About the Author

Steve Weaver is a writer and researcher based in Auburn, New York, where the story of The Portable Village begins and ends. A Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at HashiCorp, he has spent more than two decades writing for IBM, HashiCorp, and others — producing technical blogs, tutorials, and presentations that have reached audiences across the software development industry. The Portable Village is his first work of narrative nonfiction.

The book began with a family dinner and a throwaway comment: that someone had dropped two pistols in a burlap sack into Owasco Lake in the 1960s. Charles LaNovara was Weaver's wife's great-uncle — her grandmother Antoinette's brother-in-law — and a figure the family had always described, vaguely, as a man who had done time as a fall guy for the mob. Pulling that thread led Weaver into a decades-spanning investigation: through Cayuga County court archives, federal trial transcripts, Ellis Island manifests, and Siculiana parish records going back to 1821. It also led him into the history of his own backyard — the Italian-American neighborhood of Ward 8, across the town from where he lives today, and partially demolished in the 1970s to make way for a highway built as part of an urban renewal project.

Weaver has spent years tracing both his own family genealogy and that of his wife's Siculiana-rooted family, bringing a researcher's precision and a neighbor's intimacy to a story that Auburn has largely forgotten.

The Research

The Portable Village draws on an unusually wide range of primary sources. Parish registers from the Diocese of Agrigento in Sicily, some dating to the early nineteenth century, document the kinship networks that would eventually reconstitute themselves on the streets of Auburn. Ellis Island arrival manifests record the exact dates, ships, and declared contacts of the families who made the crossing. Wilmington and Auburn city directories, Cayuga County court archives, and family interviews document the American trajectory.

The criminal record is drawn from newspaper archives, federal court transcripts — including the 1951 Second Circuit appeal United States v. LaNovara (192 F.2d 259) and a denied petition to the Supreme Court — and the 1974 trial of United States v. Bufalino, in which Lu-Char Industries and its operators were documented in open court.

The book is currently in active research and drafting. Chapter One is available to read on this site.

Contact

If your family was part of Ward 8's Italian-American community — or if you have photographs, documents, or recollections connected to the families in this book — please reach out. Every piece of community memory matters.

For media or literary inquiries, use the contact form.