The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (41 page)

The Barber’s detailed revelations of his career in the Camorra proved decisive. Alessandro Vollero was sentenced to death, a verdict he managed to get reduced on appeal to life imprisonment. The Coney Island boss, Marano, got twenty years to life for murder in the second degree; three other members of the gang were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to terms of six to twelve years in Sing Sing. Others fled. Without its leaders, the remnants of the Navy Street gang dispersed and the Morellos, to their delighted astonishment, were able to reclaim almost all of the business they had lost after Nick Terranova’s murder, from the
zicchinetta
games to the artichoke racket in the Brooklyn vegetable markets. Seen from this perspective, Ralph Daniello’s testimony had greater impact than almost any ever given in a New York court. Without the Barber, the Neapolitans would almost certainly have won their war with the Sicilians and reduced the Harlem Mafia to a criminal irrelevance, with incalculable consequences for the history of crime.

As it was, the Camorra would never again be a force in New York’s underworld. Nor, of course, would Giosue Gallucci. Ciro and Vincenzo Terranova were, in effect, the last men standing in the Italian underworld, and with the prisoners of Atlanta at last nearing the dates set for their parole, the Mafia’s grip over Little Italy was as strong in 1919 as it had been a decade earlier.

All of which was just as well, since opportunities of unparalleled magnificence would soon present themselves.

CHAPTER 13
THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT

G
IUSEPPE MORELLO WALKED OUT OF THE FEDERAL PRISON AT
Atlanta on February 1, 1920, paroled ten years from the day he had started his sentence. The world had changed significantly since he had gone away. New York was more crowded than ever; the city had added nearly another million people to its population, more than a hundred thousand of them Italians. Cars, a rarity in 1910, were commonplace in 1920. So too were subway trains. The country had emerged from isolation to fight in the Great War (Vincenzo and Ciro Terranova had both been issued with draft cards, though neither man was actually called up) and ended up richer and more powerful than ever. Crime, meanwhile, had grown steadily more profitable and complex. A hedonistic generation—men desperate to forget the war, women emboldened by flapper fashions and the vote—was sending the demand for illicit pleasures of all sorts soaring, with a concomitant rise in the competition for power and money. Even within the Mafia itself, new bosses had emerged to challenge the old order.

But Morello would not slide easily back into his role as boss of bosses, or even boss for that matter. Totò D’Aquila, who had taken on Morello’s mantle after the Clutch Hand’s conviction, had a stranglehold on the leadership of the fraternity. The ruthless Palermo man still controlled the most fearsome of New York’s criminal families, and, arbitrary though his rule could be, none of the city’s Mafiosi were disposed to oppose him. There were by now five families operating within the city limits, among them numbering as many as two thousand men of respect and their associates. Many would have been well known to Morello; a number of the bosses whose careers had begun before 1910 were still as active as ever, among them Cola Schiro in the Bronx and Manfredi Mineo in Brooklyn. But there were newer faces among the ranks of New York’s Mafiosi, too. Several of them were friends of the Morello-Terranova clan, among them Joe Masseria, from Marsala in western Sicily, whose criminal record stretched back to 1907. The most influential of the new powers, though, was Umberto Valenti, a fast-rising thug known, according to Nicola Gentile, “as ‘the Ghost’ for his cruelty and his way of disappearing after an action.” Valenti made a natural ally for the Morellos; he had based himself in a burgeoning new Italian quarter in Manhattan’s East Village. But there were new rivals to be confronted, too, and the entire Italian underworld, whether friend or foe, was ready to fight for its share in the profits to be made in the immigrant districts.

The first family thus faced more competition and greater threats to its old dominance than ever before, this at a time when a good number of its old leaders were dead. Grievous losses had been incurred; the Morellos’ battles against Gallucci and the Camorra war had stripped the Harlem Mafia of several of its best men and left the surviving Terranova brothers, Ciro and Vincenzo, as heads of the family. Ciro, the younger of the two, was the more active and influential; his artichoke racket continued to produce good profits, and he and Vincenzo had also become heavily involved in some equally lucrative criminal businesses. The murder of the DiMarco brothers had given the Terranovas a firm grip over much, perhaps most, of Italian gambling in Manhattan. But the DiMarcos’ deaths also demonstrated the failings of Ciro Terranova’s leadership. Morello had always been able to control his chief lieutenants; New York’s Mafiosi may have feared the Clutch Hand, but they had always grudgingly respected him. Nick Terranova, too, had made an effective boss. But Ciro and Vincenzo commanded only a fraction of the regard that had buttressed both their predecessors. In the wake of the Camorra war, they had been compelled to retain their tenuous grip on power through violence.

