The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (6 page)

For a newly arrived prisoner such as Giuseppe Di Priemo, Sing Sing was very close to hell. The penitentiary squatted on a low bluff half a mile above the village of Ossining and had been carefully positioned so that the men imprisoned there could be made to break rocks in quarries within its perimeter; its very name, a corruption of the Indian phrase
sint sincks
, meant “stone upon stone.” The prison, indeed, had been constructed in the 1820s by its own first inmates, and a large proportion of the convicts still worked the local marble, enduring brutal conditions as they cut and shaped each stone. Over the years, though, as the prison grew, it had diversified into several other industries. By 1903, Sing Sing was one of the largest industrial complexes in the United States, and the factories inside its walls made iron stoves, forged chains, and manufactured shoes. The newest prisoners, though, were set to work in the jail’s steam laundry, where they labored in what were reputedly the worst conditions in the entire U.S. prison system, washing, drying, starching, and ironing thousands of shirts a day in temperatures that sometimes reached 150 degrees.

It may thus have been sheer desperation that drove Di Priemo to see Petrosino when the detective reached Ossining on the afternoon of April 19. Certainly the prisoner possessed, in full measure, the Sicilian’s ingrained antipathy to the police. Di Priemo began the interview cool and uncommunicative, and despite Petrosino’s ingratiating Italian, seemed uninterested in answering anything but the most basic questions.

The two men made for an interesting study. They were close in age—Petrosino was thirty-six years old, Di Priemo twenty-eight—and looked not unlike each other. Both men were short and stocky; both were physically strong. But the detective had one great advantage over the monosyllabic prisoner: a surprise to shock him into talking.

“Do you recognize this man?”

Petrosino slid a photograph of the barrel victim across the table. It had been taken in the New York morgue after the undertaker had done his best to patch up the dead man’s wounds. The eyes were glassy and the rip in the throat had been concealed by dressing the corpse in a high collar, but the face was recognizable.

Di Priemo glanced down and stiffened. “Yes,” he agreed, taken aback despite himself. “I know that man, of course I do. He’s my brother-in-law. What’s the matter with him? Sick?”

“He’s dead,” said Petrosino.

Even the detective, with his years of experience, was surprised by what happened next. There was a moment’s shocked silence. Then Di Priemo, the tough Sicilian counterfeiter, swayed and collapsed—some sort of faint, Petrosino thought. It took a minute or two to revive him, and longer before he could continue. When he did, his demeanor had changed from suspicious to downright uncommunicative. “My brother-in-law lived in Buffalo,” was all he would say. “He had a wife and family there. His name is Benedetto Madonia. His wife is my sister.”

Di Priemo gave the Italian detective an address in Buffalo, but he refused absolutely to say more. Petrosino could get not a syllable out of him concerning Madonia’s murder or the dead man’s relationship with Giuseppe Morello.

He telephoned the news back to New York in any case, and McClusky called it through to Flynn. The Chief was sitting in his office with a Sicilian translator when the phone rang, working his way slowly through the piles of letter books and correspondence seized from Morello’s room. He felt sure that he had seen Madonia’s name somewhere earlier that day, and leafing back through the Clutch Hand’s untidy ledgers, he eventually found it. Scrawled along the edge of an interior page were the words “Madonia Benedetto, 47 Trenton Avenue, Buffalo, New York.” The note, Flynn observed with interest, was in Morello’s handwriting. Unlike the other entries on the page, it had been scribbled in red ink.

BY THE TIME PETROSINO
got to Buffalo, Madonia’s wife had heard what had happened to her husband.

The salacious
New York Journal
, which had better contacts and deeper pockets than any other paper in New York, got word of Petrosino’s trip to Sing Sing from an informant at police headquarters as soon as the Italian detective phoned in his report. A hurried telegram to the paper’s stringer in Buffalo brought the reporter and a local beat policeman to Madonia’s apartment in a two-story frame house that evening. The two men found the oldest of the barrel victim’s children, twenty-one-year-old Salvatore, sitting outside enjoying the spring air.

Harry Evans, the Buffalo policeman, was a man of limited tact. Introducing himself, he bluntly explained: “The New York police believe that the Italian who was found with his throat cut is your father.”

“I don’t know about that,” Salvatore answered warily.

“Is your father home?”

“My father is in New York, but we expect him home in a few days.”

Evans pressed his point: “Do you know whether or not your father is alive?”

“I guess he is.”

It was only when the reporter handed Madonia the
Journal’s
photo of his father’s body lying in the New York morgue that the news sank in. Badly shaken, the dead man’s son burst into tears, then ran blindly back into the house in search of a family portrait. He held the snapshot and the folded copy of the
Journal
side by side. There was no room for doubt; the two photographs depicted the same man.

