Bucci II: This Time It’s Personal

Bucci II. The saga of the bootlegging priest of Burbank continues.

This episode includes a shooting, an affair, a possible love child and more clues to the whereabouts of the lost artworks of Father Alexander Bucci.

This is not the blurb for a sweeps-week TV miniseries, but a true story. Or at least based on a true story, given that everyone who was related to or was a friend of Bucci (1875-1959) tells different versions of events in his life.

It’s like an Italian American version of “Rashomon.”

The remembrances came in a steady stream in response to an “Around the Valley” column last month about Bucci, who was ordained in Italy, then sent to the United States in 1905.

After being forced out of the church in the wake of a Prohibition-era arrest for going beyond his priestly legal exemption to make wine, he spent several decades in Burbank as a priest for hire, performing masses and weddings in his makeshift home chapel.

What we knew of his career and hobby--Bucci made large religious and patriotic murals on the walls of his house solely out of canceled postage stamps--seemed colorful enough for one lifetime.

“There’s a lot more to the story,” said Joe Addotta, who called from Cypress. Addotta, 56, is Bucci’s great-great-great-grandnephew. He remembered Bucci as “a jovial little round man with a bald head” from seeing him at a few family gatherings when he was a child.

“My parents didn’t say much about him when I was growing up. He was kind of the family scandal.”

He was also a respected member of the Italian community, even though his relationship with the church was severed.

“I was baptized by Father Bucci, right in my mother’s living room,” said Evelyn Leonotti, 80, who grew up near Bucci’s home on Cohasset Street. “I can still see him, driving his car down the street,” she said, “smoking one of those strong Italian cigars. He always had his priest’s collar on.”

“He did a lot of service for people,” she said. “When my father was very ill, he would drop by and sit with him and say prayers. He was a kind man.”

What about the fact that he defied Prohibition laws?

“Who didn’t in those days?” Leonotti asked, defiantly. “There were all those vineyards in Burbank. What do you think people were doing with the grapes?”

But it might have been Bucci’s winemaking that brought on a violent death in the family in the early 1920s.

“The federal agents came to investigate, early one morning,” said Anna Overmier, a niece of Bucci’s now living in the Hancock Park area.

The agents, she said, came to the house where Bucci was living with his sister and her husband. They were looking for the priest, but Bucci’s brother-in-law, Nicola Pietrantonio, answered the door.

“He had his robe on,” said Overmier, 71. “Unfortunately, he reached into his robe and they thought he was going for a gun. They shot him on the spot.”

But one of Pietrantonio’s sons, who was about 5 at the time of the shooting, was told a different version of the story.

“The men who came to the door weren’t federal agents,” said Mike Pietrantonio, 83, now of Vista, Calif. “They said they were, but my father didn’t believe them and asked for a search warrant.”

The men went away, he said, but later returned and shot his father. “I don’t know what they were after,” Pietrantonio said.

*

Pietrantonio also disagreed with the depiction of Bucci as kindly.

“Maybe he was to other people,” he said. “But he made my brother and me work like hell in the vineyards behind the house when we were there. Even when we were supposed to be in school.”

Overmier agreed that Bucci seemed to get along better with his friends than with family. “I remember he used to come to our house every Friday with a dozen eggs from his chickens,” she said. “But he expected to be paid for the eggs, and he charged my parents more than they paid at the store.”

Nonetheless, Overmier had to laugh when she thought of her uncle. “My sister and I were going to City College on Vermont Avenue when he was still alive,” she said. “One day he offered us a ride to the school in that car of his. We were on our way when he said to us, ‘I don’t see so good. You tell me when the signal is red or green.’

“My sister and I looked at each other and made the sign of the cross.”

If Bucci had not gotten into trouble over his bootlegging, he might have been asked to leave the church anyway.

“My dear,” said Leonotti in frank tones, “Father Bucci had a mistress.”

It was not much of a secret in the Italian community.

“He ran off with her at one point,” said retired physician Richard Onofrio, whose parents knew Bucci well. “My mother’s cousin, who was the only one in the neighborhood with a car, drove them to the Santa Fe depot.”

“They were together for years,” said Addotta. “When we were kids, we were told she was the housekeeper.”

“They had separate bedrooms,” added Pietrantonio. “But there was a big communal closet. You could walk through it from one room to the other.”

Indeed, said Overmier, Bucci and his “housekeeper” had a child. “We didn’t hear about that until we were grown up and married, but everyone in the family knew it was true.” She was neither sure of the sex of the child, nor of whatever happened to him or her.

Pietrantonio, however, didn’t believe it. “I would have known,” he said. “There was no child of theirs ever in the house.”

It was not the scandals that brought a bit of celebrity to the priest, but the giant stamp murals he worked on for decades, covering the walls and ceilings of his Burbank house with more than 200,000 canceled stamps. They won him a place in a 1940s Paramount newsreel.

The murals, mounted on wood panels that were bolted to the walls, were bought, after Bucci died, by Joe Valento, who owned the nearby Twin Cannons Trading Post.

“There was an estate sale at the house and I bought them all,” said Valento, who is now retired and living in Downey. “I figured they would be valuable.”

He tried to sell them as artworks, but the art world failed to find any value in Bucci’s postage stamp rendition of “St. Anthony and Child” and other works. “I thought stamp collectors might be interested,” Valento said. “There were some valuable stamps in that art.”

But Bucci had applied shellac to his murals to preserve them. “The stamp collectors said the shellac made them worthless.”

*

Valento said he gave several of the murals to a man in Beverly Hills who said he would sell them on commission. The man disappeared.

The remaining murals were placed in a storeroom when Valento closed the Trading Post in the 1960s. They eventually disappeared, too.

“I don’t have any idea where any of it is now,” Valento said.

They remain missing. But the memories of Father Bucci remain strong.

“We called him Padre Bucci,” said Leonotti, who has lived in Burbank all her life. “It was a different time. Kids today think we would have all been shocked by what he did in his life, but I don’t think people cared so much in those days.

“He was a priest, he did his job. Everything else was private.”

*

’ He was kind of the family scandal.’

Joe Addotta,

Father Bucci’s great-great-

great-grandnephew