You proudly proclaim your membership in the House of Representatives “Problem Solvers Caucus,” a group of approximately 50 Democrats and Republicans who are supposed to look past partisan labels to achieve consensus. Fine. I’m not going to get into a debate with you over the cheap political cover such a “caucus” provides to some who have taken reprehensible, anti-democratic and inhumane positions and written them into budgets and laws. That’s a discussion for another day. I want to deal with what is, right now.

As a leader of the “Problem Solvers Caucus,” what bigger “problem” exists in this country right now than preserving our Democracy and the Rule of Law? As a lawyer, and son of a legendary judge, this should be a no-brainer for you. What bigger “problem” is there to solve right now than the uncontrolled, Secret Police actions of ICE, the recent ICE executions of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, and the kidnapping of young immigrant children, like Liam Ramos from the driveway of his home? Why haven’t you gone on Fox News to talk about that? Convince me, and your constituents of a bigger problem that exists at this very moment that is in need of a more immediate solution?

Your position of leadership in the “Problem Solvers Caucus” brings with it another crucial obligation. Your access to other key Members of Congress, is not just for ego gratification, or resume building, but to get good things done. One immediate thing you can get done today is to buttonhole your fellow “Problem Solvers Caucus” member Republican Andrew Garbarino, who represents the neighboring Second Congressional District on Long Island, and Chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security. Garbarino’s committee controls all of the funding for ICE, and has Oversight responsibility for ICE’s actions. He has failed miserably to do either.

I know that you voted against the “Big Ugly Bill” which gave huge tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, destroyed investments in cancer research and AIDS care, Medicare and Medicaid, and gave Homeland Security and ICE multiple billions of dollars of taxpayers dollars, without any mechanism for holding them accountable. Bravo, for that vote, Tom, especially coming when your colleague Garbarino, the Homeland Security Chair, literally fell asleep during that vote, demonstrating a profound lack of care for the people of his 2nd C.D—where I grew up—and for American democracy.

Before you voted last week to allow ICE’s gestapo-like tactics to continue unabated without demanding any freeze on their funding or placing any ironclad restrictions upon their illegal, inhumane activities—a terrible, thoughtless vote which, along with the votes of six other of your Democratic colleagues, enabled continued, unrestricted ICE funding to pass the House—you repeatedly failed to demand accountability from the GOP’s Garbarino—another fellow “problem solver”—to conduct sharp oversight over both the excessive spending and the use of deadly force by Homeland Security and, specifically by Trump’s ICE secret-police. Why, Tom? Wasn’t that a serious enough “problem” to be solved, that goes to the very core of our democracy?

What continues to amaze me, Tom, is how an intelligent person of such great faith as yourself—who has met with three Popes over your lifetime—Pope Saint John Paul II, Pope Francis, and Pope Leo XIV—has failed to absorb any of their powerful teachings about the treatment of “the stranger” and of “migrants?” Didn’t you listen to what they said to you? Didn’t your personal audiences with those three transformational Popes make an impact upon you, and point the way to putting your faith into pro-humane actions? Didn’t Pope Francis’s comments of it being “a grave sin” to mistreat migrants have an impact upon you, a son of an immigrant? If if did, why don’t you do something about it, especially since you have the power and position to do so right now?

Which brings me to another important area where you can have a profound influence, and end ICE’s reign of terror and murder, by helping to elect a Democratic House to hold the Trump administration accountable for its lawlessness and inhumanity. You can use your influence with Hakeem Jeffries—who permitted you to cast that vote in favor of ICE funding last week—with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and with the Democratic National Committee to prioritize Patrick Halpin’s Congressional Campaign against Garbarino in the Second CD.

Is the DNC and DCCC so politically tone-deaf that they cannot recognize the political earthquake it would be to defeat Garbarino— the GOP House Chair of the Homeland Security Committee—who has been asleep at the wheel of holding ICE accountable in its funding and its illegal actions? As a fellow former Long Island County Executive, you know how closely Halpin worked with the Suffolk County Police force, who were required to undergo 6 months of rigorous law enforcement training, without receiving a $50,000 signing bonus as ICE’s unvetted, unqualified applicants are receiving? C’mon Tom, how can you be blind to this? You are a CPA as well as a lawyer; how could you ignore to such a blatant failure on Garbarino’s part to reign in the billions of dollars of unaccounted for spending of Homeland Security, including the lavish airplanes of Kristy Noem, and the building of an ICE secret police force larger—and far less trained—than local police forces around the country, like those in Suffolk and Nassau Counties?

