The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (15 page)

Lupo liked to present his success as something he worked hard for, and indeed he did labor long into the evenings at his Mott Street office, where, according to a contemporary, another early Mafioso known as Zia Trestelle, he shuttled ceaselessly between a reception room and his private inner sanctum, alternately barking orders and receiving a succession of mysterious visitors. The truth, though, was that Lupo’s increasing affluence owed at least as much to his association with Morello, which allowed him to call on all the growing strength of the Clutch Hand’s criminal family. In return Lupo provided the Morellos with a base of operations eminently suitable for preying on weak, frightened, and friendless immigrants, the grocery trade being a favorite cover for Italian criminals at this time. As Morello well knew, the most feared, most efficient gang then based in Little Italy—a group run by a Calabrian named Giuseppe D’Agostino—identified likely victims through its own chain of corner grocery stores. There, as Petrosino would eventually discover, they “wormed information as to the financial standing of Italians living thereabout until they had the rating of nearly every man of their nationality then dwelling in the city. The rest was easy. Demands, accompanied by dire threats, were sent to the ones marked for plucking.” The Clutch Hand, Petrosino thought, set out to imitate D’Agostino’s operation, with such conspicuous success that his Sicilians pushed the rival Calabrians out of the Italian quarter within a few years.

If nothing else, Morello’s interest in the grocery trade helps to explain the startling rapidity with which Lupo rose in the first family—the Wolf and the Clutch Hand having, on the face of it, as little in common as Palermo had with backwater Corleone. The Sicilian capital was the most cultured place south of Naples, a city frequently praised for its graceful proportions and noble architecture, and Lupo had picked up something of his hometown’s swagger. He dressed well, favoring tailored clothes, and could be seen parading through Little Italy in a buggy drawn by a white horse, his hat tilted rakishly to one side. Morello, on the other hand, detested such displays, preferring a life lived in shadows. The contrast between his police mug shot and Lupo’s is striking. The Clutch Hand, frozen in time soon after his arrest in the summer of 1900, wears a vest, a rough scarf, a cheap waistcoat, and an ill-fitting jacket. His chin and cheeks are unshaven and his mustache untrimmed. Lupo, pictured three years later, sports a superior air and a fashionable hat. His face has been expertly shaved, though he affects a neat mustache, and he is well turned out in an expensive jacket.

For all this, Morello certainly respected Lupo. First noticed in the company of the first family in 1902, the Wolf had joined the innermost councils of the gang nine months later, and the two Mafiosi, Flynn would write, made a formidable team:

Lupo was the business man of the two. Morello had in his makeup more of the cunning of the born criminal. He was cautious like the fox and ferocious like a maddened bull. Lupo was always suggesting new ways for the investing of the money.

From this perspective, it is not surprising that the alliance between the pair was formalized that Christmas when the Wolf married Morello’s twenty-two-year-old stepsister, Salvatrice Terranova. The wedding took place in St. Lucia’s church in Italian Harlem, up on East 104th Street, the Clutch Hand attending and signing as a witness.

Lupo’s union with Terranova may have been a marriage of convenience, a way of tying a man of obvious ability to the Morello family and perhaps even of sealing some sort of pact between the Mafiosi of Palermo and Corleone. If so, that did not prevent the marriage from being a success. Ignazio and Salvatrice would have five children—four girls, beginning with Onofria in 1906, and a boy, Rocco, who would eventually follow his father into the family business—and they remained wed for more than forty years. Salvatrice had nothing but praise for her husband. He was “very considerate of me, and always attempted to provide the necessities of life for myself and our children,” the Terranova girl would write. “He has been kind to us all and I would consider him and excellent father and husband.”

Marriage must have been in the air in Little Italy that year, for Lupo was not the only member of the Morello gang who wed. In the early months of 1903 the Clutch Hand, too, decided to seek a bride, though in his case it would be for a second time.

MORELLO HAD LIVED
a largely solitary existence for half a decade, ever since his first wife had died in 1898. Maria Marvelesi’s passing, at the age of only twenty-nine, perhaps as a result of malaria contracted during the family’s sojourn in Texas, had left the Mafioso with a two-year-old son, Calogero, but the boy did not live with his father and was almost certainly raised by Morello’s mother and unmarried sisters. Freed of this encumbrance, the boss preferred to flit between cheap tenement apartments in the poorest districts of the city, most of them, apparently, little more than places to sleep. He was living in East Harlem in 1900, and in a squalid, cluttered attic room downtown at 178 Chrystie Street three years later, but he was seldom to be found at any of his various addresses. When he was, he worked at night, got home late, slept in. Neighbors either did not know him or pretended not to.

