The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (19 page)

Petrosino is suave, but this is never discovered until too late, and the Italian criminal who has been chatting with him over a wicker-jacketed Chianti bottle, finds a strong hand clasping his wrist and the information is given to him that he is under arrest.

But for all this, the same writer warned, the Italian Squad was hard pressed to keep up with the demands placed on it: “Petrosino and his men seldom know what it is like to get eight hours of sleep in twenty-four.”

Petrosino was promoted to lieutenant in 1907, and most of the press coverage that he generated in abundance was positive; his name was so well known and well regarded by this time that he even became the unwitting star of a whole series of dime novels, published in Italy, which portrayed him as a sort of New York Sherlock Holmes. But the larger question of whether any detective was truly up to such a task was seldom asked. Certainly it was expecting too much of even forty officers to suppress crime in a community that by now numbered well over two hundred thousand people, and it did not help that the men of the Italian Squad were provided with the bare minimum of resources. The squad was given a little office of its own on Elm Street, a short distance from police headquarters, and had its own Rogues’ Gallery and files, but no effort was made to integrate this intelligence with the main NYPD files, let alone to share information with Flynn’s Secret Service, and the squad remained almost entirely reactive, attempting to solve crimes that had already been committed rather than mounting the sort of long-term surveillance Flynn advocated in the hope of preventing those that were still being planned. To make matters worse, Petrosino still kept much of his own invaluable experience in his head—he boasted to one newsman of being able to identify three thousand Italian criminals by sight—and while this made him a formidable adversary in person, it was a dangerous habit, and one that worried his superiors, who realized how much would be lost if the lieutenant decided to retire or was actually killed.

For his handful of critics, indeed, Joe Petrosino was a good deal less effective than his press coverage suggested—a Victorian policeman who kept the peace in Little Italy in a Victorian way. Having joined the NYPD as long ago as 1883, and having served more than half a dozen years as a beat patrolman before rising to the rank of plainclothesman, Petrosino had always relied as much upon his muscles as his brains—a Brooklyn alderman had once accused him of punching “more teeth than a dentist” from the mouths of criminals. Nor would anyone who knew both men have said that he was in Flynn’s class as a detective. Petrosino was more of a plodder, a stolid, careful, conscientious man who got results by sheer hard work, solid experience, and the occasional distraction of a modest disguise.

“As a story book detective,” a critical reporter from the New York
Sun
once observed,

Petrosino would have been a lamentable failure. His devices were simple. But his commonplace appearance and the fact that he had to deal with a class of criminals not particularly intelligent obviated the necessity for unusual cleverness in his methods. … He impressed most people as a short fat man, rather dull than otherwise, certainly not to be feared by a malefactor with a mind above a pig’s, [and] he looked as unlike a detective as you could imagine. He loafed about the wine shops of the lower East Side, the West Side and Harlem; he worked for a day or two sometimes in trenches with laborers; he passed himself off as an immigration official or as an employee of the Board of Health. A big cap, the brilliant red bandana, boots or a long overcoat were about all the properties he needed.

It was true, another newsman added, that Petrosino’s men did get a few of their results with the help of clever tricks and innovations such as fingerprinting. But, like their boss, they often seemed more comfortable practicing old-fashioned police work of a sort poorly suited to tackling newfangled crimes. The nightstick, the third degree, the stool pigeon, and the telephone tip-off to a friendly journalist when a newsworthy arrest was about to be made: These were the tools of the Italian Squad.

—

ON WALL STREET
a mile from Petrosino’s Elm Street office, William Flynn was also calculating how best to keep watch over the first family.

Had Flynn worked for the Police Department, he might have left Morello alone. The Chief’s sole duty was to catch counterfeiters, and the Barrel Murder case had brought the gang’s efforts to distribute bogus notes to a hurried stop. The family had burned ten thousand dollars of counterfeit bills on the boss’s orders immediately after his arrest, and the realization that the operation had been exposed by the Secret Service was sufficient to persuade Morello’s Sicilians to seek less risky ways of making money. The men of the New York bureau found no evidence that the gang was involved in counterfeiting in the months that followed the Clutch Hand’s release from jail in the summer of 1903.

Flynn’s instinct, though, was that Morello was still dangerous. The Mafia had already turned to counterfeiting twice; it struck him that there was every prospect that it would do so again. And there were still the loose ends of the Yonkers counterfeiting case to be followed through, investigations that led to the uncovering of the Canadian end of the Morellos’ distribution operation and with it traces of a more extensive mail fraud—the gang had been sending small quantities of notes by mail to agents in Italian communities all over the country. Then, that October, three other Morello agents went on trial, with the upshot that each received a sentence of six years. All in all, Flynn felt certain that his surveillance of the Clutch Hand ought to be resumed. If there were any signs that the Sicilians were making preparations to resume their counterfeiting schemes, the Chief wanted to hear about them long before they were a serious concern.

