Longtime Chicago public relations executive Dominic DiFrisco headed the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans and was a forceful public advocate for Chicago’s Italian-American community.
“He not only cared from the bottom of his heart for the Italian-American community, he cared for all other ethnic groups,” said Chicago funeral director Lou Rago, a longtime friend and lunch companion. “There was not another ethnic group or race that Dominic did not have a friend in, and he was a telephone call away from all of them, and you know what — he brought people together.”
DiFrisco, 85, died of complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma on Sunday, April 28, at Rush University Medical Center, said his daughter, Nina Mariano. He had been a Gold Coast resident.
The son of immigrants from Corleone, Italy, DiFrisco was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Fordham University in New York in 1955.
DiFrisco worked in public relations for Alitalia in New York and was transferred to the airline’s Chicago office in 1962. Alitalia closed its Chicago office in the early 1970s and DiFrisco was offered a job in New York. A single father at the time, he chose to stay in Chicago, where his daughter preferred to remain.
DiFrisco remained in public relations and in 1980 joined Burson-Marsteller as director of government and community relations. He joined Edelman as a senior consultant in 2002. The PR firm’s president and CEO, Richard Edelman, said in a statement that DiFrisco helped the company stay prominent in Chicago after the deaths of Edelman’s parents, Dan and Ruth Edelman.
DiFrisco was for many years president of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, an umbrella organization for about 100 Chicago-area groups. DiFrisco created the group’s annual Dante Awards for members of the Chicago news media who follow Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s call to be “no timid friend to truth.” He also started the organization’s annual Filippo Mazzei Public Affairs Awards for someone who shows extraordinary skills in public affairs.
“He was extremely proud of creating the Dante Award and the additional Filippo Mazzei Award,” said Lissa Druss, the group’s director of communications. “And he was an incredible teacher, mentor (and) adviser, and he would never be without an opinion on something, especially when it came to current issues.”
DiFrisco objected to any perceived disrespect of Italian-Americans. He launched a full-throated objection to Capone’s Chicago, a downtown mobster museum and tourist trap that closed in 1996.
“We greet the news (of the museum’s closing) with a communal sigh of relief and exultation,” DiFrisco told the Tribune in 1996. “It was an architectural monstrosity and a gross insult to the Italian-American community.”
One of DiFrisco’s final public works of advocacy was his strenuous objection in 2017 to a proposal to rename Balbo Drive in Chicago — which was named for the Italian aviator Italo Balbo — after pioneering African-American investigative journalist Ida B. Wells. DiFrisco and his group ultimately prevailed, with the Chicago City Council agreeing to rename Congress Parkway after Wells.
“Balbo was never an enemy of the United States,” DiFrisco wrote in a letter to the Tribune in August 2017. “He was an inspiration to Italian-Americans and to those in aviation. Balbo did the right thing: opposed (Benito) Mussolini during his darkest time. Why should the City Council bring Chicagoland Italian-Americans into a dark corner when our community shines so brightly with all ethnic groups?”
DiFrisco also was part of an effort in the 1990s to keep his church in Little Italy, the Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii, from closing.
“He found a way to connect and keep track of everyone he came into contact with, and he genuinely cared about every aspect of people’s lives,” said criminal defense attorney Donna Rotunno, a family friend.
In 2005, DiFrisco set up a client of his, grocery-chain founder Bob Mariano of Mariano’s Fresh Markets, with his daughter, Nina, and the two eventually married.
“He just wanted to connect with people on a genuine level, and wherever I was with him, whether in an Uber, in a restaurant or in an elevator, he found a way to connect with every single person he came into contact with,” his daughter said.
DiFrisco, who was twice divorced, also is survived by his third wife, Carol; two sisters, Carmela Soricelli and Louisa Termini; and a grandson.
A funeral mass is set for 10 a.m. Wednesday, May 1, at The Shrine of Our Lady of Pompeii, 1224 W. Lexington St., Chicago.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.