The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (10 page)

“More than anything I remember the smells of the old neighborhood,” said one old Corleone Mafioso of the Little Italy of his youth.

You can’t believe how many people lived together in those old houses. There were six or seven tenements on Elizabeth Street where we lived and in those buildings, which were maybe five or six stories high, there must have been fifteen or sixteen hundred people living. And everybody took in boarders, too. A lot of the guys who came over from Sicily were not married or had left their families in Italy. They were only there at night since they were out working all day, and at night there must have been another seven or eight hundred guys sleeping in the building. We had it pretty good because there were only four of us in three rooms, but in some other apartments you had seven or eight adults and maybe ten kids living in an apartment the same size.

Some of the smells were good. I can remember, for example, that early in the morning, say five o’clock, you could smell peppers and eggs frying when the women got lunches ready for their sons and husbands. But more than anything else I remember the smells of human bodies and the garbage. There was no such thing as garbage collection in those days and everybody just threw it out in the street or put it out in the hallways. Christ, how it stank!

Poverty was an everyday reality for most of the families of Elizabeth Street, just as it had been at home in Italy. Higher incomes in New York, where it was possible for even an unskilled laborer to earn $1.50 a day—a sum thirty times the five-cent wage typical in Sicily—were offset by the higher cost of living, and many families willingly endured privation in order to remit larger sums to relatives at home. Pasta and vegetables formed the staple diet, purchased from the innumerable street cart peddlers who thronged the streets of Little Italy, and meat remained a luxury for most. Delivery vehicles inched along the pulsing thoroughfares pursued by a procession of small children who scavenged for anything that fell—or could be made to fall—from them. Few people owned more than the clothes on their backs and perhaps a single item of Sunday best. Even sheets and blankets were scarce commodities. Joe Valachi, born to Italian parents in New York a few years after the Terranova family arrived from Sicily, remembered that “for sheets my mother used old cement bags that she sewed together, so you can imagine how rough they were.”

Simply finding accommodation in the overcrowded tenements of Little Italy was hard enough. Work, good work with decent conditions and some prospects, proved a good deal more elusive. Many emigrants, hundreds of thousands of them, had been lured across the Atlantic by tales of the immense wealth of the United States and so arrived in New York filled with the hope that they, too, would accumulate an easy fortune. The reality proved very different. The only jobs available to unskilled Italians were the filthy, menial ones that Americans thought were beneath them. Rag picking—sorting through heaps of stinking rubbish in search of bottles, bones, and cloth that could be resold for a cent or two—was one source of casual employment for the men. Others labored on sewer repairs, did construction work on the new subway, or manned the city’s garbage scows. Women worked in dimly lit sweatshops, ruining their eyes by staring at the fast-moving needle of a sewing machine for nine hours at a stretch, or labored stripping feathers for mattresses and pillows in workshops that brought on lung disease.

This sort of casual work was monotonous and poorly paid. It was also frighteningly insecure. Men were hired by the day to labor on contracts that might last for a week or two, rarely longer. Women did piecework, perhaps gluing envelopes at the rate of three cents for every thousand, and lived with the threat that any dip in productivity would result in dismissal. The endless stream of immigrants pouring through Ellis Island meant that there was competition for even the basest work, and for many Italians of Bernardo Terranova’s generation the solution was to go to work for a
padrone
, an overseer who spoke some English and who contracted to supply cheap labor to a variety of businesses. The more fortunate—those with some wealth, some skill, or some connections—got help from friends and relatives who had already settled in the United States. This is almost certainly what Terranova and Morello did. Small colonies of Corleonesi already existed in the New York of 1893, one in Little Italy and another in East Harlem, where a second Italian quarter was taking root in the blocks around East 107th Street. Terranova had some skill as an ornamental plasterer, and he and his stepson most likely got at least a little temporary employment in this way.

Whatever the men of the family tried, though, it soon became apparent that it was not enough. The American economy was stalling. Fewer and fewer were able to find even temporary jobs; by summer there was almost no work to be had anywhere in New York. The American economy, foundering since 1890, was sliding into full-blown depression. It was the worst economic crisis yet experienced by the United States. The great crash of 1893 was under way.

