Joe Bruno's Mobsters - Six Volume Set (69 page)

The Mafia continues to thrive today as it did in the Roaring Twenties heyday of the Unione Siciliana.

THE END

*****

Murder and Mayhem in the Big Apple:

From the Black Hand to Murder Incorporated

By Joe Bruno

PUBLISHED BY:

Knickerbocker Literary Services

EDITED BY:

Marc A. Maturo

COVER BY:

Nitro Covers

Copyright 2012 -- Knickerbocker Literary Services

            ****************************************

What people are saying about Murder and Mayhem in the Big Apple: From the Black Hand to Murder Incorporated:

ANOTHER HISTORY LESSON
! –
RJ Parker “Bestselling Author of True Crime Books”

I love Joe Bruno's books. I always say that he's the NYC true crime historian. I never heard of the Black Hand until reading this book. NYC has had its share of murder and corruption over the past couple of centuries and the Author is a wealth of knowledge about it. A must read for any true crime book collector.

Another great one! – lcook0825

Another great book by Joe Bruno on the Mafia in the United States. Murder Inc. was an unbelievable group of men who got away with their crimes for some time. It is amazing to see how far police investigations have come since that time. I can't wait to start the next book by Mr Bruno.

What can I say! – Rony Barbery

This is another typical Joe Bruno book, detailed, factual and written like if you were having a conversation sitting on the stoop of your house with him. He writes like if he was an old friend that I hung out with in Brooklyn. I have two more of his books on my shelf, and can't wait to get to them. As with all of his other work, I highly recommend this book!

Great
! -
catenacci

Joe Bruno supplies us with a well written book that provides in depth treatments of some very interesting big time murder cases. Moreover it contains several entertaining and quite funny statements. I really enjoyed reading it.

Knock Out Punch
! - 
Joyce Metzger

Joe Bruno delivers a hard punch, well researched, no nonsense book. People need to be reminded about dark periods of history. Murder and Mayhem in the Big Apple, From Black Hand to Murder Incorporated uncovers the atrocities committed by men who had neither compassion nor conscience. They lived by power rule of the Mafia who made their bones by killing whomever the bosses said needed to be killed. That rule brought from Corleone, Sicily by Giuseppe Morello and Nick and Vincent Terranova became the Black Hand.
Fear, hatred, and brutality are brought to our awareness in a most convincing and stark manner. The reader is an observer as chills run up and down the spine. Joe Bruno gives us a glimpse loaded with facts. This history loaded portrayal includes Buggsy Goldstein, Harry Strauss, Happy Malone, Frank Abbandando, Lepke Buchalter, Albert Anastasia and Lucky Luciano. Joe Bruno brings full realism to play and bear upon our psyches.

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T
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lack
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and

They came from the
mobbed-up city of Corleone, Sicily, but they perpetrated their murder and mayhem on the mean streets of New York City.

The co-leader of the Black Hand was a monstrosity of a man named Giuseppe (Joe) Morello. Morello was born in 1867 with a severely deformed right hand, which featured only an elongated pinkie finger, which was bent grotesquely downward. As a result, Morello was called, “The Clutch-Hand,”  “Little Finger,” and “One Finger Jack.”

Joe Morello’s father, Calogero Morello, died in 1872 and his mother, Angelina Piazza, remarried one year later to Mafioso Bernardo Terranova. Joe Morello’s stepfather and mother had four children together: Nick, Ciro, Vincent, and Salvatrice. There is some confusion as to the exact relationships, but Nick Terranova, also known as Nick Morello, was, in fact, not Joe Morello’s brother, but his half-brother. Salvatrice Terranova married a wicked man named Ignazio “Lupo the Wolf” Saietta, who later in America, along with Joe Morello and Nick and Vincent Terranova, formed the hated and much feared Black Hand. For all practical purposes, Saietta and Morello had equal powers in the organization.

While still in Corleone, Joe Morello and his three half-brothers were introduced by Bernardo Terranova into the Corleonesi Mafia (sometimes called the
Fratuzzi), where they made their bones by killing whomever the Corleonesi bosses said needed to be killed. One such victim was Giovanni Vella, the head of a quasi-police force called the
Guardie Campestri
, or
Field Guards
, which patrolled Corleone on foot, looking for Corleonesi Mafia members up to no good. In 1888, Joe Morello was arrested for the murder of Vella, but then strange things started to happen.

First, the smoking gun
found on Morello when he was arrested minutes after the Vella murder oddly disappeared from the local
carabinieri
(police) lockup. Apparently, the gun was snatched by an enterprising
carabinieri,
who was paid molto lira to do so.

Secondly, there was the slight problem of a woman named Anna Di Puma, who claimed she saw Joe Morello shoot Vella to death in a darkened alleyway. Two days after
Vella’s demise, Anna Di Puma was sitting outside a friend’s house shooting the breeze, when a gunman walked up behind her and shot her several times in the back, killing her instantly. With no smoking gun, and no witnesses to testify against him, Joe Morello was released from jail.

His status in the local Mafia augmented by the Vella murder, Morello decided to make a bigger killing by dealing in the sale of “funny money,” or counterfeit bills. This went fine and dandy for a while, until Morello was arrested in 1892 with a fistful of phony cash in his good left hand. Rather than face charges in Sicily, Joe Morello thumbed his nose at the Italian authorities and absconded secretly to America, settling on the Lower East Side of New York City.

Little did it matter that Morello was tried “in absentia” in Sicily and sentenced to six years in solitary confinement. Morello was a vast ocean away from his punishment and ready to make his mark in the majestic “Mountain of Gold” – New York City.

