The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (13 page)

Only in New York was there persuasive evidence for the existence of what
The New York Times
described a few years later as “the most secret and terrible organization in the world;” only in New York were the police disposed, for a while at least, to believe that there were Mafiosi in the city. Evidence that members of at least one Sicilian Mafia family were active in New York dated back a good way, too—to the spring of 1884, in fact, when both the Police Department and the Secret Service were alerted to the activities of two brothers named Farach.

Raymond and Carmelo Farach had come to New York from Palermo, though at such an early date (the summer of 1853) that they were probably not themselves Mafiosi. But the police in Brooklyn, where they lived, were sure that the pair had some secret source of income. Raymond Farach was an impressive-looking, educated man who spoke excellent English, stood six feet tall, and was immaculately groomed and dressed, from his cultivated side whiskers to his shoes—more than would be expected of a man who owned and ran a little photographic studio. His younger brother, Carmelo, was similarly well turned out, despite earning his living as a barber and co-owner of a failing cigar store. Raymond undoubtedly had criminal connections. But it was Carmelo Farach who came to the notice of the police first when, early in April, his body was discovered in a remote field on Staten Island. He had been stabbed through the heart.

Farach’s death was certainly peculiar, as the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
did not hesitate to point out. For one thing, it was written off as a suicide at first, even though the surgeon who examined the corpse determined that Farach had cuts to his face and had been stabbed from behind. For another, the body was found with a sword cane by its right hand, though Farach was left-handed. Finally, when detectives went to talk to the dead man’s business partner, Antonio Flaccomio, they discovered, by inspecting his handful of possessions, that he had recently scoured and cleaned his clothes with acid. The police took much more interest in Flaccomio thereafter, and in time they located a witness on Staten Island who had seen Farach talking with a man who answered his partner’s description only a minute or two before his death. Several more testified to the perilous state of Farach’s cigar business and to having observed him fighting with Flaccomio over money. Another man had seen Farach and Flaccomio board the Staten Island ferry on the morning of the stabbing.

Much of this information was hard-won. A Brooklyn barber who was one of the last to see the dead man alive refused to say a word to reporters, stating: “I don’t want my name to be put in the papers because those Sicilians are a bad, treacherous lot, and my life would not be safe for a moment if it were known I had said anything either way.” (The newsmen, who had little time for Italians, printed his name anyway.) Raymond Farach was also reticent. “Italians that come from Palermo are, as a rule, the worst men in Italy,” he told the police. “They will knife a person as soon as look at him.” Few were surprised when, at the inquest into Farach’s death, the coroner’s jury called the case murder but said there was too little evidence for any formal charges to be brought.

That was the last that was heard of Antonio Flaccomio for more than two years. The chief suspect in the Farach case left New York soon after the inquest and traveled widely through the United States—to Buffalo, Louisville, Chicago, and New Orleans.

Flaccomio did not return to Brooklyn until July 1886, when he paid an unexpected call on Raymond Farach—who later said Flaccomio had confessed and begged permission to return to New York, an odd thing for anyone to ask of a moderately prosperous small businessman. According to the
Daily Eagle
, Raymond told his visitor he could not live in Brooklyn (“If he does, and I again encounter him, I will kill him!”), and Flaccomio had gone instead to Little Italy. Certainly it was in Manhattan, outside Cooper Union on St. Mark’s Place, that Carmelo Farach’s murderer met his own death two years later.

Flaccomio had spent the evening of October 14, 1888, playing cards with a group of friends. Walking home, he was suddenly attacked: Two men rushed up to him on a street corner, and while his companions grappled with one, the other pulled out a wicked-looking bread knife and stabbed him in the chest. Flaccomio had just sufficient time to mutter, “I am killed” before he crumpled to the pavement. In the ensuing confusion, his murderers escaped. They had been recognized, however, and—between themselves—the dead man’s friends agreed they were Italians.

The Cooper Union stabbing was not the sort of case New York’s police would normally have solved. It was a purely Sicilian affair, and the NYPD had a poor record of tackling Italian crime. Only two of its detectives spoke the language—Joseph Petrosino was still seven years from his promotion at this point—and the half-dozen witnesses, all of whom were friends of the victim, had sworn a solemn vow to deal with the matter themselves rather than divulge the murderers’ identity to the authorities. Yet the Flaccomio killing was rapidly investigated and, to the surprise of most of Little Italy, apparently just as quickly solved.

