The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (9 page)

It is uncertain whether this was Morello’s first murder, but the killing was so poorly handled that it seems likely it was. Taking aim at a range of only a few yards, the Clutch Hand opened fire; several shots rang out, but only one bullet hit Vella, piercing a lung. The Field Guard pitched forward and fell facedown on the cobblestones, his breath coming in wet gasps. Morello did not wait to administer the coup de grâce. The sound of two men running echoed down the alleyway and faded into the night.

The next thing that the neighbors heard was a woman screaming. Vella’s wife peered out of a window to see her husband sprawled in the alleyway. Hurrying out, she threw her arms around him, cradling his head in her lap as she called for help. Shutters banged up and down the passage as other householders leaned out to find the cause of the disturbance. Someone ran for the police. By the time help arrived, the wounded man had been carried into his apartment, where his neighbors laid him gently on the bed.

Vella was conscious but dying, blood seeping through his shirt to stain the sheets. It was clear to everyone in the room that he did not have long. His friend the carabinieri captain was the next man to appear; realizing that there was no time to waste, the policeman began asking what had happened. He could get little sense out of Vella. The captain appeared to be delirious and was plainly sinking fast.

“Did you see who shot you?”

“Cows, cows … the Mafia,” Vella groaned. He meant Streva’s gang of cattle rustlers. Then he began to babble a list of names—the members of the Corleone Fratuzzi. The carabinieri man scribbled rapidly, but as Vella rambled on, he interrupted. There were too many names; they could not all have been involved in the shooting. The policeman tried a different tack. Had there been any recent quarrels, he asked—disputes that had taken place in the last few days?

“Yes,” the dying man replied. “I quarrelled with Ortoleva yesterday. He wanted to take my job away—take the bread from my mouth.” The words came in a bubbling gasp. Vella’s lung was collapsing; he was coughing blood, and, worse, air had seeped into his bloodstream. Moments later, the first bubble of oxygen reached his heart, causing a massive cardiac arrest.

Giovanni Vella’s dying words posed a dilemma for the Corleone police. There was plenty of evidence that the Fratuzzi had played a part in the Field Guard’s murder; aside from Vella’s accusation, questioning of members of the crowd still milling in the alleyway produced a witness who claimed to have seen Morello in the passage and to have watched as Morello concealed his gun beneath a pile of rubbish. A search quickly revealed the weapon, which proved to have been recently discharged. On the other hand, the dying Field Guard had also named Ortoleva as a suspect, and Vella’s rival was arrested that same night. When the police learned that two men had been seen lurking in the shadows, they also detained another of the candidates for Vella’s job.

There are clear hints in what happened next that Streva and the bosses of Corleone’s Fratuzzi brought their influence to bear on the police investigation. Morello was arrested and held, pending questioning, but his pistol, the main evidence against him, disappeared soon afterward from the police lockup, apparently removed by a member of the carabinieri who had been paid to dispose of it. Ortoleva, meanwhile, supplied the police with an apparently solid alibi: He had been confined to his apartment, he explained, by a grocery wagon that had parked in the narrow street outside the building, so close that he could not open the front door. Before long, however, several of Giovanni Vella’s friends, pursuing inquiries of their own, were approached by a prostitute who claimed to have watched the middle-aged Ortoleva shin down a rope from his fourth-floor apartment just before the shooting. How the mayor’s son could have known, in those circumstances, where to find Vella was not explained; nor did anyone ever discover whether the prostitute was sincere, mistaken, or paid by someone to give evidence. What was certain was that the carabinieri investigating Vella’s death seemed a lot more interested in Ortoleva than they were in Morello. When, some days after the murder, the Clutch Hand was bailed out, Ortoleva remained in prison, rotting on remand.

