The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (20 page)

Morello was not alone in issuing formal sets of rules. A few earlier New York gangsters had done so, and another set of gang regulations would turn up a few years later in Ohio, the work of a Mafia-like Italian group known as the Society of the Banana. Nor was the Clutch Hand’s evident ambition remotely unfamiliar to New York’s underworld. What was unusual about Morello was the speed with which he was able to expand his influence, first through the city and then beyond its boundaries, at a time when long-distance communication still involved telegrams and letters, and when crossing the United States from top to bottom, side to side, meant journeys lasting several days. Morello had been in the country only since 1893, resumed his counterfeiting career in 1899, and formed his criminal family in 1900. By 1903, though, he was the uncrowned king of Little Italy. And three years after that, he was acclaimed as boss of bosses of the entire American Mafia.

IT WAS NICOLA GENTILE
who revealed the Clutch Hand as the most senior, most powerful Mafioso in the country, and probably no one in the Italian underworld was better placed to know the truth.

Gentile, too, was a Sicilian, born in the province of Agrigento in 1885. According to his own account, given decades later when he was in his seventies and no longer had a lot to fear, he emigrated to the United States in 1903, lived and worked in Kansas City, Missouri, and was initiated into what he called the
onorata società
—the Honored Society, the Mafia—in Philadelphia two years later. Later Gentile moved to Pittsburgh, where he joined another Mafia family, and he spent time in San Francisco and Chicago, too. In his youth, the Agrigento man was arrogant and tough—”the classic raw material of the Mafioso”—and he soon built a reputation as a killer, ingratiating himself with his fellow Sicilians in Pittsburgh by violently subduing the local Neapolitans. (“You cannot become a
capomafia
without being ferocious,” he explained.) But Gentile was something of a diplomat as well, with contacts among members of the Mafia in many cities, and one of the Mafiosi with whom he was acquainted was Giuseppe Morello. There is no reason to doubt a man of his seniority and experience when he described the Clutch Hand as “boss of the bosses of the honorable society when I first entered it.”

It would be easy to read too much into this title. The Mafia of 1906 was a loosely organized collection of families in eight or ten large cities that rarely acted in concert, and there is certainly no proof that Morello tried, or even wanted, to exercise direct control over families in far-flung parts of the United States. What the Clutch Hand did do was act as an adviser and an arbitrator—and arrange matters, on occasion, to benefit New York. Where he governed, he seems to have governed by consensus. But the fact that his authority was recognized at all by men living thousands of miles from Manhattan is testament to the respect in which the Corleone boss was held.

How large and how powerful the American Mafia had become by 1906 cannot be said with any certainty. Only a handful of fragmentary records survive. Taken together, though, these scraps paint a picture of a more complex organization than almost anyone suspected at the time—one in which
cosche
were springing up in a growing number of towns, wherever there were large Sicilian populations. It was a fraternity that maintained links with its compatriots in Italy and whose bosses in the United States were also in regular communication. And, while still fatally prone to the sort of murderous internecine disputes that soured relations between families in Sicily, the American Mafia was also evolving mechanisms to resolve disputes and so maximize the money it was making—profit, as Flynn once pointedly observed, being “all these people were concerned with.”

Nicola Gentile, with his ceaseless wanderings, makes a fine guide to the Mafia as it existed in the first decade of the century. His memoirs describe families in New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, in Pittsburgh and Chicago—where Anthony D’Andrea, a turn-of-the-century counterfeiter, had emerged much as Morello had, and was now the leader of the city’s Mafia. (The D’Andrea whom Gentile described—”so savage and so fierce” and “greatly feared in all the United States”—became an influential politician in Chicago’s Italian wards and flourished until his murder there in 1921.) Kansas City and San Francisco were also mentioned; Boston, Baltimore, Detroit, and Wilkes-Barre were not, though there is independent evidence of Mafiosi operating in these districts from the first years of the century. In another decade families would be established in several other large cities—Cleveland, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Buffalo—and some of these groups probably had their roots in the prewar period as well.

