Cosa Nostra (29 page)

The Morello gang based its power in New York on the same principles of territorial control as any
cosca
back in Sicily: protection rackets and patronage; relationships with police to ensure immunity from prosecution. Immigrant communities also made for very solid packages of votes; lacking a real interest in or understanding of the politics of their new country, many immigrants were happy to trade their votes for small favours from a patron.

Nevertheless there were some important differences between the environments that mafiosi worked in at home and in New York. The problem faced by the mafia’s system of territorial dominance was that America was a more mobile and diverse society, with a long tradition of crime and corruption all of its own. The population of Elizabeth Street, as in the other immigrant quarters, was in constant flux. People came and went from the Old World. Many new arrivals moved on to other parts of the US. Others, as they improved their living standards, moved up and out to more salubrious areas in Harlem, Brooklyn, and beyond.

Mafiosi had to be as mobile in the New World as the Italian population they preyed on. Morello had travelled within the US before settling in New York; his gang also had another base in the Sicilian community of East Harlem. Nicola Gentile, a young Sicilian, who was initiated into the mafia in Philadelphia in 1905, moved between mafia
cosche
in different cities several times in his career. (Gentile is the subject of the next chapter.) He had dealings with men of honour in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Kansas City, San Francisco, and Canada. What he describes in the years before the First World War is a criminal network firmly rooted in Sicilian communities across North America, but having very little influence outside those communities.

New York was where this network looked to for leadership; it had by far the largest Sicilian population, and it was the main terminal for goods and people arriving from the island. The same mafioso—as reliable a witness as there can be to such things—affirmed that Piddu Morello was the supreme boss of the whole American branch of the mafia until 1909.

Whatever Morello’s status within the Sicilian mafia nationally, it did not make his position much easier in New York. At the time of the ‘body in the barrel’ murder, the Morello
cosca
found its neighbourhoods bounded by crews who played by different rules, spoke a different Italian dialect, or even hailed from an entirely different country. Instead of the constant consultation that took place between
cosche
affiliated to the same association in Sicily, mafiosi in New York City were faced with the underworld equivalent of international diplomacy.

By the time the Morello
cosca
had set up operations in Little Italy, the New York criminal marketplace had already been an arena of ferocious competition for years. The tenements of Manhattan at the turn of the century were a patchwork of territories for gangs of sharp-dressed young hoodlums like the Gas House Gang, the Gophers, the Hudson Dusters, and the Pearl Buttons. In 1903, Paul Kelly’s Five Points gang controlled the area between the Bowery and Broadway that included Little Italy. Kelly had been born Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli in Naples. He took his new Irish-sounding name during a short boxing career. A dapper, soft-spoken man, he reputedly commanded 1,500 toughs, most of them Italian, but including some Jews, Irish, and others. Kelly’s organization embraced prostitution, gambling, protection, property, and machine politics. Although he never stood for office himself, he fed support upwards to Tim ‘Dry Dollar’ Sullivan, the undisputed Democratic boss of the Lower East Side. American-born politicians, particularly the Irish like Sullivan, were the only ones who seemed capable of building a power base that traversed the different ethnic slums.

If, as the papers suggested at the time, the Sicilian mafia had wanted to conquer New York, it would have needed to have arrived half a century earlier. From their base within the Sicilian communities, mafiosi had the resources and skills to carve out a competitive slot in the New York underworld. But they found it impossible to dominate.

*   *   *

The Sicilian mafia in America also faced the problem of trade-mark control. It was America that turned ‘mafia’ into the best-known brand name in organized crime. Celebrated cases like the body in the barrel began to spread ‘mafia’ far and wide. Yet in the process the logo drifted out of the grasp of the cluster of local Sicilian firms who originally traded under that name. Rather in the way that, in common parlance in the UK, a ‘Hoover’ now means any old vacuum cleaner, the American press applied ‘mafia’ to all forms of Italian organized crime, and then to any gang activity whatsoever. (This was, in a sense, a notable achievement for the Sicilians, who were latecomers in an already mature market.)