The man responsible for this unexpected turn of events was Inspector Thomas Byrnes. Irish, forty-six years old, with thinning hair, a shaggy mustache, and eyes that glinted like steel knitting needles, Byrnes was the head of New York’s Detective Bureau. Renowned as the most brilliant policeman in the city, Byrnes was an innovator who reformed the department’s record department, introduced the Rogues’ Gallery, which collected crooks’ mug shots, and perfected the brutal but productive methods of the third degree. He was also rich, having, with the help of stock tips provided by Wall Street insiders, assembled a portfolio of property and shares worth seventy times his five-thousand-dollar salary.

Byrnes had taken an interest in the Cooper Union case for a couple of reasons. The first was official: Flaccomio—quite unknown to his friends—had been a police informer, one of the few the NYPD possessed in Little Italy. He had recently provided the Detective Bureau with evidence against a fellow Sicilian and apparently provided information about the Mafia as well. Byrnes’s second reason was personal. He had built much of his reputation for exceptional police work on well-timed disclosures to the press and saw, in Flaccomio’s murder, the prospect of further headlines, not least because he thought that he could crack the case.

Byrnes’s first move was to arrest the witnesses. He had three of the men who had been with Flaccomio when he was killed locked up in New York’s grimmest prison, the Tombs, on Centre Street in lower Manhattan. Three days’ confinement in the jail’s tiny, dripping cell blocks yielded names. The killers, Byrnes informed the press a few days later, had been two brothers from Palermo named Carlo and Vincenzo Quarteraro. It was too late to capture Carlo, who had had slipped out of the country disguised as a priest, but Vincenzo Quarteraro was arrested and then sent for trial.

Byrnes felt sure he had his man—so sure that he supplied New York’s newspapers with the details of his case. He had been struck, he said, by the intelligence and criminal abilities of the men whom he had locked up in the Tombs, but more so by the details of the ruthless fraternity that they described. “They are rather intelligent and have received some education,” Byrnes told
The New York Times
.

They are fugitives from their native country, having been engaged there in various crimes and offenses. The criminal classes in Sicily are banded together in a secret society known as “The Maffia,” all the members of which are pledged to protect each other against the officers of the law. If one of the society commits a crime, all the other members are bound to shield and keep the crime secret under pain of death. The members of this society are chiefly forgers, counterfeiters and assassins. Murder with some of these men is simply a pastime. They have no pity, and think nothing of killing any one who stands in their way or betrays their secrets.

How much of this intelligence had been wrung from Byrnes’s interviews is difficult to say. The inspector may have had some of his details from other sources, perhaps even from newspaper accounts of Sicily. But his knowledge of contemporary Mafia activities in the United States was detailed enough to suggest a firsthand source of information. There were, he explained to the
Times’s
reporter, “two principal headquarters of this society in this country—one in this city and the other in New Orleans.” The two groups were connected, so that “members of the society who commit a serious crime in this city find refuge among friends in the South, and vice versa.” New York’s Mafiosi were also well enough organized to deal with unreliable associates. Flaccomio had been marked for death when it was discovered he had passed information to the authorities, and the dead man had known all about the danger he was in—a few days before his murder he had sat down to talk with his thirteen-year-old son, explained that he would inherit the family fruit store if he, Flaccomio, died, and asked the boy to take good care of his sister.

Coming from a policeman of Thomas Byrnes’s stature, these disclosures were significant. The newspapers that reported the interview saw no reason to doubt them, and when Vincenzo Quarteraro came to trial at the end of March 1889, the same papers ran stories under the headline
THE “MAFIA” MURDER
. Unfortunately for the police, however, the publicity given Byrnes’s statements had concealed essential weaknesses in their case, the most important of which was that there was no real evidence against Quarteraro other than the statements of the victim’s friends, all of whom were criminals themselves. Even John Goff, the assistant district attorney charged with prosecuting the case, admitted that it would be difficult to secure a conviction. “He says that if the charge was larceny he would recommend the dismissal of the indictment on the evidence, but as it is murder he does not care to take the responsibility,” the
Times
observed.

Goff had found one witness to testify to the Mafia’s existence: “an Italian whose death was ordered for having given information to the Government … A scarred cheek shows that an effort was made to carry the Mafia’s decree into execution.” Against that, though, Quarteraro mustered a formidable array of testimony, American as well as Italian, to prove that he had been miles away at the time of the killing. Goff’s evidence, on the other had, was supplied by a succession of lowlifes—”the scum of Sicilian society”—who failed to impress either judge or jury. Quarteraro’s attorney openly accused the three men Byrnes had locked up in the Tombs of having committed the murder themselves.