“You had better come in,” the young man told his visitors.

—

PETROSINO ARRIVED
at the Madonia house the next morning to find the whole family in mourning and the dead man’s wife in bed. Lucy Madonia had been unwell even before word of her husband’s brutal murder reached her. Now she looked drawn and ill, older by far than her forty-two years.

It took Lucy a long time to admit that she knew anything of her husband’s activities. He was just a mason, she insisted in response to Petrosino’s questioning, and had never been in trouble in his life. Yes, Benedetto had done what he could to help her brother when they heard of his imprisonment; he had hurried down to New York to see a lawyer, then journeyed on to Sing Sing to visit Di Priemo. But his purpose was simply to request that his brother-in-law be moved to the penitentiary at Erie, Pennsylvania, where it would be much easier for his family to visit him.

Petrosino persisted. He had experience with interrogation and knew when to hold back information and just when to reveal it. By the time that he had laid out all the police and the Secret Service knew about Benedetto, Lucy Madonia had been compelled to agree that her husband was indeed acquainted with a group of Sicilians in New York. He had “gone out on the road” for them, she admitted, shuttling by rail from Pittsburgh to Chicago and Buffalo. What exactly Madonia had done on his visits to those cities Lucy did not know, she said, but the Secret Service men to whom Petrosino showed her statement on his return to Manhattan recognized the route as one often employed by counterfeiters. This tied in well with the anonymous letter writer’s claim that Madonia had a conviction, at home in Sicily, for passing forged bills.

Mrs. Madonia had one more thing to tell Petrosino. Her brother, Di Priemo, she confided, had written to her more than a month ago to say he was in trouble. Soon after that, he had cabled urgently for funds. From somewhere, her husband had raised a thousand dollars—a large sum, and one he dared not send directly. With Di Priemo in custody pending his trial, Benedetto had instead addressed his envelope to an acquaintance in New York. Enclosed with the money was a note instructing the man to take the cash and hand it to a man in a Prince Street saloon.

It was what happened next, Lucy thought, that had sent her husband to his death. Her husband’s friends had received the money safely, but they had done precisely nothing to help Di Priemo, neither hiring him a lawyer nor using the cash to bring influence to bear to save him. Nor would they return the unspent dollars to Madonia. Inquiries, and, eventually, letters of entreaty, had no effect on them. In the end the Buffalo stonemason decided that his only chance of recovering the cash was to visit New York himself.

Then Mrs. Madonia added something else, something that made Petrosino start. There was one man, the widow said, who might know why Benedetto had been killed. Her husband had mentioned his name to her, just once, when they were debating how to help Di Priemo. A man called Giuseppe Morello, Madonia had whispered, was the head of a “great society, a secret society, of which he himself was a member, but Morello was against him and would do nothing to aid her brother.”

Petrosino knew what that meant. It meant the maimed, implacable Morello was no mere counterfeiter with a ruthless streak.

He was something much more frightening. He was boss of the New York Mafia.

CHAPTER 2
MEN OF RESPECT

T
HE MAFIA, LIKE GIUSEPPE MORELLO HIMSELF, WAS BORN IN WESTERN
Sicily in the 1860s. It rooted and took shape in a land of stark beauty, grinding poverty, and frequent violence, insinuating its way into the fabric of the island until it exercised a malign, corrupting influence over most aspects of Sicilian life. It became—for the best part of a century—the richest and most successful criminal organization in the world. Yet it remained at base a study in enormous contradictions.

The Mafia was a secret society whose existence was known to every man and woman on the island. Its name was familiar to tens of thousands but was never spoken by its members. It stood for justice—or so it promised its initiates—in places where justice was hard to find, but in reality it worked hand in hand with the landed nobility to keep down Sicily’s miserable peasantry. It worshipped honor but lusted after profit—and though, in New York, the society claimed to offer protection to the lowly immigrant, the truth was that, as late as 1920, it preyed exclusively upon the Italian community.

The Mafia thrived on violence. Its fearsome reputation, in both Sicily and the United States, was based on an eternal readiness to kill: men, women, infants, anyone who stood in its way. Its innocent victims—the businesses from which it extorted money, the parents of children held for ransom, inconvenient witnesses who saw or heard more than was good for them—all knew that Mafiosi carried out their threats and that failure to heed their warnings had dire consequences. To all that, though, was added a further diabolical refinement. From its earliest days, the Mafia nurtured an intricate web of working relationships with the people responsible for fighting it. Policemen were bribed. Landowners had favors done for them. Politicians were shown how helpful a ruthless group of criminals could be at election time. In this way, a fraternity that existed to sell protection was protected itself. The real reason why the Mafia was feared—and had its demands met, its orders obeyed—was not simply that it killed. It was that it seemed to be invulnerable. It killed
and got away with it
.