Morello did feel some need for female companionship. By 1900 he was seeing another Sicilian woman, with whom he had another child, a daughter born, probably, early in 1901, and so far as the police and Secret Service were concerned, the couple lived as man and wife. But Angela Terranova did not see things that way. The Clutch Hand’s mother disapproved of his relationship, and shortly before the Barrel Murder, she and her daughters decided it was time to find her son a second wife. They wanted a woman from a family that they approved of, and one who came from Corleone.

Morello seems to have agreed—”I have a notion to get married,” he confided to one female acquaintance, asking her help in breaking off his earlier relationship—but the task of locating a suitable bride fell to his eldest sister, Marietta Morello, who was dispatched to Sicily to make the necessary arrangements. Having called for advice on relatives who still lived in Corleone, Marietta settled on a pair of sisters named Salemi. She procured photos of them and returned to New York. Morello examined the portraits, then chose the younger of the sisters, a striking twenty-year-old named Nicolina—Lina to the family. The necessary arrangements were swiftly made, and that summer Marietta Morello sailed again for Sicily, taking Lucia Terranova with her and returning in September with Lina and a substantial dowry, amounting to nearly four hundred dollars. Sailing with the Clutch Hand’s bride-to-be were her elder sister and a brother, Vincenzo Salemi. Vincenzo would marry Lucia that December, four days after Lupo the Wolf and Salvatrice were wed.

The Salemi family was clearly sealing an alliance with the Morello-Terranova clan; the Salemis were also obviously aware of their new in-laws’ criminal activities and may even have had ties of their own to the Corleone Mafia, since Lucia Terranova’s new husband, Vincenzo, became involved in New York organized crime. But Lina’s marriage to Morello, like Salvatrice’s union with Lupo, was no mere marriage of convenience. Lina would bear her husband three daughters and a son, the first in 1908, and be his staunchest supporter, too. Dark-haired, passionate, and possessed of a sharp temper, Lina could read and write—unusual accomplishments in a Sicilian woman of her time, though like Morello she spoke no English and would not learn to do so for a decade or more. She also possessed a strong sense of her own worth. There would be no more contact between Morello and his Sicilian mistress, nor even with the couple’s infant child—who died, in any case, before she reached the age of two. Nor would there be more living in cramped, decrepit rooms. Soon the Clutch Hand was established in a larger and more comfortable apartment on East 107th Street, close to his parents, sisters, and brothers. The family was still not affluent—not then, and not for several years, their rapidly increasing income being diverted into investments or offset by the sharply rising costs of running their numerous illicit businesses. But, thanks in large part to Lina, Morello was at last living in a style more suited to a man of respect.

THE FAMILY BUSINESS
was still booming, and by 1903, Lupo’s grocery empire was growing fastest of all, spreading from Little Italy to include outposts in Italian Harlem and Brooklyn. The opportunities, both commercial and criminal, seemed endless. Well-off customers were targeted with Black Hand letters. Lupo’s wholesale operation, which underpinned the retail business and supplied Italian food and wine throughout the city, was used to extort money from dozens of independent grocers who were forced to pay premium prices and who quickly learned how dangerous it was to contemplate transferring their business to a cheaper rival. Veiled threats soon gave way to violence—beginning, often, with the poisoning of the expensive and vulnerable teams of dray horses every grocer needed to make deliveries, and progressing from there to the bombing of stores and even homes. One shopkeeper, Gaetano Costa, a Brooklyn butcher, was shot dead in his own store for refusing to pay a demand for a thousand dollars, and Salvatore Manzella, who dealt in Italian wines and foods from premises on Elizabeth Street, was reduced to bankruptcy by four years of unceasing extortion. Manzella at least survived long enough to testify that he had been visited regularly by Lupo, who had forced him to sign a series of blank receipts and delivery notes. The Wolf filled these in and discounted them as he pleased. “My life was at stake,” Manzella said, asked why he did it, and in all he was bled for several thousand dollars over the years, including one sum of $1,075 in cash, which was every cent he happened to have in his store when Lupo called.

