The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (26 page)

PETROSINO SAILED IN COMFORT
on the liner
Duca di Genova
, traveling first-class with cash supplied from Bingham’s secret service fund. He could hardly do so under his own name, however, and the confidential nature of his journey dictated that he adopt a false identity. Petrosino made the voyage under the alias Simone Velletri, supposedly a Jewish businessman. He carried with him two smart, brand-new yellow leather suitcases and spent the first days of the voyage sequestered in his stateroom, studiously avoiding other passengers. When he did eventually emerge on deck, he told those who asked that he was returning home to Italy in search of a cure for a digestive complaint.

Petrosino’s caution was entirely justified. He was too well known in the Italian community, and far too recognizable, to pass undetected on a vessel filled with New Yorkers. And on board the ship, sailing in steerage, was at least one criminal whom he had personally arranged to have deported to Italy and who might welcome the chance to take revenge. As it happened, there was no trouble on the
Duca di Genova
, but Petrosino was certainly recognized by at least one member of the liner’s crew: Carlo Longobardi, the purser, who had seen his photo in the papers and approached him so enthusiastically that Petrosino was emboldened to confide his true identity, even unbending to the point of spending several hours regaling his new acquaintance with memories of his most famous cases. Petrosino made another acquaintance on board, too: a younger man who went by the name of Francesco Delli Bovi and was so often seen in Petrosino’s company that later the Italian police would take a special interest in him. When they discovered that Delli Bovi had disembarked with Petrosino at Genoa and then vanished—no trace of him was ever found—it would be suggested that the mysterious passenger had been a secret agent of some sort, sent to worm his way into the detective’s confidence.

Whatever the truth, Petrosino left the
Duca di Geneva
keen to complete his mission as rapidly as possible. Boarding the first available train for Rome, and clutching a slip of paper on which his new friend Longobardi had recommended some hotels, he arrived in the Italian capital that same evening, registered at the Hotel Inghilterra under another assumed name, and was up early the next morning to call at the U.S. embassy. The ambassador, Lloyd Griscom, had already received a telegram from Washington about him and provided letters of introduction to the Ministry of the Interior and to the local police. Petrosino filed both in his yellow suitcases alongside the materials he had brought with him from New York: a list of two thousand Italian criminals whose penal certificates he wanted, notes on several possible informants in Palermo, and his .38-caliber revolver.

Lieutenant Petrosino apparently felt safer in Rome than he had aboard the
Duca di Genova
. He was a stranger in the city, and there seemed no reason why he should be recognized, nor why anyone should take the slightest interest in what a squat, balding “businessman” was doing. He called formally on the chief of police, seeking the necessary permissions to continue with his mission and adding letters of introduction to the authorities in Palermo to the contents of his suitcases. For the rest of his stay in the capital, however, the detective took care to retain his anonymity. Planning a quick visit to his family home in Padula, he warned his brother, who still lived there, “not to let anybody know anything, not even your wife.”

Petrosino would have felt considerably less sanguine had he known that his absence had already been noticed in New York, and far worse had he realized that the Italian-American newspaper
L’Araldo Italiano
, reporting on Bingham’s secret service plans days earlier, had printed the information that he would leave for Italy—a detail that the newspaper could have obtained only from someone inside the Police Department. The same story ran in several other dailies, most damagingly from the lieutenant’s point of view, in the
New York Herald’s
European edition, which was printed in Paris but widely circulated throughout the continent. The article in question was scarcely sensational; it was tucked away on page six of the newspaper, and it mentioned Petrosino only in passing. But it was enough. News of the detective’s mission appeared in several Italian papers, and by the time he reached Rome, hundreds of people in Europe and the United States knew that he was making for the city and that he would travel on from there to Sicily.