The so-called ‘Mano nera’ (‘Black Hand’) offers further illustration of this brand-name inflation in the United States. The ‘body in the barrel’ case attracted press attention to a spate of extortion demands that were directed at wealthy Italian-Americans. Headlines in the
New York Herald
read: ‘New York Italians Kept Silent by Terror of the Far Reaching Arm of the Mafia.’ ‘Scores of New York Business Men Pay Blackmail to Mafia.’ On 3 August 1903—a few months after the discovery of the body in the barrel—Nicola Cappiello, a successful Brooklyn building contractor, received the following note (in Italian) marked with a skull and crossbones.

If you don’t meet us at Seventy-second Street and Thirteenth Avenue, Brooklyn, to-morrow afternoon, your house will be dynamited and you and your family killed. The same fate awaits you in the event of your betraying our purposes to the police.

Mano nera

Across southern Italy, demands like these were called
lettere di scrocco,
‘scrounging letters’, because the authors often protested their poverty as well as issuing threats. It was a method employed in the violence industry even before the mafia emerged. Thus Mr Cappiello’s story conformed to a well-established pattern from the Old World. When he refused to cooperate, further messages followed. The amount demanded escalated to $10,000. Then three old friends, along with a stranger, came to visit and offered to mediate with the extortionists for $1,000. Cappiello decided to go along with the proposal, but a few days after he handed over the money the same men came back to ask for more. Fearing that he would be bled of his entire wealth, Cappiello went to the police. His ‘friends’ were arrested and convicted.

The name ‘Mano nera’ was destined to be more successful than this particular gang. Gradually more and more blackmail letters were signed with a black hand. The excited press coverage patently began putting the idea into criminals’ heads. The name spread from New York to Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans until it became, for a while, more popular even than ‘mafia’ as a designation for Italian organized crime.

‘Black Hand’ became a criminal fashion. Professional gangs apart, jealous neighbours, commercial rivals, hard-up workers, and pranksters also sent ‘Black Hand’ letters. In Sicily, this kind of abuse of a criminal ‘logo’ used by the honoured society would have been unthinkable. Mafia
cosche,
with spies in every street, brutally protected their monopoly on intimidation.

*   *   *

Despite the failure to achieve convictions, the ‘body in the barrel’ case established Joseph Petrosino as a new kind of hero in the eyes of New Yorkers, a sort of frontiersman of Mulberry Bend. His own life story was a parable of America’s redemptive power: from poor dago to upstanding detective. Who better to patrol the dark and overcrowded tenements and sweatshops where the swarthy new immigrants from ‘the boot’ lurked?

Petrosino was responsible for sending hundreds of Italian criminals back to the peninsula, and for imprisoning many others. His rise through the ranks of the NYPD continued. In January 1905, he was appointed head of the force’s new Italian branch. Soon afterwards, he became the first Italian-American to make lieutenant. In 1907, he married Adelina Salino in the old St Patrick’s Church on Mott Street in the heart of Little Italy.

The following year Petrosino was assigned to police Raffaele Palizzolo’s visit to New York. The man absolved of ordering the death of Emanuele Notarbartolo came to thank those who had reputedly contributed $20,000 to his cause. Interviewed by a
New York Herald
reporter, Don Raffaele declared that the main purpose of his visit was to ‘instil into his Sicilian compatriots the principles of good citizenship’. He laughed when asked whether he had anything to do with the mafia.

By this time Petrosino’s reputation had spread. Criminals newly arrived from southern Italy would ask to be taken to police headquarters and have friends point out the cop of whom they had heard so much. In the autumn of 1908, the gritty lieutenant was awarded a gold watch by the Italian government for his part in the arrest of a leading Neapolitan gangster.

Despite the gold watch, Petrosino and his superiors grew tired of the Italian authorities’ failure to stop criminals and anarchists leaving Italian shores for America. In February 1909, Petrosino became head of a new secret service arm of the police department. His first mission was to go to Italy to set up an independent information network on gangsters with criminal records in Sicily. Given the difficulties in convicting mafiosi, Petrosino hoped to use the information gathered on the island to expel as many as possible from the USA as illegal immigrants.

