The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (22 page)

HOW MUCH GIUSEPPE MORELLO
earned over the years from extortion, counterfeiting, and his numerous rackets cannot be known with any certainty, but it was plainly a great deal of money. William Flynn, who knew more about the first family’s businesses than most, believed that Lupo and Morello between them turned over somewhere in excess of two hundred thousand dollars “in a few years,” a figure that apparently did not include the profits of several legitimate businesses acquired with funds generated by their criminal empire. Morello began making investments of this sort at an early date—by 1903, his assets already included the spaghetti restaurant on Prince Street where Madonia was murdered, a barbershop and a cobbler’s on Tenth Avenue, and two houses that were leased to tenants—and this portfolio was regularly augmented. “As fast as Morello got money,” Flynn explained, “he would farm it out by acquiring a barber shop or set up a man in a shoe repairing shop,” and at much the same time, Lupo the Wolf was developing his grocery business into the envy of Little Italy. At a time when a family could live in New York on three hundred dollars a year, the Clutch Hand and his brother-in-law were wealthy. The truth, so far as anyone can gauge it, is that Morello was probably worth some thousands of dollars in 1903, some tens of thousands four years later.

It was Lupo, so Flynn explained, who came up with the idea of capitalizing on the booming construction market in a city struggling to accommodate a million new immigrants each year. A six-story tenement block, the most common and most profitable variety of housing in New York, could be put up for about $25,000 and when completed contained twenty-four small apartments, each of which could be rented at a rate of about $130 a year. Developers could thus recover their investment over an eight-year period, while retaining a highly salable asset in the tenement itself.

Since not even the Morello family’s illegal enterprises generated the sort of funds required to pay for the construction of entire tenement blocks, Lupo arranged to sell shares in a newly incorporated construction company and then obtain mortgages on suitable lots. The upshot was the formation of the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative Association Among Corleonesi, a company chartered on December 31, 1902, and named in honor of the most prominent Sicilian businessman of the day. The real Ignatz Florio, a shipping magnate from Palermo, was one of the wealthiest patricians in Italy and came from a family known for doing business with the Mafia. In all likelihood, however, Florio remained entirely ignorant of the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative and never discovered that the Morellos were trading on his good name on the far side of the Atlantic.

As chartered, the association had a modest capital of $1,200, and Lupo did not feature on the list of the company’s directors. The company’s president was another Corleone man, Antonio Milone; Morello was listed as treasurer, and four other directors, all prominent figures in the Sicilian community in Little Italy, rounded out the board. Shares in the company were offered at two dollars and five dollars, and there seems to have been no need to coerce anybody into buying stock. Grudging respect for the Clutch Hand’s business sense was sufficient to persuade several hundred small investors to purchase a share or two apiece.

Most of the Co-Operative properties were built in the outer reaches of the city, where land could still be purchased relatively cheaply. “The main purpose of the association,” Flynn explained, “was to accumulate sufficient funds to erect two rows of Italian tenements in One Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street and One Hundred and Thirty-eighth Street and Cypress Avenue, in the Bronx,” and these properties were completed by 1906. There were several other projects too. The Co-Operative purchased lots on 80th Street, 109th Street, and Beach Avenue. The largest of its developments was a row of tenements built at 140th Street and Lenox Avenue, for which mortgages totaling $120,000 were issued at the tail end of 1905.

Some details of the Florio Co-Operative’s methods are known because four of its shares were purchased by the Romano family, and Salvatore Romano, the doctor whose services the family plundered at will, later gave evidence at a grand jury hearing regarding this part of Morello’s crooked business empire. Romano’s mother was the first of her family to invest; she acquired four shares in 1903 for five dollars down and made a gift of two to her son and daughter. Some years later, probably in 1906, when shareholders voted to increase the company’s share capital nearly two hundredfold, to $200,000, Mrs Romano added further to this holding. Whether she ever saw a cash return from her investment seems doubtful. “The shareholders,” her son explained, “received dividends each time a building was completed. They could withdraw these funds or roll them over to be invested in the Association’s next project. Most chose the latter course.” Mrs. Romano was among those who simply let their investment in the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative ride—and with good reason, since for the first four years of its existence the association was a great success.

The buildings constructed by the association were sold as soon as they were finished; neither Morello nor Lupo had any interest in becoming a slum landlord. They sold three six-story buildings on 138th Street to a company named Harris & Trimble in February 1907, and a trio of 140th Street properties went to a well-known landlord, Therese Kummel. Both transactions generated good returns; the figures show profits of $15,000 on 138th Street and $9,000 on 140th Street.

