The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (48 page)

Acting on Lehman’s recommendation, Harding’s successor, Franklin Roosevelt, soon signed the necessary order. On July 13, at dawn, Brooklyn police arrived outside the Lupo home. The Wolf was under arrest and on his way back to Atlanta long before his friends or lawyers had any inkling of the danger.

The sound of the federal penitentiary doors slamming behind him was a shocking blow to Lupo. He had 7,174 days, or almost twenty years, of his sentence still to serve, and was not due for release until March 4, 1956—when he would be seventy-nine years old. With no hope of a further commutation and little of parole, his one chance of release was to fight the validity of Roosevelt’s summary recall, and a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, aimed at the warden at Atlanta, was filed accordingly in 1937.
Lupo v. Zerbst
, as the case was known, drained much of the Lupo family’s finances and was a miserable failure, though it did enough to confirm the president’s rights in cases of commutation to be cited in legal textbooks to this day. In the same year, news reached the Wolf that his son had proved incapable of keeping up the bakery business; Rocco Lupo was declared bankrupt at the end of September.

It is scarcely surprising, in these circumstances, that Lupo’s physical and mental state seemed parlous to the prison doctor. “Examination reveals … an elderly white man, very obese, who enters the examination room promptly, and responds to questions in a lingo, but has a good understanding of the English language,” the physician noted. “At the present time he is nervous, irritable, and excitable, with a tendency to self-pity and somewhat lachrymose.” The Wolf was diagnosed with a heart murmur and had varicose veins in both legs. According to his brother, he experienced a nervous breakdown at the time of his arrest; examined in Atlanta, his IQ was measured at 70, on the borderline of retardation, and the early symptoms of “senile psychosis” were detected.

During his first term in Atlanta, Lupo had flouted prison regulations. He had been placed in solitary confinement for “crookedness” in 1910, for fraternizing with other prisoners in 1911, and for breaking rules in 1919, and there were other reprimands and warnings. Now, though, he was more or less a broken man. Two minor incidents were recorded in 1936, soon after his return to prison, but the prisoner’s record was otherwise spotless. Lupo even earned a commendation from the tailors’ shop, where he was put to work, for his exemplary behavior while engaged in sewing flies.

The years passed slowly. There were fewer visits from family and friends; many were already dead, of course, his daughters had married, and Salvatrice, in New York, was too old and too impoverished to make the journey down to Georgia anymore; if there was any truth in the rumors of a fortune banked in Italy, the money was lost when the United States declared war on Mussolini’s regime in 1941. There was little companionship; most of the Wolf’s fellow prisoners were far younger than him. He kept to himself during exercise periods, circling the vast prison yard alone, and, in his loneliness, became increasingly religious. According to Zia Trestelle, a fellow Mafioso who once took the train to Atlanta to see him, Lupo regularly attended Mass and had come to feel some sort of contrition for the life he had chosen. In a letter to his eldest daughter, Onofria, he wrote: “I am overcome by my memories. All these years in America, sometimes I think they never existed. I’d like to be a boy again in Sicily and die young, very young, and never know all these years of struggle and evil.”

The Wolf was still in Atlanta when peace returned in 1945, by now well past retirement age. A year later, on the tenth anniversary of his return to jail, the prison doctor noted that the old man was “failing fast, becoming more and more senile and childish.” Lupo’s case was reviewed over the summer, and it was recommended that he should be released while his family was still able to take care of him. There was a further legal tussle over the legality of granting a parole violator renewed parole, however, and the old man was not actually discharged from Atlanta until the morning of December 21, 1946. He had $7.83 in his pocket, the sum total of his prison savings. The warden advanced him just sufficient money to get him to New York.

Ignazio Lupo returned to the city in time for Christmas, a living example of the maxim that crime does not pay. A fifty-year career in murder and extortion had left him and his elderly wife quite destitute. At some point in the 1940s, Salvatrice, penniless and alone, had been forced to sell their heavily remortgaged home, and the couple moved into a rented room in Queens, visited occasionally by their children. Lupo the Wolf died three weeks after his release, on January 13, 1947, at the age of sixty-nine. The story failed to make the papers.

—

THE MATRIARCHS OF the Morello-Terranova clan lived longer but died in the same obscurity as Lupo. Angela Terranova, Bernardo’s wife, the mother of four brothers who had terrorized New York, died in Queens in 1941, age ninety-two. Twice widowed, she had survived her second husband by more than three decades; at least seven of her ten children predeceased her, among them all her sons. Angela had lived quietly in the United States for nearly fifty years, and as befitted a Mafia wife, she left no record of her thoughts and feelings. The life had brought her a certain affluence—relative, that is, to the existence she could have expected had she remained in Corleone—but she was certainly not rich; she died in her daughter-in-law’s apartment on 222nd Street, where she had lived for just eight months. Whether she believed the violent deaths of three sons and a grandson were a price worth paying for that modest comfort is impossible to say.