The Sicilian’s eventual acquittal seems to have come as no surprise to those who had actually watched the trial, but it was certainly an unwelcome blow to Byrnes. The inspector had staked a small part of his immense credibility on Quarteraro’s guilt, and the jury’s verdict left him scrambling to distance himself from his earlier statements. “As a class,” the inspector told the
New York Tribune
, “Italians do not seem to be dangerous to the public of this city.” Most were actually law-abiding; there were “no portraits of Italian thieves in the Rogues’ Gallery.” When the Hennessy shooting brought the Mafia back into the news a year later, Byrnes declared that while Sicilian killers could certainly wreak havoc in the distant South, “no band of assassins such as the Mafia could be allowed to perpetrate murders in New-York.”

Inspector Byrnes’s volte-face was an important milestone in Mafia history. The great detective possessed the prestige to sway New York’s newsmen and New York public opinion. Had Vincenzo Quarteraro been convicted, the papers would have reported Byrnes’s triumph and approved his verdict on the Mafia. The idea that members of the fraternity were living in New York might easily have been commonly accepted a year or more before Giuseppe Morello so much as set foot in the United States, and the police, particularly the Detective Bureau, would almost certainly have taken a much tougher stance against Sicilian crime and perhaps even have recruited more Italian detectives. Courts, too, would likely have been more willing to convict suspected Mafiosi than they were after the Quarteraro verdict.

As it was, however, the consequences of New York’s first and least-remembered Mafia trial were very different. The police grew more wary of Italian crime. Newspapers grew more skeptical. Most important of all, Byrnes—the most famous, the most celebrated, the most powerful detective in the country—more or less washed his hands of Little Italy and its inscrutable inhabitants. “Let them go ahead and kill each other,” the inspector was reported to have said—and whether he did say it or not, it was a view widely held in the NYPD. Thenceforth, for several decades, the police would pay far less attention to crimes committed in the Italian quarter than they would to similar offenses reported from elsewhere in the city. Murders, bombings, public outrages—all these were still investigated, naturally, though it was relatively seldom they were solved. But more minor crimes, even crimes of violence, received short shrift, and Italian criminals who preyed solely on Italians went unmolested much of the time.

The Hennessy and Flaccomio trials, between them, shaped America’s view of the Mafia for more than a decade—the former more than the latter, for Quarteraro’s trial attracted only a tiny fraction of the coverage accorded to the events in New Orleans. But if Vincenzo Quarteraro’s acquittal went largely unremarked on in the country as a whole, it did have important consequences in New York itself, and one was to make it easier for the earliest Mafiosi in the city to operate unhindered.

For Morello, that was very welcome news, because—for Morello—crime was about to pay.

CHAPTER 5
THE CLUTCH HAND

G
IUSEPPE MORELLO HAD RETURNED TO NEW YORK FLUSH WITH
the money saved from a year in the sugar fields of Louisiana and two more of sharecropping in Texas. It probably amounted to a good sum for the day—five hundred dollars would be a reasonable estimate. That would have been enough to pay for a decent apartment in the Italian quarter and keep the whole family for a year, or it might have provided the seed capital for a small business. That Morello and the Terranovas did not possess sufficient cash for both purposes is suggested by their choice of residence; as late as 1900, Bernardo Terranova still lived at 123 East 4th Street, in a small apartment in a poor tenement district, and Morello in a room at the foot of Second Avenue at East Houston Street, one of the most densely populated slums in all Manhattan. Most of the family’s savings were poured instead into an ornamental plastering business that Terranova opened in the Italian quarter. For the next few months, Morello helped his stepfather when he could—as did Vincenzo, Nicola, and Ciro, after school. At the same time, Morello began to plow what remained of the family’s money into business ventures of his own.

Whether the man who had played such a prominent part in the affairs of the Corleone Fratuzzi really meant to live an honest life in the United States remains something of a mystery, but the available evidence suggests he did, at least at first. There was, after all, the lingering threat posed by Morello’s 1894 conviction in Messina, and the six-year sentence waiting to be served should he ever be deported to Sicily; then there were the attempts, apparently sincere, to wrest a living from the land in Texas and Louisiana. There was never any suggestion of criminal activities in those years, though there may well have been some after the family returned to New York—even five hundred dollars did not go all that far in Manhattan in those days. Certainly, if Morello really meant to start fresh in the United States, that ambition did not survive the failure of four successive attempts to make his mark as a legitimate businessman.

The Clutch Hand’s first acquisition, in the spring of 1897, was a coal store in Little Italy. It lasted only a year. After that, Morello ran an Italian saloon on 13th Street and another on Stanton Street that had to be closed only six months after it opened “on account of no business.” Business wasn’t much better up on 13th Street, and the second bar was also sold. His most ambitious venture was a date factory that employed fifteen or twenty people, but this too swiftly failed. Morello, Ciro Terranova said, “kept this factory for about six or eight months, but used to lose on it.” By the spring of 1899, the money was mostly gone, and the bars and factories—Terranova’s plaster contracting company excepted—were sold or closed.

