The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (46 page)

As for the Mafia’s standing as the most fearsome, most efficient, most iconic gang of criminals in the United States, that too owed as much to Morello as it did to the vastly better known hoodlums of the Luciano generation. Mafia history, in the United States, begins not with Maranzano’s murder, as it is generally written. Its roots lie several decades earlier, in the dust and blood of Corleone and in the fractured heart of the Morello family. Understanding America’s Mafia means understanding that, if nothing else.

GIUSEPPE MORELLO HAD outlived most of his friends and many enemies, chief among them William Flynn, who remained head of the Secret Service until 1917. The Chief was a considerable success, not least in the years leading up to America’s entry into the First World War, when, in the absence of the counterespionage organizations that would share responsibility for security in later years, his agency assumed some of the responsibility for rounding up the spies and saboteurs loose in the United States.

Germany was the most active power in this respect, striving not only to influence American opinion but also to prevent its enemies from obtaining munitions and supplies from America. Flynn assigned eleven men to counter these efforts, and they scored some notable successes. The most celebrated incident involved a German diplomat, Dr. Heinrich Albert, whose briefcase one of Flynn’s men snatched on a crowded streetcar. Opened, the case revealed an array of incriminating documents, including account books showing that Albert had spent $27 million building up a spy network in the United States. German money had funded dock strikes, attacks on shipping, and bombs planted in munitions plants.

The Albert case and other triumphs made Flynn famous during the war in a way that his years combating counterfeiting had not. He reveled in his celebrity, and it is hard not to conclude that fame went at least a little to his head. Never averse to personal publicity, Flynn had always liked to take a full part in operations and share in any credit that accrued—a predilection more laudable in the chief of a small Secret Service bureau than it was when indulged by the director of a national agency. Now he set to work to rouse the country to the threat of German espionage, delivering scaremongering speeches from New York to California. In one newspaper interview, Flynn said that Germany had 250,000 spies at work in the United States. “Maybe,” he added, “one of them is sitting next to you.” His wilder claims resembled those of a later and less principled agitator, Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Rabble-rousing statements of this sort underlined Flynn’s bulldog patriotism, but they also aroused considerable anger in German and Irish communities. Pressure on the Chief mounted rapidly, and it came as little surprise when he tendered his resignation from the Secret Service in November 1917, saying he was exhausted and had been ordered to rest. It soon emerged that the real reason for Flynn’s departure was lack of support in Washington for his hard-line approach to counterespionage. The great detective’s nemesis, in this respect, was William Bayard Hale, a newspaperman of German ancestry and pronouncedly pro-German views who had been an influential correspondent in Berlin until America entered the war. Hale returned to New York, where Flynn put him under investigation as a potential threat to national security.

According to a protest the furious reporter lodged with President Woodrow Wilson, this surveillance included a visit from an intimidating Secret Service man who issued threats against his family. When the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI) was ordered to check out the complaint and concluded that Flynn had acted “not only without the authority of law, but in defiance of [an] act of Congress limiting activities of [his] service,” he had to go. He was replaced by his deputy, William Moran—another veteran Secret Service man, but one who would prove considerably more malleable and, on occasion, actually corrupt.

As things turned out, Flynn would enjoy one last hurrah as a detective, and it would come precisely because he held such firm views on questions of national security. Two years after his departure from the Secret Service, a tremendous explosion shook the home of A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general of the United States, virtually demolishing it. Eight similar devices exploded that same evening across the country, all but one of them at the homes of judges and politicians involved in bringing cases against anarchists and radical socialists; sixteen deadly letter bombs were also discovered at the New York post office, where they had been put aside for bearing insufficient postage. A few months later, in September 1920, there was another terrific detonation on Wall Street, opposite the headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Company. On that occasion, the bombers exploded a huge device that had been concealed on a delivery wagon.

Concerted terrorist action of this sort was unprecedented in America; worse, it came at a time when fear of communism and union agitation was sweeping the country. The shaken Palmer dedicated his Department of Justice to tracking down the men responsible. To fulfill that pledge, he needed a brilliant detective, and Flynn was the obvious choice. Hastily recalled from semiretirement (he had accepted a sinecure as head of the Federal Railway Administration police), the old Secret Service chief was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation. The task of monitoring suspected radicals Flynn gave to an ambitious Justice Department clerk by the name of J. Edgar Hoover. He himself took charge of hunting down the bombers.

It was an impossible task, rendered harder by the scarcity of information or reliable informants, but Flynn still nearly managed it. In a fine example of the sort of plodding detective work that he had always believed in, his men tracked down a label found in a fragment of clothing outside Palmer’s house by calling at every laundry in each of the eight cities where bombs had exploded. In time, they identified the man responsible for the Palmer blast and narrowed their inquiry into the Wall Street atrocity to the point where Flynn felt certain that the men he was seeking were followers of an anarchist named Luigi Galleani. He even called in his old informant Salvatore Clemente and sent him to Italy to try to penetrate the gang. Clemente, posing as an Italian American radical, made some useful contacts but failed to get to Galleani, who had already fled to Switzerland. Flynn kept trying, but he could never obtain the sort of evidence that would stand up in court.

By early in 1921, opinion was shifting against the Bureau of Investigation. Flynn’s cheerful public pronouncements, endlessly claiming he was on the verge of breaking the case, appeared increasingly hollow; people wanted arrests, not promises and theories, and the bureau was not providing them. Support within the Justice Department withered, too, as Flynn failed to address the plummeting morale among his staff. To make matters worse, Hoover had launched a series of raids that resulted in the rounding up of ten thousand suspected radicals and the deportation of more than five hundred, without having firm evidence that any of the men involved were criminals. The “Palmer Raids,” as they were known, turned into a public relations debacle of such magnitude that there was no way Flynn could keep his job under the new Harding administration. At the end of August 1921 he was replaced as director of the Bureau of Investigation by another famous detective, William Burns—a man renowned in equal measure for catching the radicals who had blown up the
Los Angeles Times
building in 1910 and for running a private detective agency that had been caught jury tampering and specialized in intimidating unions.

