The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (18 page)

It was Morello’s obsession with power, the Chief was sure, that made him such an implacable enemy, determined to exterminate the weakness within the ranks of his own gang that the barrel case exposed and perfectly willing to kill even his most loyal followers if it suited his purpose. Certainly it did not take a man of the Clutch Hand’s cunning to deduce that the Secret Service knew far more about his family’s doings than he had realized, and that the gang’s brush with the authorities owed much to the incompetence of his own men—not least that of Petto the Ox, whose decision to relieve Madonia of a one-dollar watch could easily have cost the boss and several other men their lives. Morello’s own analysis of events soon convinced him that he had at least one traitor in his ranks, and he apparently also grew determined to rid himself of a number of men who knew too much about the Barrel Murder. The thirst for vengeance against all those who he believed had wronged him was one of the Clutch Hand’s most pronounced traits. In the autumn of 1903, he began to plot against them all.

The first man to die in the aftermath of the Barrel Murder was Salvatore Especiale, a New York Sicilian of some education who was found dead, with two bullets in his chest, on a street corner in Brooklyn that December. According to the local police, Especiale had known Giuseppe Catania and had some peripheral involvement in the Madonia affair as well. More significantly, as Captain Condon of Fulton Street station explained, he was rumored among his associates to have been “used as a ‘stool pigeon’ by the Secret Service men.” Especiale, it was said, had been responsible for supplying information that led to the arrest of several Italian counterfeiters. There is nothing in William Flynn’s files to suggest that this was actually true; what mattered, though, was that his fellow Sicilians believed it was. Especiale certainly knew he was in danger. He had purchased a steamship ticket to Naples a few days before his death, and “the dread penalty,” so one newspaper observed, was widely understood to have been exacted by the Mafia and “was now believed to be the tragic sequel to the ghastly barrel murder mystery.” Morello, in other words, had ordered the murder of a man who he believed to have been Flynn’s informant inside his counterfeiting ring.

The next in the series of killings linked to the Madonia affair did not take place until October 1905, and it occurred far from New York, in the mining town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—itself a noted stronghold of the Mafia and the Black Hand. The victim on this occasion was Tommaso Petto, who had fled Manhattan soon after his release from jail in January 1904 and had been living in the town under his real name, Luciano Perrini. Petto had continued his criminal career after leaving New York; he had amassed several arrests, and the other Sicilians of the district were, a Wilkes-Barre newspaper reported, “often afraid of him. It is alleged that he was a member of the Black Hand and Mafia clans [and] he was what is known as a boss or king among his countrymen.” Whatever Petto’s reputation, though, it was not sufficient to save him from assassination. A few days before his murder, the Ox’s pretty wife had noticed a stranger hanging around their house, and when she informed her husband, he had taken her sufficiently seriously to begin carrying a large-caliber revolver in his waistband. This gun was discovered lying by the body after Petto was found sprawled dead in the road close to his home on the evening of October 21. He had been ambushed on his return from work and given no chance to return his assassins’ fire. Five rifle bullets had smashed into his chest from a short range. From the size of several of the wounds—”large enough to admit a teacup,” one local journalist reported after speaking to the town’s police—it appeared that the Ox’s killers had used explosive bullets to make sure of killing their man.

News of Petto’s death reached New York days later, and it was immediately supposed that he had been killed by Giuseppe Di Priemo in revenge for his involvement in the Barrel Murder. The
Sun
even reported that the imprisoned counterfeiter had been seen by several people in Manhattan, “on a hunt for ‘The Ox,’ and that he had gone to Pennsylvania in search of him.” Flynn, though, was adamant that Di Priemo could not have been Petto’s killer; in October 1905, the Secret Service man observed, Benedetto Madonia’s brother-in-law was still locked up in Sing Sing. The Chief was correct. Di Priemo’s surviving prison records show that the earliest date he could have been paroled was April 14, 1906.

So far as Flynn was concerned, the most likely solution to the Petto murder mystery was that the Ox had been murdered by another of Madonia’s relatives. “To my mind,” he wrote, “there was no doubt that the slaying was an act of vengeance.” It was not long, though, before the police began to formulate a rival theory. Petto, it was speculated, had been a victim of Morello himself, shot dead as a punishment for the idiocy he had displayed in pawning Madonia’s watch and because he knew too much about the barrel mystery.