Not much more is known of the last years of Morello’s wife. Lina of the volcanic eyes never remarried after the murder of her husband, though she outlived him by nearly forty years. She raised four long-lived children, the last of them a sufferer from Down syndrome, and died in New York, at the age of eighty-three, in 1967.

THE LAST MEMBER of the Terranova clan was Ciro. The Artichoke King retained his influence throughout the Castellammare War and remained a significant figure in the New York underworld of the early 1930s. He lived with his family in a large pink house in Pelham Manor, an affluent village on the northern outskirts of the city, kept up his power base in Harlem, and maintained an interest in his old vegetable racket. Under Lucky Luciano, he also kept his stake in the Harlem numbers racket, as a junior partner to Dutch Schultz.

To the casual observer, Ciro appeared serenely untroubled by the vicious undercurrents in the New York underworld. He survived the 1935 murder of his ally Schultz and the upheaval surrounding Luciano’s conviction, a year later, for organizing prostitution—an arrest that resulted in a punitive sentence of thirty to fifty years’ imprisonment. By then Terranova was popularly supposed to be a millionaire, and certainly the high living continued. He threw a lavish wedding for his daughter Anne in 1935. That same year, a reporter describing the comfortable lives lived by New York’s racketeers sarcastically observed that “Ciro Terranova, the high lord of the Harlem rackets, loves a canter in the park or among the lovely hills of Westchester, because you meet such interesting people on the bridle path.” In truth, however, Terranova was never quite so rich as he appeared. The artichoke racket, which he passed on to an old subordinate named Joseph Castaldo in 1931, was then reported to gross well under a third of a million dollars a year, and when, after Schultz was murdered, Luciano relieved him of his share in the Harlem numbers racket, he was left without a source of income.

By 1936, Terranova had been “encouraged” to retire, and his lack of ambition—the sheer unlikelihood that he would strike back at the younger bosses who were ousting him—was probably all that saved him from a violent end. In some respects it might have been better for the old Mafioso’s reputation if he had been killed. Stripped of his wealth and power, Ciro became an easy prey for a New York Police Department under pressure from Mayor La Guardia to take a tougher stance on crime, and for several years he was harassed every time he came within the city limits. Taking advantage of the fact that Terranova had no visible means of support, the police detained him as a vagrant, subjecting the old boss to repeated humiliation.

“I have to come down here sometimes,” Ciro complained to Captain Daniel Courtayne on one of these occasions.

“You are supposed to be a bigshot racketeer,” Courtayne taunted him. “You’re just a cheap pushcart peddler. That’s about your speed.”

“I never was a pushcart peddler,” snarled Terranova. He was furious.

Ciro was a husk of his old self by now. In 1935, the government began pursuing him for unpaid tax on his earnings—the same ruse that had been employed to convict Al Capone a few years earlier. Two years later, apparently unable to pay a $543 bill, the Mafioso slipped into bankruptcy. His bank foreclosed the mortgage on the house at Pelham Manor, and he moved back with his wife to 338 East 116th Street, the old headquarters of the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative Association, a property that the family had owned for many years. His other assets were listed as two hundred dollars in cash owed to him, two shares in a realty company, and a “possible cause for action for wrongful arrest.”

Less than a year later, still only forty-nine, Terranova was crippled by a stroke that left him paralyzed down his left side and incapable of speech. He was taken to Columbia Hospital, where he expired half an hour after midnight on the morning of February 20, 1938, the only one of the four Morello-Terranova brothers who died in bed. The police had long since dropped their campaign of harassment against him. Ciro, an officer told
The New York Times
, died not only virtually penniless but also “criminally, financially and physically irrelevant.”

It is hard to imagine a more humiliating epitaph for a Mafia boss from Corleone.

WILLIAM FLYNN, WITHOUT whose efforts practically nothing would be known of the first years of America’s Mafia, has no monument in New York or anywhere else. His grave in Valhalla, just north of the city, lies in a family plot that nobody much visits anymore; he himself has been virtually forgotten. Joe Petrosino, on the other hand, survives—if only barely—in the collective memory of the city that he loved. His resting place, in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, is marked by a pillar topped with an elaborate bust. It continues to attract visitors, and a handful of tributes—a card, a withered flower—lie scattered at its base. By an appropriate coincidence, the plot lies less than a policeman’s beat away from the bare and unremembered graves in which Giuseppe Morello, Ignazio Lupo, and the Terranova brothers were interred.

In 1987, as a gesture to the policeman’s memory, a tiny triangle of land at the junction of Kenmare and Lafayette streets, in Little Italy, was designated Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino Park. A small plaque next to the entrance identifies the place, but the park itself remains unused. It stands forlorn and empty aside from a single tree, and the ground has been concreted over from end to end. To add to the atmosphere of uncaring neglect, both pillars guarding the entrance lean at crazy angles, and the gate that once secured it has disappeared.