Pat Halpin has spoken eloquently about these urgent matters, and was a powerful partner with Governor Mario M. Cuomo on strengthening local police departments and fighting the crack/cocaine epidemic of the 1980’s.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/AFK15HWNOvM?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

You know Pat Halpin; you know his strong history of public service, from his time in the New York State Assembly, to his courage in combatting the crack-epidemic as County Suffolk County Executive, to his steady leadership of the Suffolk County Water Authority. How could you not galvanize the Democratic National Committee and the DCCC behind Patrick’s candidacy for Congress, in the face of Garbarino’s clear cut failure to exercise any oversight over Homeland Security or ICE as Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee? How can you be so silent? Just because Garbarino is a member of the “problem solvers caucus” with you? Don’t you see that Garbarino, and other Trump/ICE enablers, are a huge part of the “problem?”

Use your power, Tom; use your position of influence with Jeffries, with the DCCC and with the DNC; use your pulpit on Fox News, on CNN and across all media platforms to condemn ICE’s unrestrained spending, illegal tactics and murderous brutality; and use the great moral lessons you’ve learned directly from three Popes: treat migrants, and our own citizens with humanity, decency and respect for their lives.

Yours in creating a better country and world,

Steve Villano

Liam Ramos, a 5-year old pre-schooler in a Minneapolis suburb, snatched from in front of his home by ICE Agents; Tom Suozzi, as a young boy, son of an Italian immigrant, raised in wealth & privilege.

Steve Villano

Jan 24, 2026

(Liam Ramos, Age 5, (top, dark shirt), son of a legal immigrant, inhumanely taken by ICE agents from in-front of his suburban Minneapolis home; Congressman Tom Suozzi (bottom, tan suit and red tie), son of a legal immigrant, raised in wealth and privilege in a NYC suburb.)

This is a story of two lives, separated by nearly 60 years, millions of dollars, and the accident of birth and background.

One life belongs to Liam Conejo Ramos. He is 5 years old. He was a pre-schooler at Valley View Elementary School in a Minneapolis, Minnesota suburb when ICE agents forcibly took him away from his home this week, while he was wearing his Spider Man back-pack, and his blue bunny ski hat. His middle name is “Conejo” which means bunny in Spanish.

Liam’s pregnant mother was just a few feet away from him, inside their home, when Liam and his father, Adrian, a legal immigrant from Ecuador, were snatched from their driveway and shipped off to a Texas ICE detention facility this week. The student population at Liam’s Pre-School is 50% Latino, and, according to school officials, three other of his young classmates were ripped away from their families by ICE Agents during the past year.

Liam’s father, did have a connection to Texas, where, according to a CNN story by Holly Yan, reported on Friday, January 23, “His family came to the US legally from Equador and presented themselves to the Border Office in Texas, in December, 2024, to apply for asylum.” Little Liam’s family was here in the United States legally, having followed every rule, and done everything immigrants applying for asylum in the US are supposed to do.

The other story belongs to another son of a legal immigrant, Congressman Thomas Suozzi of Glen Cove, Long Island, N.Y. Suozzi, now 63, was born in the small city of Glen Cove, a rare community that welcomed immigrants.

His father, Joseph A. Suozzi, immigrated to the United States from Ruvo del Monte, Italy, during a time of severe anti-Italian sentiment, led by the KKK, which drafted the xenophobic Immigration Act of 1924, the model for the Trump/Stephen Miller anti-immigration policy. During the 1920’s, with the Klan at the peak of its political power, a swath of US public sentiment at that time, considered Italians, especially those from Southern Italy, to be too dark-skinned to be “real Americans.” Since he was a child, it was Joseph Suozzi’s wish to be a “real American,” a sentiment Tom Suozzi discovered his father expressed early in his life.

Joseph Suozzi, Tom’s father, attended elementary and high school in Glen Cove, served in World War II where he became a war hero, and graduated from Harvard Law School. He returned to Glen Cove, where he was elected to a local judgeship, served as Mayor for four years, was elected to a 14-year term on the New York State Supreme Court, appointed to an Associate Justice Appellate Division judgeship by Governor Hugh Carey, and then founded one of the most prestigious, and most successful law firms on Long Island, with other former judges and political leaders.

Tom Suozzi, born in 1962 , one year after his father was elected to his first Statewide judgeship, never had to worry about being ripped away from his mother, and sent to a detention center for swarthy-looking Italian-Americans. He was the youngest of 5 Suozzi children and was comfortably swaddled into his family’s political and legal cocoon. Not only did Tom’s father serve as Mayor of Glen Cove, so did his Uncle Vincent, and his cousin Ralph. So too, did young Tom Suozzi, elected to his first term as Mayor only 5 years out of Fordham Law School.

