The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (31 page)

The Chief, by his own admission, had no inkling that Comito was an unwilling accomplice, and he expected to discover evidence that his new suspect was heavily caught up in the counterfeiting scheme: “bundles of [forged notes] in his rooms,” perhaps, “together with letters and other evidence connecting him with Lupo, Morello and the others.” Certainly Flynn anticipated trouble; he sent nine men to make the arrest. It was a surprise when they found nothing. A careful search of the Calabrian’s apartment revealed “not a single bogus note, nor any blackmail letters,” and Flynn began to change his mind.

Comito, Mazzei had already told him, was an even-tempered little man derisively known to the Morellos as “the Sheep.” That name, the Chief decided, appeared well deserved; his prisoner was simply too timorous to be a full-fledged member of the Mafia. Comito, he admitted, “had [not] profited at all by the counterfeiting scheme” and “was not at heart a criminal.” This discovery was a surprise but also an opportunity. If the Sheep had been coerced into working for Morello, there was a chance that he might talk.

Flynn, who had conducted hundreds of interrogations, realized instinctively that his prisoner would not respond to bullying or threats.

Instead of placing him under arrest I sat down and had a long talk with him. … I soon learned that if I could get him to talk I would have a witness who could fasten guilt upon almost every man of the band.

This strange character was influenced to a remarkable extent by kindness. There were tears in his eyes when I told him that neither he nor Katrina would be arrested. … The girl was spirited away and put under the protection of the government and Comito himself was under my own supervision. For days he was in the Custom House in New York, never leaving the building except disguised and with me.

For days I worked over him, always treating him with the greatest kindness and striving to overcome the fear which at times got the better of him. … Each night I went with Comito to some Italian restaurant and dined on spaghetti with tomato sauce and onion soup, until I felt inside like a Sicilian and added inches to my girth. At first, Comito glanced fearfully about him and only played with his food. He knew the men with whom he had to deal, and he knew their methods, but gradually he came to look on me as [someone who] would protect him even against the secret vengeance of the men from Corleone.

Bolstered by Flynn’s repeated reassurances, Comito’s weak resistance crumbled. His apartment had been raided on the fourth of January. Within a week he had reached an agreement with his captors: testimony against the Morello family and, in return, protection, immunity from prosecution, and the money to make a fresh start somewhere other than New York.

With that the whole story came pouring out. Comito, Flynn discovered, had vivid, almost perfect recall. He remembered absolutely everything, it seemed: his visits to the Sons of Italy, the introduction to Cecala, the offer of a job in Philadelphia, the river voyage to Highland, and the remote house in the distant woods. More than that, Comito unpicked the mechanics of the counterfeiting operation, providing information sufficient to incriminate nearly a dozen members of the gang, and offered evidence against the gang’s principals, Lupo and Morello, who would normally have been almost impossible to convict. He described the Wolf’s visits to Highland, toting guns and giving frowning approval to a succession of proofs, and his fateful encounter with Morello, clearly the leader of the gang, a man who behaved as though the enormous deference that the others showed him were simply his due.

Taken down in shorthand and typed up, Comito’s testimony ran for well over a hundred pages, or nearly fifty thousand words. It was the most complete and most incriminating body of testimony that the service had obtained for years, and Flynn thought that it would be sufficient to convict every member of Morello’s family. For the time being, though, it was plainly best to keep that knowledge to himself. The less that the Clutch Hand knew about Comito and his evidence, the better.

LUPO AND MORELLO
, meanwhile, were not idle. There were the usual stiff compulsory levies among Italian businessmen in Little Italy, to pay the costs of a defense led by Mirabeau Towns, one of New York’s best-known but most expensive trial lawyers. Orders went out for the destruction of the Highland printing press, and the remaining stock of counterfeits was burned or buried. There were also attempts to construct alibis for the prisoners; Cecala, for example, made arrangements for two witnesses to claim that he had been ill in bed with pneumonia on several crucial dates.