It must have been then, sometime in 1898 or early 1899, that Morello returned to his old trade as a counterfeiter. There was, after all, something irresistible in solving money problems simply by printing money, and the Clutch Hand had the right sort of acquaintances among the criminals of the Sicilian community; he maintained a wide correspondence with exiled Corleonesi in every part of the country, exchanging letters with men as far away as Kansas City, New Orleans, Belle Rose in Louisiana, and even distant Seattle. In New York, on the streets of Little Italy, there were hundreds more men who had the necessary skills.

For the New York office of the Secret Service, led then by a hugely experienced veteran by the name of William P. Hazen, the first faint whiff of trouble came as early as the spring of 1899. Agents in Boston tracking the activities of another Italian counterfeiting gang, the Mastropoles, had begun intercepting letters sent between its members. That March they found one postmarked New York, which, when opened, proved to have been sent by Morello. There was nothing especially incriminating in the letter itself, but when dealing with Italian gangs it was standard practice to forward this sort of information to the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. There it was entered, checked, cross-referenced against existing lists of suspects, and then forwarded to sister offices for further investigation.

John Wilkie, the director of the Secret Service, took care of the last part of the job himself, dictating a note to Hazen requesting that an agent be sent down to Second Avenue to search the new suspect out. Hazen assigned the task to Special Operative Frank Brown, and Brown caught a streetcar to the East Side the same afternoon. The agent located Morello’s address but could find no trace of the Clutch Hand, nor anyone who would admit to knowing him. The matter did not seem especially important at the time; Morello was just another name, and there were always dozens to be checked. Brown reported his failure to Hazen, who filed a two-line report to Wilkie and then rapidly forgot about it. It was an error he and several other people would live to regret.

SEVERAL MILES UPTOWN
, in a small apartment on the first floor of 329 East 106th Street, Giuseppe Morello was busy installing a small printing press in an empty room. It was an old, unsophisticated machine, certainly not one capable of producing exact copies of Treasury bills, but it was the best he had been able to obtain. Perfect reproductions were unnecessary anyway. The Clutch Hand’s counterfeits would be passed at night in busy places—saloons, gambling houses, oyster bars—where they would be subjected to no more than a cursory examination. They would not fool a bank or a policeman, but they were never meant to.

Morello had moved to the Italian enclave in East Harlem just in time, apparently more by luck than judgment, and probably because he needed a larger base. The press had to be positioned where the sound of forged notes being struck would not easily be overheard, and there were printing plates and sundry other items of equipment that were far too precious to be left unguarded. All had to be stored in the apartment, which would also act as a home and the headquarters of several members of the gang.

The counterfeiters were an odd, mixed bunch. Morello had located an Italian from New Jersey who knew how to make printing plates, and a young Sicilian named Calogero Maggiore to take charge of disposing of the notes. Maggiore, who looked younger than his twenty years, had a job ironing shirts in a laundry and no criminal record, a decided advantage in Morello’s eyes. He would seek out buyers with a more experienced Italian, a street hustler known as “Lingo Bingo” around 106th Street, and there were at least two other Sicilian members of the gang. But the remainder of Morello’s men were Irish, led by a Brooklyn oyster bar proprietor known as the Commodore and a streetwise crook named Henry Thompson. Thompson, who was nicknamed “Dude” for his natty taste in clothes, recruited another eight or ten queer-pushers, all of whom were told they could purchase as many of the forged notes as they wished at a discount of 60 percent. Since the plates Morello had commissioned from his printer friend turned out five-dollar “General Thomas head” bills of a type first printed in 1891, the pushers would have to find two dollars in good currency for every five-dollar fake they bought.

The Clutch Hand was very careful. Maggiore and the other Italians knew where the counterfeiting operation was based, but the less trustworthy Irish queer-pushers, even the Commodore, were kept in ignorance of this essential detail; they met and talked to Maggiore or to Lingo Bingo on the streets. Most of the bad currency would be passed well away from 106th Street, too; Dude Thompson’s most reliable men—three down-on-their-luck Irish petty crooks—were told to work the beach resorts out on Long Island, where the stores and restaurants opened late and the counter staff were often far too busy to check for forgeries.

The one other potential source of trouble was the maid Morello had hired to cook and clean for him. She was an Irish girl named Mollie Callahan, the daughter of Dude Thompson’s lady friend. Mollie’s sweetheart, Jack Gleason, was another minor member of the gang, and Morello must have concluded that she could be trusted. Just to be certain, though, the girl was told to stay away from the room in the apartment where the press, the plates, and other counterfeiting gear were stored.