But Morello was not quite free of suspicion. Other Corleonesi had seen or heard things that they should not have on the night of the murder. One was a woman named Anna Di Puma, a neighbor of Vella’s, who had been returning to her home along the alleyway shortly before the shooting when she saw two men lurking in the shadows. Di Puma recognized one of them as Morello, whom she “knew very well,” and when she heard gunfire a few moments later and ran back up the alley to find out what was happening, she found Vella lying at the spot where the men had been. A second possible witness was Bernardo Terranova’s next-door neighbor, Michele Zangara. Zangara had been in his apartment when, late one night soon after the Vella murder, he had heard voices drifting through the thin wall between his apartment and his neighbors’. “Peppe, what have you done?” he heard Angela Terranova ask her son. “Now they will come to arrest you.” There was a moment’s pause before Morello’s whispery voice replied: “Shut up, Mother. They have gone on the wrong scent.”

Zangara knew enough about Morello and Terranova to say nothing to the police, but Anna Di Puma was much less cautious. She told several of her friends what she had seen, adding that she would gladly give a statement. She was prepared to testify in court as well.

It did not take much time for word of Di Puma’s intentions to reach Morello, and it took less for the Fratuzzi to dispose of her. Even in the nineteenth century, even in a place like Sicily, where personal honor supposedly counted for so much, the Mafia never balked at killing women, and Di Puma’s intransigence convinced Streva and Morello that she had to be silenced, and quickly. Two days later, as Vella’s neighbor sat chatting on a friend’s front step, someone shot her in the back.

With the irritatingly honest Di Puma out of the way, Morello had little to fear from the authorities. He was so obviously the chief beneficiary of the woman’s death that the police arrested him again and questioned him for several days, but the investigation went nowhere. There were no witnesses to the murder—if any of her neighbors had seen or heard anything to suggest who Di Puma’s killers were, they had the sense not to say so in public—and Morello himself produced a solid alibi: He had been in Palermo, he said, at the time of the murder. This was probably the truth; with Streva arranging matters on his subordinate’s behalf, the Clutch Hand had no need to do anything so risky as shoot the woman himself. To make quite certain that no charges would be pressed, however, the Fratuzzi brought influence to bear once again. Two eminent lawyers, members of the fraternity, came forward to support the Clutch Hand’s alibi, signing affidavits stating that they had seen him in the capital. There was also another killing. Pietro Milone, one of the few policemen in Corleone who believed in Ortoleva’s innocence, met his death in another darkened alleyway before he had the chance to pursue his investigations. His assassin, too, was never caught.

The murders of Milone and Di Puma ended any prospect that Morello might be brought to justice for Vella’s killing. Francesco Ortoleva was not so fortunate. After four long years on remand, Ortoleva finally came to trial in 1893. Even then, the Fratuzzi took no chances. The defendant’s attorneys were bought off, and, having recommended to their client that neither Streva nor Morello should be dragged into the case, the defense team unexpectedly resigned en masse just before the trial was scheduled to begin. A replacement lawyer, brought in at short notice, had little time to grasp the case’s numerous complexities. Ortoleva was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

GIUSEPPE MORELLO RETURNED
to his old haunts in the autumn of 1889 with his reputation burnished. Vella’s murder had improved his standing within the Fratuzzi, and so had the way he had handled himself under questioning; there had been no betrayal of Streva or any of the other bosses in the town. The Clutch Hand also had proposals to make—schemes for making more money than the local Mafia had imagined possible.

Morello’s new idea was counterfeiting. It made considerable sense. For one thing, it was an urban crime rather than a rural one, and the Vella affair had shown how much easier it was in Corleone to deal with the carabinieri than the Field Guards. For another, it seemed relatively safe; counterfeiting was not then a federal offense in Italy, which meant that responsibility for suppressing it fell squarely on the shoulders of small-town police who were poorly equipped to tackle such sophisticated crime. Most important, they had access to a steady supply of notes produced by a Mafia counterfeiting ring that had begun to operate in Palermo at about this time. The Palermo counterfeiters worked under the protection of Francesco Siino, one of the most powerful Mafiosi in all Sicily, and were probably the source of the bad money that Morello brought into Corleone. The Fratuzzi also possessed, in the reluctant Mafioso Bernardino Verro, the means of passing its forged bills into circulation. By the spring of 1893, at the time of Verro’s initiation into the Mafia, the socialist café that he ran in the town was overrun with members of the Fratuzzi gambling with counterfeit notes. The Mafiosi earned the café such a dubious reputation that Verro felt it wise to stay well clear.