Petrosino’s first inkling that his secret was out came on the afternoon of his second day in the Italian capital. Pausing for a moment outside the Press Club on the Piazza San Silvestro, he was hailed by two Italian American newspapermen whom he knew from New York. Visibly annoyed at being recognized, the detective begged the men to tell no one he was in the city. The reporters agreed, even offering to show him around the sights, but it soon became clear that they were not the only people to have spotted Petrosino. That same afternoon, while walking through the city center, the lieutenant noticed a poorly dressed man staring at him. “I know him,” the detective told his friends, though he could not remember where they had met. Afterward, when the man made off Petrosino put his police skills to good use and followed at a distance. He trailed the stranger to a nearby post office and watched while he composed a telegram. When the man stepped to the counter to send it, the detective sidled closer and heard enough to realize that the cable was on its way to Sicily.

—

HOPING, APPARENTLY, TO CONFOUND
anyone still following him, Petrosino decided not to travel to Palermo on any of the passenger ships that shuttled up and down the Italian coast. Instead he took a train to Naples, where he paid the skipper of a mail boat to take him on board. The little steamer sailed south overnight, reaching Sicily next morning, and the detective stepped ashore in a quiet corner of the Palermo docks at dawn on February 28. He was convinced that his arrival had gone unremarked.

Perhaps feeling he had left his enemies behind in Rome, Petrosino soon recovered most of his self-confidence. He continued to take elementary precautions, checking into his hotel under a false name and donning a rough disguise for several of the journeys that he took outside the city to gather penal certificates. But he also made a number of simple errors, creating a trail that any determined enemy might follow. He opened an account under his own name at the Banca Commerciale in Palermo and freely revealed his true identity to the waiters in the Café Oreto, a homely place on the Piazza Marina where he ate supper with dangerous regularity. After his first few days in the Sicilian capital, Petrosino also felt secure enough to walk around the town without his revolver. He left the gun in his hotel room, stowed inside one of his suitcases.

Everything about the detective’s actions over the next few days suggests that he was anxious to finish his work in Sicily as rapidly as possible. He worked ferociously long hours, beginning on the morning of his arrival, when, having called briefly on the U.S. consul, William Bishop, he put in almost a full day’s work in the Palermo courthouse. He spent the next three weeks either in the courthouse or in the records offices of half a dozen outlying towns, copying out hundreds of certificates by hand. On Sundays, Petrosino stayed in his hotel and typed up his notes.

By the end of the first week of March, Petrosino had accumulated more than three hundred penal certificates from all over western Sicily, each of which was enough to secure the deportation of an Italian criminal from New York. He had also gone a long way to fulfilling a second aim of his mission, disbursing almost two thousand lire from Bingham’s secret service fund to establish a network of informants on the island. This was especially dangerous work, since the men whom he approached were mostly criminals. Several, almost certainly, were more likely to report Petrosino’s appearance in Palermo to their friends in the underworld than they were to assist the hated police, no matter how much money there might be involved. The detective’s presence in the Sicilian capital could not remain secret for much longer.

The one thing that Petrosino did not do—in fact, conspicuously avoided doing for days after his arrival in the city—was to advise his Italian counterparts that he was in Palermo. He seems to have concluded, for whatever reason, that he could not trust the local authorities, and it was not until March 6 that he at last went to call on Baldassare Ceola, the commissioner of police, to present his letters of introduction.

Petrosino had some reason to fear that the carabinieri were in league with local crooks and Mafiosi. Accommodations had existed for many years between gangsters and police in many Sicilian towns, to the mutual benefit of both. But Ceola was a northerner, sent to Palermo from Milan eighteen months previously in the express hope that he would stay free of the taint of corruption, and he felt very much offended—as much by Petrosino’s evident suspicion as by his rudeness in not calling earlier. Meeting the renowned American detective in person, moreover, Ceola found himself underwhelmed. The commissioner was a gentleman, like most senior Italian police officers: urbane, well educated, and at ease in the highest of society. The short, scarred Petrosino, with his abrasive manners and New York-accented Italian, made a distinctly unfavorable impression. “I saw at once,” Ceola wrote to the prefect of Palermo, “that Lieutenant Petrosino, to his disadvantage, was not a man of excessive education.” An unwise one, too, Ceola thought. When he offered the services of a bodyguard, Petrosino refused point-blank to accept one.

