The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (17 page)

Flynn spent some time going through the containers, finding nothing of special interest until he reached the box that held the items taken from Morello’s bodyguard, Petto the Ox. The Secret Service man tipped the contents over the desk and let his eyes wander over the detritus of the Ox’s life: a motley assembly of cigar butts, handkerchiefs, loose change, and junk. Toward the bottom of the pile he noticed a scrap of paper. Flynn spread it open on the desk and saw it was a pawn ticket issued by Fry’s Capital Loan Company, a store at 276 Bowery. The ticket was dated April 14, the day after the Barrel Murder. Capital Loan had advanced Petto the sum of one dollar in exchange for a pocket watch.

Flynn thought back to the day of the murder and recalled that Madonia’s waistcoat had sported a watch chain but no watch. He called Detective Sergeant Carey. Had the ticket been redeemed? he asked. No, Carey said; Madonia’s wife had stated that her husband was carrying a large gold timepiece—an item worth far more than a dollar, even to a pawnbroker. The police believed the old watch must be Petto’s.

Flynn knew nothing of Salvatore Madonia’s statement, nothing of the cheap tin watch the boy had loaned his father, but the pawn ticket intrigued him. Check it, he urged Sergeant Carey. Just to be certain.

IT WAS NOT UNTIL
the next day that Carey got around to visiting the Capital Loan Company, and by then the sergeant had read Petrosino’s dossier. He asked a clerk to redeem Petto’s pledge and waited while the man looked over the ticket, rummaged under the counter, and produced a battered timepiece with the outline of a locomotive punched into its cover.

Carey recognized the watch at once. Its description matched Salvatore Madonia’s, right down to a mass of scratches on the neck where the boy had once tried to pry the casing open. It seemed unlikely that the barrel victim would have given away a watch belonging to his son, and since young Madonia’s father had not been short of money, it followed that the timepiece had almost certainly been stolen by his murderer. The sergeant hastened back to Mulberry Street to find McClusky.

Carey, as he most likely knew, was only just in time. No one had imagined, until now, that Petto was a man of any importance in Morello’s gang, or guessed that the Ox might have played more than a minor part in the Barrel Murder. Indeed, the police had thought so little of him that Petto was still being held on a bail of just five hundred dollars, a figure so low that he had by now found a bail bondsman willing to supply it. The police had uncovered the one piece of evidence tying the Morellos to Madonia’s murder on the very morning Petto was due to be released.

McClusky recognized the importance of Carey’s find at once and wasted no time in placing a phone call to the House of Detention. Then, having instructed the warden not to release Petto under any circumstances, the inspector hurried over to the Criminal Courts building on Centre Street to speak to the district attorney. The upshot of all this activity was the best news the police had had in weeks: Petto’s bondsman was turned away from the House of Detention, and, shortly afterward, the Ox was arraigned and charged with murder.

Word of these developments did much to restore morale at police headquarters, where McClusky made several more bullish statements to the press. Sergeants Carey and Petrosino resumed the questioning of Morello’s men with extra vigor—as promised, several of the prisoners were subjected to the physical interrogation methods of the third degree—and the two detectives began to think for the first time that they were making progress. Pietro Inzerillo and Joseph Fanaro both showed signs of talking, Carey said, and when Fanaro, who had been seen in the murdered man’s company more often than any other member of the gang, spent several hours closeted with Assistant District Attorney Garvan, word spread that the Sicilian was prepared to testify. To Carey, even Morello

seemed to be weakening; I thought that he might talk. It had not been unusual to find that gang leaders like him would talk, for the tradition prevails among this type of criminal organization that the king can do no wrong, and Morello was a king.

So far as Petrosino was concerned, however, this was wishful thinking. Morello was too stubborn and too well aware of the weaknesses of the police case to break as easily as that, and Fanaro and Inzerillo were both too frightened of their leader to risk turning against him. If the NYPD wanted more arraignments and convictions, it would have to prove its case against a stone wall of Sicilian obstruction, starting with a strong performance at the coming inquest. The effort would be worthwhile; the right verdict would open the way for charges to be brought against the other members of the gang.

