The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (16 page)

THE CATANIA MURDER
plugged one potential leak in the Mafia’s counterfeiting operation, and Morello would have no more trouble with men talking when drunk or spilling secrets. That much was proved at the end of 1902, when several members of his ring were caught in Yonkers, just to the north of New York, while passing the Clutch Hand’s bills.

The pushers, Isadore Crocevera and Giuseppe Di Priemo, Madonia’s brother-in-law, were typical minor members of the Morello gang. Both came from western Sicily—Di Priemo from the small town of Santa Margherita in the province of Agrigento, and Crocevera probably from Palermo—and both had only recently arrived in the United States.

Accompanied by a boodle carrier named Giuseppe Giallombardo, the two Sicilians spent the evenings of December 29 and 31 passing Morello’s five-dollar notes in exchange for drinks, cigarettes, and food. They tendered one bill at Rafael Barbarita’s saloon and another at John Rossi’s butcher’s shop, where it was presented in payment for a packet of kidneys and pork chops—butchers were favored targets among counterfeiters because the grease that accumulated on their hands made it harder for them to detect forged currency, which also tended to be greasy.

Nothing untoward occurred on December 29, but the three Sicilians were less fortunate on New Year’s Eve. One of the storekeepers who had been handed a counterfeit bill took a second look at it when the pushers left his premises, then summoned a passing patrolman. Di Priemo and Crocevera were unlucky. The officer spotted the pair huddled in conversation just along the street, and both men were arrested.

Morello would have been grimly satisfied to know how well his pushers stood up under questioning. Flynn made a series of determined efforts to wring information from the prisoners, but neither Crocevera nor Di Priemo would utter an incriminating word. Several separate interrogations failed to drag a shred of useful detail out of either man, and even Chief Flynn, who had grown used to Sicilian recalcitrance after eight months in New York, was convinced that this mulishness was based on something more than ingrained hatred of authority. “I knew that none of these men would talk,” the Secret Service man would write. “If any one of them did, and was released, his body would doubtless be found, broken and mutilated, within 24 hours.”

Flynn tried one last subterfuge to get his prisoners to talk—a clever effort to set the two Sicilians at each other’s throats the next time they were questioned. “With a great show of secrecy” (he explained his tactics some years later),

I kept Di Priemo locked up with me in an inner office for more than an hour. Crocevera, of course, knew that he was in there, and my scheme was to make him think that Di Priemo had confessed, thus leading the other prisoner, in a spirit of spite, to incriminate his companion, and perhaps divulge many secrets of the band.

After I thought Crocevera had had time to think things over, I dismissed Di Priemo. As he left my office I went to the door with him, and in sight and hearing of Crocevera shook him cordially by the hand and bade him goodnight heartily, as if I was much gratified by what he had told me. As a matter of fact, he had told me next to nothing, but I wanted to strengthen Crocevera’s suspicions against him.

It was an elaborate charade, and one that might have worked in different circumstances, but not with two members of the Morello family. So far as Flynn could see, his efforts had no effect. Crocevera glowered fiercely as Di Priemo left. But when he was marched into Flynn’s office moments later, he was as unforthcoming as ever.

Morello’s queer-pushers went to prison three months later without betraying their superiors—Giallombardo for six years, Di Priemo for four years, Crocevera for three—and leaving the Secret Service without leads to the inner councils of the gang. But Flynn’s efforts had not been in vain. As he would not discover until later, the Chief’s subterfuge had indeed convinced Crocevera that the family had been betrayed, and if the counterfeiter had nothing to say to Flynn, he had plenty to tell the other members of Morello’s gang. Word of Di Priemo’s supposed betrayal reached the Clutch Hand’s ears, and the queer-pusher’s willingness to deal with Flynn was soon common knowledge in Little Italy.