It was a sad end to a remarkable career. Flynn remained certain that he had been within an ace of cracking the Wall Street case, and he undoubtedly got closer to the correct solution than did the far more famous Burns, who also failed to make arrests and was convinced from the outset that the culprits were the unions he hated. The loss of his $7,500 bureau salary was, moreover, a severe blow to a man with a large family to support. (“As he has told me, he has half a dozen little Flynns, and he has been working for the Government so long that he has not anything laid by,” Palmer had once observed.) Going into business for himself, as the boss of a new New York detective agency, produced some money, but Flynn had to make ends meet by turning to the one other thing that he was good at: For the remainder of his life, he earned much of his living as a writer.

Flynn had been contributing occasional articles to newspapers such as
The Washington Post
and the
New York Herald
ever since 1914, most of them retellings of his greatest cases. After his enforced retirement from the Secret Service, he embarked on a brief career as a crime novelist and a scenario writer for the motion picture industry, turning an acquaintance with the actor King Baggot—forgotten now, but in 1917 the greatest film star in the country—into a commission to write story lines for Theodore and Leopold Wharton. The Whartons were the pioneer producers of movie serials such as
The Perils of Pauline
, a melodrama that was the first to feature what became a popular cliché, the heroine tied to railway tracks by a mustache-twirling villain; they turned Flynn’s experiences into a twenty-part spy thriller titled
The Eagle’s Eye
. A few years later, the Chief was hired to lend his name to new detective fiction magazine,
Flynn’s Weekly
, which he edited with evident relish and which eventually became the longest-running, most successful title of its kind.

It was all too much for the aging detective. Though still in his late fifties, Flynn was very overweight by now, a confirmed smoker of powerful cigars, and beset by family problems that spilled over into his working life. His daughter Veronica and son Elmer, whom he had taken on as partners in his agency, were running the detective business into the ground. Both heavy drinkers, they overspent and upset clients. The pair’s increasingly erratic behavior distressed their more abstemious father, and the worry weakened him.

William Flynn expired of heart disease at the age of sixty, in October 1928. He died a disappointed man.

FRANCESCO ORTOLEVA, the man framed by the Corleone Mafia for the killing of Giovanni Vella, was finally released from jail at the end of 1913. Age sixty-five, “broken in body and weighted with years”—so Flynn remarked—he had served twenty-one years of his life sentence for the murder. Taking into account the time that Ortoleva had rotted on remand, awaiting trial, he spent a quarter of a century in jail for a crime that Morello had committed.

Why the prisoner of Palermo was freed at this time remains uncertain. It may be that he simply served out his time and was granted parole; perhaps Flynn intervened on his behalf, as he once claimed. But the Ortoleva family had campaigned long and hard for his release, and they had been given new hope when news reached Corleone of Morello’s conviction for counterfeiting. Ortoleva’s son, James, came to New York in the summer of 1910 to see Flynn and ask if arrangements could be made for his mother to visit Atlanta; he hoped the sight of a woman who had been cruelly wronged might induce Morello to confess. Flynn was not encouraging—”While Morello is making an effort to have his case appealed, it is very doubtful he would make any admissions which would be detrimental to him,” he said—but he took a liking to Ortoleva nonetheless and offered him employment as his confidential secretary. The next year, James wrote a fruitless series of letters to the federal penitentiary, attempting to persuade the Mafioso to accept responsibility for Vella’s death.

Francesco Ortoleva was healthy enough, after his long incarceration, to go to New York and live out his last years with his wife and son. He arrived in the city aboard the SS
San Guglielmo
on January 25, 1914. “I pray for him and his family,” Flynn concluded in his account, “and they give thanks to me and mine.”

MOST OF THE THUGS, gangsters, and counterfeiters who likewise crossed the path of the Morello family faded into obscurity or came to violent ends.

Pietro Inzerillo, the café proprietor who had supplied the barrel in which Benedetto Madonia’s body was placed, fled New York when news broke of the Secret Service roundup of Morello’s counterfeiting operation. He returned to Italy, where in October 1911 one of Flynn’s informants stumbled across him unexpectedly in Milan and learned that he had resumed work as a counterfeiter. Giuseppe Di Priemo did not make it that far; he died on board ship while traveling home to Sicily sometime after 1909. But two other American Mafiosi did successfully reestablish themselves on the island. Carlo Costantino, one of the assassins sent after Petrosino in 1909, stayed on in Palermo as a robber, swindler, and liquor dealer; he died in the late 1930s, riddled with the syphilis he had contracted in New York. His associate Antonio Passananti, on the other hand, outlived every other member of the Morello family. Jailed for four years for murder in 1911, Passananti went into hiding during a crackdown on the Mafia in the mid-1920s and continued to crop up sporadically in Italian police reports until the early 1960s. In the first week of March 1969, by then ninety years old, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Passananti had belatedly given up his life of crime a year or two earlier. The last note in his police file read: “He no longer associates with criminal figures [and] can no longer be regarded as a socially dangerous individual.”

A little more is known of Ralph Daniello, alias Ralph the Barber, who pleaded guilty in June 1918 to his part in the ambush and assassination of Nick Terranova. In recognition of the testimony that had convicted five of his fellow Camorrists, he was given a suspended sentence. The Barber did not walk free immediately, however; convinced, with reason, that the surviving members of his gang would kill him, he begged the judge to keep him behind bars until all his confederates had been safely jailed.