There had been hints, dating to the last decade of the nineteenth century, that Mafiosi were in touch with one another across the continent, and that men of respect sometimes traveled from town to town on business. A Sicilian arrested in Philadelphia on a charge of sending Black Hand letters testified “that he and his companions were members of the Mafia and that they were in communication with similar branches in New York, Baltimore and Pittsburg.” That was in the winter of 1903, and channels of communication apparently existed through the American interior by that date as well. Francesco Di Franchi, said by the police in California to be “an agent of the murderous la Mafia society,” had been in New Orleans at the time of the Hennessy shooting, was thrown out of Denver a few years later, and was finally shot dead in San Francisco in December 1898. Di Franchi had appeared in the Bay Area only a few days before his death, having arrived there from New Orleans in pursuit of yet another Italian, whom he planned to kill. In Chicago, meanwhile, Carlo Battista—found standing over the body of a dead Sicilian on Grand Avenue in February 1901—had just come to the city from New York; stranger still, a police search of the dead man’s pockets turned up evidence that the victim, in turn, had been a witness to a murder in Manhattan. And some years later, on the West Coast, a gunman by the name of Mike Marino (“who according to the police,” the
Los Angeles Times
reported, “is one of the head gunmen for the Mafia in this country and abroad”) shot dead at least two more Sicilians with a rifle from a moving car. Marino, the police disclosed, was an experienced killer, already wanted for murder in New York, Chicago, San Diego, and Seattle.

Morello, too, was an occasional traveler, one whose influence was clearly felt across large swaths of the United States. The earliest indications of the Clutch Hand’s growing importance were discovered among the collection of five hundred letters seized from his Chrystie Street attic room at the time of th Barrel Murder. These communications, the
Herald
reported after a briefing from Flynn, “were received from Sicily and from nearly every city of importance in this country,” but the most revealing among them had been mailed from New Orleans—still home to the second-largest Italian community in America—and came from one Francesco Genova, whom the Secret Service believed to be the brother of Messina Genova, a member of the Barrel Murder gang. This letter discussed a young killer named Francesco Marchese, who had recently escaped from Sicily after receiving a thirty-year sentence for murder. Marchese had made his way to Louisiana and established contact with Genova, who was now recommending him to Morello, explaining that he was held in high regard in New Orleans and Palermo. Morello did find him a job; Genova’s letter was apparently an example of a system, later described by Flynn, that enabled members of various Mafia families who were not personally known to one another to transfer from one city to another with the help of letters of recommendation from their bosses.

Morello’s influence in New Orleans was not confined merely to matters of administration. A few years later, probably in 1908, several of Flynn’s operatives tracked the boss on a visit to Louisiana, this time to deal with an Italian hotelier who had, the Secret Service heard, grown so angry at the Mafia’s rapaciousness that he had threatened to reveal everything he knew to the police. Morello arrived in the city, held meetings with some Sicilians there, and after a stay of three or four days was observed by Flynn’s men parading through the Italian quarter of the city, “wearing on his head a red handkerchief knotted at the four corners.” It was a Mafia death sign, the Chief explained, and a visible display of the Clutch Hand’s authority in New Orleans. That afternoon, Morello caught a train back to New York; that evening,

the offending Italian was found dead in his [hotel] with a score of knife thrusts in his breast very like those received by the victim of the “barrel murder.” The direct evidence was again lacking on which to convict the dreaded visitor. Yet the Italians of all the country took this stabbing as they had the “barrel murder,” as a warning not to defy the authority of the big chief.

