The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (11 page)

NEW YORK’S ITALIAN
neighborhoods had changed considerably in the brief time that Morello and his family had been away. The number of Italians in the city tripled between 1890 and 1900, and the Little Italy centered on Elizabeth and Mulberry streets had grown so considerably that it now ran well over half a mile along the Bowery. Sister colonies in Greenwich Village and East Harlem had also multiplied many times in size, and overcrowding had become an even greater problem; there were so many people in so many apartments in some districts that the population density was worse than in Bombay. On the other hand, the economy of the Italian quarter was flourishing again. Demand for familiar staples ensured that there was a growing trade in imports of lemons, olive oil, and wine. Artichokes, an ingredient of minestrone, were shipped into the city by rail all the way from California. There were Italian grocers, cobblers, bootblacks, and bankers, Italian newspapers and clothes. In 1897, according to one estimate, the inhabitants of Little Italy were making so much money that $30 million a year was being wired or carried back to friends and relatives at home. A much larger sum, this news implied, was being earned and spent on the streets of New York.

With money came the prospect of a better life. An honest laborer might secure a permanent position; a petty businessman a handcart or a shoeshine stand to call his own. But for the criminals of the Italian districts, the burgeoning wealth of many immigrants meant more and better opportunities to prey on their fellow men. In the course of the 1890s, the sort of incidents that had characterized Little Italy in earlier years—mugging, petty theft, and knife fights—began to give way to new and more sophisticated forms of crime. The first protection rackets had begun to flourish on the streets of the Italian quarter by the last years of the decade. Then came determined attempts to target the wealthiest of the district’s immigrants: extortion, backed by threats of violence, and the seizure and ransoming of children. As early as 1899, there was a “kidnapping craze” among the Italians of Brooklyn.

Crime was certainly no less prevalent in Little Italy than it was elsewhere in Manhattan. Joseph Petrosino, who knew as much about the immigrant community as anyone, contended that only a minuscule proportion—
3
or 4 percent, he thought—were actually criminals. But there were 200,000 Italians in New York by 1900, and even a small percentage of that total was still a lot of men: well over 5,000, if the detective’s estimate was correct. Nor was there much chance that Italian crooks might be deterred by the prospect of punishment. “At that time,” confided Giovanni Branchi, the Italian consul general in New York,

whole parts of the town, whole streets, were inhabited by Italians only, with their shops, cafes, etc. All these places were virtually without police supervision with the exception of the regular Irish policeman at the corner of the street, who did not care a rap what Italians did among themselves so long as they did not interfere with other people. At the time there were only two or three policemen who spoke or understood Italian … so that in nine cases out of ten any Italian committing a crime was nearly sure of going unpunished if he only escaped a few days from arrest.

According to various figures that were bandied about at the time, in fact, only one out of every 250 crimes committed in the Italian quarter was reported to the police; of these, only one case in every five yielded arrests; and of the cases that did come to court, as few as one in three hundred resulted in a conviction. Small wonder that, for many immigrants, justice was something a man had to obtain for himself. And small wonder that for Morello and others like him, the prospects of a successful criminal career began to seem as bright in the United States as they had ever been in Sicily.

It did not take long for Italian crooks to demonstrate just how lucrative organized crime could be in several American cities. Extortion rings, which had been commonplace in Sicily and sprang up in the Italian quarter of New Orleans as early as the 1850s, appeared in New York during the last years of the nineteenth century and in Chicago—home to another large and growing Italian community—after 1901. The methods adopted by the men responsible were very similar. The victims, generally storekeepers or bankers or other wealthy immigrants, would receive a letter demanding a substantial sum of money. They would be directed to take an envelope of money to a lonely meeting point or hand the cash over to a man who would call on them at their place of business. Failure to comply, they were warned, would result in the destruction of their premises and perhaps in their own deaths.

The letters, which were always anonymous, were often phrased in bizarrely courteous Old World language, but the underlying threat of violence was ever present. “I beg you warmly,” one such missive concluded, “to put them [the notes] on your door within four days. But if not, I swear this week’s time not even the dust of your family will exist.” Another, even blunter, letter warned:

You got some cash. I need $1000.00. You place the $100.00 bills in an envelope and place it under a board at the northeast corner of 69th Street at eleven o’clock tonight. If you place the money there, you will live. If you don’t, you die. If you report this to the police, I’ll kill you when I get out. They may save your money but they won’t save your life.

Sinister communications of this sort—received unexpectedly by victims who knew all about the impotence of the police—usually had the desired effect. Most of the extortionists’ targets were terrified, and unknown hundreds handed over sums that they could barely afford. Not everyone complied, of course, but the brave and the stubborn few who ignored the letters could expect to get a visit from the gang, and though it was not unheard of for a victim to shrug off even their threats and remain unmolested or to negotiate the payment of a smaller sum, everyone in Little Italy had heard of stores destroyed by dynamite, children kidnapped and sometimes murdered, and rich men shot or knifed to death for failing to hand over cash.