Soon after Joe Morello escaped from Sicily and landed illegally in America, Bernardo Terranova, his wife Angela, and six of their children, boarded the ship
Alsatia
and headed for America to join Joe Morello. Also with them was Joe Morello’s wife, Lisa Marvelesi, with her two-month-old baby, Calogero, who was named after Joe Morello’s blood father. They passed, as did all immigrants at the time, through Ellis Island and entered America legally.

While most immigrants came to America with only the clothes on their back and a few bucks in their pockets, the Terranovas brought with them the stunning total of 18 pieces of
luggage, filled with the finest clothes and who knows how much cash. Even though this was not against American law, it should have raised some eyebrows among Ellis Island officials, since Sicilian Mafioso Bernardo Terranova listed his occupation as “laborer,” even though he was a well-known Mafioso in Corleone. It’s obvious something of value changed hands from Bernardo Terranova to crooked immigration officials before he and his family were allowed to pass through customs.

When they first came to America, Morello and the Terranovas tried their best to fly under the radar of American law enforcement. Even though there was basically no communication between the Sicilian police and their American counterparts, there was a three-year grace period after which an Italian immigrant became immune to deportation. The Terranovas joined Morello and settled in Manhattan’s Little Italy on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. At first, they tried to make a living in a series of legal jobs, including plastering.

However, the Panic of 1893 changed everything.

In the 1880s, America was the land of milk and honey. Railroads were being built at a record pace, and, in fact, they were over-built, because railroad revenues could not cover the expense of the railroad’s construction. By 1893, new silver mines had flooded the market with silver, causing the prices of silver to plummet. In addition, the American farmers, especially the wheat and cotton farmers, suffered low prices, triggering their markets to dive as well.

The combination of all three crises reverberated throughout America, but it especially devastated the metropolis of New York City. The final nails in the economy’s coffin were driven in when the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad claimed bankruptcy in February of 1893, and almost simultaneously, President Grover Cleveland convinced Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Americans panicked and rushed to the banks to withdraw their cash. This economic tsunami blasted across the Atlantic, and United Kingdom investors quickly sold off their American stocks and replaced them with stocks backed by gold. This caused the second biggest national credit crises ever; topped only by the Stock Market Crash of 1929.

With no
jobs available in New York City and figuring it was not the right time to return to a life of crime, in 1893 Joe Morello, to support his family, traveled to Louisiana to work in the cotton fields and sugar plantations. Eventually, Morello became a fruit peddler, selling lemons from a sack on his back. In two months, Morello had accumulated enough cash to send up north, so that the rest of his family could come south to work on the plantations with him. Since Sicilian laborers were highly valued by the southern plantation owners for their hard work, Morello, Bernardo Terranova, and all their women and children, easily obtained jobs cutting and stacking cane sugar.

The work was grueling and the pay nothing to write home about, but it was better than anything they had back in New York City. Working 18-hour days during the height of the sugar season (known as the
zuccarata
) the grown men were paid as much as $1.50 a day. Woman and children were not valued as highly, and as a result, the Morello and Terranova women earned only $1 a day, and their children were paid as little as 10 cents a day.

Still, it all added up and the family earned enough
hard cash in two years to move to a rural area near Dallas, Texas, where they were able to obtain work as sharecroppers. The money was good, but the work was hard and malaria was easily contracted. In 1897, after all members of the family had endured bouts of malaria, Joe Morello and the Terranovas, now with more than a few bucks in their pockets – blood money they had earned in the fields down south - made the trek back north.

It was time for Joe Morello, his stepfather, and his half-brothers to go back to what they did best, being Mafioso - thi
s time in New York City.

*****

Ignazio Saietta, known as
“Lupo the Wolf,” had a different type of journey before he hooked up with Joe Morello and the Terranovas in America.

Saietta was born in Corleone, Sicily, on March 19, 1877. Before he reached the age of 20, Saietta was a top killer for the Corleonesi Mafia. However, after killing a man - he said in self-defense - Saietta was forced to flee to America.

Saietta told this sad story in American court years later, when he was being tried on a counterfeiting case along with Joe Morello.

As was reported in the
New York Times
, Lupo told the court:

“When I was a manufacturer in Italy, I trusted Salvatore Morello, a storekeeper in Viapiatepoli for 500 lire (about $100), and I trusted another storekeeper, Francesco Vitalli, an old man. One day Morello came to me and said I must not sell silk handkerchiefs to Vitalli and more. ‘Vitalli is an old man. Do not bother him,’ I told Morello.

“But Morello grew worse and would not pay me the money he owed me. One day he came to my store and said, ‘Did I tell you not to sell any more handkerchiefs to Vitalli?’ Then he added: ‘You will not get your money until you sell me the handkerchiefs instead.’

“‘You are crazy’ I said, but Morello responded, ‘You must obey my orders.’ ‘Are you crazy?’ I told him. And he said, ‘Are you taking his part?’  I said, ‘This is an old man. Do not bother with him.’

“Then he grabbed me by the throat. I tried to get away from him. He seized me by the throat again. He pulled out a stiletto and I broke away and ran behind the counter. I got my revolver and shouted, ‘Don’t touch me.’

“He came and I shot. He fell. I don’t know what was happening then. I ran away.”

According to the
New York Times,
“Saietta was sobbing when he finished his tale. Saietta then told of going home and telling the story to his family. His family dissuaded him from surrendering to the police, telling him that the Morello family was big and powerful, and the best thing for him to do was to run away.

“He escaped to England, thence to Montreal. Next he went to Buffalo, New York, and finally came here (to New York City).”