To nobody’s surprise, the most elaborate of these efforts were made on Morello’s behalf. Marshaled by Nick Terranova, who had been reluctantly released by Flynn when no firm evidence could be found to prove his involvement in counterfeiting, the members of the Clutch Hand’s family designed an elaborate alibi. Morello, they decided, should claim to have been ill for the preceding year. Unlike Cecala, though, whose witnesses were a daughter and a friend, the boss would call on solid, independent testimony to shore up his alibi: A pair of doctors, Salvatore Romano and Salvatore Brancatto, would swear on oath that he had been incapacitated.

Romano, of course, had helped the Morellos before. In January 1910 he was still practicing in Rochester, the town to which he had been obliged to flee in order to avoid the attentions of the Clutch Hand’s family, and he knew nothing of Flynn’s arrests until early in January 1910, when he unexpectedly received a letter from his mother in New York.

“This is the way it was done,” he recalled a few months later.

Mrs. Morello and the mother of Morello and the brothers of Morello went to my mother and began to talk to her. They [said] that he had got into very serious trouble. They also said that the only way that he could possibly be saved would be to produce an alibi. I was to say that he was not out at any time he was accused of being out. … I could then testify that I was treating Morello at the time and he was unable to get out when the charges alleged.

The boss, his relatives decided, would say he had been confined to bed with rheumatism throughout late 1908 and most of 1909. It was by no means an implausible claim; Morello, Romano said, was a hypochondriac, “always complaining,” and though he was not genuinely ill, he apparently believed that he did suffer from the condition. To convince a jury that the boss could have taken no part in the counterfeiting scheme, however, Romano and Brancatto would have to testify that they had visited their patient regularly at home and had found him entirely immobile. That meant committing perjury in a federal court—something that Romano, for one, felt deeply apprehensive about.

Reluctant though he was to tangle with the Morellos again, the doctor knew he had no choice.

My mother asked them not to call me, that it would be putting me into trouble, and that I would have to abandon the business I started. They told her that it was an absolute necessity that I come down from Rochester to testify. If I did not come, they said, Morello would be sentenced surely. … So my mother wrote to me. “This is the last proposition that they are going to give you,” she said. “I think you cannot avoid coming down.”

Romano agreed immediately. “I knew the character of the men I had to deal with,” he said. “I knew that if I refused and Morello got a big sentence they would put the whole thing up to me. I thought of my mother down here [in Italian Harlem] going in and out at night, and I had something to fear.”

Nothing happened for several weeks. Then, sometime in the middle of January, the doctor received an urgent telegram from Manhattan. Nick Terranova had sent it. “Be in New York tomorrow,” the message said, and Romano obeyed.

“I am very sorry to trouble you,” Terranova said when the two met.

“I know what you are losing. I know that you are doing this for us, but it is absolutely necessary. You are in no danger at all.”

He said, “How many times a week do you want to say that you saw him?” I answered once a week. “I want to make my testimony as light as possible,” I told him, “so as not to get into trouble with the Court.” He said that once a week was probably too little; “Make it twice a week,” he said.

Reluctantly, Romano agreed; in court, later, he would actually go further, testifying that he had called on his patient “two to three times a week” and diagnosed “articular rheumatism … which gave him severe pain and fever” in his legs. To make sure that all the stories were kept straight, Terranova took Romano to the holding cells to reacquaint him with Morello. “Don’t worry,” the Clutch Hand assured him. “There is no danger at all. Nobody saw me out of the house, and I was as pale as a ghost at the time.”

Joe Petrosino had met his death eight months earlier by severely underestimating the power of the Mafia. Now Morello was making an equally serious mistake: By placing his faith in Dr. Romano, he was badly underestimating Flynn. The Clutch Hand plainly had no real idea how strong the government’s case was, nor did he realize that Flynn had penetrated most of the protective layers in which he had cocooned himself. At trial the Secret Service would be able to call on statements from no fewer than eight operatives to prove that Morello had been out and about in the Italian quarter when he was supposed to be confined to bed. Flynn also had Comito’s testimony. Against that weight of evidence, the word of two Sicilian doctors would prove to be of little consequence.

