The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (14 page)

Left solely in the hands of the police, the investigation into Morello’s counterfeiting ring might have ended there, but the Secret Service did things differently Hazen had little interest in getting men as insignificant as Kelly off the streets. The important thing, he knew, was to trace the notes back to the men who had printed them and to seize their press.

The first thing was to persuade one of the arrested men to talk. Tyrrell accomplished this quite neatly by checking over the men’s records and then taking Charles Brown aside. Brown had a prior conviction for larceny—he had served four years in Sing Sing prison—and was not keen to return to jail. By dangling the lure that the Secret Service would go easy on him, Tyrrell obtained a full confession. Brown named names and, thanks to his information, agents began tailing Dude Thompson around his haunts on the East Side.

It did not take Hazen’s operatives long to gain the confidence of Dude and his confederates. Two Secret Service men posing as potential buyers of counterfeit notes eavesdropped as the Irish members of Morello’s gang talked over the North Beach incident, blaming the arrests on the carelessness of Brown and his confederates; the three men had gotten steaming drunk before leaving New York. Thompson, who still had six Morello notes to dispose of, sold one to the agents, and a few days later Hazen’s men went to see Kelly in prison and got from him some idea of the location of the printing press.

Penetrating the depths of the Morello gang took time, nonetheless. The agents spent a week identifying Calogero Maggiore, and they were still not sure who stood behind the young Sicilian when Hazen gave the order to round up as many of the gang as possible. On the morning of June 9, a Saturday, four operatives picked up Dude Thompson, Jack Gleason, and several of their confederates. Gleason talked immediately, apparently glad to confide his suspicions concerning the disappearance of Mollie Callahan. Knowing that word of the arrests would soon spread through the district, Operative Burke went straight to Maggiore’s favorite saloon on East 106th Street. Hoping to entrap the young Sicilian, he offered to buy twenty dollars’ worth of counterfeits. Maggiore left the bar to fetch the notes and was arrested on the corner.

It was only now, at the last moment, that the Secret Service men found out about Morello, and the Clutch Hand’s arrest that early summer afternoon owed more to luck than it did to the agents’ judgment. Jack Gleason was standing outside the 106th Street saloon telling Hazen’s operatives the little he knew about Morello when the Irishman spotted his employer hurrying across the road. The Clutch Hand had been lurking in a dark recess of the bar, watching Maggiore do his business, and made off when he realized that his man had been arrested. Agents Burke and Griffin seized him on the corner of Second Avenue and East 108th Street at 2:15
P.M
.

Morello was escorted to the police station house on 104th Street to be booked. It was the same building in which Margaret Callahan had reported her daughter missing six months earlier, and the first time that the Clutch Hand had been arrested since his arrival in the United States. Morello proved to have $26.39 in genuine currency on him and no counterfeits, and Hazen and his agents quickly realized that they had little firm evidence against him. Gleason was the only member of the gang to identify their leader. The other counterfeiters refused to betray him—inspired by either loyalty or fear—and without the press and the printing plates, none of which were ever found, it was impossible to prove that Morello had produced the General Thomas notes. Fortunately for the Clutch Hand’s prospects, American law also prohibited the conviction of criminals based solely on the testimony of accomplices.

Morello’s cunning in distancing himself from his criminal activities, a practice he would follow throughout his career, was clearly shown when he and the other members of the gang were brought before Judge Thomas in the U.S. Circuit Court. Calogero Maggiore, little more than a boy, was singled out as the ringleader of the gang and sentenced to six years in Sing Sing. Brown got three years and Kelly two. Morello was discharged and walked free. He had enjoyed a narrow escape, and he knew it.

The way forward was plain enough. There was no security in working alone, no certainty in relying on confederates from unknown backgrounds, or on men who lacked the steadfastness and loyalty that came from swearing binding oaths. Those qualities could be found only in Sicilians—in other Mafiosi. The Clutch Hand would have to build a family of his own in New York City.