How much Di Priemo knew of this is hard to say, though it would be surprising if he was unaware of his associates’ suspicions. Whatever the truth, the pusher was safe for the time being, his prison cell in Sing Sing being beyond the reach of Mafia justice. The same could not be said, however, of Di Priemo’s brother-in-law, Benedetto Madonia of Buffalo, who occupied a more senior position in the Morello family and had likely introduced Di Priemo to the gang. That had been a serious miscalculation, as it now appeared, and it was followed by further errors. In March, Morello had asked Madonia to go to Pittsburgh and arrange for the release of the two queer-pushers who had been arrested there with Vito Laduca. Madonia failed and, worse, wrote to New York to request money with which to grease the wheels of Pittsburgh justice. When Morello replied that there was none available, the Buffalo man responded with an angry note, full of abuse, in which he accused the Clutch Hand of caring nothing for the men who worked for him. There was bad blood between the two thereafter, which explained why Morello seized the thousand dollars that Madonia raised in Buffalo and sent to Little Italy to pay for his brother-in-law Di Priemo’s defense.

It was only a few days after this, in the first week of April 1903, that the Clutch Hand received another letter from Madonia. This time the Buffalo man wrote to announce his imminent arrival in New York. He wanted an audience with Morello, and help in arranging for Di Priemo to be moved to a prison nearer Buffalo. Above all, he wanted his money back.

Few things were more likely to anger the Clutch Hand than a demand for money, particularly one from a man he thought had let his family down. Morello sent back word agreeing to the meeting, but scarcely for the reason that his lieutenant hoped. Then he set about preparing a reception. Madonia could come to New York if he wished to. But if he did, he would not leave alive.

CHAPTER 6
VENGEANCE

“C
LEAR THE COURT OF ALL PERSONS HAVING NO BUSINESS HERE
!”

Peter Barlow leaned forward on the magistrate’s dais at Jefferson Market police court, a Gothic monstrosity that rose in gaudy red-brick tiers over 10th Street at Sixth Avenue. He was annoyed that he had to shout to make himself heard above the rising hubbub in his crowded courtroom. It was bad enough that he was hearing cases on a Sunday worse that he had been given charge of the arraignment of Giuseppe Morello and twelve of his associates, all held since their arrest three days earlier on suspicion of involvement in the Barrel Murder. And it was certainly intolerable that, with the prisoners marshaled just outside the door, all waiting for the hearing to begin, his courtroom was filled to overflowing with a throng of incomprehensible Sicilians, most of them fierce-looking men in frayed second-best suits, and all of them talking at once.

“Clear the court!”

Barlow was new to Jefferson Market. He had been a magistrate for less than a year. But he had heard about the Black Hand and the Mafia, and knew that Italian gangsters habitually packed courtrooms with their intimidating friends. These men would sit in the front rows of the public seating and glare menacingly at the prosecution witnesses as they took the stand. Shushing, hissing, threatening gestures—all were used to cow their adversaries into silence. Faced with a fierce-looking row of hoodlums, and all too uncomfortably aware that the names and addresses of those who offered testimony were routinely published in the press, many a witness stuttered and lost his chain of thought, or retracted every word of the statement he had sworn to give. Barlow had little doubt that the Morello gang hoped to dissuade as many of Chesty George McClusky’s witnesses as they could from giving evidence.

“Clear the court!”

The first few people in the public seats began to move at last, but it took Barlow’s ushers several minutes to eject the last of the unwanted spectators—most still protesting in their native language—and to escort in the prisoners. Morello stood flanked by Vito Laduca (whose knife, the police revealed, had been smeared with a rust-red substance that they believed was human blood) and Messina Genova, also a butcher, who Petrosino now believed had struck Madonia’s deathblow. Bail on these three had been set high, at $5,000 a man. Most of the remaining prisoners had their bails fixed at a more modest $1,000, including Ignazio Lupo, who had been the last of the thirteen men to be arrested. A few minor members of the gang, including three who had been in the United States for only a month, were held on bonds of a mere $100.