Little is known of how Morello’s counterfeiting ring was run, who was involved, or how much money the Corleone Mafioso made. Even the circumstances of the ring’s collapse remain mysterious. What is known is that the Siino family came under increasing pressure from other Mafia
cosche
along the coast during the early 1890s. These disputes eventually coalesced into a bloody feud between Siino and several branches of the Giammona family, who headed a rival faction in the Sicilian capital, and quite possibly the betrayal by the Giammonas of Siino’s allies in Corleone. Whatever happened, it is certain that Morello’s operations in the Sicilian interior were compromised sometime in 1892. The Corleone police launched an investigation and several suspects were detained. Eventually, in September of that year, a warrant was at last issued for the Clutch Hand’s arrest.

Morello did not wait for the case to come to court—he fled, a fact that did not prevent the Italian government from trying him in his absence during the summer of 1894. So seriously did the Sicilian authorities take the case, indeed, that the trial was moved to the Assize Court in Messina, on the eastern tip of the island, in a part of Sicily where the Mafia’s writ did not run and there was little chance that influence or tampered evidence could be brought to bear. The strategy worked; the defendant was found guilty and handed a heavy sentence: six years and forty-five days in solitary confinement.

It barely mattered. By the time the verdict was pronounced, Morello and his family had been in the United States for well over a year.

CHAPTER 3
LITTLE ITALY

I
T WAS A SPRING DAY, BUT ONLY IN NAME. DARK CLOUDS, PREGNANT
with rain, blew in from the north and sagged low over New York harbor. Squalls of wind, damp with the clammy moisture of the North Atlantic, came spinning down around Long Island and darted off across the germy water, whipping up spume and whitecaps as they hurried for the Jersey shore. The skies were gray. The city was gray, a jumble of drab factories and rickety tenements. The sea, green-brown at the mouth of the Hudson River, swirled with the factory filth that oozed across the bottom of the harbor until it turned gray as well. And it was cold: the sort of gooseflesh East Coast chill that the passengers cramming the rails of the emigrant ship
Alsatia
had never felt in Italy.

The
Alsatia
lay, hove to, in choppy seas just south of Ellis Island. She was thirty days out of Naples and fresh from a rough Atlantic crossing that had left a large part of her human cargo praying for a landfall. That had come on March 8, 1893, a Wednesday. Earlier that day, the ship’s first-class passengers, 150 of them, had disembarked at a Manhattan pier. They were presumed to be above the tests and examinations that awaited the eleven hundred more or less impoverished Italians still crammed nervously in steerage. Fourteen months earlier, the U.S. government had opened an enormous immigration center on the island, staffed by hundreds of inspectors and health officials and capable of processing as many as twelve thousand men, women, and children in an hour. There emigrants were questioned as to their employment prospects—men were required to have a job waiting for them—and checked to ensure that they possessed sufficient money to support themselves. They were also tested for a number of diseases. Inspectors carried sticks of chalk and marked people’s coats with codes: L for lame, G for goiter, H for a heart condition. The examination for trachoma, an infectious eye disease, was particularly dreaded; it involved having a buttonhook thrust behind an eyelid. Anyone seen bearing a chalk mark was taken off for more interrogation, and most of those who were declared unfit to enter the United States were packed off back to their old countries. A few managed to dodge this fate by smartly brushing off the chalk upon their clothing.

The ledgers that were maintained on Ellis Island record the Terranova family’s arrival on the
Alsatia
and give bare details of their circumstances. There was no sign of Giuseppe Morello, for example—the Clutch Hand had slipped into the United States some six months earlier, in the early autumn of 1892. Bernardo Terranova was aboard, however, with his wife, Angela, and all six of their children: Lucia, the oldest, who was just sixteen; her sister Salvatrice, twelve; and Morello’s three half brothers: Vincenzo, seven, Ciro, five, and Nicola—Coco to the family—who was only three years old. There, too, was Morello’s wife, Maria Marvelesi, whom he had married soon after the Vella murder. Marvelesi came from Corleone and was the same age as the Clutch Hand. She had with her the couple’s child, a two-month-old infant christened Calogero in memory of Morello’s father.