Understanding how and why this murderous society came into existence means understanding a little of the history of Sicily, for the Mafia could have arisen nowhere else. The island, which lies at the tip of the Italian boot, was a place unlike any other. It had been a vitally important crossroads for thousands of years, standing astride trade routes that ran north and south and east and west across the Mediterranean, and its strategic importance meant that it had been fought over ever since Roman times. Greeks, Arabs, Normans, Holy Roman Emperors, the French, and the Aragonese had ruled over Sicily, and all of them had ruthlessly exploited its people. Most recently, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the island had become subject to the Bourbon kings of Naples, a junior branch of the royal family of Spain, which ruled over a fragile patrimony known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Bourbon state consisted of the southern half of mainland Italy and the island itself, but there was never any doubt as to which of its pair of provinces was most important. Its kings lived and reigned in Naples, the largest city in all Italy, and visited the island portion of their kingdom as infrequently as once a decade. Even in the Two Sicilies, in short, Sicily itself was seen as a distant, troublesome, and barbarous place—of value for its revenues but too rugged and too rural to befit a king.

For the people of the island, this indifference was to be expected. Centuries of occupation and harsh taxation, of being ruled from afar by men who had no roots on the island and no reason to care for it, bred in the local people a hatred of authority and a deep-rooted unwillingness to settle disputes through the same courts that protected foreign interests and enforced alien laws. Rebellion was commonplace in Sicilian history, and resistance—however mulish and unheroic—was seen as praiseworthy; private vengeance and vendetta were preferable to abiding by the rule of law. Even in the nineteenth century, outlaws were popular heroes there; banditry was more deeply rooted in Sicily than it was anywhere else in Europe, and it endured there longer, too. Little changed even after 1860, when Giuseppe Garibaldi landed on the island on his way to uniting all of Italy. Garibaldi himself was all but worshipped in Sicily because he freed it from its Bourbon overlords. But the Italy that he created, with its capital in Rome, treated Sicily much as the state that it replaced had done, extracting what it could in taxes and giving little or nothing in return. Peace was kept by a garrison of northerners and by police, recruited on the mainland, whose most important duty was not solving crimes but keeping order. The carabinieri did this by setting up and running a huge network of spies and informants to keep an eye on potential malcontents and revolutionaries.

It would be misleading, nonetheless, to think of the Sicily of 1860 as a province united in more than its suspicion of outsiders. There were considerable differences between the eastern districts, where the earth was rich and the local barons still lived on their estates, investing in roads, bridges, and irrigation schemes, and the western portions of the island, where it was far more difficult to wrest a living from the land. Western Sicily was a place of mountains, dust, poor soil, and poorer agricultural towns. A thin strip along the west coast was relatively wealthy; it consisted of the capital, Palermo—an elegant port with little fishing and less industry, many of whose people earned a living as functionaries of the state—and the Conca d’Oro, the Golden Shell, where the island’s most important exports, oranges and lemons, were grown in innumerable small citrus groves. The aristocrats of the western hinterlands were mostly absentees, who preferred to live comfortably in Palermo and lease out their estates to grasping tenant farmers known as
gabelloti
. It was in the interest of the barons of Palermo to keep the city’s working classes pacified with cheap bread and endless festivals, but the peasants of the distant interior were accorded less respectful treatment. In the eyes of many of the barons, they existed merely to grow food and pay taxes, at rates that, by 1860, required them to hand over half their crops and half their earnings to their landlords and the government.

These demands left peasants practically destitute, a state of affairs rendered more unbearable by the fact that most barons, and even the
gabelloti
who ran their estates, paid practically nothing. One army officer, sent over from the mainland to help keep order, remembered that

it hurts to see some of the scenes you come across when you live here like I do. One hot day in July … I was on a long march with my men. We stopped for a rest by a farmyard where they were dividing the grain harvest. I went in to ask for some water. The measuring had just finished, and the peasant had been left with no more than a small mound. Everything else had gone to his boss. The peasant stood with his hands and chin planted on the long handle of a shovel. At first, as if stunned, he stared at his share. Then he looked at his wife and four or five small children, thinking that after a year of sweat and hardship all he had left to feed his family with was that heap of grain. He seemed like a man set in stone. Except that a tear was gliding silently down from each eye.