THE CRASH OF 1893
was a slump as bad in almost all respects to the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was a run on gold; the value of stocks and shares plummeted; thousands of companies went bankrupt; and at least five hundred banks failed. It was no time to be an impoverished immigrant in a frightened New York. By December, fully a quarter of the working population had no job.

Morello and the Terranova family spent that terrible year living in Manhattan. How they survived there is unknown, but their position must have been precarious. Even with the help of fellow Corleonesi, Terranova and Morello had two wives and seven children to support; none of the family spoke English; and only one of their offspring was old enough to earn—Lucia, Terranova’s eldest daughter, turned seventeen that year. Their savings and even the sale of their personal possessions would have stretched only so far. When it became clear that the economy would not recover quickly, the only realistic solution was to search for work outside New York.

Ciro Terranova, the second youngest of Bernardo’s sons, was the only member of the family who ever spoke about these early years. Five years old in 1893, just old enough to grasp something of the problems that his parents faced, he recalled his half brother Giuseppe leaving New York to hunt for work soon after their arrival. Morello traveled south, to Louisiana, a well-worn route for Italian migrants in those days. Severe labor shortages in the Deep South, where the cotton fields and sugar plantations had never recovered from the emancipation of their slaves a quarter of a century earlier, made the landowners of the state eternally anxious to hire immigrants. Sicilian laborers were particularly highly valued; they worked hard, were inured to backbreaking toil, and were often skilled farmers, too—plantation managers never ceased to be amazed at the variety and quantity of food that their Italians conjured from the little kitchen gardens they were allowed to tend. Italians, Southern gentlemen discovered, worked willingly at even the dirtiest jobs, and unlike Chinese laborers, who were readily tempted by offers of better jobs, they generally fulfilled their contracts.

According to Ciro Terranova, Morello worked at first as a fruit peddler, “selling lemons with a bag on his back.” In two months he accumulated sufficient money to send for the rest of the family, and, when they arrived, he and his stepfather went to work on a plantation. It must have been early in 1894 by then, at the time that the seed cane was planted, and there was plenty of work in the fields. Afterward, in spring, laborers were needed to pull weeds and clear drainage channels. In August and September, the growing cane was thinned, and in the autumn it was harvested.

October marked the beginning of the
zuccarata
—the grinding season—in the sugar parishes of Louisiana. Gangs of Sicilian laborers spread out through the fields armed with machetes with which to hack down the giant canes, then hauled them to nearby wagons and transported them to mills where they were washed, cut into pieces, ground, and clarified. Sugar crystals, mixed in with molasses, went from the mill to enormous centrifuges, where they were separated; from there the sugar was loaded into wagons and shipped to a refinery.

It was hard, physical, unrelenting work, a test for any able-bodied man, much less one as crippled as Morello. Work began at sunrise and went on until dusk, sometimes considerably later. In that time, a good man could harvest three or four tons of cane, but, in order to maximize production, plantation owners would hire entire families and give work not only to women but to children as young as five. Probably all of the Terranova children cut and stacked cane together from October until the harvest season ended in January 1895.

The work did not pay badly by the standards of the time. Men could expect to receive sixty-five cents a day outside the grinding season and as much as $1.50 for working an eighteen-hour day during the
zuccarata
itself. Women and children got less, perhaps $1 and ten cents respectively. But rough accommodation was provided free, and even if only by stinting themselves, eating nothing but bread and the vegetables they grew themselves, a thrifty family could save as much as $2.50 a day for the duration of the season. This must have seemed a fortune to men and women used to the sort of wages paid in Sicily, and it even compared favorably to the $200 a year that unskilled workers earned in New York at this time, from which the costs of rent and food would have to be deducted.

Louisiana had other attractions for Italian immigrants. Temperatures during the winter months were close to what Sicilians were used to and were far more comfortable than chilly New York. And for the duration of the harvest season, anyway, a large Italian community flourished in the sugar fields. More than two thousand Sicilians came to Louisiana in 1893—some direct from their homeland, in boats that sailed between Palermo and New Orleans, depositing the workers that they carried directly into the fields—and others from distant parts of the United States.