For several months all went well with the Clutch Hand’s preparations. Two copper plates were etched, and paper resembling the sort used to print the five-dollar notes was purchased. Test sheets were run off on the press, and inks mixed until the colors more or less matched. Morello seemed satisfied; distribution of the counterfeit bills would begin in the New Year, he said.

Then, one day in late December 1899, Mollie Callahan’s inquiring mind got the better of her common sense at last. She had glimpsed the press while she was cleaning. Exactly what was being printed, though, remained a mystery to her—one that neither her mother nor her lover would explain. Unable to restrain her curiosity, the girl waited until she thought the place was empty, then crept into the forbidden room.

A bundle concealed the printing plates, and Callahan picked it open. A gleam of copper caught her eye, then a neatly etched five-dollar symbol. Then a movement to one side, by the door.

Whirling round and stifling a scream, Mollie found herself staring deep into the blackest eyes that she had ever seen.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF MORELLO’S
servant girl on the cusp of the new century went unnoticed by all but her closest relatives; there were always thousands of runaways on the streets of New York. Callahan’s mother, fearing the worst, reported her daughter’s absence to the precinct house on East 104th Street, where the police launched a routine investigation. No one they spoke to seemed to have any idea where the maid had gone—no one, that is, but Jack Gleason, to whom Mollie had confided some of her suspicions concerning her mysterious employer. Gleason felt sure his girlfriend had been murdered, but he was far too frightened of the Clutch Hand to say as much, and the Italians the policemen questioned shrugged their shoulders expressively and regretted that they could not help. The apartment on 106th Street was checked, but there was nothing to be found there, and the press was gone.

Morello had the counterfeiting operation under way again by March. It was still a small-scale business—about two hundred five-dollar bills were printed and the forged notes, wrapped individually in newspaper, were sold to the queer-pushers in batches of three or four at a time. Five dollars was double the daily wage of a workman at the time, however, and at a profit of nearly two dollars each, even two hundred bills would generate a decent income.

On good days, dealing forged notes was not a high-risk business. The stores and bars where the bills were passed rarely examined them, and when a counterfeit was detected it was often enough for the pusher to apologize, say he had no idea how he had gotten the note, and replace it with some genuine currency. There were narrow escapes, however. Edward Kelly, one of Thompson’s men, was picked up on May
23
when he was caught trying to pass a Morello bill on East 46th Street in earshot of a beat patrolman. Mary Hoffman, the proprietor of the clothing store Kelly had entered, screamed for the police, and Officer Bachmann, of the local precinct, appeared before the Irishman could bolt. Kelly, who had been attempting to purchase a pair of drawers, was arrested but kept quiet. Taken to the nearest station house, he insisted he had won the bogus note playing craps and said nothing to implicate his confederates.

Kelly was released on bail a few days later and went straight back to passing bills, and it was not until May 31, 1900, that things went seriously wrong for the Morello gang. It was a warm and pleasant early summer evening, and the resorts on the Queens side of the East River were crowded with revelers, ideal conditions for passing counterfeits. Three of Dude Thompson’s men—Kelly, Charles Brown, and John Duffy—were working the resort in North Beach, palming off bills in sideshows and restaurants. To minimize their risk, each carried only a single Morello note, mixed in with genuine currency. A fourth member of the gang, Tom Smith, a black-mustached night watchman, hung around on a nearby street. His job was to be the pushers’ “boodle carrier”—the man who held a roll of notes but did not attempt to pass them. The theory was a good one: If any one of Thompson’s men was captured, he would be holding only a single forgery, and the ambitious scale of Morello’s operation would be hidden from the police.

It was shortly before 10
P.M
. when a North Beach restaurant owner took a second look at a five-dollar bill and recognized it as a forgery. Kelly, who had presented the note in payment for a plate of oysters worth five cents, tried to talk his way out of the situation, without success. Instead the proprietor summoned several policemen to detain him, and when someone pointed out that Kelly had entered in company with John Duffy, Duffy was arrested, too.

Tom Smith, the boodle carrier, escaped, but a sweep of all the shops and shows on the waterfront dredged up Charles Brown, the third member of Dude Thompson’s group. All three of the queer-pushers were taken to the 74th Precinct building, booked, and held in the cells overnight. The next morning the police called Hazen’s office, and the prisoners were taken to the U.S. marshal’s office in Brooklyn. By the time Assistant Operative Tyrrell, one of Hazen’s men, got there at lunchtime on the first of June, the three had all been questioned and were each being held on bail of three thousand dollars.