The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (3 page)

Carey felt more confident in guessing the dead man’s nationality. The corpse’s looks were clearly Mediterranean. More tellingly, a brief note, written in Italian in a woman’s hand, had been found crumpled in a trouser pocket. Both earlobes had been pierced for earrings, a practice commonplace in Sicily, and the stiletto wounds on Madonia’s neck also looked bloodily familiar. In the course of his career, the detective had examined the victims of several Italian vendettas. Most likely, he concluded, the man had died in one of the murderous feuds common in Little Italy.

Not all of Carey’s colleagues were so certain; in the first hours after the murder, some officers were working on the theory that the dead man might have had his throat cut by a vicious robber or was even the victim of a deranged crime of passion. The possibility that the corpse was Greek or Syrian was also mooted. Most policemen, though, concurred with the sergeant’s swift deductions. There were, after all, dozens of murders every year in the Italian sections of the city, and most were the products of exactly the sort of deadly feuds with which Carey was so familiar. Few cases of this type were ever solved; New York’s police (nearly three-quarters of whom were Irish) did not pretend to understand what went on in Little Italy, and faced with witnesses and suspects who rarely spoke much English and seldom sought to involve the authorities in their disputes, detectives found it almost impossible to solve even incidents in which the murderers’ identities, and the reasons for the killing, were common knowledge in the immigrant community.

It was clear from the outset, though, that this murder would not go uninvestigated. The brutality of the assault, and the unprecedented circumstances of the barrel’s discovery, had all the makings of a great sensation; by the time Carey had concluded his initial examination, at about 6:15
A.M.
, the sidewalks outside Mallet & Handle’s were already clogged with gawkers who milled about in the hope of glimpsing the now shrouded body. A squad of police reserves, summoned from nearby station houses, had to link arms to keep back a crowd that quickly swelled to several hundred people. The first newspapermen appeared as well, scrawling down their shorthand summaries of what was known about the case. Bloody murder was always front-page news.

By breakfast time, indeed, the fresh whiff of sensation had brought a gaggle of inspectors all the way up from police headquarters. Among the senior officers keen to reap the attendant publicity was George McClusky the head of the Detective Bureau, who took full charge of the investigation. A tall, good-looking man with handsome hair and a thick mustache, McClusky had served more than a decade with the bureau and possessed so much swagger and self-confidence that he was universally known behind his back as “Chesty George.” But the inspector’s high opinion of his own abilities was not matched by reality. McClusky was a clumsy investigator, too certain of the rightness of his own opinions and lacking the subtlety and intuition of the best detectives. He tended to be hasty, too, and all too often rushed into premature arrests. A genuinely baffling case—which Arthur Carey already feared the barrel mystery would turn out to be—might easily confound him.

Fortunately for the police, Carey had already taken steps to remedy the situation. His tentative identification of the barrel victim as a Sicilian had prompted him to call for help, and within the hour it arrived in the unlikely shape of a squat man in a shapeless overcoat, his face half hidden beneath a derby hat. The newcomer was Sergeant Joseph Petrosino, born in Padula, south of Naples, but now New York’s great expert on Italian crime. Quite possibly the most recognizable officer in the entire department, Petrosino was smallpox-scarred, strong-featured to the point of ugliness, and short even by the standards of the day—he stood a mere five feet three and customarily wore lifts in his shoes to augment his height. The detective’s diminutive stature, though, was as deceptive as the look of blank-eyed stupidity that he often wore upon his face; the sergeant tipped the scales at close to three hundred pounds, and much of that bulk was muscle. “He had,” a member of the district attorney’s office who knew him well once wrote, “enormous shoulders and a bull neck, on which was placed a great round head like a summer squash. His face was pock-marked and he rarely smiled, but went methodically about his business, which was to drive Italian criminals out of the city and the country.”