Liam Ramos’ father was not a lawyer, nor a judge, nor had he yet had the opportunity to serve in an American war. Only a legal resident of the US for one year who was “following the process to secure safety for his family from persecution in their home country,” according lawyer Marc Prokosch, Liam’s father didn’t have the chance Joseph Suozzi had, to establish himself or his family in a community in the United States.

The Ramos family legally entered the United States one month before Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term as President, promising to deport one million “illegal” immigrants—only the most dangerous, he said—during the first year of his second term. Liam’s father, Adrian, while not a judge, nor a Mayor, had no criminal record. Liam, an innocent five-year old, was not a danger to anyone, and was beloved in school.

During the first year of Trump’s second term of office, The Marshall Project, a non-profit organization which keeps detailed records of ICE’s actions, reported that more than 3,800 children were detailed by ICE, including 20 infants. Liam Ramos was another non-white child snatched from the driveway of his family’s suburban Minneapolis home, along with his father, a legal immigrant.

CNN’s reported on Friday, January 23, that the Ramos’ family pastor Sergio Amezcua ,who has been helping the family, was on the scene and witnessed that the “ICE agent was trying to use the baby to get his mother to come out of the house, but the neighbors advised her not to do it.” Neighbors were advising Liam’s mother to stay inside the home, where ICE agents could not enter without a judicial warrant for her arrest. Reading that, I thought of the scenes in the brilliant,16-time Academy Award nominated film “Sinners,” where the Vampires—all White Supremacists—couldn’t enter a building full of Black people unless they were invited.

Like the Ramos’, the Suozzi’s were people of strong faith. Devout Catholics, they sent their youngest son Tom to Chaminade High School, an expensive private Catholic School in Mineola, Long Island. From Chaminade, Tom Suozzi stayed within the Catholic education system, attending Boston College for his undergraduate degree, and Fordham University Law School. Both are stellar Jesuit colleges.

Last year, Suozzi was part of an official delegation to the funeral of Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Pope in the long history of the Catholic Church. He met Pope Francis two years earlier, when Francis, a passionate advocate for migrants and refugees who said that “driving away migrants is a grave sin,” gave Suozzi a zuccetto, a white, circular skull cap, like a yarmulke, which is a symbol of humility and faith. Francis had, himself, worn the cap.

In a tribute to Pope Francis after his death, Suozzi said: “Thank God for Pope Francis. He always reminded us that the poor, the homeless, and migrants are all made in God’s divine creation.” Suozzi said that less than one year ago.

In a CNN Interview with Anderson Cooper during Pope Francis’ funeral, Suozzi retold his family’s own history of immigration:

COOPER: “And your dad came from Italy.

SUOZZI: My father was born in Italy, came to the United States as a young boy, lived a great American success story and —I define my whole look of America through the lens of the American Dream and immigrants. It’s painful for me that immigration has become such a tough issue.

COOPER: Well, especially when you think about the way Italians were treated back then when your father came.

SUOZZI: Oh yes. And my father, even after he graduated from Harvard, couldn’t get a job at a law firm because Italians were not liked because they had fought with the Germans during World War II. And that and the mafia, and you couldn’t get to first base….And then he went back to our hometown, teamed up with another Italian guy, and ran for city court judge, and at 28 years old, became the youngest judge in the history of New York State.”

With that kind of rich, immigrant family background and a compelling story of how an Italian-American outcast like Joseph Suozzi seized the moment to make it in a country which symbolized opportunity—overcoming virulent prejudice and hatred—the link between the experience of the Suozzi family and the Ramos family would appear to be unbreakable. If anyone could understand the plight of immigrants facing hostility and discrimination, the Suozzi family certainly could.

Couple that with Tom Suozzi’s strong Catholic faith, and his profoundly moving personal meetings with the two most powerful pro-immigrant Popes of the last century—Francis and Leo XIV—it’s astonishing that Tom Suozzi is not a champion of the rights of immigrants and migrants, considering that Pope Francis declared it to be a “grave sin” for Christians to drive away migrants—precisely what the Trump Administration is presently doing in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and in towns and cities across the country.

Suozzi himself, as Mayor of Glenn Cove in 1994, took concrete actions to integrate Glen Cove’s immigrant workers into his community that was so good to his family:

“I was the young Mayor of Glen Cove in 1994, and we had dayworkers from Central and South America gathering on a street corner, seeking work. The community was divided…and I ended up setting up the first day-worker spot on the East Coast—and those same guys that were on the street corner NOW have their own businesses, they own their own homes and there children go to school with my children…THAT’s the American Dream.”