It says a great deal for Morello’s abilities and reputation that his reappearance in New York—accompanied, from the summer of 1920, by the almost equally influential Lupo—so unsettled Totò D’Aquila that the city’s all-powerful boss of bosses was panicked into ordering just such drastic measures against the Clutch Hand and the Wolf. No firsthand evidence has survived of what happened in Manhattan that summer; Flynn, promoted to a post in Washington, had been taken off the case, and the Chief’s intricate network of informants had fallen into disuse during the First World War. What seems to have occurred, however, was that Morello and Lupo were accorded a rapturous reception in Harlem—welcomed, feted, and restored, at least in part, to their old eminence. Word of their reemergence reached D’Aquila, and D’Aquila just as quickly sensed a threat. The boss of bosses took his time, ensuring that he retained the necessary support. Then, at the next meeting of the Mafia’s general assembly, held sometime between June and September 1921, he saw to it that both his rivals were denounced. The two New Yorkers were labeled dangerous traitors to the established order, tried in their absence, and sentenced to death.

What precisely Lupo and Morello had done to deserve this fate remains unclear. The Clutch Hand had been working to reestablish his position in East Harlem. That much would have been expected, and no doubt tolerated, too. But it had soon become clear that Morello posed a much more direct threat to the new boss’s rule. It is not unlikely that the Clutch Hand really had been plotting to usurp Totò D’Aquila’s power and so regain his old eminence, and almost certain that he had struck up a dangerous friendship with Umberto Valenti, who was rapidly developing his power base in the East Village. It was this combination of north and south Manhattan, of an old leader noted for his cunning and a new one renowned for his viciousness, that D’Aquila feared. The death sentences passed by the Mafia assembly applied not only to Morello and Lupo but to Valenti and several of his followers as well.

Flynn and Nicola Gentile help to explain what happened next. Thanks, no doubt, to friends in the council, the three condemned leaders heard of their sentences before D’Aquila could put them into effect. Acting hurriedly, they fled the country, leaving by ship from Newport News, a small port in Virginia. It was the first time that Morello had left the United States since 1892, and though it was highly unlikely that the Italian authorities were still seeking him in connection with his counterfeiting conviction, now twenty-six years old, the decision does suggest that he was desperate.

The fleeing Mafiosi were next seen in Sicily, where they arrived around October 1921 in search of sanctuary and assistance. The men spent the better part of six months hiding around Palermo. It was during that time that Morello, Lupo, and Valenti called on Nicola Gentile in the hope that he could help resolve their problems.

The exiled Mafiosi had chosen their man well. Gentile was an established power in both the American and the Sicilian arms of their fraternity, a known conciliator who had helped resolve several similar disputes. But he was also a formidable boss in his own right, with “strong authority and relations within the Mafia all over the United States,” as he put it himself, and by no means a mere diplomat. “You cannot be a
capomafia
without being ferocious,” Gentile said, and he had first made his name in the society as a man of action rather than words. Arriving in Pittsburgh in 1915, Gentile had been shocked to discover that the local Mafia was cowed by the more powerful Camorra—Pittsburgh’s Mafia capo even collected protection money in the Sicilian community on the Neapolitans’ behalf. He responded by recruiting his own gang of violent street toughs
(picciotti
in Mafia slang) and using them to assassinate a number of Camorra leaders. The murderous efficiency of Gentile’s gang soon brought the Neapolitans to the negotiating table, and there Gentile emphasized his superiority by humiliating his opponents. The Camorrists were threatened “with all-out war if they so much as offended another Sicilian,” and, when they submitted, Gentile became the most powerful figure in Pittsburgh’s Italian underworld. Soon afterward, he regularized arrangements by having the ineffectual capo shot and “sent back to Sicily in a luxury coffin,” taking over as his city’s Mafia boss.