It was April 19, 1903, the first day of the first hearing into the barrel killing, and the day before Joseph Petrosino would finally confirm the victim’s identity. For men who claimed to work at menial jobs, the Sicilians had secured first-rate representation. Morello and Lupo had retained Charles Le Barbier, one of the half-dozen most celebrated lawyers in Manhattan; five lesser attorneys from Le Barbier’s firm had charge of the other members of the gang. According to the police, the legal fees had been met by a compulsory levy raised in Little Italy by other members of Morello’s family, the total collected being as much as ten thousand dollars. Over the next few weeks, word would filter in that similar collections had been made in other cities on the eastern seaboard, a startling testimony to the boss’s growing influence. In Boston, seven Sicilians appeared at police headquarters to beg for protection against the Mafia, “by which,” a local paper noted,

they claimed to have been ordered to contribute to the defense fund in the barrel murder case. Each of the foreigners showed a letter from New York. They were thoroughly frightened even when they were in the secure shelter of [the chief of police’s] private office. The letters told them that everywhere they went they were marked men; that the eye of the Mafia was on them always; [and] that they were as good as dead if they did not send the required money immediately.

Le Barbier and his associates set about earning their fat fees as soon as Barlow opened the proceedings. “I ask that the weeding out process begin today,” Le Barbier began. “There are a great many prisoners, and as this was a secret murder, all these men could not have had a share in it.” A “bunch” of his clients should be dismissed at once, the advocate continued. When Barlow rejected his request, Le Barbier fired back by highlighting the single greatest weakness in the prosecution case:

I am sure the police are on the wrong track. They have made a great mistake. The proof of this error is apparent when, from day to day, they have failed to establish the identity of the victim of these murders. I ask that the Assistant District Attorney point out one among the prisoners against whom there is some ground for the belief that he is guilty.

Le Barbier’s interjection set the tone. Hamstrung by Inspector McClusky’s insistence on premature arrests, Assistant District Attorney Francis Garvan had no real answer to him, nothing but hope that an identification would be made and some prospect that he could at least prove that the gang had been engaged in a conspiracy. To make matters worse, Morello himself gave away nothing on the stand; the Clutch Hand denied so much as knowing the dead man, and answered most questions with a shrug of the shoulders and “I don’t remember.” Lupo, called next, struck the reporters in the courtroom as suave and unruffled. He “perjured himself again and again,” one newsman thought, but there was little that even McClusky could do about such lies other than to vow to waiting reporters that “the prisoners will be given the third degree to the limit in the hope that one of them will break down.”

It was not until the hearing’s second morning that Garvan got his stroke of luck. The assistant DA was halfway through another unproductive examination when a clerk from his office crept into the courtroom with a piece of paper on which was scribbled information just phoned in from Buffalo: a name, and the details of the dead man’s home and circumstances. It took Garvan a moment to digest the news. Then he smiled, put down the note, and started to recall the prisoners, beginning with Morello. Had they ever met a Benedetto Madonia? The result was the closest thing to a sensation the newsmen covering the hearing had yet witnessed. “Each denied knowing the man,” a reporter from the
Sun
observed, “but the first time the question was asked, there was a great babbling in Italian among the prisoners and they were apparently very much excited.”

Garvan got in a few more good blows after that. His best moment came the next day, when he produced the ledger Flynn had found in Morello’s apartment, with its entries relating to Madonia, and with it a letter Petrosino had recovered from the dead man’s family. The letter, addressed to Buffalo, had been scrawled in red ink in the same crabbed Sicilian script as the ledger entry, and Garvan forced the Clutch Hand to admit that he had written it. It was proof that Morello knew the barrel victim. The letter was also, at least in the eyes of the police, the dead man’s death warrant. “In the Mafia,” one officer explained to the
Evening Journal
,

it is not customary to threaten. The leader does not communicate to a suspected member that his acts have rendered him subject to the death penalty. Their method of procedure is more subtle.

To the offending member of the Mafia a letter written with red ink, in lieu of blood, is sent. … Compliance with the contents, or the contrary, will not affect the doom of the recipient. To an Italian versed in the ways of the Mafia, the receipt of such a letter is equivalent to a sentence of death.

The press made a good deal of this revelation, and the prosecution could now prove, by way of the letter and the ledger, that Morello had lied under oath in swearing that he did not know Madonia. But neither the written evidence nor anything that the ADA pried out of the prisoners proved that any one of them had participated in the Barrel Murder. Madonia had last been seen by Flynn’s operatives walking off down Prince Street at eight in the evening with several of Morello’s men. But what had happened to him after that remained a mystery. Speculation, circumstantial evidence, tips from several informers—all had helped the police to reconstruct those last few hours. But none of it was admissible in court. There was insufficient information, Barlow concluded on the fourth day of the hearing, to hold any one of the prisoners on a charge of murder. That meant that all thirteen would have to be discharged.