Aside from all that, there was also Morello, who Flynn knew had gotten away with murder, and for whom the Secret Service man had begun to feel considerable loathing. “He has become enveloped in mystery,” Flynn once observed in notes about his enemy,

[and] ultimately he will be looked upon as a big bad man, but he wasn’t and isn’t. He was a little bad man. He was vicious and vindictive and dangerous generally … treacherous but yellow. His mob was, like all mobs, a fluctuating quality. He enlarged it or decreased it to suit his own immediate purposes, [but] his staff was composed of as sinister an aggregation of cut-throats as I have ever surveyed, arrested and sent to prison.

There was more to Flynn’s determination to put a stop to the Clutch Hand’s activities than mere dislike, of course. By 1906, the Mafia was evidently a significant threat to law and order in New York.

As the Chief pointed out, convicting Morello would put one of the most murderous men in the city behind bars. “I’m of the opinion that 50 murders could be traced to the Morello-Lupo outfit,” he wrote.

Actually putting this decision into action was more easily said than done, of course. More so even than the Italian Squad, Flynn’s Secret Service bureau—indeed, the agency as a whole—was desperately short of men. Between the years 1890 and 1910, the number of Secret Service agents assigned to offices across the United States was never more than forty; the average was only twenty-seven men. Nine of those, plus Flynn, were assigned to the New York bureau, which made the Wall Street office the only one of any size outside Washington. But the city was home to so many forgers and counterfeit bills that every agent in the city was kept busy. In most years, more than a fifth of all the counterfeiting cases in the country meant work for the Manhattan office.

Both Flynn and his predecessor, William Hazen, had been aware for years they had a problem. As early as the summer of 1900, Hazen had written pleadingly to Washington, informing headquarters that the New York bureau required, at a minimum, a stenographer, a typist, and more agents. Little had changed by 1903, when, during the Barrel Murder investigation, Flynn’s men had worked sixteen-hour shifts, slept four hours on a sofa in their office, and then gone back out on the streets again. Now, that same autumn, the Chief was able to spare no more than one or two men to watch over Lupo’s grocery store and Inzerillo’s café, and that merely on an intermittent basis. As the months passed without any sign of a resumption of counterfeiting activity, even that watch was wound down and discontinued.

All this did not mean, however, that Flynn abandoned all attempts to monitor the New York Mafia. Informants recruited in Little Italy kept his office supplied with fragments of intelligence, and, unlike the minor street thugs favored as stool pigeons by the Italian Squad, the Chief’s recruits were generally former forgers with a good knowledge of serious crime. Tony Brancatto, Flynn’s top man in the Italian Quarter, was a Sicilian tailor who had once run a large-scale counterfeiting ring. Since his release from prison shortly before the Barrel Murder, Brancatto had—so Flynn believed—reformed, and the Sicilian now supplied the Secret Service with a stream of useful information, much of it gleaned from criminals’ gossip in Italian bars.

Italian-speaking agents supplemented such informants on the streets. In 1903 the New York bureau employed one such man, Larry Richey (born Ricci), a Philadelphian who had joined the Secret Service at sixteen as a result of a dime novel adventure—he had chased a ball down into a basement that turned out to be the lair of a counterfeiting gang. A few years later, Flynn added a second Italian speaker to his staff. Peter Rubano, an older and more experienced operative, became the Secret Service’s chief undercover man in the Italian quarter, assimilating so well into the life of the district that eventually, so Flynn recorded, he wormed his way into the outer circles of the Morello family itself. Over the years, both Richey and Rubano succeeded in producing large quantities of useful information.

The task of recruiting able agents of such auspicious quality was made easier by the fact that the Secret Service was regarded as a glamorous employer. The name, the lure of exciting detective work, and the relatively handsome pay of four to seven dollars a day (half as much again as a policeman’s) combined to encourage large numbers of well-qualified potential agents to apply for the handful of posts available. There were seldom fewer than three thousand men on Director Wilkie’s waiting list, and this meant that it was possible to select honest operatives of high attainment who possessed specific qualities; even Flynn had had to wait a decade for his chance. “In the Secret Service,” the Chief once explained to a curious journalist, “are specialists in dealing with certain callings. There are, for instance, the ‘lawyer,’ and ‘doctor,’ and the ‘engineer.’ They can pass themselves off as doctors, lawyers or mechanics as the case requires.” At Flynn’s instigation, the bureau even brought in female agents on occasion, a remarkable and forward-looking policy never dreamed of by New York’s Police Department. Nor was there ever any problem with corrupt, dishonest agents—this at a time when the Police Department was entirely awash with graft and almost every officer on the force took bribes.