Bombs were the favored tool of the extortionists. They were anonymous, created a terrifying effect, and were easily assembled—so many Italians were employed in the construction trade that it was a simple matter to steal dynamite. They could even be used outside the streets of Little Italy; a New Jersey justice of the peace, who had convicted several members of one gang, was “literally blown to pieces” by a parcel bomb delivered to his office. Even in high-profile cases of this sort, however, arrests were few and far between, and it was widely known that many of the most famous and influential Italians in the city had caved in to the extortionists’ demands. The best-known of these victims was the opera star Enrico Caruso, who met one demand for $2,000 and, when this fact became public knowledge, was rewarded for his capitulation with “a stack of threatening letters a foot high,” including another from the same gang for $15,000.

To many New Yorkers, including the reporters of the English-language press, the most compelling feature of these cases was the bizarre decorations that adorned the extortion letters. Demands were accentuated with crude drawings of skulls, revolvers, and knives dripping with blood or piercing human hearts. Many also featured pictures of hands, in thick black ink, held up in the universal gesture of warning. It was this last feature that inspired a journalist writing for
The New York Herald
to refer to the communications as “Black Hand” letters—a name that stuck, and, indeed, soon became synonymous with crime in Little Italy.

From there it was but a short step to the idea of the Black Hand as a distinct organization, with its own leaders and hundreds, if not thousands, of members scattered through the country. The notion of a powerful, professional criminal conspiracy did seem to answer many questions, not least explaining why the authorities found it so very difficult to make arrests. The police, led by Petrosino, did what they could to ridicule the idea, but without success. Conviction that a Black Hand society actually existed soon took root. By 1905 the San Francisco
Call
was reporting that the organization had thirty thousand members and chapters in a dozen cities across the United States. In 1907, Black Handers were blamed for as many as three hundred killings in Manhattan alone, and the number of their outrages was said to be increasing at the rate of four a day.

From the perspective of most New Yorkers, the Black Hand was at once a thrilling source of entertainment and a symbol of just how desperately uncivilized Italian immigrants could be. For the men and women of the Sicilian quarter, who lived with the threats of the extortionists every day, it was a reminder of how little had really changed since they had crossed the ocean, to be preyed upon in the United States as they had been preyed upon at home. For Giuseppe Morello, though, the success of Little Italy’s extortionists was if anything an inspiration. For if unorganized amateurs, lacking skills and experience, could make a success of such illegal enterprises, what opportunities must there be for real criminals, men who would not scruple at raining far greater destruction down upon their victims and enemies? How much money was waiting to be made by the ruthless? What, in short, were the prospects for an American Mafia?

CHAPTER 4
“THE MOST SECRET AND TERRIBLE
ORGANIZATION IN THE WORLD”

T
HERE WAS NO MAFIA WHEN MORELLO ARRIVED IN THE UNITED
States, no network of families such as existed in Sicily, no American “boss of bosses”—perhaps no
cosche
operating on the far side of the Atlantic at all. But there were emigrant Mafiosi living in several states, and these men were in communication with the families that they had left behind in Italy, both actual and criminal.

Men of respect had been crossing the ocean ever since the 1870s, when emigrants first began to flood from Sicily. Some left the island because they were poor and went to America because the booming of the citrus business meant there were flourishing trade routes between Palermo and several U.S. ports; others emigrated to join their families. America also became a place of refuge for Mafiosi fleeing problems at home. Morello was one, but there were others who, like him, were in trouble with the law or escaping some murderous internecine feud. Tunisia, which had long been the favorite refuge of exiled Mafiosi, was closer to Sicily—a mere few hours by sea from Palermo. But the United States offered much that a sojourn in Tunis did not: prospects for work, a fast-growing Italian community, and, crucially, better chances to make money.

The Mafia initiates who did cross the Atlantic in the nineteenth century were small fry, nonetheless. The bosses of the richest families enjoyed far too much influence at home to have any need to leave their island, and on the handful of occasions when they and their immediate lieutenants thought it wise to leave Sicily for a while, they were more likely to go to the mainland under the protection of influential friends, as Giuseppe Valenza, the brutal landowner from Prizzi, had done in 1877. The same bosses also did so well out of their Sicilian rackets that they had no particular incentive to test new markets on another continent. One thing that can be said for certain about the first Mafiosi to arrive in the United States—Morello and his family included—was that they were not sent there by their superiors as part of any worked-out plan to expand the influence of the fraternity. They traveled as private citizens, and if they did continue to pursue a life of crime, it was because the
mala vita
offered them the best prospect of a good living.

