The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (39 page)

How far the game had progressed, who was there in addition to DiMarco and Lombardi, and other incidents of the afternoon are blank to the detectives. They do know, however, that a “straight flush,” a very unusual “hand,” was dealt to DiMarco, for that “hand” was found under his bullet-riddled body. They believe that the dealing of that hand was the signal for the “gunmen” to open fire on DiMarco and his unsuspecting bodyguard. Twenty shots were fired, perhaps more. … DiMarco was shot ten times and Lombardi twice. Eight or ten men who had been in the room and were a part of the murder plot escaped “clean,” as the police say. That is, they got away before any one saw them and left only their hats as clews, and as ten straw hats were found the police are suspicious that they were left to mislead them.

There was a postscript to DiMarco’s murder. The dead gambler’s brother, Salvatore—long a force in the coal racket—was found dead two months later, sprawled in a clump of weeds on Washington Avenue. He had been struck hard across the forehead with some sort of club, perhaps a baseball bat, and lay with his skull turned to eggshell, his throat cut, and a large sum of money—the proceeds of the sale of his brother’s restaurant—missing from his pockets. Salvatore’s murder finished the DiMarcos as a force in the Italian underworld and made certain that there could be no feud with the Morello family. That, as it happened, was just as well, for by then the Terranova brothers were confronting a threat more serious than any they had faced. Over the East River in Brooklyn, a new power, hailing from Naples, was rising in the underworld—one as terrible and as murderous as the Mafia and no more willing to share the spoils of New York with others.

The Camorra had arrived in the United States. War was brewing.

THE CAMORRA, A CRIMINAL SOCIETY
with roots deeper even than the Mafia’s, had originated in Naples around the year 1820 as a mutual welfare fraternity for prisoners in the city’s jail. It evolved outside of prison walls, moving first into extortion and then to the creation of a full-fledged gang of vicious crooks with bases throughout the city. The Camorra differed from its Sicilian rival in being far more hierarchical; among other things, it had a single recognized and formally anointed leader. In most respects, however, the Neapolitans worked in much the same way as the Mafia. There was a gang—a family—for each district of the city, led by a
capintrito
and consisting of anything up to a hundred men who were formally initiated into the fraternity and divided into four ranks. There was a central council, known as the Great Mother, which settled disputes and punished betrayals. And there were rackets, more or less identical to those run by the Sicilians: horse theft, blackmail, and the control of gambling.
Camorra
was, like
Mafia
, a word used by outsiders. Initiated members of the fraternity referred to it as the Società dell’Umiltà, the Society of Humility, or as the Bella Società Riformata, the Fine Reformed Society.

Since Naples was nearly as poor as Sicily, there were nearly as many Neapolitans in the United States as there were Sicilians, and most large American cities had their Neapolitan quarter and their Neapolitan criminals. When precisely the society first established itself in New York is obscure, though almost certainly it gained its first footholds later than the Mafia did. What can be said with confidence is that a number of prominent Camorrists entered the United States between 1900 and 1910, that most settled in across the East River from the Morellos’ strongholds, and that they formed two distinct but allied gangs, one based on Navy Street in Brooklyn and the other farther out, in Coney Island. The former gang, based in a coffee shop at 133 Navy Street, was led by Alessandro Vollero, a youthful-looking thirty-year-old
capintrito
who had arrived in New York in 1907 with his wife and children. Vollero’s boss, Pellegrino Marano, ran the Coney Islanders from a restaurant, the Santa Lucia, which stood close to the amusement parks.

Thanks in large part to the strength of the Mafia, the Camorra was significantly less powerful and less organized in New York than its Sicilian rivals as late as June 1916. There were fewer Camorrists than there were Mafiosi—one member of the Navy Street gang put their total strength, with that of the Coney Islanders, at no more than forty men—and they made their money from gambling and from dealing in cocaine; the far more lucrative vegetable, ice, and coal rackets were all controlled by Sicilians. Membership, too, was a privilege granted far more easily by the Camorra than it ever was by the Mafia. One low-level Neapolitan gunman spent years working more or less honestly in Buffalo before being suddenly summoned to New York and asked to join the gang, apparently simply because he had known another of the Coney Island leaders, Tony Paretti—Tony the Shoemaker, he was called—when they were young in Italy. The Camorra did resemble its Sicilian counterpart in some respects: Loosely linked Neapolitan gangs existed in a number of cities, from Boston to Chicago and from Buffalo to Pittsburgh, and the Neapolitans also organized their own initiation ceremonies, which closely resembled those of their Sicilian rivals. The same Camorra probationer described being handed a penknife and ordered to draw blood from his friend Paretti’s arm. Marano then “went near the shoemaker’s arm, and sucked the blood, and a little more blood came out. He said to me, ‘You have gained.’” For all this, though, and ambitious though its leaders were, the Neapolitan gangs remained less influential than the Mafia even after Giosue Gallucci’s death.