It is legitimate to wonder whether Terranova and Morello took advantage of this fact to extort from and to terrorize their fellow workers, as the Mafia had done in Corleone, and whether either found his way to New Orleans, where there was a fast-growing community of Sicilian criminals. A decade or so later, certainly, Morello would travel frequently to the Crescent City, where a cousin lived and he apparently had numerous acquaintances. There is no evidence, however, that any member of the family took part in such activities when they were working in the sugar parishes, and when Morello and the Terranovas left Louisiana after a year, it was to go not to New Orleans or New York but to an agricultural community in Texas where the Mafia held no sway.

The family went, Ciro recalled, to Bryan in Brazos County, a farming community south of Dallas, tempted by the offer of a house, the loan of a team of horses, access to a doctor, and the guarantee of work in the Texas cotton fields. Almost certainly they settled on the east bank of the Brazos River at a spot where another group of men from Corleone had erected a shanty township in the 1870s. On the far bank, opposite, was another crude Italian settlement, this one consisting of people from the Sicilian town of Poggioreale. The two communities spoke different dialects, were rivals, and looked upon each other with mutual distrust.

Morello and the Terranova family spent two years farming outside Bryan. According to Ciro’s recollections, his father and half brother worked as sharecroppers, renting a parcel of land—available in those days at the rate of five dollars an acre—on which they planted and harvested their own cotton. The family was free to sell its crop, paying a portion of the proceeds to the landlord, and conditions seem to have been better than they had been in the sugar parishes; according to Ciro, only his father and Morello had to work full-time.

Life in Brazos had a Sicilian simplicity. The menfolk labored in the fields. The Italian women of the colony, including Angela Terranova and Maria Marvelesi, cooked for their families, rolling pasta by hand and leaving it in the sun to dry, baking bread in outdoor ovens, and sending their children off into the fields with their husbands’ dinners. They sewed their families’ shirts, trousers, and dresses, made their own soap from lye and grease, and washed their clothes by hand in iron pots over a fire. Their children weeded the crops, chopped wood, and “helped around.”

For all this, wresting a living from the Texan soil was difficult, even for Italians with experience of farming. The land baked in the summer and the soil was poor. Crops had to be watered by hand during the dry season, from buckets heaved up from the river, but when it rained the only way for men and mules to cross the fields was by strapping broad planks of wood to their feet. Few pesticides were sold in the Bryan district; instead Italian farmers planted garlic, sunflowers, and marigolds to ward off insects, put up birdhouses and drinking basins to attract birds, and embedded stones in shady corners to encourage toads. “Farming wasn’t that good in those days,” the grandson of one of the pioneer Sicilians remembered decades later. “They made just enough to eat and sleep and buy a few clothes.”

This harsh life can hardly have appealed to a man like Giuseppe Morello. Farming in Brazos County was a grinding business for ordinary Sicilians. For criminals, for Mafiosi who had grown used to much easier lives, it must have appeared doubly frustrating. By the beginning of the Terranova family’s second year in the cotton fields, it had already become clear that there was no quick fortune to be made from cotton: The dry soil of the Brazos River watershed required considerable improvement if it was to yield a decent crop. Morello was not willing to make this effort. In any case, there was no real incentive for tenant farmers to invest such Herculean efforts in someone else’s land.

The decision to return north was taken in the autumn of 1896. The family’s time in the South had already been tinged with tragedy; soon after the Terranovas’ departure from New York, Morello’s one-year-old baby, Calogero, died. A second boy, born probably in the Louisiana sugar fields, was given the same name, but by the end of Morello’s second year in Texas he and every other member of the family were sick with malaria, a disease then rife along the Brazos River, an area that had been ignored by earlier waves of German and Czech settlers because it was so prone to frequent flooding. Illness made the decision to abandon sharecropping an easy one to take, and so did the reports filtering down from the north of a New York that was at last recovering from the crash of 1893. By the first months of 1897, two years after the family had arrived in Texas and three after they had left Manhattan, Morello and the Terranovas were back on the raucous streets of Little Italy. This time they were there to stay.