The New Orleans incident seems to have been unique. Ostentatious assertions of authority were not generally Morello’s style, and though he very likely ordered other murders, for the most part the Clutch Hand advised and governed by letter or, more formally, through a central Mafia “council” that was established some time before 1909. The creation of a ruling body of this sort—known among Mafiosi as “the Commission” and said to meet every five years—is known from later testimony, dating to the 1930s and beyond, but its existence some two decades earlier suggests an organization of unexpected sophistication, given the difficulty and expense of travel at the time. Gentile and Morello both discussed the council, though, Gentile explaining that it consisted of no more than a handful of the most powerful bosses from around the country and was responsible for broad strategy. A much larger “general assembly,” numbering as many as 150 delegates, also met and had a wider brief, electing capos in cases of dispute and giving its approval to proposals to silence troublesome or recalcitrant Mafiosi. According to another Morello letter seized by Flynn, the two assemblies were separate, and membership in the council did not entitle even a powerful boss to speak at meetings in the assembly: “He can come but only to hear and then has no right to the floor, neither right to an opinion or right to vote,” the Clutch Hand wrote.

Whether or not either the Mafia council or the general assembly had real influence is not known, but it seems doubtful. The council, as Gentile pointed out, often did little more than rubber-stamp decisions of the boss of bosses, who would settle matters in advance after consulting his advisers. Gentile was still more scornful of the general assembly, which was, he said, “made up of men who were almost illiterate. Eloquence was the skill that most impressed the hall. The better someone knew how to talk, the more he was listened to, and the more he was able to drag that mass of yokels the way he wanted.” If anything, mention of councils, debates, and votes underlines the difficulty of persuading any group of criminals to agree on anything, not least when each boss and each family are engaged in a ceaseless quest to expand their influence, broaden their business, and improve their profits, often at the expense of their fellow Mafiosi. From this perspective, the assemblies described by Gentile and Morello were safety valves as much as anything else—mechanisms for heading off disputes between rival gangs before they could turn into all-out wars. And there certainly was a need for institutions of this sort. By the middle of the first decade of the century, the Mafia had begun to make serious money.

THE RAPIDITY WITH WHICH
the Morello family grew in strength and in sophistication was startling. The Morellos substantially improved upon the crude methods of the Black Hand, preferring more enduring, far more profitable protection rackets, which meant that rather than extorting enormous one time payments from their victims, the Mafia levied weekly payments from a variety of businesses, from wealthy storekeepers down to the poorest peddlers. Individually, the sums involved were often small, scarcely worth bothering with, but they mounted up over time, and few in Little Italy escaped the gang’s attentions. East Harlem was “pretty rough in those days,” recalled Joe Valachi, the son of an impoverished vegetable seller from Naples who was born in the district in 1904. “You could hardly walk around without catching a bullet. I remember my father had to pay a dollar a week for ‘protection,’ or else his pushcart would be wrecked.”

“Protection” amounted, in effect, to a form of tax: pay it and be left alone, or refuse to pay and accept the consequences. “Dipping the beak,” the Mafia called it, and it was already commonplace in Sicily; according to Mafia lore, the idea was introduced to the Italian quarter of New York by Vito Cascio Ferro when he arrived in the city in 1902. As Cascio Ferro explained the technique, it was a matter of expediency, mere common sense. “You have to skim the cream off the milk without breaking the bottle,” Don Vito once said. “Offer people your protection, help to make their businesses profitable, and not only will they be happy to pay, they’ll kiss your hand in gratitude.”

Whether Cascio Ferro was actually responsible for the idea—and it seems unlikely that no such scheme had existed before—protection did mean something when two or more rival gangs were competing for the same territory, and most Sicilians grudgingly accepted the necessity of paying it. “With the Mafia … at least they gave you somethin’,” one shopkeeper observed. “The other gangsters gave you nothin’ each time you paid them somethin’.” But the idea that Mafiosi were somehow benefactors, even defenders of the poor, was laughable, though it was something that the gangsters themselves claimed and perhaps believed; so was the notion that their criminal activities, from murder to extortion, were the only way that immigrant Sicilians could secure justice and respect. The truth was that Morello and his henchmen were parasites who terrorized their fellow countrymen, exploited the weak, and dealt in fear. Before 1920, when Prohibition opened up opportunities that earlier generations of racketeers had scarcely dreamed of, Italian criminals preyed only on Italians. There was nothing remotely heroic about the things they did.