The Florio Co-Operative was big business now. In 1905-6 alone, Lupo and Morello took out mortgages totaling $336,000 to fund a dozen construction projects, and this in turn meant there was considerable pressure to make the new share issue a success. With nearly $198,000 worth of stock to sell, at a new price of a hundred dollars a share, it was no longer sufficient to tout the shares around in Little Italy. New investors had to be sought, and large quantities of the newly issued stock were disposed of outside New York, a significant portion of it purchased by the Morello family’s criminal associates. By 1907, according to Flynn, “there were stockholders all over the country, as far west as the Mississippi valley and south to the Gulf of Mexico,” many of whom were important Mafiosi.

The new shareholders were far wealthier than the impoverished Corleonesi who had bought up the association’s first stock issue in penny parcels; they could well afford the $100-a-share price. But, as time would tell, they were also a good deal less patient than Morello’s earliest investors.

Less patient, and more dangerous.

THE IGNATZ FLORIO CO-OPERATIVE
had been neatly positioned to flourish while the economic times were good, but the business was poorly placed to survive even a modest economic downturn. Land had been purchased while prices were high, on the assumption that values would continue to soar and finished buildings would always command good prices. Three, and sometimes four, construction projects had been put under way at once, which meant that there were rarely any cash reserves. And—so Flynn reported, anyway—Morello soon developed the dangerous habit of dipping into what remained of the association’s funds, further depleting the sums available to run the business on sound lines.

The depression of 1907, which laid waste to the American economy more completely than any financial panic since the slump of 1893, thus hit the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative hard. This crisis, sparked by a failed attempt by one financier to corner the market in copper, spread rapidly, thanks largely to the catastrophic underlying weakness of most large corporations, and by late summer share prices were falling more sharply than they had ever done before. As stock tumbled, finance houses all along Wall Street found themselves with insufficient assets to cover their exposure, and one by one they failed. So severe were the financial shock waves generated by what had been a purely American disaster that its effects were felt around the world. Thus 1907 marked the beginning of one of the world’s earliest global recessions.

Thanks in part to the firmness of J. P. Morgan, the greatest financial titan of the day, the worst of the panic had run its course by October 1907. But even Morgan at the height of his powers could not stop the financial crisis from tipping over into a general slump. New York’s immigrant communities were among the worst affected by the deepening crisis. Twenty-five banks failed in Little Italy alone, and their collapse cost twelve thousand customers their life savings. Hundreds of small businesses went to the wall. Only those that were well established, well run, and well managed had much chance of survival.

The Ignatz Florio Co-Operative was not well run, and it felt the full force of the recession. The price of land and property both plummeted, exposing Lupo and Morello to large losses on several projects, and by the summer of 1908 the association had exhausted its remaining funds and began to default on its obligations. At least three suppliers began legal actions against the company in an attempt to recover their losses. Morello was able to settle one by paying the $895 that was owed, but another case, a suit brought by the building firm John Philbrick & Brother over the much larger sum of $5,000, rumbled along for the best part of three years, evidence—if any were needed—that the fledgling Mafia could not yet challenge or intimidate American-owned companies and that it still had little influence outside the Italian community. Work on new projects ceased. The Co-Operative itself staggered on until 1913, but it never succeeded in recovering its losses, nor regained even a fraction of its old eminence.

The recession hit other parts of the first family’s business empire, too, and among the most prominent casualties was Lupo’s chain of grocery stores. Fewer and fewer Italians could afford the Wolf’s high prices, and to make matters worse, he, too, had acquired the habit of draining his businesses of cash to fund his high-class way of life. With economic conditions still worsening, even the flagship Mott Street store was teetering on the brink of closure by the autumn of 1908. According to
The New York Times
, Lupo’s property portfolio was worth about $110,000 at this time. The Wolf, however, had mortgages totaling $72,000 and had just remortgaged for a further $13,000.

Lupo’s problems, like Morello’s, mostly involved unpaid suppliers. The most significant requirement for any strong grocery business was cash flow; creditors typically demanded payment within thirty days, and failure to move stock in that time led swiftly to missed payments and suspended accounts. Lupo’s solution to this problem seems to have been to sell in bulk to whoever could be cajoled or browbeaten into paying even a fraction of what the unsold goods were worth. By the time auditors appointed by several of his most pressing creditors arrived at Mott Street to pick over the accounts, the entire chain of stores had assets, including stock, of only $1,500, and debts in excess of $100,000.