The back office staff responsible for maintaining the Secret Service records in Washington were of the same high quality, and their files, a well-maintained and well-indexed collection, together formed an invaluable resource. The bureau’s headquarters in Washington boasted a Rogues’ Gallery, in Room 35 of the U.S. Treasury Building, that featured displays of 250 active counterfeiters and photographs and records of ten thousand more. Files bulged with samples of counterfeits, and clerks labored over ledgers containing the criminal records and exact physical descriptions of every forger and queer-pusher ever arrested by the bureau. The volume of fresh intelligence processed each morning was considerable. Each Secret Service agent was required to submit a daily report summarizing his activities in minute detail, and the names and the information these reports contained were carefully indexed and cross-referenced, providing Flynn and his colleagues in other bureaus with access to a formidable quantity of information on counterfeiting and counterfeiters throughout the country.

All these resources, all this information, gave Flynn a large advantage when it came to watching the Morellos. When the Chief discovered that the gang had begun to meet in a room at Lupo’s wholesale store, he rented a room across the street. He also arranged to have mail dropped into a local box recovered, opened, and read. His agents followed Morello and his men when they left New York, sometimes trailing their targets as far as New Orleans. And long months of dogged detective work—hours standing on street corners observing, weeks spent piecing together the details of the gang’s movements, actions, and acquaintances—ensured that Flynn generally had a shrewd idea of where Morello was and what he was doing.

When the Mafia moved, he would be ready.

CHAPTER 7
FAMILY BUSINESS

T
HE BODY LYING IN THE BROOKLYN MORGUE HAD BEEN REDUCED
to little more than packages of meat. Its arms and legs lay piled on one side of the slab, sawn clean through at the shoulders and thighs and still clad in the fragments of a suit. The torso and the head lay on the other, the throat cut and the trunk expertly drained of blood—”almost complete sanguination,” in the grim phrase of the medical examiner. The face had been so hacked up with a straight razor that it no longer appeared human. Even Antonio Vachris, who had fifteen years of service with New York’s police, had never seen such awful mutilations.

The injuries themselves, though, were familiar enough. The dead man’s nose, lips, and tongue had all been roughly cut away, and all were missing—punishments typically inflicted by Sicilians on traitors. The remainder of the mutilations—the slashed throat and the dismemberment—were warnings to anyone who might think of doing likewise. That explained why the body had been dumped where it was likely to be found: wrapped in two oilcloth bundles and thrown onto a stinking dump in Pigtown, a dilapidated Brooklyn neighborhood populated largely by Italians.

The victim had been young and strong, of middling height, though poorly dressed and showing little sign of wealth. Putting a name to the remains would usually have been a lengthy task, but when Vachris slid his fingers into a jacket pocket, they closed around an envelope that held a folded square of paper. It was a letter postmarked Carini, Sicily, a few weeks earlier, and addressed by one Antonio Marchiani to his son Salvatore in New York. Unfolding the paper, Vachris read an urgent scribble in Sicilian: “I hear from a number of people who have returned from America that you are constantly in company of a lot of bad Palermo people,” the elder Marchiani had written. “It is the express wish of your father and mother that you cut loose from them, as you cannot come to any good end with them. If you have not the money to return, we will send it to you. Never mind how poor you are: Come home.”

Vachris replaced the letter in its envelope. The butchered remains lying in front of him now had a name. But clearly Salvatore Marchiani had had no time to heed his father’s warning. His expertly dismembered body was the plainest evidence imaginable that someone powerful and vengeful had wanted him dead.

Marchiani was only twenty-two years old at the time of his death in February 1908, but, as the Brooklyn police discovered over the next few days, he had an interesting background. He had lived three years in the United States but was a frequent visitor to Sicily. He had extensive criminal connections. And he was widely believed around Palermo to have been a member of the Mafia. More intriguing still, the young man had links with Giuseppe Fontana—the Mafioso tried for murdering the former governor of the Bank of Sicily—and with Joseph Fanaro, the red-bearded Palermo man who had been arrested, with a dozen others, at the time of the barrel killing. He and Fanaro had, indeed, spent his last night on earth playing cards. So far as the police could tell, Fanaro had been the last person to see the murdered man alive.