The notion of Morello as the killer, wreaking vengeance on the members of his own gang, and perhaps using his own Mafia connections to have the murder carried out, was an idea that gained greater currency over the next few years as several other members of his family met equally violent deaths, in several cases far from Manhattan. Vito Laduca was the next to die, shot dead in Carini, Sicily, in February 1908; then Messina Genova was murdered in Ohio. A year after that, in the summer of 1909, Giovanni Zacconi—the Stanton Street butcher thought by Petrosino to have driven the covered “death wagon” that took Madonia’s body, in its barrel, to its resting place on East 11th Street—was also killed. Zacconi had abandoned New York for a new life as a fruit farmer in Danbury, Connecticut. On July 28 he was ambushed by a group of seven killers who attacked him with shotguns in a country lane. At least a dozen shells were fired, and the Mafioso was found by his son lying by a ditch with half his face blown away. “He was,” one Washington newspaper reported, “arrested in connection with the famous ‘barrel murder,’ [and] it is believed he incurred the enmity of the organization and was slain for revenge.” The
Chicago Tribune
said much the same, adding: “The police explain the four killings [of Petto, Laduca, Genova, and Zacconi] on the theory that the real murderers of Benedetto have been killing the men who knew the details of the crime.”

SOMEHOW, FEW PEOPLE
seemed at all surprised at the collapse of the Barrel Murder investigation. New Yorkers had grown used to seeing Italian crimes going unsolved, almost always for lack of conclusive evidence. But a yearlong Secret Service operation lay in ruins, along with all the lonely, boring, dangerous hours of observation that it had entailed. Worse, Morello and his confederates had been thoroughly alerted to the fact that they were under continuous surveillance.

The Clutch Hand had always been a careful man; now, the Secret Servicemen assigned to watch him observed, he had grown almost pathologically cautious. His movements became ever more unpredictable, and when he did emerge from one of his haunts, he walked rapidly, frequently glancing over his shoulder to see if he was being followed, and developed the unnerving habit of turning a corner and vanishing by darting into a nearby building before the man tailing him could catch up. Arrangements were also made by the Morello family for mail to be delivered covertly to an unknown address, probably a bar or store owned by one of the boss’s friends. The Secret Service, which had obtained more firm evidence of wrongdoing by intercepting the gang’s correspondence than from any other source, spent months attempting to discover where the missing mail was going, but without success.

Flynn was extremely perturbed by this turn of events. Lupo and Morello were among “the most dangerous foreign criminals in the country,” he had concluded, and he had warned McClusky that his arrests were premature. “Too many policemen,” the Chief complained, “make the mistake of viewing an arrest as their most important function. The most vital task of a policeman is not an arrest—but a
conviction
. An arrest without the necessary evidence for a jury is not only wasted labor, but in its final analysis a confession of weakness.”

What made the failure to prosecute the gang the more galling in Flynn’s eyes was the inability of the police to learn from their mistakes. The NYPD made no real attempt to keep the Morello family under surveillance after May 1903, let alone to investigate the sources of its income or obtain fresh intelligence about its members. Petrosino, who might have played a central role in such an effort, found himself swept off almost immediately to check the rising tide of Black Hand crime; he had little time to spare for longer-term investigations over the next two years. McClusky and his Detective Bureau were relieved to drop the case. That meant that the job of keeping an eye on Morello and his men fell by default to the ordinary patrolmen of the first family’s local precinct, the 104th Street station, who were woefully ill equipped to deal with such well-organized criminals. Rather than concentrating, as Flynn urged, on quietly amassing fragments of intelligence, the police instead indulged themselves in a campaign of petty harassment. “The detectives,” Ciro Terranova said, “used to come around very often and search everybody. Since the time of Morello’s arrest, each and every member of my family including my brother, have been searched on average twice a week.”