It seemed for some time that the detective was right, that his presence in Palermo was still unknown, and that word of his arrival was, if anything, more likely to leak through the police than anyone else. He worked on steadily for another week without apparent interference, and on Thursday, March 11, he called again on Bishop to inform him that his work was nearly done, that he would be leaving for New York in a few days’ time. Each time he left the consulate, however, Petrosino had to pass through a large crowd of Sicilians hanging around outside, mostly men waiting in line for visas, and this time he was recognized. Two Palermo criminals had joined the line. One of these men was Ernesto Militano, a young thug described by the police as “an incorrigible robber of prostitutes” who was renowned as the owner of “the finest pair of moustaches in Palermo.” The other was Militano’s friend Paolo Palazzotto. Palazzotto had returned to Sicily less than a week earlier after spending several years in the United States. He too had been deported from New York by the Italian Squad.

The two men both caught sight of the detective, and Palazzotto jerked forward as though to confront him. He was restrained by Militano, and Petrosino emerged from the crowd unscathed, clambered into a waiting carriage, and clattered off. Palazzotto had to content himself by shouting out, loud enough for everybody in the crowd to hear: “There goes Petrosino, the enemy of the Sicilians. He’s come to Palermo to get himself killed!”

IN FACT, HAD PETROSINO
only known it, his presence in the capital was already all too well known, not only to Ceola and the police but to a number of his enemies as well.

The
Herald’s
article of February 20 was responsible for most of the damage. It had been picked up by
Il
Mattino
of Naples and then run by several other Italian papers. Enrico Alfano, the powerful former head of the Neapolitan Camorra, seems to have learned of the mission in this way. So, too, according to one newspaper, did a group of Baltimore Black Handers that Petrosino had broken up and had deported the previous summer. Best informed of all, however, were the members of the New York Mafia. According to Antonio Comito’s testimony, Giuseppe Morello and his men knew that the detective had sailed for Italy as early as February 12, a full week before the
Herald
published and only three days after the
Duca di Genova
sailed. Their intelligence, no doubt, had come from
L’Araldo Italiano
, which had broken the news of Petrosino’s mission three days earlier.

Lupo and Morello had every reason to wish Petrosino dead, Lupo perhaps most of all after the humiliation of the beating he had taken, and the two men had long bemoaned the difficulty of killing the policeman in Manhattan. “Damned detective,” the Wolf exploded once within Comito’s hearing. “The devil guards himself too thoroughly. When he walks it is with a loaded revolver in his hand covered by a pocket, and two policemen without their blue coats walk near him eyeing everyone.” In Palermo, though, things would be much easier. The family had plenty of friends in the city, and Petrosino had a good deal less protection.

The chance was far too good to miss, and within days of the detective’s sailing a pair of Mafiosi left for Naples and Palermo, their fares paid by the Morello family. Both men sailed under aliases, but their real names were Carlo Costantino and Antonio Passananti, and they had been employed in Brooklyn as managers of two of Lupo’s grocery stores. Arriving home, they explained that they had come to Italy to avoid some pressing creditors.

Costantino and Passananti spent a few days with their families. Then they traveled into the Sicilian hinterland to call upon the man they had come to Sicily to find. He had been with Morello in New York years earlier and was now the most powerful Mafioso on the island. His name was Don Vito Cascio Ferro.

FRIDAY DAWNED OVERCAST
, threatening rain, and Petrosino took an early train out of Palermo. He spent the morning in the courthouse of the nearby town of Caltanissetta, copying penal certificates there, and was back in the Sicilian capital that same afternoon, keeping an appointment before retiring to his hotel room to type up his work. At some point he pulled out a small pocketbook he had brought with him from Manhattan, which contained his handwritten notes on Sicilian criminals. Reaching for a pen, the detective added a new name to the bottom of a list. “Vito Cascio Ferro,” he scrawled in his spidery script, “born in Sambuca Zabut, resident of Bisaquino, Province of Palermo, dreaded criminal.”