Years later during in first term in Congress, Tom Suozzi took to the House floor on January 18, 2018 and gave a speech worthy of Pope Francis’s advocacy for immigrants:

“We have to remember that all immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, are human beings, and they are entitled to be treated with human respect and dignity…If we really want to make America great again, we have to reclaim that mantle as the beacon of hope.”

With that kind of immigrant family history, deep Catholic faith, and public record, it makes Suozzi’s latest crassly political, immigration-crushing actions perplexing, since he is actively denying what he knows to be true, and has lived.

A Newsday story by Billy House this week headlined “Long Island Dems Back DHS Bill,” underscores the point. On the one hand, in voting for the appropriations bill that increased ICE funding by billions of dollars without extracting citizen safeguards against ICE’s cruel and illegal actions, Suozzi declared:

“There is no question that ICE has overstepped its bounds. ICE’s current confrontational enforcement posture in Minnesota, previously in Chicago and elsewhere across the country is escalatory and inappropriate.”

Yet, Suozzi, contradicting everything he learned about the law at Fordham Law School and from a brilliant, compassionate legal mind like his father Joseph; everything he learned from superb social justice mentors like Jack English and Eugene Nickerson; and all of the lessons on humanity taught directly to him by Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV, Suozzi still voted in favor of the legislation that kept funding the Trump Administration’s unconscionable and unaccountable War against Immigrants. I cannot imagine that Pope Leo, whom Suozzi met and praised last year, would buy Suozzi’s lame argument that he voted to “avoid a government shutdown,” while voting to continue a State-sponsored assault upon migrants, and people of color.

Suozzi’s vote, and the votes of six other of his Democratic colleagues, provided the margin of difference for the legislation to pass. Had those seven Democrats—over whom Suozzi has some sway because of his leadership in the “Problem Solvers Caucus,” voted “NO” on the Trump-favored appropriate bill, the unlimited license for ICE to mistreat immigrants and American citizens would have been defeated 214-213.

Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in Congress, opposed the bill, demanding broad cuts and legal guardrails on ICE, in the aftermath of the Renee Good murder by an ICE Agent. Good, not a migrant, was an American citizen and mother of three, who was following the moral example set by Popes Francis and Leo, in objecting to the mistreating of migrants. In announcing his opposition to providing billions of dollars more to ICE—without accountability for their inhumane, illegal actions—Jeffries noted that he would not “support the lawless behavior of ICE to use taxpayer dollars to brutalize American citizens.”

That legal and fiscal rationale didn’t seem to matter to Tom Suozzi, who is both a lawyer and a CPA, with a present net worth of approximately $13 million.

If he was willing to forget the moral power of the white skull cap, the zuccetti, that Pope Francis wore, and then gave to him, and the words Pope Francis spoke that “mistreating migrants was a grave sin,” Tom Suozzi demonstrated to many of us who have know him for years, that something much darker is at work within him and has driven the Long Island Congressman to abandon what he knows to be true about his faith, his family history, and his commitment to the Rule of Law.

But redemption is possible, for someone like Suozzi who was raised on the religious concept of forgiveness. He can do penance by fighting for the freedom of 5-year old Liam Ramos and his legal, immigrant father from ICE’s deadly grip, and perhaps, setting up a scholarship fund for other migrant children like Liam. He can do that in memory of his father, a legal immigrant. He can reign in the Stephen Miller/Trump/DHS/ICE reign of terror aimed at the “grave sin” of driving away migrants, a moral crime of which Pope Francis eloquently warned.

And, Suozzi can put into action the words of Pope Leo XIV, whom he also had the privilege of meeting. On November 1, 2025—less than three months ago— Pope Leo held a mass in Rome, where, after quoting the Gospel from Matthew:25 of ‘feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, and clothing the naked,” the Pope added his own interpretation of Matthew’s great humanity:

“Jesus says very clearly that at the end of the world, we’re going to be asked, ‘How did you receive the foreigner? Did you receive him and welcome him or not. . .There’s a deep reflection that needs to be made in terms of what’s happening with how immigrants in the U.S. are being treated today.”

The question for Tom Suozzi, is whether or not he’s listening to what Pope Leo said, whether he cares about the towering teachings on migrants and humanity from both Popes Leo and Francis—each of whom he met— and if he has the courage to act on a moral imperative, far, far larger than himself, or his own political career.