BETWEEN THE SUMMER
of 1900, when he so nearly went to prison, and the spring of 1903, when he was arrested for ordering the Barrel Murder, Giuseppe Morello assembled the first Mafia gang in Manhattan. It was only a small group of men at first, but they were all utterly loyal to him, and if the branch of the Stoppaglieri in New Orleans led by Charles Matranga had claim to be the first
cosca
in the country, Morello’s family boasted a vastly more significant distinction: It survived. It grew and changed over the years, fighting and merging with other groups until the outward traces of its early days were lost. But its history can be traced all the way to the introduction of Prohibition, then through the 1920s and the great Mafia war that followed, up until the present day. In that respect, as in others, the Morellos were the first family of organized crime in the United States.

The most important quality that Morello sought in his new associates was absolute reliability. His lieutenants were related to him by blood or marriage or were recruited from Corleone. These were men the Clutch Hand had known and trusted in Sicily, and who knew and trusted him in turn. Morello was proud of this fact. Letters written by the boss and his closest advisers were signed not only with their names but also with the salutation “All of Corleone.”

The same exclusivity did not apply to the rank-and-file members of the gang, who came from all over western Sicily—a purely practical decision, in all likelihood, since there were still only a handful of Corleonesi in New York. In any case, the petty rivalries that poisoned relations between neighboring communities in Italy mattered scarcely at all in New York; no matter where a Sicilian might hail from, he would have more in common with someone born elsewhere on the island than he ever would with the Neapolitans—with whom there was considerable rivalry—let alone with native Americans. There were strict limits to this policy; to gain acceptance to Morello’s gang, a potential member first had to be vouched for by a man from Corleone. But by 1903, the first family was thirty strong and included men who hailed from a number of small towns in the Sicilian interior, among them Carini, Villabate, and Lercara Friddi.

Morello’s position as the head of the family was not challenged by anybody. There is no record that Bernardo Terranova, still working full-time as an ornamental plasterer, had any involvement in his stepson’s criminal activities; if he did, it was most likely to proffer advice based on long experience. Morello’s stepbrothers, meanwhile, were still too young to take much responsibility. Vincenzo, the eldest, was seventeen in 1903, Ciro fourteen, Nicola a year younger than that. Ciro had recently begun working as a waiter in Morello’s spaghetti restaurant. The other brothers seem to have assisted in the plastering business; as they became older, all three became gradually more involved in the family’s criminal activities without ever challenging their leader. At the time of the Barrel Murder, Morello’s most prominent lieutenant was Vito Laduca, who came from Carini, just outside Palermo, and had spent some years in the Italian navy before turning to a life of crime.

Laduca had served a five-year prison sentence in Sicily before emigrating to the United States in February 1902. He was older than most other members of the gang and possessed a strength and ruthlessness Morello admired. As well as taking a very active role in the family’s counterfeiting business—Laduca traveled widely to sell the Clutch Hand’s forged notes and was arrested in Pittsburgh on a charge of possessing counterfeit five-dollar bills in January 1903—he was a brutally effective extortionist, referred to in the New York press as the “dread bulwark of the Black Hand.” Laduca’s criminal activities also extended to kidnapping. Concealing his true identity behind the alias “Longo,” he was the chief suspect in the abduction of Antonio Mannino, the eight-year-old son of a wealthy Italian contractor, for whom a fifty-thousand-dollar ransom was demanded. Mannino was released after a week for what was widely believed to have been a far lower payment, but Laduca was nonetheless able to send large sums of money home to Carini, where he was thought of as a wealthy man.

The ease with which men such as Vito Laduca moved from Sicily to New York and gained admittance to Morello’s family suggests strong links existed between the Mafiosi of the old and new worlds at this comparatively early date. Others made the same journey (among them Giuseppe Fontana, chief suspect in the murder of Marquis Emanuele Notarbartolo, who appeared in the United States in the autumn of 1901) and, when they did, became members of the Clutch Hand’s circle so rapidly that their arrival must have been expected and planned for. Giuseppe Lalamia and the brothers Lorenzo and Vito Loboido were seen with Morello by Flynn’s Secret Service men less than two weeks after stepping ashore at Ellis Island. From a few scraps of surviving evidence, it appears that once the first family had been established, Mafiosi leaving their homeland for America would obtain letters of recommendation from their bosses in Sicily that had to be presented to the leaders of the fledgling
cosca
in New York. As other Mafia gangs emerged elsewhere, the same credentials, sent by mail or telegram, were also required if a man wished to move between cities in the United States. There were plainly advantages in being able to guarantee the reliability of a man born in an unfamiliar part of Sicily who was not known personally to the existing members of a family.