The Wolf’s humiliation was completed that October when he received a highly public visit from Joe Petrosino. The police had received word that Lupo, desperate for cash, had begun resorting once again to crude extortion, backed by a series of blood curdling threats. What happened next soon entered the folklore of the Italian quarter. “According to those who witnessed what occurred,”
The New York Times
reported some time later, “Petrosino walked up to Lupo and said something in a low voice. Then the detective’s fist shot out and Lupo fell to the floor. Petrosino—according to the story of the eyewitnesses—gave Lupo a severe beating.”

It was a story destined to lose nothing in the retelling, and the Wolf’s already dangerous temper was not improved by the exaggerated versions of events that soon began to circulate. The most lurid and suggestive of these stories had the detective dumping Lupo’s beaten and unconscious body in a barrel in the middle of the street.

THE NEW INVESTORS
in the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative were the next to see their money disappearing. The trickle of judgments lodged against the association was becoming a flood: $125 in March 1908, $529 in April, another $123 in June, all to individual contractors. A further $474 was claimed by the New York Cornice & Skylight Works, and $700 by the Ericsson Engine Company. Next came New York Supreme Court hearings brought by larger, more disgruntled creditors, one that September and another the next May, the latter ending with judgment in the plaintiff’s favor to the tune of $8,032.

The need for more funds became pressing, then urgent. When Ignazio Lupo vanished from New York, hotly pursued by his creditors, his final snarling act of defiance was to order $50,000 of groceries on credit and have the goods shipped to a dockside warehouse in Hoboken, New Jersey—from which they were to have been sent to Sicily for sale by old associates in Palermo. But Petrosino, following the paper trail, tracked down the missing consignments and had them impounded, closing off another hoped-for channel of illicit cash.

Recession and the failure of Lupo’s stratagem left the first family in serious financial difficulty. By the autumn of 1908 Morello had been forced to return cap in hand to his shareholders, explain that they would not be receiving any dividends on their investment, and ask them to consider bailing out the Co-Operative with an additional injection of funds. As might be expected, the news went down badly, not least among the Mafia bosses the Clutch Hand had talked into buying up the shares issued in 1906. “Some of the members who had lost their money began to crowd Morello,” one of the boss’s principal lieutenants recalled to Flynn a few years later. “[They] threatened to kill him.”

The Clutch Hand knew these men meant what they said, and he took the threats seriously—seriously enough to turn back to the one sure way he knew of making very large sums of money very quickly.

It was the end of October 1908. The Morello family was back in the counterfeiting business.

CHAPTER 8
GREEN GOODS

A
NTONIO COMITO HAD DECIDED THAT HE LOATHED NEW YORK
.

Comito was a slight man in his early thirties: black-haired, cleanshaven, five feet four. Born in Catanzaro in Calabria, a dirt-poor region in the toe of Italy, he was ambitious and bright and spoke four languages—two of them, Spanish and Portuguese, picked up during seven years spent in South America, where he had worked as a teacher, a printer, and an assistant to the Italian consul in Rio de Janeiro. Yet things had gone badly wrong for him ever since he’d come home from Brazil. There were no jobs to be had in Catanzaro, and when, growing increasingly desperate, he sailed for New York in the summer of 1907, it was only to discover that there was no work there, either.

Alone and all but friendless in Manhattan, Comito took a room with his brother’s family and secured short-term positions in two print shops. By the spring of 1908, his fortunes had reached their nadir. He was unhappy at home, where his brother had become increasingly overbearing, and the plummeting American economy was making it harder than ever to scrape a living. He lost his first job, which had earned him ten dollars a week, in March 1908, and took two months to find another, which paid less. By August he was out of work again, and this time there were no positions to be had at any salary.

Manhattan that autumn was no place for a man without friends or savings, and Comito would have been destitute had it not been for two small pieces of good fortune. He contrived to maintain the memberships he held in two fraternal societies, the Foresters and the Sons of Italy, and these offered him a social life and the chance to earn a few dollars in commission, touting among other members for printing work that he passed on to a former employer. He also met an Italian woman in her early thirties who was alone in the United States and looking for a man as a “protector.” Katrina Pascuzzo was no beauty, but she was hardworking and sensible, and she earned a few dollars a week from cleaning work. By the end of October, Comito had moved out of his brother’s flat and into rented rooms on James Street with her. The couple “lived together agreeably,” as the Calabrian recalled, dividing all that they earned equally. The fact that Comito was already married, to a wife whom he had left at home in Italy, seems to have troubled him not at all.