It took Petrosino only a few minutes to examine the yard, the body, and the handful of effects that had filled Madonia’s pockets. Then he and Carey turned their attentions to the barrel in which the dead man had been found. It had been cheaply made, without hoops, and now that the corpse had been removed, the detectives could see that a three-inch thickness of sawdust coated its base. Taking turns, the two men reached inside and sifted through the blood-saturated cedarwood, discovering a hairpin, onion skins, and several black cigar butts that Petrosino said were of Italian make—detritus, the detective noted, from a restaurant floor. Carey, running a finger along the inside of the staves, felt tiny granules grind against his skin. Several lodged under his fingernails; lifting his hand to his mouth, the sergeant touched the tip against his tongue and tasted sugar. That suggested the barrel had at one time been the property of a candy store, a pastry shop, or a café.

It was only as the morning brightened into daylight that the most important clue emerged. Peering for the first time at the barrel’s base, Carey made out the faint marks of a stencil. There, in muted ink, he read the legend “W&T.” And, stamped along the side of a stave, was a faint serial number: “G.223.” The two detectives glanced at each other. Here at last was a lead worth following.

NEW YORK’S PRINCIPAL SUGAR
refineries sat bunched together on the far side of the East River, belching smoke along the waterfront. Carey spent the remainder of the morning and part of the afternoon trudging from one to another, until at last he found a factory where clerks recognized the stencil marks. “W&T,” the detective was told, were the initials of one of the refinery’s customers: Wallace & Thompson, a grocer on Washington Street. “G.223” denoted a recent consignment consisting of six hoopless barrels of sugar.

The man at Wallace & Thompson was just as helpful. He recalled the order and told Carey that all six barrels had already been sold. Half of the consignment had been broken up and disposed of in ten-pound lots, but the other three barrels had been sold entire.

“Have you got any Italian customers?” Carey asked.

“Only one,” replied the clerk. “Pietro Inzerillo, who has a pastry shop in Elizabeth Street.” Inzerillo had purchased two barrels of sugar for his Café Pasticceria, a popular meeting spot for working-class immigrants that stood just around the corner from the Prince Street saloon.

Sending word for Petrosino to join him, Carey hastened off to Little Italy.

AN AMBULANCE BROUGHT
Madonia’s body to the city morgue midway through the morning. The coroner’s surgeon, Dr. Albert Weston, was waiting; he performed a quick, efficient autopsy, noting a physical description, listing wounds, and informing the police that their anonymous victim had died sometime between 3:30 and 4
A.M
. The examination uncovered several other clues as well. Seventeen separate wounds had been carved into the man’s face after he died—suggesting, the coroner thought, the motive of revenge. And the scarcely digested Sicilian meal that Weston found in the man’s stomach was the first firm evidence McClusky had as to Madonia’s nationality and to what he had been doing at the time that he was murdered.

The autopsy complete, Weston laid the corpse on a bed of ice. In this way the remains could be preserved, at least for several weeks, while attempts were made to discover its identity. Soon after lunch, the first in a long line of policemen and potential witnesses began calling at the morgue, sent there by McClusky in the hope that someone would recognize that striking face; in time, more than a thousand people would file hopefully past the body. Weston even allowed a photographer from William Randolph Hearst’s muckraking
New York Journal
to snap a picture of the cadaver as it lay on the slab. That sort of thing was usually frowned on, but the
Journal
, with its screaming headlines, simple text, and ample use of illustrations, boasted a larger circulation among the immigrant community than any other New York paper. By evening half a million of its readers would have seen the dead man’s face. Surely one of them would recognize it.

McClusky fed Weston’s information to his men. Nobody could say that the police were not making every effort to solve the case; hundreds of detectives from precincts all over the city had been pulled off their normal duties to question informants and to hunt for clues, and virtually the whole of the uniformed force was sucked into the investigation, too; even long-serving Manhattan crime reporters could scarcely remember a time when so great a proportion of police resources had been devoted to a single case. Yet by mid-afternoon, Carey and Petrosino aside, not one of the NYPD’s thousands of officers had come up with a worthwhile lead. The mystery man in the rickety barrel seemed to have sprung from nowhere; no one had seen him loitering around the city, noticed anything suspicious, or had the least idea how a well-dressed Sicilian with chestnut eyes might have come to such an awful end.