All this was difficult enough when times were good. But times were rarely good for long in Sicily, and the lot of the peasantry worsened considerably in the course of the nineteenth century. The abolition of feudalism, which occurred only in 1812, upset the economy of the interior; it resulted in the dissolution of many large estates, with a consequent diminution in efficiency, and ushered in the rawest sort of capitalism. The
gabelloti
—who paid fixed rents to the barons for the right to farm their lands—had every motivation to extract the maximum revenues from their properties, and wages, where they were paid at all, were driven down by an abundance of labor, a population explosion in the early nineteenth century taking the number of Sicilians to as many as two million. That total far outstripped the numbers that the island could support, and the misery endured by Sicily’s peasants was increased by a long succession of natural disasters—floods, drought, and landslides among them—that culminated in the terrible earthquake that destroyed the city of Messina in 1908 and killed as many as eighty thousand people. So great was the poverty in the western districts of the island, and so terrible the destitution, that as much as a third of the population of the island emigrated between 1870 and 1910, at first mostly to the cities of northern Italy but increasingly to the United States. One side effect of this unparalleled movement of men, women, and children was that, after about 1890, practically every family in Sicily had friends or relatives in the great American seaports, particularly New York and New Orleans.

For those who stayed behind on the island, poverty and the lack of opportunity combined to make crime increasingly commonplace in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Given the choice between a lifetime of toil in arid fields, struggling for survival, and the lures of the “bad life,” the
mala vita
, thousands of Sicilian youths were tempted into careers of thievery and petty deception; and when, eventually, they were caught and sent to prison, they mixed there with far worse criminals and emerged as likely recruits for far more dangerous gangs. Crime on the island was, moreover, all too often violent. Government authority was never absolute in the depth of the Sicilian interior, and the failure of the Italian state to restrict power and weaponry to the hands of the police and army—to impose what historians would call a “monopoly on violence”—meant that many men habitually bore arms. The annual murder rate in western Sicily, which by 1890 ran at as much as sixty-seven deaths for every thousand people, was fifty times the rate in mainland Italy and paid eloquent testimony to Sicilians’ propensity to deploy knives and guns to solve their problems.

One other factor, unique to Sicily, played a part in the emergence of the Mafia, and that was the readiness of large swaths of the island’s population to conspire and rebel against hated authority. As early as the late eighteenth century, in the wake of the French Revolution, the Sicilian police began picking up reports of secret societies that met in remote parts of the countryside to swear oaths of loyalty and plot the downfall of the Bourbon monarchy. Although few in number at first, they grew; there were many such groups by the mid-1830s, and more a decade later, when, at the height of the unpopularity of the Naples government, one Palermo nobleman observed that “all the good citizens had begun to organize themselves in Secret Societies.” Conditions for the formation of such groups remained propitious even after the unification of Italy in 1860; one of the new regime’s earliest proclamations, a demand for universal military service, drove hundreds of Sicilian youths to flee into the interior and turn to banditry, not least because it was widely rumored that young men sent for service on the mainland were castrated.

Sicily’s “brotherhoods” and “sects” were generally organized around a capo, or captain, who was often a
gabelloto
. Many borrowed the ideas and symbolism of the Masons, a secretive brotherhood, centuries old, whose notoriety and love of ritual had provided inspiration for any number of similar societies. There were others, though, with different inspirations, which owed loyalty to a radical village priest or which drew for their membership on the armed town militias that participated in uprisings against the hated Bourbons in 1820, 1848, and 1860 and rose again to support a Sicilian nationalist rebellion in 1866. Each of these groups had weaponry and men; each hated the government and the police. The “sects,” like criminals and politicians, were in the business of controlling people, and it seemed natural for them to offer to protect their fellow citizens—against the Bourbons at first, then against their personal enemies—and to expect to be paid for their services. Within a year or two, predictably enough, “protection” morphed into protection rackets. Landlords, farmers, and ordinary villagers discovered that they were no longer paying to be shielded against the Bourbons. The protection that they paid for was protection from the “sects” themselves.

WHETHER THE BROTHERHOODS
that slowly coalesced in Sicily between 1800 and 1860 possessed any form of central leadership is still debated. Little evidence survives—some early Mafiosi seem to have joined in the revolt of 1866 expressly in order to ransack police stations and burn the confidential reports they contained—and while there are certainly suggestions that the first criminal “families” emerged in and around Palermo and spread outward from there, there is also plenty of evidence that the Mafia meant different things to different people. In some tellings of the story there was a “high Mafia” on one hand—made up of barons,
gabelloti
, priests, and lawyers—and a “low Mafia” on the other, consisting of criminals from the peasant class who committed crimes at the behest of their superiors and were protected by them in turn. The Mafia, in this interpretation, deployed violence to make itself integral to the government in Sicily, which certainly explains why it has proved so hard to keep down. Other writers, though, including several of the policemen charged with keeping order on the island, insisted that “Mafia” was nothing but a state of mind. The word, in these men’s view, was nothing but a bit of slang, denoting a sort of insolent self-confidence and pride innate to all Sicilians; there was no secret society at all, they argued, merely groups of men who would not tolerate oppression. It took decades, and the evidence of numerous informants, to prove to everybody’s satisfaction that the Mafia was very organized and very real.