On 21 February 1909, Petrosino arrived in the northern Italian port of Genoa. Travelling south, he stopped off to meet officials in Rome and to visit his brother near Salerno. On 28 February the scourge of the Black Hand landed in Palermo ready to take on the mafia in its homeland.

His body arrived back in New York on 9 April aboard the
Slavonia
of the Cunard Line. Nearly four weeks had passed since his murder; the ship had been delayed by bad weather. Petrosino’s remains were taken in procession to his apartment at 233 Lafayette Street. Five platoons of mounted police and a guard of honour accompanied the funeral carriage, which was laden with wreaths from official bodies in both Sicily and New York. The plan had been to have an open coffin while he lay in state, but there was only a photograph on the lid because the embalming had failed. The
New York Herald
estimated that 20,000 people came to pay their respects. It also aired the suspicion that the embalming had been botched deliberately—the Sicilian mafia’s final insult to its victim. On 12 April, another grand procession took Petrosino through the streets for a funeral service at St Patrick’s in Mott Street.

Petrosino died because he badly underestimated the power and ruthlessness of the mafia in Sicily. His street wisdom was attuned to New York, but he had an émigré’s condescending attitude to the old country. When he was interviewed about the mafia during the ‘body in the barrel’ investigation, his comments smacked of prejudice and folklore:

Practically everyone who comes here from Sicily is afflicted with this moral disease. It is inherited and ineradicable. The Mafia is a loosely organized organization, but the same spirit of opposition to all forms of law and all forms of authority is instinctive with everybody at all connected with it. In Sicily the women and children will work hard in the fields and the man will strut around with a gun over his shoulder.

Petrosino’s supposedly ‘secret’ mission to Italy had been pre-announced in the New York press. When he reached Palermo, he refused the offer of an armed escort. The only protection he thought he needed were the dollars he handed out as bribes. He used the methods that had proved so successful at home, boldly seeking to make personal contact with criminals and mafiosi out in the streets. This, of course, was what the Sicilian police did too; but they would never have dreamed of trying to do it in isolation. After Petrosino’s death, it was found that he had even left his revolver in his hotel room.

Police in Palermo suspected a link between Petrosino’s death and the ‘body in the barrel’ gang. Two members had travelled back to Sicily at the same time as Petrosino, keeping in touch with Piddu Morello using coded telegrams. The theory was that Morello and Giuseppe Fontana had asked Vito Cascio-Ferro to arrange the killing on their behalf. When Cascio-Ferro was arrested, he was found to have a photo of Petrosino. Yet there was an alibi: Don Vito’s political collaborator, a member of parliament, claimed that the mafioso had been at his house when Petrosino was shot. Much to the indignation of the American press, the case never even came to trial.

Many years later, after a life sentence had finally brought his career to an end under Fascism, Cascio-Ferro was interviewed in jail. He claimed to have only ever killed one man in his life, ‘and I did that
disinterestedly
’. This cryptic phrase was taken to refer to the most famous murder with which his name had been associated: that of Joe Petrosino. The implication was perhaps that he had carried out the murder as a favour to his American colleagues. This ‘confession’ does not necessarily mean he committed the crime. It might simply have been an attempt to bask in the stolen glory of another mafioso’s work. Like the ‘body in the barrel’ case, Joe Petrosino’s murder is still classified as unsolved.

*   *   *

Along with most Sicilian immigrants to the United States, the members of the Morello gang probably did not intend to make their stay permanent. Like many of those same immigrants, however, the most prominent members remained in the USA for the rest of their lives. For some this was not a very long time. Inzerillo opened another little pastry shop but was shot and killed soon afterwards. Di Primo, a model prisoner in Sing Sing, was released early. Petto the Ox moved to Browntown, Pennsylvania. On the night of 25 October 1905, he was hit by five bullets from a shotgun in his own back yard. Petrosino suspected that Di Primo was the murderer. Giuseppe Fontana disappeared soon after the Petrosino killing.

Other members of the gang played a role in New York’s organized crime scene for decades. In the year of Petrosino’s death, Piddu Morello was convicted of running a counterfeiting business in East Harlem and given twenty-five years in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He lost his role at the head of the organization.