No one, that is, but a man sitting in an anonymous Wall Street office who had glimpsed Madonia just once, the day before the murder.

THE MOST ATTENTIVE READER
of the evening papers sprawled behind a desk in Manhattan’s Treasury Building, leafing with growing interest through pages dense with coverage of the barrel mystery.

William Flynn was chief of the New York bureau of the U.S. Secret Service, which made him the most important agent in the country outside Washington. A native of Manhattan, the son of an Irish immigrant, and educated in the city’s public schools, Flynn did not look much like anyone’s idea of a government man. He was thirty-six years old and tall, close-cropped, and bullet-headed, with the powerful build of the semi-professional baseball player that he had been in his twenties and a face that too much desk work was beginning to turn jowly. Flynn had an unlikely background for a Secret Service agent, too; he had left school at fifteen to be a plumber and later worked for several years as a guard in a New York jail. But he was a great deal cleverer than his bland looks and sausage body might suggest. In the six years since he had joined the service, Chief Flynn had blazed such a trail through New Orleans, Washington, and Pittsburgh that John Wilkie, the agency’s director, had personally selected him to tackle the toughest posting that the service had to offer. Now here he was on Wall Street, the U.S. government’s most senior detective.

Flynn’s job was to keep the biggest city in the country free from counterfeiters and forged bills. Although best known today for guarding the president, the Secret Service was, and remains, a department of the Treasury. It had been founded after the Civil War, at a time when nearly half of all the cash in circulation was counterfeit, and its first duty has always been to maintain robust public confidence in the value of the dollar. The agency came by its close protection role by accident—one of Flynn’s predecessors in the New York office had actually been demoted for informally assigning men to guard President Cleveland—and even in 1903, after the assassination of William McKinley had forced Washington to take that problem much more seriously, nine-tenths of Secret Service manpower, and practically all its budget, was devoted to the war on counterfeiting. The work demanded men of unusual ability; forgers rarely committed messy, headline-grabbing crimes, they could work from almost anywhere and were noted for their brains. Tracking them down and procuring evidence against them called for patience, thoroughness, and cunning. In all these qualities, Flynn excelled.

The counterfeiting problem in New York was particularly bad. Large quantities of fake notes and bad coins were in circulation. A few of these were first-rate forgeries; most counterfeit currency, though, consisted of badly printed notes on poor-quality paper and crudely struck half-dollar coins and quarters. These unskillful fakes were never intended to fool bankers or Treasury men; they were put into circulation by small-time crooks known as “queer-pushers,” who bought them at a discount from the men who forged them and took their chances palming them off on harassed bartenders and shopkeepers. Queer-pushing was far easier when practiced in poor immigrant districts, where crowds were dense and the locals unsophisticated. It was for this reason that counterfeiting was especially common in the Jewish and Italian enclaves of New York—and for this reason, too, that Flynn had spent the evening, a day earlier, loitering outside a butcher’s shop on Stanton Street in Little Italy.

The Secret Service had been aware ever since the spring of 1899 that Sicilian forgers were passing bad money in New York, and over the years its agents had arrested a number of queer-pushers who were agents of the gang. Half a dozen of these small fish had been convicted and given sentences of as much as six years; most recently, on New Year’s Eve 1902, a group of Italians had been caught in Yonkers passing counterfeit five-dollar bills drawn on the Iron Bank of Morristown, New Jersey. Three of the members of this gang had been convicted a month before the Barrel Murder. They had gone to jail tight-lipped—much to Flynn’s frustration—refusing to reveal either the names of their suppliers or the location of their printing works.

It had taken the Secret Service twelve weeks, and a large expenditure of effort, to solve the mystery of the Morristown fives. In the end, however, long hours of covert observation and the careful cultivation of informants drew agents to a dingy butcher’s shop at 16 Stanton Street, a two-minute walk from the spaghetti restaurant where Madonia would meet his death. The store, Flynn learned, had changed hands in early April. Its new owner was a large and powerful Sicilian named Vito Laduca.