As Joe Petrosino would point out, both Fontana and Fanaro had ties to the Morello family. Whatever it was that Marchiani had done to get himself killed—and the Brooklyn police had several theories to account for that—there was little doubt who was responsible. All the evidence suggested that the murder was Morello’s work.

NO ONE WAS EVER
charged with the Pigtown killing, there being no witnesses and so no firm proof to back up Petrosino’s strong suspicions. But if the body on the Brooklyn dump proved anything, it was how inexorably Morello’s Mafia family had consolidated its strength in the years between the Barrel Murder and this new killing. In 1903, Morello’s power had stretched no farther than a few blocks of Little Italy. By February 1908, when Marchiani died, it reached across the five boroughs of New York, even to the remote part of south Brooklyn where the body was discovered.

That power could be exerted only in the Italian districts of the city, of course. And rival gangs continued to exist, even within the tight confines of Little Italy. They ranged from small groups of amateur extortionists all the way up to the notorious Five Points gang led by Paul Kelly—an Italian who took an Irish name—which at its peak was said to number twelve hundred men. As early as 1903, however, sprawling but ill-disciplined gangs such as the Five Pointers had begun to lose ground to tighter, smaller, better-organized bands of criminals, and with good reason. The Five Points gang boasted a competent leader, Kelly, but few other men of marked ability. Their strength consisted largely of an undifferentiated mass of slow-thinking, poorly educated, violent street thugs, and their income was minuscule in relation to their numbers, consisting almost entirely of the proceeds of muggings and petty thefts. The Morello family, on the other hand, was better disciplined and more ruthless and made money more efficiently from its vastly more ambitious crimes. The eclipse of the Five Pointers by the Mafia was complete by 1905, when Kelly, with his gang rapidly disintegrating, was forced to flee north to Harlem and seek Morello’s protection. The Clutch Hand welcomed the old gangster to East 116th Street and rented him an apartment in a building owned by the Morellos.

The root of the Morello family’s effectiveness lay chiefly in its leadership and discipline. Morello himself stood unchallenged at the head of the gang, his orders obeyed without question, and Lupo made an effective deputy. Their power rested on their willingness to have men murdered, and over the years the New York police attributed a lengthy list of killings to Morello, starting, Petrosino thought, with the death of Meyer Weisbard, a jewelry peddler whose body was found stuffed into a trunk at the New York docks in January 1901. Weisbard had had his teeth knocked out and his throat cut—seemingly for being overly impudent in demanding payment from his Italian customers, since three hundred dollars’ worth of his stock was found in the blood-saturated trunk with him. A year later, an Italian banker by the name of Louis Troja, widely believed to be the richest man in Harlem, met a similarly violent end, bludgeoned to death in his business premises, and the list went on from there. Nor were Lupo and Morello the only members of the Mafia to resort to killing, at least in Petrosino’s view. Vincenzo Terranova, the eldest of the Clutch Hand’s stepbrothers, was the principal suspect in the murder of “Diamond Sam” Sica, a barber-cum-gambler shot dead on a Harlem street early in 1908. And Nick and Ciro Terranova did not scruple at killing women, plotting to strangle another gangster’s former girlfriend when they discovered she had learned the details of one of the Morello family’s assassinations.

Few of these murders were committed by the men who ordered them, of course. Instructions were passed down from the boss to lower-ranking members of the Mafia, who were expected to plan and execute the killings and take all the risks. Men brought into the Morello family, or initiated into rival groups such as the Camorra, were told that unquestioning obedience would be required, and that included committing murder if so ordered. “Sometimes,” explained a Neapolitan named Ralph Daniello, one of the tiny handful of men who actually testified in court as to the methods of the earliest Italian American gangs,

the system does not run smoothly. Then there is trouble—and death. Sometimes the leaders of one district look with envious eyes on the wealth made in the others; sometimes an outsider tries to squeeze in. Sometimes one of the leaders tries to depose his fellow boss and get a larger share of the spoils for himself. Sometimes a gambling house owner forgets to give over a share of his winnings. Then one of the leaders would call one of us into his house. “This man is in the way,” the boss would say, naming someone. “He interferes. Go
get
him.”

We went. We did not dare protest. It was the other man’s life or ours. For the murder, we did not get a cent, but we knew that if we returned to headquarters without finishing it, that same day would see our end. We lived in constant terror.

Lowlife thugs of Daniello’s type were scarcely specialists in murder. They were retained, on weekly pay that amounted to as little as ten dollars, to carry out all the miscellaneous tasks of gangland, from running card games and gambling houses to collecting extortion payments. There were plenty of examples of men of this dubious caliber botching the killings they had been assigned to commit. Mike Fetto and Johnny Esposito, ordered by Ciro Terranova to shoot dead the owner of a successful gambling joint, both failed miserably to complete their assignment. Fetto, the first man to attempt the job, went to the club in question but could not find the man he had come to murder. When he returned the next day with Esposito, his partner shot the wrong man by mistake. Fortunately for the two gangsters, Fetto made amends by shooting dead the gambler whom the pair were actually supposed to kill.