Even with Katrina’s modest earnings, money remained a problem, and work was still impossible to find. Then, unexpectedly, at a meeting of the Sons of Italy held on November 5, 1908, an opportunity presented itself in the form of a tall, sandy-haired stranger who pulled Comito aside as he started for home. As the pair strolled along the street outside the meeting hall, the stranger made an offer that seemed—at the time as much as in retrospect—very nearly too good to be true. There is no work to be had in New York, the man observed in Sicilian-accented Italian. You should come to Philadelphia. I have friends there who will make you the master of your own print shop. They will pay you twenty dollars a week, and the work will not be onerous. Come to Philadelphia and your worries will be over.

Comito had never made a secret of his profession—the fact that he was a printer was generally known among the Sons of Italy—so he was not especially surprised that a man whom he had never met before knew so much about him. And the chance of regular work at a decent salary was sufficient to blind him to at least two warning signs. The sandy-haired stranger, he would recall, stared intently as they talked, “searching my eyes for something he expected but did not see,” and “often spoke as if he were on the verge of saying something more than he did … [and] just as he was apparently about to say something he would check himself and smile vaguely in an indifferent way.” None of this appeared to matter at the time, however, and though Comito had only the haziest notion of where Philadelphia was, he did not even bother to ask his new friend’s full name. “The truth is that, all in all, I took him to be a good man,” he wrote, and he readily agreed to meet again in a few days, to be introduced to the Sicilian’s companions. His only real concern was that he would lack the experience to operate unfamiliar machinery and might lose the chance of a good job in consequence.

Comito’s friends and family urged caution. An uncle warned him of the Black Hand and urged his nephew to “be careful not to acquire bad habits or companions. He said that affable strangers would lay traps for my down fall, that I must always be on the look-out.” Katrina, more pointedly, observed that they lacked the cash to go to Philadelphia. She let herself be persuaded, though, and two days later, at ten o’clock on a dreary Sunday morning, Comito’s new acquaintance materialized as promised on his doorstep. A second stranger—shorter, stronger, more forbidding—hovered at his shoulder. This man’s hair was receding, his face lined; his razor slash of a mouth turned down at the corners. He looked to be about forty years old. “Mr. Comito,” the man from the Sons of Italy announced, “I present to you my friend, the gentleman of whom I spoke, owner of a printing shop in Philadelphia. His name is Antonio Cecala.”

COMITO KNEW NOTHING
of Giuseppe Morello, nothing of the Clutch Hand’s decision to begin counterfeiting once again, nor of the Morello family’s urgent need to find a competent Italian printer to do the work; nor of Antonia Cecala’s particular expertise in the field of insurance fraud; nothing, in fact, of the Mafia at all, if his own account can be believed. But Cecala, he sensed, was a dangerous man to be involved with. The squat Sicilian was brutal and sarcastic, and his teeth were yellow and stained, which turned even his smile into an evil leer. He was also prone to fits of violent temper, as Comito discovered when they toured the town to buy a secondhand, foot-driven printing press and Cecala nearly came to blows with the seller. Afterward the two men called at a photographic store in the shadow of Brooklyn Bridge, where Cecala purchased a camera and chemicals. When Comito asked what the camera was for, his companion brushed away the question with an angry shrug, and he was equally evasive when asked about the print shop in Philadelphia. Cecala’s chief concern was to get Comito out of New York as quickly as possible and to ensure that Katrina accompanied them. Katrina, when she heard this, felt nervous, urging Comito that “things are not clear—all is not as they say.” But avarice and wishful thinking, together with a touch of fear, persuaded him to overrule her.

The next morning, November 11, Cecala reappeared at ten with two companions. The first he introduced as Nick Sylvester, a slight Italian American, not much more than a boy, whose job it was to pack the goods and load them onto a wagon. The second, Cecala continued, was his “godfather,” a man in his mid-thirties named Salvatore Cina. Taller, thinner, balding, and roughly dressed, with a crushing grip and a thick Sicilian accent, Cina was, so Cecala explained, “very rich, has businesses of his own in Philadelphia.” Noticing the printer’s appraising look, he added: “Do not regard his poor clothes as representing his wealth. It is his choice to be one of us.”

That, Comito thought, was an odd remark. “What do you mean by ‘one of us’?” he asked.

“That you may know sometime in the future,” Cecala replied. “How can we be sure now that it is well you should know? You must wait until we are satisfied.” And with that, he and Cina climbed onto the loaded wagon. They pulled up Comito and Katrina after them and, with Nick Sylvester at the reins, set off for the New York docks.

“It was a strange answer to a natural question,” the printer mused,

and I let it pass without further notice. But I took pains to watch and listen carefully to whatever [Cina] might say. I knew immediately that he was of a lower class and extremely uneducated. This was the first time that anything had occurred particularly which would have made me think that Katrina was right when she said, “All is not as they say.”