It was still unusual for families to emigrate together; more than eight Italian immigrants in every ten were men, and more than half of them eventually returned to Italy. Other than that, though, there was little in the Ellis Island records to suggest the Terranovas were anything extraordinary. Bernardo gave his age as forty-three and said his job was “laborer,” which was normal enough; most Italians were unskilled, and several hundred of his fellow passengers claimed the same menial occupation. He was the only member of the party who could read or write, and that was common, too. The only clue to Terranova’s eminence in Corleone, and to his membership in the Fratuzzi, lies in the notes that the officials made of the
Alsatia’s
baggage. At a time when the average Italian immigrant entered the country with six dollars, carrying a single case, the Terranovas mustered eighteen pieces of luggage among them. No other family on the ship arrived in the United States with so many personal possessions.

From Ellis Island, New York was only a short ferry ride away, but for the
Alsatia’s
wondering Italians it was like entering another world. Gotham was an unimaginable metropolis, a hundred times the size of Corleone, and filled with the sort of modern innovations and conveniences that were barely even dreamed of in the Sicilian interior. Buildings were lit by gas or electricity, and heated—downtown, at least—by steam; running water was commonplace and not an unimaginable luxury. Travel, hitherto by horse-drawn omnibus, was increasingly by electric streetcar or elevated railway; the first subways were being planned. Telegraphs and telephones were everywhere, and even saloons had ticker-tape machines, to carry the baseball play-by-plays. There were a thousand theaters and music halls and more than ten thousand bars. The tallest building in the city was a church whose spire ascended to a dizzying 290 feet above street level. And everywhere there were people: more than two million of them in 1893, a third of whom were foreign-born, making New York not merely the most vibrant, fastest-growing city in the country, but by a distance the most cosmopolitan.

The largest immigrant communities were still the Germans and the Irish, who between them accounted for more than half a million of the city’s population—this at a time when there were fewer than three thousand Chinese in Manhattan, a thousand Spaniards, and three hundred Greeks. They still lived largely in their own communities, the Irish in Five Points and Hell’s Kitchen, and Germans in Williamsburg or “Kleindeutschland,” east of the Bowery. Immigration from northern Europe had slowed by 1890, though. For the next two decades, by far the greatest number of new citizens would come from Eastern Europe—mostly Jews, fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire—and Italy. The number of Italians in New York, which was well under 1,000 in 1850 and only 13,000 in 1880, had grown to nearly 150,000 by the turn of the century. By 1910 it had more than doubled again, standing in excess of 340,000. In Italy as a whole, between 1860 and 1914, five million people, one-third of the entire population, left to find work overseas.

The earliest Italian settlers in New York came from the industrial cities of the north. They were skilled workers and middle-class professionals, and they received a cordial welcome. It was not until the 1880s that this pattern changed and much poorer, less educated peasants from the southern provinces began to flood into the city. These Neapolitans and Sicilians were escaping harsh conditions in their homeland: high taxation, an endlessly depressed economy, compulsory military service, and an unprecedented slew of natural disasters—droughts, floods, earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions—that followed one upon the other so relentlessly that they were seen as signs from God.

Unskilled, illiterate, and speaking mostly in impenetrable dialect, the men of the south were despised even in Italy, where a bit of doggerel popular at the time perfectly described their position in society:

At the head of everything is God, Lord of Heaven.
After him comes Prince Torlonia, lord of the earth.
Then come Prince Torlonia’s armed guards.
Then come Prince Torlonia’s armed guards’ dogs.
Then, nothing at all. Then nothing at all.
Then nothing at all
.

Then come the peasants. And that’s all
.

In Manhattan, they were still less welcome. Though useful, insofar as they did dirty jobs that earlier immigrants now thought of as beneath them, Italians from the southern provinces were regarded with hostility by many New Yorkers. Their dark complexions, lack of English, and devotion to an alien food were all regarded as distasteful. They were much more volatile than northern Europeans, it was commonly supposed, and prone to deadly knife fights and vendettas. Worse, only a minority embraced American institutions with the fervor expected of immigrants. Few Italians mixed with men of other nationalities, and well under half actually applied for U.S. citizenship. For many Sicilians and Neapolitans, the United States was a place to work hard, spend little, and save ferociously; many planned to return home with their savings. These were habits many Americans regarded as ungrateful and insulting.