Welcomes could be far more elaborate than those accorded to Mafiosi of no consequence. Men who had established a reputation in Sicily would be received in New York with elaborate courtesy. One of the most eminent bosses to make the trans-Atlantic crossing, Vito Cascio Ferro, of Bisaquino in the Sicilian interior, had been in Manhattan for only three days when he received a letter addressing him by the honorific “Don Vito” and inviting him to “eat a plate of macaroni” with Morello, Giuseppe Fontana, and four other New York men of respect. It was most likely through Morello that Cascio Ferro was introduced to another band of Sicilian counterfeiters, led by Salvatore Clemente and a notorious female forger by the name of Stella Fraute. Cascio Ferro became involved with Fraute’s gang and narrowly escaped conviction when the Secret Service rounded up her associates in 1902. In return for this respectful welcome, the Sicilian boss—at least according to tradition—offered Morello and his family advice on the best means of improving the profitability and efficiency of their operations.

BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT
of the men who joined the Clutch Hand’s
cosca
in the first years of the new century was Ignazio Lupo, who had been born in Palermo and who first arrived in the United States in 1898. A decade younger than Morello and vastly less experienced, with a moon face that he kept generally clean shaven, Lupo nonetheless brought brains, imagination, and even sophistication of a sort to the Clutch Hand’s gang of thugs. He was “extremely intelligent,” William Flynn discovered, and “by all means the best looking of the bunch,” not to mention so emotional that he could easily be moved to tears. But Lupo was also just as ruthless as Morello, and so predatory that he would be known to generations of New Yorkers as “the Wolf.” He spoke quietly in a high-pitched, almost feminine voice that perfectly conveyed his silky menace, and could be unpredictable and violent. “I give you my word,” said Flynn. “Lupo had only to touch you to give you the feeling that you had been poisoned.”

Ignazio Lupo had been born in 1877 to a family that possessed some influence in its native city, thanks in part to its links with the Palermo Mafia. When the Wolf reached the age of eighteen, his father set him up in his own store on the Via Matarazza, where he sold high-quality clothing and dry goods. According to the records of the New York police, he was already an active criminal by this time and had joined a “Black Mailing gang” that was probably an offshoot of one of the city’s families; a relative, a man named Francesco Manciamelli, would rise to take the leadership of one of the half-dozen Palermo
cosche
around 1912.

Lupo might well have stayed in Sicily and forged a career there had it not been for an incident that occurred one day early in 1898. He was serving in his dry goods store when a business rival named Salvatore Morello came in to demand that Lupo stop undercutting his prices. The Wolf refused, and at least in his telling of the story, the argument got out of hand. The dispute became a fight, and when Morello pulled a knife, Lupo drew his revolver, with fatal results.

The Wolf hid in Palermo for about five days, time enough to discover that he would probably be prosecuted. Advised by his anxious family to flee, he sailed for Liverpool and then to Montreal, eventually entering the United States illegally via Buffalo. By the time Lupo reached New York, he had been found guilty in absentia by the Italian courts and was wanted in Palermo to serve a twenty-one-year sentence for murder.

The Lupo family had money—enough to set Ignazio up in his Palermo store, and enough to get him out of Sicily at short notice—and the Wolf had no apparent difficulty in finding his feet in New York. He set up a store on East 72nd Street in partnership with a cousin named Saitta; then, after a falling-out, he moved to Brooklyn and imported olive oil, cheese, and wine from Italy. By 1901 Lupo was back in Manhattan, running a prosperous grocery shop at 210-214 Mott Street, in the heart of Little Italy. Over the next few years, the business grew, until he was the owner of a large wholesale operation at 231 East 97th Street and at least half a dozen retail stores. His Mott Street flagship, which stood seven stories high, boasted quality foodstuffs, sumptuous new delivery wagons, and an inventory running to well over one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of goods. It was generally regarded as the most prestigious grocery store in the Italian quarter: “easily the most pretentious mercantile establishment in that section of the city,”
The New York Times
observed, “with a stock of goods over which the neighborhood marveled.”