A few years after the park opened, with fine irony, an Italian restaurant across the street was purchased by Alphonse D’Arco, a capo in the Lucchese family—one of the five Mafia gangs that had emerged from the Castellammare War, and a family that at one time included several members of the old Morello clan among their ranks.

For many years, Al D’Arco used the restaurant as a secure meeting place where numerous Mafia crimes were planned. In 1991, however, he learned that the bosses he had served so loyally and so long had lost confidence in him and were plotting his murder. Fearing for his life, he ran to the FBI and, to save himself from prison, gave the bureau every scrap of information he possessed about the Luccheses.

Almost all of the details that D’Arco provided were unknown to the bureau and the police. The capo explained in detail how his Mafia family profited from protection rackets in the construction, air freight, and rubbish industries, controlled as many as twenty union locals, and maintained discipline by murdering anyone whom it thought of as an enemy. He also passed the police details that enabled them to close about a dozen unsolved murder cases.

Amid this welter of sensational disclosures, D’Arco supplied one piece of information that went unremarked in the press. The Luccheses, he explained, ran lucrative protection rackets in both of New York’s gigantic wholesale produce markets, in Brooklyn and the Bronx. No one in the city sold fruit and vegetables without paying off the mob.

For someone with a sense of history, the disclosure was sobering. Three quarters of a century after Morello and Ciro Terranova had set up the first New York vegetable rackets, their direct descendants in the Mafia were still taking a cut on every single artichoke sold in the five boroughs.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W
RITING THE HISTORY OF CRIME POSES UNIQUE CHALLENGES to any author. No more than a handful of records written by participants on either side of the divide between criminals and police survive; private papers are conspicuous by their absence; memoirs are distorted by evasion, fading memories, and special pleading. Worse, few among the participants in the events described had a clear picture of what was going on; fewer still elected to explain their actions, or those of their bosses, in print; and none did so dispassionately. Accurate, reliable, and comprehensive firsthand accounts are, in short, entirely lacking.

I have done my best to surmount these obstacles, though inevitably narrative history is not always the ideal medium in which to explore conflicts in testimony and gaps in information, and my work has been made vastly easier by the unstinting assistance I have received from dozens of people who had no motive, other than kindness, to help.

Recollections, anecdotes, private papers, and photographs provided by members of the Morello, Flynn, and Farach families have, I hope, added depth to my portrayal of characters who are generally depicted entirely one-dimensionally In this context, I would like to thank Giuseppe Morello’s great-grandson Steven Gargiula, Chief William Flynn’s grandson William Flynn Sanders, and Carmelo Farach’s great-grandnephew Dean Farrish, for their help.

In the United States, my old friend and colleague Dr. Henk Looijesteijn—who fortuitously happened to be in Albany and New York just before I arrived to conduct my own research there—got the search in the New York State Archives and the Municipal Archives, New York, under way on my behalf. I was also the grateful recipient of assistance from Ellen Belcher of the Lloyd Sealy Library of John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Spencer Howard of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa; Richard Gelbke and Gregory Plunges of NARA-Northeast in New York; Arlene Royer of NARA-Southeast in Morrow, Georgia; Leonora Goodlund of the New York Municipal Archives; Stuart M. Cohen, clerk to the New York Court of Appeals, Albany; Bill Gorman of the New York State Archives, Albany; Tiffany Levandowski of Osterhout Free Library in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Amy Veracruz-Gregory of the Brazos County Genealogical Association, Texas; Colin Brown and Nancy Abrahams of Brooklyn Heights; and Parry Desmond of Philadelphia. Dino Paternostro, of Corleone, a noted authority on the local Mafia, most generously conducted new research on my behalf in Sicily. In the United Kingdom, Dr. Serena Ferente, of King’s College London, was my guide to research on the subject in Italian, Carolyn Keim helped with electronic resources at the Seeley Historical Library, Cambridge, Kevin Brownlow shared his knowledge of William Flynn’s brief film career—a fascinating period I would have liked to devote more space to—and Dr. David Critchley whose knowledge of early American Mafia history is unrivaled in its depth, very generously swapped leads and documents. I owe a considerable debt, too, to Fiona Jerome for her assistance with the plates sections.

My indomitable agent, Patrick Walsh, worked miracles on my behalf and deserves a large slice of the credit for helping me to realize this project on a large scale, and my editors, Kerri Sharpe in London and Tim Bartlett in New York, showed huge enthusiasm for this project from the start; each in turn improved it. Thanks, too, to Tim Rostron at Double-day in Canada, Diana Fox and Lindsay Schwoeri at Random House, Rory Scarfe at Simon & Schuster, and to Rob Dinsdale and Jake Smith-Bosanquet at Conville & Walsh.

At home, Penny and Ffion provided more support, in every way, than I deserved during a seemingly endless period of writing and rewriting. This book is for them, for the shade of Mollie Callahan, and for every other innocent victim of the Morello family.