It was thus fortunate for Morello and his companions that the Pittsburgh boss was disposed to help. Valenti, whom D’Aquila “considered the number one enemy and the first to be eliminated,” was a “dear friend,” the
capomafia
wrote, and Morello a respected former boss of bosses. Gentile himself was sufficiently influential in America to have another general assembly convened, and there, sometime early in 1922, a compromise was reached. Morello, in all likelihood, renounced all claims not only to his old position but also to the leadership of his own family; he must also have formally acknowledged D’Aquila as boss. At the same time the alliance between the Morellos and Valenti was somehow broken, almost certainly by Totò D’Aquila, who seems to have accepted Valenti back into his organization in exchange for his promise to help tackle the first family. When next glimpsed in the public records, the two were sworn enemies. The death sentences on the men were then revoked, and Morello, Lupo, and Valenti returned from Sicily that spring.

They arrived to find the city changing once again. The fragile peace that had long existed between its four Mafia families was coming to an end. D’Aquila’s dominating ways explain part of the rising tension, but there were many other reasons why the gangs of New York might come to blows. There was simply more to fight for in postwar Manhattan than there had ever been before, and the reason why this was so could be summed up in one word:
Prohibition
.

ALCOHOL HAD BEEN
outlawed in the United States in 1919 with the passage of the Volstead Act. As later codified in the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the new law outlawed the manufacture, distribution, and sale of any alcoholic drinks. It also created the means to enforce the regulations: a new federal agency named the Prohibition Bureau, spread thinly across the country with a total of fewer than two thousand agents. A quarter of a million, one government official said, was closer to the number that would be needed to properly enforce the law.

Prohibition’s proponents, chief among them religious leaders, firmly believed that they were saving the nation from itself, and to some extent they had a point. Drunkenness and alcoholism was responsible for several thousand deaths a year by 1919, not to mention a fast-rising tide of failed marriages and many more thefts, assaults, and petty crimes. “The insidious effects of alcohol are responsible for more misery than the late war,” pronounced the bishop of Rochester, a firm supporter of the notion of a “dry” America, and millions of his countrymen agreed with him. Unfortunately for the authorities, however, tens of millions did not. Laws that lack public support are notoriously impossible to enforce, and the advent of Prohibition had no measurable effect on the demand for beer, wine, and spirits—not least in New York, where it was estimated that the 16,000 saloons that had existed in the city before the passage of the Volstead Act were replaced by 32,000 speakeasies. Thus, while it was relatively easy for the government to close down the country’s large breweries and distilleries, new sources of supply were quickly found. Ale and liquor were imported from Canada and the Caribbean, smuggled in by boat all along the Atlantic shoreline. British exports of alcohol to Canada sextupled between 1918 and 1922, with virtually all the surplus finding its way south. Liquor was manufactured in the United States as well, in such quantities that the seizure of neither 173,000 illicit stills in 1925 nor forty million gallons of beer and wine five years later had any noticeable effect on the available supply.

Before 1919, even the best-organized and most efficient of the nation’s criminals had controlled rackets worth no more than some thousands of dollars. Now control of a vastly profitable industry had passed to the underworld, and it had done so not merely without a struggle but with the active support of practically every drinker in the country. New York juries habitually returned not-guilty verdicts in even the clearest cut of Prohibition cases, and large-scale breweries operated virtually unchecked in busy city centers despite their telltale smells and smoke. Prices, meanwhile, increased so rapidly that a humble beer cost anywhere from twice to ten times what it had before the passage of the Prohibition laws.

There was, in short, a huge amount of business to fight for, and the streets of America’s great cities soon turned into battlegrounds as rival gangs began to shoot and gouge their way to dominance over their local markets. Prohibition would lead directly to the emergence of a number of the greatest names in crime: Dutch Schultz, Waxey Gordon, and the Italian Frankie Uale in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and, in Chicago, Al Capone—born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents from Naples, at one time a minor member of a Brooklyn street gang, but by the end of the decade the most notorious boss in the United States. Capone built a vast stake in the supply of alcohol throughout the Midwest and made so much money that his influence could be felt in Manhattan.

What all this was worth in monetary terms is difficult to say—figures, for obvious reasons, were not kept. By the early 1930s, one estimate put beer sales in the New York region at $60 million to $100 million a year; another estimate suggested that alcohol sales in Detroit grossed $215 million in 1928. The market in New York, a city bigger than Chicago and Detroit put together, can scarcely have been worth less than $500 million by that time, and if the city’s Mafia families, among them, claimed even one-twentieth of that, their profits must have exceeded $5 million a year.