Counterfeiting, too, remained central to the Morellos’ business, though the family was by now highly wary of the Secret Service and alert to the dangers of printing its currency in Manhattan. It was safer by far, Morello calculated, to send printing plates to Italy, where forged currency could safely be run off far from the prying eyes of the new head of the New York bureau, William Flynn. The problem of smuggling the counterfeits back into the United States remained, but the success of Lupo’s wholesale business suggested a solution. By 1902 the Wolf was importing thousands of dollars’ worth of wines, olive oil, and foodstuffs from Italy, and his consignments, off-loaded at Manhattan piers, received no more than cursory inspections from customs agents. Morello arranged for his crudely printed dollars to be sealed inside gallon olive oil cans. The new operation was an immediate success; in all, considerably more than ten thousand dollars of forged notes were brought into New York under the noses of U.S. customs agents and distributed in New York, Pittsburgh, Yonkers, and perhaps half a dozen other cities.

Flynn was aware by the first days of 1903 that Morello notes were circulating in Manhattan. The Italian printers’ work was scarcely hard to spot (the notes contained no fewer than ten spelling errors, the Chief explained), but the Secret Service made little headway despite expending considerable resources in the fruitless search for the counterfeiters’ plant. A handful of queer-pushers were arrested, but none could be made to talk. Discipline in the first family was fierce—fiercer by far in 1902-3 than it had been two years earlier, and with good reason considering the jail terms handed down to Calogero Maggiore and Dude Thompson’s Irishmen.

The Clutch Hand had learned the lessons of 1900 well. His gang was now entirely Sicilian, from the queer-pushers on the street to the boodle carriers and on up to the senior Mafiosi who actually arranged for the money to be distributed. Morello and Lupo had as little to do with the business as possible; there was to be no incriminating trail of evidence to lead the police or the federal authorities to them. And the system worked well. The most important members of Morello’s family all evaded detection, and when Vito Laduca was captured in Pittsburgh with two pushers and a quantity of the boss’s five-dollar bills, he obtained his release within a week, while the pushers were both held for trial.

A handful of leaks and potential leaks were plugged, and with such decisive ruthlessness that only the weak or the extremely foolhardy would have considered betraying Morello. The most dramatic example of the Clutch Hand’s determination to protect himself came in the summer of 1902, when the appallingly mutilated remains of a Brooklyn grocer were discovered on the shore of the East River at a spot named Dead Man’s Cove. Giuseppe Catania, a strapping, muscular Sicilian, commonly thought to have the strength of two men, or even three, had run a store at 165 Columbia Street through which Mafia counterfeits were passed. Catania, who had probably been introduced to the Morello gang by Lupo during the Wolf’s brief sojourn in Brooklyn in 1901, had been missing from home for two days when a group of boys swimming in the river uncovered a pair of large potato sacks in undergrowth above the waterline. Curious, and hoping that the contents of the sacks might possibly be worth something, the boys sliced them open with their pocketknives. One contained a set of gore-saturated clothes. The other held the missing grocer’s naked body, securely trussed with a length of rope, the ankles forced up tight against the lower back and the torso all but drained of blood. The dead man’s throat had been cut, and his head dangled from his neck by a solitary tendon; he “must have bled a gallon from the horrible wound,” the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
speculated, adding that it would have taken several determined attackers to overcome so strong a man.

The police investigation into Catania’s murder got nowhere, quickly foundering amid speculation about vendettas formed long ago in Italy and fallings-out with friends. The dead man’s wife and six children swore that he had had no enemies, and the story, front-page news at first, faded from the newspapers after a week. The police did eventually conclude that the Mafia lay behind the killing, but there was no firm evidence and no arrests, and it was left to the dogged William Flynn to uncover the true motive for the murder. The murdered grocer, the Chief learned a year later from informants in Little Italy, had liked to drink, and, drunk, tended to talk as well. Word of his indiscretions had reached the Clutch Hand, who decided that no mere warning was sufficient. When the doomed man had last been seen, in Manhattan just before his murder, he had been in the company of Lupo the Wolf. Catania’s gruesome death, his near decapitation, the sealing of his body in sacks that were intended to be found—all were products of Morello’s determination to convey a message to the members of his family: Weakness and lack of discipline meant inevitable death.