Relations between the Sicilians on one side and the Camorra leaders on the other were peaceful enough at first. The rival gangs stuck to their own territories, sharing the spoils of New York’s rackets, and their leaders attended an annual “smoker” in Brooklyn, arranged to encourage amity between the two organizations. All this changed, however, after the year 1915, as the Camorrists, sensing weakness, became determined to expand into Manhattan, and the Terranova brothers attempted to resist their advances. The outcome was the first of many modern “wars” between rival factions of criminals.

One flash point was the Neapolitans’ first appearance in Manhattan, when the Coney Island gang’s Marano opened up a gambling house on Hester Street after Joe DiMarco was killed. Another was a budding feud between Vollero and Nick Terranova, whom the Navy Street gang boss blamed for the death of a close friend. It was only on the orders of Marano that Vollero agreed to keep the peace, at least until a conference between the two sides due to be held at the Santa Lucia late in June 1916.

Marano’s plan was to bring the Mafia and the Camorra closer together, to ease friction between the gangs, tighten their joint control over the Italian underworld, and formally parcel out the New York rackets. The Neapolitans knew what they wanted from this arrangement—they were greedy for more money and more power, and Vollero particularly envied the Morellos’ stranglehold over the artichoke trade. Motives were less clear on the Sicilian side, though the Terranovas were certainly anxious to avert the threat of fighting a war on two fronts—against the Camorra on one side and the even more grasping Totò D’Aquila on the other. If the Neapolitans read the first family’s agreement to discuss concessions as a sign of weakness, though, they were sorely disappointed. When Marano announced that he wanted to discuss not just the vegetable racket but gambling, cocaine, and extortion, too, the Terranova brothers decided that they had heard enough. Unwilling to surrender their hard-fought-for dominance over any racket, Nick, Ciro, and Vincenzo stonewalled until the talks broke down. So far as Vollero was concerned, that was a declaration of war.

Cooperation between the gangs did not cease immediately; it was Vollero who supplied the gunmen who killed Joe DiMarco, and soon after the gambler’s murder the Terranovas came down to Navy Street with fifty dollars, a gift for the assassins. By August 1916, Vollero was actively plotting his enemies’ destruction.

In the end, though, it was not Vollero but Marano who decided that the time was right to dispose of the Morellos. The Coney Island boss’s motives were clear enough—he wanted to seize control of the Mafia’s rackets and in particular the three most valuable: the artichoke trade, the lottery, and gambling. The Morellos’ dominance of the lottery particularly incensed him. “Yes,” one of Marano’s men would remember him raging, “it is true that these semen want to keep that game uptown, but they will have to figure it with me. I will show them who Don Pellegrino Marano is. I will have them all killed.”

Tony the Shoemaker agreed. “All the Neapolitans are semen,” he chipped in, “because if we could all get together and agree, after this job is done, we would all be wearing diamond rings; and we would get all the graft.”

Marano’s first task was to persuade the Navy Street gang to back his plan. This was by no means an easy matter; for all Vollero’s scheming, most of the Navy Streeters, who were based just over the East River in Brooklyn, had long been just as friendly with the Morellos as they were with the Coney Island gang. The Morellos had even saved the life of one of Vollero’s closest friends, Andrea Ricci, in some otherwise unrecorded incident a short time earlier, and it took Marano quite some time to persuade his fellow Neapolitans to agree to his scheme. Even then there were dissenters; Vollero’s chief lieutenant, Leopoldo Lauritano, frankly told other members of the gang that he found the Sicilians more trustworthy than the Coney Islanders. In the end, though, greed won out. As Marano’s right-hand man explained matters to the reluctant Ricci, “You must consent to the killing of the Morellos, because you know that up in Harlem there is quite some money to be made. You and I have been there. If we open up a saloon, you know that we can make money with the ice and coal.”