No more than a few scant traces of Mafia activity date to the years before Morello’s arrival in the United States; most come from ports, and all from towns that were home to large Italian communities. There may well have been more going on in these places than we realize;
cosche
kept no lists of membership, and there is almost never any way of knowing which of the hundreds of Sicilian criminals who arrived in the United States over the years were Mafia initiates, nor how many of the several dozen men named in the American press as Mafiosi actually were men of respect. Newspaper coverage can be misleading; at times, particularly in the middle 1870s, the early 1890s, and after the Barrel Murder in 1903, the word
Mafia
was deployed as a form of shorthand to describe all manner of Italian criminals. Only a handful of personal testimonies survive. Often the sole indication that this man or that really was a Mafioso comes from tracing the events of later life—the arrests, convictions, and associates that he acquired in the course of his criminal career.

For all this, even the most conservative analysis suggests that, by the turn of the century, men with Mafia connections could be found in Boston, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Chicago and in the rough-and-tumble mining towns of Pennsylvania. Outside Philadelphia, for instance, members of several Sicilian Mafia families began settling in Scranton, Pittston, and Wilkes-Barre during the late 1800s. The first to appear were the Sciaccatani—men from Sciacca, on the south coast of the island, a known stronghold of the fraternity—who arrived in Luzerne County during the 1880s and found work in the local pits. They were followed by families from Montedoro, who built homes in the Brandy Patch area of Pittston; their gang, known locally as the Men of Montedoro, extorted protection money from Italian miners. So did the Mafia of Hillsville, near New Castle, led by a man named Rocco Racco, who in 1906 unwisely drew attention to himself by murdering a local game warden in a dispute over a dog. And, more than a decade before Racco was arrested, tried, and hanged, the first members of the DiGiovanni family, from Palermo, arrived in Montgomery County. The Secret Service began uncovering evidence of counterfeiting in the latter district as early as 1896 and linked the business to the Sciaccatani. The ring was circulating forged currency in several Pennsylvania coal towns and as far away as Baltimore.

None of these little pockets of Mafia criminality attracted much attention from the press; even the Racco trial, a nine days’ wonder in its time, was only scantily reported beyond the eastern seaboard. But one Sicilian murder did cause a sensation throughout the United States before Morello’s arrival in the country. It was a killing that took place in New Orleans, at the American end of one of the most important trade routes to Palermo. It began with a dispute between two armed gangs of Sicilians, resulted in the death of a controversial police chief, and ended with one of the most notorious mass lynchings ever to occur in the United States. It also convinced several million Americans that the Mafia existed.

DAVID HENNESSY SWALLOWED
the last of his oysters, washed down his supper with a glass of milk, and glanced out onto Rampart Street. It was close to midnight on October 15, 1890, and an inch of rain had fallen in the streets of New Orleans that evening, turning the city’s manure-strewn, unpaved roads into a filthy slurry and forcing the handful of pedestrians braving the weather to take off their boots and socks and roll their trousers to their knees to cross between the sodden sidewalks. So he was pleased to see the storm had eased, leaving behind it little but a thick, damp delta mist that swirled through the streets of the French Quarter and drifted down toward the Mississippi.

Hennessy, at thirty-two, was the youngest chief of police in the United States, and one of the most famous. He was a good-looking officer—”pretty Dave,” the New Orleans newspapers called him—and brave as well as shrewd, a teetotaler in a city of hard drinkers and a man who had survived the corrupt morass of New Orleans politics with his personal integrity more or less intact. Yet Hennessy had his dark side, too. He made arrests without worrying too much about using proper procedure. He played a full part in the squalid factionalism that undermined his city’s police department. And he had favorites—friends, relatives, and allies whom he met at a private members club known as the Red Light—and no shortage of enemies. A few years earlier he had put a bullet through the brain of one of them, the then chief of detectives, and won himself a disputed acquittal at his murder trial by claiming self-defense.

More recently, in the spring of 1890, Hennessy had found himself embroiled in another dangerous dispute, a bitter wrangle between two groups of Sicilians in the city docks. In those days the New Orleans waterfront was almost entirely controlled by gangs of black and Irish longshoremen, who competed for the most lucrative contracts and kept the best jobs for themselves. The handful of Italian stevedores were left to squabble over minor bits of business, the most important of which were contracts to handle the unloading of Italian-owned fruit boats sailing from Central America. A large proportion of this business was in the hands of the Macheca Brothers shipping line, and, for the best part of a decade, Joseph Macheca had awarded his contracts to a company run by the four Provenzano brothers: Peter, Vincent, George, and Joe. In 1886, however, a rival firm named Matranga & Locascio had appeared on the waterfront. Tony and Charles Matranga won several contracts by bidding low and two years later secured a monopoly over the entire Italian fruit business.