A week remained before the inquest opened, long enough for Petrosino to make the necessary arrangements. First Salvatore Madonia and his mother were ordered back to Manhattan to give evidence. Then Giuseppe Di Priemo was brought down from Sing Sing to be examined as to his part in the Madonia affair. The witnesses were plainly reluctant, Salvatore perhaps most of all. Among them, however, or so Petrosino hoped, the three could do much to explain Madonia’s death and illuminate his relations with Morello.

Before any of that could happen, though, the Manhattan coroner would need to find a dozen men willing to serve as a jury.

FOR GEORGE LEBRUN
, the Barrel Murder inquest was turning rapidly into a nightmare.

LeBrun was Manhattan’s assistant coroner, and one of his innumerable duties at Coroner Gustav Scholer’s court was to empanel inquest juries. He had years of experience of this, and never had he found a routine task so difficult to organize. Newspaper coverage of the “Mafia murder case” had left the readers of the New York press in little doubt as to the ruthlessness and brutality of the killers, and the majority of the jurors summoned would not sit, citing various excuses. “Even with the formal arrests,” LeBrun confessed, “I had difficulty getting enough men to serve,” and the assistant coroner was left in no doubt why. Several potential jurors, the man from the
Herald
wrote, “made no secret of the fact that if it could be avoided they would be most loath to sit on a jury and have to bring in a verdict of guilty against a member of the Mafia, even if the weight of evidence was conclusive, and it was evident that in the minds of several of them the prospect of Mafia vengeance in such an event was extremely vivid.” When, after a delay of almost a day, a jury was finally assembled and the jurors’ names were read, not one among the dozen was Italian. Most were stolid men with German names who lived far from Little Italy.

Interest in the case was great; every public seat was filled, and a line stretched down the corridor outside. Most of those who did gain entry to the courtroom were Sicilian, and though these spectators sat impassively through most of the proceedings, there were ominous stirrings on the public benches whenever critical pieces of evidence were heard. Scholer, unlike Peter Barlow, never ordered that his court be cleared.

Assistant District Attorney Garvan again took charge of questioning the witnesses. The most dramatic moment of the morning came when Petto the Ox was on the stand. The prisoner, who had sat sullenly through Garvan’s interrogation and refused to look at the array of stilettos and other “gruesome objects” brandished by the ADA, was stonewalling more questions

when a photograph of the murdered man showing him as he appeared after death, was suddenly thrust by Detective Sergeant Petrosino beneath the eyes of Petto, who is directly charged with the murder. The man gave a start of surprise, his eyes rolled, and he clasped his hands convulsively, but it was only a moment … he recovered his self control and, shrugging his shoulders, refused to look again at the photograph, although it remained in front of him for fifteen minutes.

Mostly, though, Garvan and Petrosino struggled to make an impression on their witnesses. Newspaper reporters made much of the admissions of Nicola Testa, who was the butcher’s boy at Vito Laduca’s Stanton Street store and who startled the press bench by agreeing that he was the nephew of the murdered Brooklyn grocer Giuseppe Catania—but that was merely circumstantial evidence. Giovanni Zacconi, a Sicilian with a stake in the same store, was named in court as the owner of the wagon that had carried Madonia’s corpse away, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. But Joseph Fanaro, of whom much had been expected, had plainly reconsidered his position since his meeting with the district attorney. Placed on the witness stand, he remained determinedly mute, denying absolutely that he knew Madonia even though he had made a lengthy statement on the subject only two days earlier. It was “a remarkable exhibition of an apparent loss of memory,” the
Herald
caustically remarked.

Fanaro’s mulishness was the first clear sign that Garvan and Petrosino’s case was not going according to plan, but the remainder of Garvan’s witnesses fared even worse under the defendants’ steely gaze. Lucy and Salvatore Madonia had both given statements identifying the tin watch that Carey had retrieved from Capital Loan, but, once on the witness stand, Salvatore began to speak with “evident misgivings,” terror etched on his face. Carey was there to see the youth give evidence. “The watch,” he said,

was handed to the lad. He looked at it and was about to speak when there was a shuffling of feet and a hissing in the courtroom, which was filled with swarthy-faced men. One of these jumped up and put his fingers to his lips. Young Madonia was now not so sure it was his father’s watch.