MORELLO’S TRIAL GOT UNDER
way on January 26, 1910. It was held in New York, in the federal courthouse on Houston Street, a utilitarian building on a noisy thoroughfare ruled over by Judge George Ray. There were nine defendants. Aside from Lupo and Morello, Cecala and Cina were also standing trial, and Calicchio, the aging printer, too. Fourteen minor members of the gang had been convicted on charges of pushing counterfeits a few weeks earlier; a dozen others, including Giuseppe Boscarini, were to be prosecuted separately in the spring.

The members of Morello’s family put on a show of strength on the first day. By order of the Terranova brothers, Ray’s courtroom was “thronged with a rabble of Italians,” and a large crowd of Sicilians who had arrived too late to find space on the public benches milled about in the corridors outside. Some of the latter broke into the empty U.S. marshal’s office, where a razor-sharp stiletto was later found embedded to a depth of several inches in the wall. Further crude attempts at intimidation followed. A second knife turned up the next day on the jury benches as proceedings opened for the morning. It was removed before the jurors saw it, but word of the discovery got out, and the knife and its meaning was one of the chief topics of conversation in the courthouse that day. Efforts were made to silence witnesses as they took the stand as well; according to
The New York Times
, at least one Sicilian spectator made lurid “death signs” during the first week, “hissing and sweeping nails across his throat.” Judge Ray, a pinched, humorless man of below-average height who had heard more counterfeiting cases than any other man on the East Coast, would stand for none of this. He had the hissing Sicilian ejected from the building and stationed extra ushers in his court, and there was no more trouble after that.

The trial itself had been scheduled to last a month. Morello and his codefendants faced a huge number of charges—an unheard-of 548 in total, all felonies and all carrying considerable sentences, but the real reason why so much time had been allotted to what appeared a relatively simple case was not made clear until the first full day in court. It was then, with a rustling along corridors and consternation rippling through the defense, that Antonio Comito took the stand and began to tell the jury of his experiences in Highland.

Morello had expected an acquittal until then. There was plenty of evidence, he knew, against his chief lieutenants: Cecala had been caught with Flynn’s marked bills, and the Vasi brothers with a large quantity of counterfeits. But these men were expendable, and there was nothing, or at least so the Clutch Hand thought, to link him conclusively to the counterfeiting scheme.

The printing press lay at the bottom of the New Paltz River, north of Highland, tipped off a bridge by several members of the Cina family. There was no reason to suppose that its resting place would be discovered. The plates, meanwhile, had been retrieved by Salvatore Cina’s wife and concealed eight miles to the east, in the hamlet of Ardonia. Mrs. Cina had buried them on a farm owned by another of Morello’s associates—a Sicilian farmer who went by the Anglicized name of William Oddo. It had been Oddo who concealed Ignazio Lupo while he was on the run from his creditors in New York.

Word that the plates were hidden at the Oddo farm had been far less welcome to Morello. The farm made a decent hiding place, of course. It was remote and seldom visited, and the Clutch Hand had no reason to suppose that Flynn knew of any connection between Oddo and the Morellos. But quite unknown to Mrs. Cina, the farm was already being used by the first family for other purposes. Morello had long felt a need for some remote spot in which to dispose of the bodies of his victims—men whom he wished to see disappear for good, leaving no trace of their whereabouts and no clues for the police. The Oddo farm met his criteria. Beginning, it seems, in 1908 or 1909, a number of bodies had been buried there, among them the remains of several men who had found out more about counterfeiting in nearby Highland than was good for them. Flynn later would talk of the spot as “Morello’s private burial ground,” and though there is no way of knowing just how many corpses were interred on Oddo’s land, one thing is certain: Mrs. Cina unknowingly had deposited her bundle so close to the graves that any search would be more likely to uncover a dead body than reveal the missing plates.

Even the news of Mrs. Cina’s error, though, did not anger the Clutch Hand so much as the sight of Comito entering Ray’s courtroom. The diminutive Calabrian cut a curious figure in the witness box—he was nothing but a “thin, nervous youth,” one newspaper reporter thought, and the enormity of his decision to give testimony was plainly terrifying him. But though Comito dared not meet the gaze of the defendants (he delivered his evidence with his eyes fixed firmly on a spot on the opposite wall), he held nothing back. By the end of the first day of his testimony, most of the reporters present thought there was no hope for Morello.