Hennessy knew Joe Provenzano, who ran the Provenzano company; both men were members of the Red Light club. He had less to do with the Matranga brothers, who had come to New Orleans years earlier from western Sicily. As police chief, he certainly knew that the Matrangas were widely hated on the waterfront—they paid miserably, less than half the wages offered by the Provenzanos—and that relations between the rival firms of longshoremen had been deteriorating sharply. He knew that Charles Matranga blamed the Provenzanos for three recent murders in the Italian quarter, among them the unsolved killing of a man named Giuseppe Mattiani; he also knew that Mattiani’s torso had been found in an attic room on the corner of Bienville Street, smeared over with coal oil and stuffed into a greasy sack, its legs removed and the head cut off and burned beyond recognition. Hennessy had heard rumors that Joe Provenzano had vowed to “soak the levee in blood” if he did not get his contracts back. But Hennessy worried more about the Matrangas. In the last few months the chief had uncovered evidence that both brothers were members of the Mafia, a society whose existence had been rumored in New Orleans for almost a decade. He may also have known that the family maintained links to the
cosca
in their hometown of Monreale.

It was the Italian authorities, oddly enough, who had gathered the first real evidence of a Mafia in New Orleans. More than a decade earlier, at the tail end of the 1870s, the Monreale police had been hunting a man named Salvatore Marino, a leading member of the Stoppaglieri—the “Stoppered Mouths” or “new Mafia” of that town. Marino had been arrested for murder in 1875 and held in jail pending a trial, only to be released when, thanks to his influential Mafia friends, a court official had stolen and burned the prosecution files. The same shadowy allies had then obtained a passport for Marino and arranged for him to flee to New Orleans, where he changed his name and, by his own admission, established a branch of the Stoppaglieri in the city, a task made considerably easier by the presence of a large community of emigrant Monrealesi along the Mississippi. When in an expansive mood, Marino was prone to brag to friends of the enormous influence he wielded. He told one man who worked for his grocery business that he was the capo of an association numbering forty-five thousand men.

Marino’s boastful indiscretions eventually reached the ears of Sicily’s police, and a spy by the name of Rosario La Mantia was dispatched to the United States to find him. La Mantia succeeded in his mission, but Marino died of yellow fever soon afterward, leaving the agent to return to Italy late in 1878 with several compromising letters he had recovered from the dead man’s house. One of these documents was a note from a member of the Monreale Mafia addressed to Tony Matranga in New Orleans. The state prosecutor in Palermo later identified both Matranga and Marino as “members of the association of the Stoppaglieri.”

How Tony and Charles Matranga and the New Orleans Stoppaglieri fared during the 1880s is not known, but the gang apparently grew stronger after Marino’s death. Certainly Joe Provenzano—although by no means an unbiased source—claimed to have had heard a great deal about the fraternity that he called the “Stopiglieri.” “They’re people that work for the Matrangas,” he told several reporters.

There are about twenty leaders of them. They are the committee, and there are about 300 greenhorns who have got to do anything the leaders say. … They pay them $10, $20, or $100 to get a man out of the way, and if the man they order to kill some one won’t do it they have him killed, so he can’t tell anything to the police.

They’ve got the Mafia Society everywhere … in San Francisco, St. Louis, Chicago, New-York, and here.

The Matrangas flatly denied that a word of this was true, telling the New Orleans
Daily Picayune
that Provenzano had spoken out to hide the fact that he himself was a Mafia boss. But the Matrangas had no proof, and it was their rival who supplied the most intriguing details of the Stoppaglieri’s influence and methods. According to Provenzano—who explained he had his information from a former Matranga ally who had come to work for him—it was Mafia power that lay behind the brothers’ fast-growing business on the waterfront. The man had described his initiation into the secret society: “They brought him into the room and he saw [Charles] Matranga dressed in a black domino [a loose cloak incorporating a mask], and others were dressed in dominoes, and they made him swear on a skull with a dirk [knife] in it. He said he was willing to rob people, but he didn’t want to have to kill anybody, so he got out of it.”

No one in New Orleans paid much attention to stories of this sort at first, and it was not until May 1890 that David Hennessy himself was drawn into the struggle between the rival groups of longshoremen. In that month the violent dispute between the two finally burst the bounds of the Italian quarter when a crew of Matranga stevedores was ambushed after midnight in the streets above the docks. Three men were badly wounded in a fusillade of gunfire, and Tony Matranga, hit in the knee, lost most of his right leg. Hennessy investigated, and when his men uncovered evidence that the Provenzanos were involved, he locked up Joe and his three brothers and announced that he would send to Italy for the records of both families. The police chief also sent letters seeking information about Joseph Macheca, the shipping magnate who had given the Matrangas their contracts. Macheca had been orphaned in childhood and adopted into a Maltese family, but he, too, came from a Sicilian family.