Word of the prisoners’ impending release spread quickly to the crowd of friends and relatives waiting outside the courtroom. But Morello and his men got no farther than the courthouse steps before McClusky rearrested them, this time on charges of perjury—each man having denied on the witness stand that he so much as knew Madonia.

Lupo was held on a separate counterfeiting charge; correspondence that Flynn had taken from his room showed that he had been mailing forged notes to Italian laborers in Canada.

So far as most New Yorkers were concerned, all this legal maneuvering meant little. Morello was still under arrest in the House of Detention with his men. The police were searching for more evidence. There was still time for them to make a case, and Petrosino had brought Salvatore Madonia, the dead man’s son, to New York to give statements. The young Madonia indeed proved to be a font of useful information: He gave the police details of his father’s thoughts, his movements, and the belongings he had taken with him on his travels. At times Salvatore amplified or contradicted the information Petrosino had obtained from the young man’s mother. She had described her husband’s pocket watch as a valuable gold one, for example, but Salvatore said Benedetto had actually taken his son’s cheap tin watch when he left for New York. It was easily identified, Madonia added, being stamped with an image of a locomotive on its cover.

Salvatore had little doubt about the murder. “I believe my father was killed by the Mafia because he threatened to reveal secrets which had come into his possession,” he told Petrosino. “He knew a great deal about the members of Morello’s gang, and I believe that through fear or revenge they murdered him.” His statement was so persuasive that even the usually cautious sergeant made a bullish statement of his own when cornered by a reporter from the
Evening Journal
. (“This murder,” the Italian detective said, “has done more to reveal the extent to which the Mafia flourishes in New York than anything else that ever happened before. Heretofore the name ‘Mafia’ has been associated with the Italians of New Orleans. It is now made clear to every one that the largest and most dangerous branch of the society in existence has its headquarters right here in New York.”) But there was plenty more that Petrosino wanted from his witness, not least his statement in an open court. The inquest into the barrel victim’s death had just been scheduled for the first of May, and that would give the police another opportunity to interrogate Morello under oath. That evening the detective booked Madonia into a hotel on Bleecker Street and left him there under the protection of a Sergeant Illich.

Petrosino planned to return next morning, but he was not the only person in Manhattan who saw the young man as a vital witness, and something took place that evening to shatter his informant’s fragile confidence. Madonia begged Illich to stay the night with him and double-locked his door. Rising early the next morning, the young man then declared that he would not stay in New York any longer. “If I remain here they will kill me,” he informed his bodyguard. “I shall have to go away from Buffalo and hide somewhere where I am not known. Even then I am afraid they will find me. Their vengeance never rests.”

There was nothing that Sergeant Illich or anybody else could say to dissuade the boy, and an hour or two later Madonia was on board a fast train back to Buffalo. With a week to go until the inquest, the police had just lost their most important witness.

WILLIAM FLYNN HAD
barely thought about the barrel case for several days. There had been so little time; the demands of his heavy caseload had confined him to the collection of scraps of extra information that he had forwarded to Washington. He and his men had played no part in McClusky’s laborious and unproductive questioning of the thirteen Sicilians or in the proceedings at Jefferson Market. Nor had Flynn looked in any detail at the exhibits and evidence the police had gathered.

Barlow’s hearing changed all that. The public might feel reassured that Morello remained in custody, and be taken in by optimistic statements that the barrel mystery was close to a solution; Flynn knew better. The evidence against the counterfeiters was so weak that it seemed likely that the entire gang would escape conviction. Irritated though the Chief still was by McClusky’s handling of the case, he felt that he should try to help.

McClusky made no objection when Flynn called at headquarters on April 25 and asked if he could see the evidence; after Barlow’s ruling, even the police inspector was willing to admit that he would welcome some assistance. Flynn was shown into an empty room, and, a few minutes later, several boxes were brought in and piled against a desk for him. Most contained the personal possessions of the thirteen prisoners, seized from their homes or taken from their pockets ten days earlier.