The Morellos had some reason to resent the attentions of the 104th Street men; on one occasion, several officers seized Ciro and his brother Vincenzo while they were out searching for a doctor to tend Morello’s son and, ignoring their protests, dragged them off to the station house for interrogation. But the Sicilians had more reason to be grateful. The crude efforts of the Harlem precinct barely hindered the family’s activities, the police felt they were “doing something,” and their regular harassment made the Morellos more careful and so more effective. For Flynn, the 104th Street campaign amounted to rank incompetence.

What was really needed, it seemed clear to almost everybody, was a police squad dedicated to Italian crime. There was reason enough to set one up; the number of Black Hand bombings, shootings, and stabbings rose fourfold between 1903 and 1907, by which time
The New York Times
alone was reporting in excess of three hundred incidents a year—a figure that implied that a far greater number of similar offenses were going unremarked. And while at this same time the number of Italian-speaking policemen on the force was gradually rising, Petrosino was the only man devoted to tackling crime in Little Italy. Detective Sergeant Antonio Vachris, a Genoese who was Petrosino’s opposite number in Brooklyn, complained that he spent more of his time dealing with saloon license violations than he did with the Black Handers of his own borough, and of course that meant that the officers who were assigned to investigate murder and extortion in Italian Brooklyn had no chance of grasping the intricacies of such cases, nor even of making themselves understood to their witnesses.

It was not until January 1905 that a new police commissioner solved this conundrum, partially at least. Worried by the rising tide of violence in Little Italy, William McAdoo, a reform-minded New Jersey lawyer, brought together a small group of Italian-born officers to tackle the problem. Petrosino, still a detective sergeant then, was the obvious choice to lead this new Italian Squad, but McAdoo scoured the ranks of the NYPD for other speakers of the language, eventually unearthing eight more men, among the four thousand then on the force, who possessed the necessary linguistic skills. There were so few Italian policemen in New York, in fact, that Petrosino’s deputy, Maurice Bonsoil, was half Irish and half French, but Bonsoil had grown up in a Sicilian quarter of the city and spoke the dialect better than he did English. There were other surprises, too: The addition of an Irish-sounding patrolman, Hugh Cassidy, to the ranks of the squad baffled newspaper reporters until it was discovered that the man had been born Ugo Cassidi and had Anglicized his name.

Petrosino’s nomination to lead the new Italian Squad was well received throughout the city, not least in Little Italy itself, where word of the appointment helped assuage growing concern among the great majority of honest immigrant families that the spate of bombings and kidnappings for ransom was getting out of hand. Early successes, including the solution of an especially bloody murder in the Bronx, helped to burnish the detective’s reputation further. Petrosino also scored a signal victory in arresting and having deported to Italy an important Neapolitan criminal named Enrico Alfano, who was one of the heads of the Camorra, an extended, organized criminal band that terrorized Naples in much the same way as the Mafia did Sicily. Alfano had fled to the United States after the murder of a rival boss and was widely considered untouchable. His deportation caused a sensation in Italy, where it resulted in an eleven-month trial and, eventually, in thirty convictions—the fiercest blow struck against the Camorra in a generation. Petrosino’s exploits also made a deep impression on the Italians of New York, many of whom had viewed Alfano with a superstitious dread. The Neapolitan crime boss had been seen,
The New York Times
reported, “in the light of a demi-god; he was thought to be invulnerable to bullets and able at all times to escape his pursuers.” Yet the Italian detective had defeated him.

By the time the Alfano affair reached its conclusion, Joe Petrosino was unquestionably one of the two or three most famous policemen in the city, and arguably in the entire United States. He was certainly influential enough to browbeat his superiors into increasing the size of the Italian Squad, which grew to number thirty men by 1908, with ten more stationed across the East River in Brooklyn. “The personality and the mentality of the chief of the Italian squad are striking,” wrote one reporter who returned impressed from interviewing Petrosino.

He is short in stature, but stoutly built. He is clean-shaven and shows a strong but determined jaw. The mouth is firm, the lips are set in a straight line, suggesting purpose rather than severity. The eyes are not the searching eyes of the inquisitive prodder, but the intelligent eyes of a student. There is generally a kindly light in them, a light that makes one feel easy in mind. They invite you to be confidential, and when the straight line of the lips breaks into a smile, you can readily imagine that you are talking to some gentle and thoughtful person who has your interests at heart.