Indeed, there were several reasons for concern, now that Comito’s suspicions were aroused. The baggage, he noted, had been labeled not for Philadelphia but for “Highland, N.Y.,” a discrepancy Cecala brushed away by explaining it was merely a stop on their journey. Then again, Comito and Katrina were never left alone long enough to talk. And when the party boarded a ferry for a journey up the Hudson River, it became clear that they would be traveling after dark.

“At what time will we be in Philadelphia?” I asked, still dissatisfied with the turn affairs were taking and his deliberately evasive answers.

“Tonight, about eight o’clock,” [Cecala] answered, and looked me straight in the eye.

“Why do we arrive at night?”

“It is better for us because no one will see what we are doing and we will need to give an account to no one.”

“Why do we need to fear giving an account to anyone,” I asked boldly, determined to sift matters down. “We are doing nothing dishonest, are we?”

“That, Comito, I will not answer now,” he whispered in a hissing way. “But listen to what I say. Do as you are bid from now on. Your life is forfeit.” And he gave me that sign that struck horror to my soul. Quickly throwing a finger to the center of his forehead and drawing it straight across from left to right, he lowered it to his throat and drawing it across his windpipe, made a suggestive noise, like the slitting of a pig’s throat.

Comito was left alone on deck for a short while after that, but Cecala soon reappeared, this time to baldly announce that he had insufficient money to pay all the party’s fares. Comito had not a cent on him, but Pascuzzo had a five-dollar note that she had hidden in her stocking. Pressed by Cecala for cash, she retrieved the bill and offered it to him. Cecala snatched the note away. “I knew you had it, for I was told,” he remarked in an icy tone. “But I wished to see if you would lie.”

When Cecala had gone again, Comito remonstrated with his mistress. She ought not to have admitted she had money, he complained. But “with her usual foresight,” Katrina said that she thought she had been watched in their apartment earlier when she had hitched up her skirts to hide the bill.

The loss of the five dollars was serious, both Comito and Katrina knew. They were traveling upriver into the approaching winter, heading for an unknown destination in the company of a vicious group of strangers, to carry out some unknown but no doubt illegal work—Comito thought it might be printing pornography. And now they were penniless, without the means to fend for themselves should they get an unexpected chance to run. “I remained like a stone,” Comito recalled.

My courage oozed away and I asked no further questions. But a thousand and one evil thoughts surged through my mind. It flashed upon me that all these preparations had been but part of a scheme to trap me. I felt in my heart that … they were cunning and had led me so far it would be hard now to get back.

We reseated ourselves upon the lounge. … Soon with a million horrible thoughts crowding my tired head I was asleep.

CECALA HAD LIED AGAIN
. It was nearly one in the morning by the time the ferry tied up to a jetty at a deserted spot far up the Hudson, and by then the weather had turned bitter. A crisp layer of frost covered the ground; the trees were bare; hills came crowding in on both sides of the river; and after a while the wind got up and began to blow fresh flurries of snow into their faces. Comito listened hard as a member of the crew called out the details of the place where they had landed. “I failed to hear the world ‘Philadelphia,’” he commented.

In fact they were in Highland, a tiny farming village fifty miles up the Hudson, and had been heading north, away from Philadelphia, ever since setting out from New York. Comito and Katrina, no wiser still as to where they were actually being taken, allowed themselves to be driven on to Cina’s farm, an hour away, to spend the night, and from there they were sent on to another property, this one owned by Cina’s brother-in-law, a Tampa Mafioso named Vincenzo Giglio. Cecala soon vanished—back to New York, Comito was told—and there the couple waited for the best part of a month. It was not until December 8, 1908, that Cina and Giglio loaded up the cart again. With Cina at the reins, the printer and Katrina were driven deeper and deeper into the surrounding woods.

Both Comito and his mistress were well aware by now that they were not going to Philadelphia, but neither knew quite where they were. They had certainly not expected to be quite so isolated, and the desolate terrain and lack of human habitation were intimidating. “In half an hour of the coldest driving that I had ever experienced,” Comito would recall months later, “we were so far in the country that there were no more houses, nothing but trees and the road we were on.” They pressed on farther from there, driving for two more hours through a maze of bare, skeletal trees, the cart groaning all the while under the weight of their luggage and their horse stumbling and slipping on the ice, until at last they reached a desolate spot around a bend from which a small stone house could just be glimpsed between the trees. It was utterly isolated. There was no other sign of houses, nor any traffic on the rough wood track—nobody and nothing, Cina roughly assured them, but a mail cart that passed once a day. The printer was prodded from his seat. “This is the place you are to live, friend Comito,” Cina said.