Morello, more than other leaders, did take steps to improve his men’s murderous efficiency. He provided them with guns and encouraged them to become proficient with them. At first Morello’s men worked on their aim in the shooting galleries that then proliferated in Manhattan, but places of this sort were dangerous—the police might be watching them—and alternative arrangements were promptly made. “There is a wood on the outskirts of New York,” the
Herald
reported a while later in an article bemoaning the fast-rising tide of murder in the Italian quarter,

where certain trees are almost cut in twain by the leaden slugs which have been fired into targets nailed to them. It is there that they become proficient with the revolver and the shotgun with the barrels sawn off short.

When a man is marked for death his assassins learn the street which he passes through most frequently on his way home at night. Then an apartment or a stable with a window facing this street is selected. … Some night when the victim is strolling homeward the ugly snub-nosed barrels are thrust through the window, which has been kept open just wide enough day and night. There is a squeeze on the trigger, the roar of the explosion to which Harlem’s “Little Italy” is becoming accustomed, and by the time the police enter the building from which the shot was fired there is nothing but a few empty bottles, a table and a chair, and the smell of stale tobacco smoke.

The real solution to the problem of killing efficiently was to leave the business to professional assassins, the first of whom were certainly in business as early as 1912. The Morello family passed many of its trickier problems to a killer named Lulu Vicari, a short, prematurely gray-haired man of thirty, so dark complexioned he was often mistaken for a Cuban, and identified by one of Flynn’s informants as “one of the most dangerous of the Morello gang. It is said that he does most of the shooting for the Terranovas.” Rival gangs had their own specialists, patient and methodically ruthless men who often were equally lethal. One freelance Italian holdup man, foolhardy enough to make a living by robbing gangsters on the street, purchased a chain-mail vest to protect himself against attack. A pair of assassins trailed him for a week, waiting patiently for the day that he appeared without his armor; when he did, they quickly shot him dead. Similarly meticulous planning went into the murder of a known enemy of the Morellos, Giuliano Sperlozza, a Black Hander who so feared being shot that he took to hiding in a windowless room deep inside his tenement. His killers entered the building while he was absent one day and placed a chalk O mark halfway up the door leading to his hideaway. Sperlozza was killed by a sniper who fired through the window, through the O, and into the extortionist as he sat in his chair on the far side of the door.

Most work of this sort was done on the direct order of a boss, either to maintain discipline and exert control over the members of his own family, or as part of a war with rival gangs. But organized crime had grown sufficiently sophisticated by the second decade of the century to hire out killers to third parties. The most notorious incident of this sort—notorious because the police eventually broke the case, setting off a lengthy series of trials and appeals—occurred in downtown Manhattan in 1914 when an independent poultry dealer by the name of Barnet Baff began selling his stock at prices well below those set by the Jewish-run cartel that controlled the chicken racket in West Washington Market. When dire threats failed to weaken Baff’s determination, the poultry dealers turned to the Morellos for help. A Mafia man by the name of Ippolito Greco agreed to hire out four gangsters to “take care” of Baff who was shot through the head soon afterward. The four murderers, who were each paid a hundred dollars, were tracked down after an investigation that lasted nearly a year; it took four more to establish to the satisfaction of a jury who had hired the gunmen and why.

Murder, of course, remained a last resort, even for Mafiosi, but it was the threat of it that underpinned discipline within the Morello family and ensured that the members of the gang stuck strictly to the Clutch Hand’s rules, which were clearly set out and astonishingly bureaucratic. Morello’s Mafia was governed by a set of nine regulations, which apparently were issued to each man upon initiation; one copy, discovered in “a small black book closely written in the nebulous dialect of Sicily,” turned up among the possessions of a man arrested by Flynn and carefully set out the rights and role of both the boss and his associates. Insulting another member of the family or leaving New York without Morello’s explicit permission could both be punished with a twenty-dollar fine. Lying or drawing a weapon on an associate merited expulsion from the family. Another article shed light on the finances of the gang, explaining that its members were expected to turn over four-fifths of their earnings to the “society”—meaning, in effect, Morello. Several more dealt with the plainly important topic of gang meetings, which the boss possessed the sole right to call, which had to be announced at least a day in advance, and which members of the family were required to attend on pain of being cut out of “the next division of funds.”