“Andrea, you must consent,” Vollero added. “You see, there is the graft on the artichokes, the policy [lottery] graft and the
zicchinetta
[card games], and the ice and coal. We had DiMarco killed to satisfy them. Now we can kill the Morellos to get this graft.”

The Brooklyn Camorra of 1916 was nowhere as fearsome as the Morello family. It was far less well organized—both the Navy Street and the Coney Island gangs had existed for no more than a year or two—and not so well resourced. There was, for instance, little of the cooperation that stood the Sicilians in such good stead; both Vollero and Marano closely guarded important portions of their operations, the Navy Street boss refusing to share the cash he made peddling cocaine “to theatrical people and waiters,” and Marano keeping the profits of his Harlem lottery for himself. Because of this, the Neapolitans agreed, it would be wildly dangerous to allow themselves to be dragged into a lengthy war. Their best and perhaps only hope was to remove the entire Morello leadership in a single stroke. Dispose of the Terranova brothers and their aides, Marano and Vollero thought, and their Harlem rackets would fall naturally, like ripened fruit.

It took the Camorra bosses a little less than a month to plot the Morellos’ deaths. Six Mafia leaders were invited to Navy Street early in September, ostensibly to discuss the division of the New York rackets: the three Terranova brothers, Stefano “Steve” La Salle, Eugene Ubriaco, and lastly Giuseppe Verrazano, who had taken over from DiMarco as head of the Morellos’ gambling interests. With those men dead, Vollero thought, what remained of the first family would flounder, leaderless. The foot soldiers of the Morello gang would either be reduced to petty crime or be forced to join forces with the Neapolitans of Navy Street.

A dozen members of Vollero’s gang gathered on Navy Street the day before the meeting in order to go over the arrangements for the planned murders one last time. Three men had been chosen to do the killing, and arrangements were made for their guns to be loaded with special ammunition—bullets smeared with garlic juice and pepper, which were believed to cause infection in a wound and would, it was hoped, account for any Morellos who might be only injured in the ambush. The pistols themselves were concealed in a special cupboard hidden in the wall, and various other Camorrists were assigned lesser tasks: greeting the visitors, making them drinks, and escorting them to the Navy Street café.

The ambush had been planned for the afternoon of September 7, a warm early autumn Thursday, and the Camorra assassins made sure they were ready in plenty of time, carefully concealing themselves in doorways that looked out onto a corner of Johnson Street. To Vollero’s dismay and disappointment, though, only two of the six Morello bosses appeared for the meeting: Nick Terranova and his friend Eugene Ubriaco. The reason for the others’ absence was never known; Terranova’s willingness to travel to Brooklyn without bodyguards suggests he was unaware of the Camorrists’ treachery, and most likely the decision to leave the other four members of the gang behind was nothing more than ordinary caution. Whatever the truth, Nick’s usually well-tuned sense of menace failed him now. Noticing that the Camorrist who served his glass of Moxie looked drawn and had turned white with stress, Terranova looked him up and down and said, “What is the matter? You are kind of pale. Don’t you feel well?” “I don’t,” the man replied, and the Mafia boss shrugged the matter off. “Why don’t you have someone examine you?” he said; then, when it was time to go, he and Ubriaco strolled off arm in arm down Johnson Street to their bloody deaths.

Vollero’s gunmen held their fire until the men were close. Then, emerging from their doorways, they unleashed a hail of bullets, catching their targets from several angles. Terranova was the first to die; the Morello boss had no time to do more than half draw a revolver from his pocket before he crumpled in the nearest gutter, shot six times. Ubriaco lasted a few seconds longer, pulling his gun and backing off along the street as he tried to pick off his attackers. The Camorrists proved to have the better aim, however; Ubriaco was shot through the heart after discharging five of his six bullets. He collapsed on the pavement, his body lying amid shards of glass from windows shattered in the fight. By the time the last echoes of the fight had died away, Vollero’s men had fired some twenty times. They had also disposed of the Morellos’ most effective leader.