Anna Genovese (formerly Vernotico, née Giovaninna Petillo; 28 October 1905 – January 1982) was an Italian-American businesswoman in the Italian mob and the second wife of mobster Vito Genovese of the Genovese crime family and the Costello crime syndicate. She played a key role in Manhattan's drag bar scene in the middle of the 20th century.
Genovese was born Giovaninna "Anna" Petillo, the eldest child of Italian-Catholic immigrants, Aniello Vincenzo Petillo from Risigliano, Naples, and Concetta y Cassini Genovese, a cousin of Vito's. His brother Carmine lived with the Petillos after immigrating in 1910. Her siblings were Nicolas, Peitra, Ferdinand, and Mario Petillo. She has been erroneously listed as a sibling to mobster David Petillo; they were cousins. In the spring of 1924, at age 19, Genovese married her first husband, Gerard "Gerry" Vernotico. According to Kate Harmon, Genovese's great niece, to whom the Mob Queens researchers spoke and have on record at 10:55 in Chapter 1 of their podcast, Anna's marriage "was not looked upon kindly" by her family as Vernotico was considered a man of little means; a census record notes that he was a carpenter, though in reality he was a baker in New York City's Little Italy. In 1927, Genovese and Vernotico had a daughter, Marie, and moved a few blocks north of Anna's West Houston Street home to a tenement apartment next to an elevated train on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. In a 1930 census, she is listed as a housewife, and Gerard as a carpenter, though grand-niece Harmon states that Gerard was in fact a baker at a bakery in Little Italy and "had nothing." Court records show that at the same time, Anna had been working evenings in one of the clubs in the Washington Square Park neighborhood, near or in Greenwich Village.