Opinion hardened further at about the time the Terranova family first came to Manhattan. There was concern at the number of anarchists and socialists pouring into the country to preach revolution. There was concern at the number of criminals. Nineteen Italians in every twenty of those passing through Ellis Island were found to be carrying weapons, either knives or revolvers, and there was nothing in American law to stop them from taking this arsenal into the city. The Sicilian police were said to be issuing passports to known murderers in order to get them out of the country—a calumny, it transpired, but there were still real reasons to take such problems seriously. So many Italians were passing through Ellis Island every day that it was not possible to check their statements properly. But when the 1,400 passengers on board the SS
Belgravia
were subjected to a spot investigation, one in six was found to have given false information. “Statistics prove,” the
Herald
trumpeted in one alarmist feature article, “that the scum of Southern Europe is dumped on the nation’s door in rapacious, conscienceless, lawbreaking hordes.”

SO FAR AS THE
members of the Morello-Terranova family were concerned, though, New York was a welcome haven. They were safe there from the Italian authorities. Cooperation between Sicily and the United States was all but nonexistent at the time; certainly the police in Palermo and Corleone made no effort to discover if any of their wanted men were hiding in the United States. And only when an Italian became so notorious that the American government wanted to expel him would the New York police trouble to discover if the man had a criminal record in Italy. Any immigrant who had been in the United States for three years or more became, in any case, immune from deportation. All Giuseppe Morello and his stepfather had to do was steer clear of trouble for that long. Then they could put their difficulties in Sicily behind them.

Where Terranova and his family went when they disembarked from the Ellis Island ferry remains unknown; nor do we know exactly when they were reunited with Morello. In all likelihood, however, the clan took lodgings in the main Italian quarter of Manhattan. Speaking no English and already pining, like most immigrants, for the familiar staples of the old country, they would have made straight for Little Italy.

The Italian district of New York, centered around Mulberry Street, was still in its infancy in 1893. It had been predominantly Irish as late as 1890, when Mulberry Bend, a kink in the road a few blocks north of City Hall, was the most reviled slum in the city: rife with disease, thick with litter, and home to communities of the desperate and destitute with names such as Bandit’s Roost and Bottle Alley. “There is not a foot of ground in the Bend that has not witnessed some deed of violence,” wrote the reformer Jacob Riis, whose after-hours visits to the rotting lodging houses and drinking dens of Mulberry Street produced some of the most memorable images of old New York. Among the horrors Riis described were homes so caked in filth they would not burn when set afire and “stale beer dives” in windowless, earth-floored cellars, where patrons desperate for oblivion sank rotgut whiskey and the flat dregs of empty beer barrels discarded by saloons.

It was largely thanks to Riis’s eloquent campaigning that the worst excesses of Mulberry Street were swept away in 1890, leaving the district to the next great wave of immigrants from southern Europe. Three years later there were already tens of thousands of men, women, and children crammed into the seething streets around the Bend, a population larger than that of most Italian towns.

Conditions in the tenements of Little Italy were grim, though certainly no worse than they had been at home. Most of these dilapidated premises had been built before new zoning laws improved the standards of New York housing. They typically sprawled over almost the entire lot, so there was little light and no room for recreation; in the absence of gardens and public parks, children played on rooftops or in the streets. Almost every building was cold and damp in winter, when walls became so saturated with damp that they steamed whenever fires were lit. In summer the same apartments baked, so much so that even Sicilians, well used to infernal heat, preferred to sleep out on the rooftops or the fire escapes.

Privacy was nonexistent in the district. Bedrooms doubled as parlors and kitchens as bedrooms; every toilet, down the hall, was shared by fifty or sixty people. There were no bathing facilities; washing meant a visit to the public bath. There was no central heating; the only source of warmth in some apartments was the kitchen stove. Those lucky enough to have fireplaces in their rooms stockpiled coal on the floor, in corners, under beds, making it impossible to keep things clean. Every tenement, in any case, was infested with cockroaches and bedbugs. All had rats.