“It looks like mine,” the boy stammered at last in answer to Garvan’s question, “but there may be many watches like it in the world, and I cannot say it is.”

Lucy Madonia, the dead man’s wife, was just as equivocal. She, too, was handed the timepiece, and she, too, started as the same stirring of bodies and rustling of feet swept through the courtroom. The same dark-skinned man half rose for a second time, and “Mrs. Madonia,” Carey said, “positive the day before that the watch was her husband’s, now suffered a lapse of memory.” The Madonias’ useless testimony was a huge blow to the police, shattering the one firm link between Petto the Ox and the Barrel Murder, and what was left of the police case crumbled when Pietro Inzerillo took the stand. The confectioner, “who had been prepared, among other things, to admit the presence of the sugar barrels in the rear room of his shop,” blanched at the same sinister shuffling of feet and refused to talk.

The final witness called to the stand on that first afternoon was Giuseppe Di Priemo, Madonia’s imprisoned brother-in-law. The squat Sicilian was the last of the witnesses whose evidence might have indicted the Morello gang. Knowing that Di Priemo had every reason to loathe the Clutch Hand, Petrosino had done what he could to persuade the queer-pusher to give evidence, promising full protection from Morello’s family. Apparently reassured by that guarantee, Di Priemo had spent nearly two hours two days earlier giving a statement to Francis Garvan, but once in court, he took the oath and promptly withdrew every word. The counterfeiter “laughed on the stand,” a bitter Sergeant Carey would recall, “and said that Petto was his very good friend and surely would not have killed his brother-in-law. Yet we knew he hated the bull-necked man.” This once, Carey thought, his witness was not particularly intimidated by the massed ranks of Sicilians in the courtroom. So far as the detective sergeant was concerned, Di Priemo had an altogether different motive for his silence: He planned to exact his own revenge for the murder of his sister’s husband.

The inquest ran for seven more days after that, but the verdict had been decided long before it staggered to a close. Madonia, the jury ruled, had certainly been murdered—but by “a person or persons unknown.” There would be no more indictments; even Petto was eventually released from his damp cell in the Tombs. Morello was never heard to utter another word upon the subject. But it was not long before events elsewhere brought the Barrel Murder back to the attention of New York’s papers. When they did, the city and the city’s police got a longer, deeper, cooler look at the dangers of angering the Mafia.

GIUSEPPE MORELLO LEFT
few clues to his true character beyond the little that can be deduced from his crimes, which were intelligently planned and resolutely executed. He was in many respects conventionally Sicilian: a man who took his duties both as son and as the head of his own family seriously, and was so determined to honor his father’s memory that three of his own sons, in succession, were christened “Calogero.” More than that, though, Morello was a man of dominant personality and steely determination, both attributes that were most likely products of the struggle he was forced to wage to overcome his disability. His exceptional qualities—for a murderer, at least—are evident in his achievements, for though there had been Mafiosi in the United States long before the Clutch Hand arrived there, none was ever regarded with so much awe by his fellow criminals.

There was, even so, little that was attractive in Morello’s makeup. True, he was an innovative boss, one who rarely felt bound by other people’s rules, and he created, in the first family, a criminal organization of considerable effectiveness. The gang was, moreover, very much his own creation; it bore only a passing resemblance to a Sicilian Mafia family, and not the least of the Clutch Hand’s talents was an ability to weld together a disparate group of Mafiosi from different towns and backgrounds and make them so formidable that they gained an ascendancy over all the other gangs in New York’s Italian district. But Morello was also treacherous and unforgiving, an autocrat who suppressed all dissent and rarely sought advice from even his closest lieutenants. Only Lupo the Wolf, of all his numerous associates, seems not to have feared him; the remaining members of the family acted as much from terror as from loyalty. Chief Flynn, who mulled over the puzzle of Morello’s personality for years, concluded that the boss was interested chiefly in power, not money, which explained why he lived modestly and why he never made as much as he might have done from his murderous career. For Flynn, the Clutch Hand’s actions were really not hard to explain. Morello, he wrote, was simply “bad—thoroughly, conscientiously and zealously bad. … There are few men of whom you may truthfully say that they enjoyed being criminals. Old Giuseppe was one of them.”