The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (25 page)

The guns that Lupo had brought consisted of several revolvers and a case of repeating rifles of the most modern design, each capable of firing fifteen shots a minute. The Wolf gave a brief demonstration of the weapons, to general acclaim; then, at his order, the rest of the gang settled down to modify the ammunition he had brought. Each slug was carefully scored crosswise across its tip, hollowing out the point to create dum dum bullets that, Lupo explained, “would spread out and tear nasty holes instead of neatly boring through.” The idea was, Comito said, “accepted with much laughter,” and the Wolf seemed pleased that any police who discovered the house would have “a pleasant visit.”

By the time the bullets had been modified, Katrina had prepared a late supper for the gang. There were not enough chairs to go around, so she and Comito stood, “acting as waiters to these lords at the table,” while Lupo, Cecala, and Zu Vincenzo gossiped and laughed with Giglio and Cina. The talk was of how the Wolf had evaded his numerous creditors and the New York police and spent the last three months hiding on a relative’s farm not far away, and of Cecala’s efforts to sell the forged Canadian bills.

“What news do you bring, Ignazio?” Zu Vincenzo asked at last. The meal was over and the Mafiosi were lounging around the stove sinking glasses of wine.

“You know all that I know,” Lupo replied, “except perhaps that Petrosino has gone to Italy.”

Comito had never heard of Petrosino, but he could scarcely mistake the bitter hatred that Morello’s men felt for him. “He has ruined many,” the Wolf spat. “Here’s a drink to our success here, and a hope of death to him.” And they all raised their glasses in a toast.

“It is a pity,” Lupo added, “that it must be done stealthily—that he cannot first be made to suffer as he has made so many others suffer. But he guards his hide so well that it will have to be done quickly.”

Comito thought of what Cecala and Uncle Vincent had told him of the many branches of their nameless society, of their boast that it was “possible for us to do things in one part of the world and have the other half of the affair carried out so far away that no suspicion can possibly come to us”—and of how confident they seemed to be that retribution was about to rain down on their enemy.

Whoever this Petrosino was, he thought, and whatever he was doing in Italy, he was clearly in the gravest danger.

CHAPTER 9
“SEE THE FINE PARSLEY”

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF NOVEMBER 15, 1908, AT MUCH THE SAME
time that Antonio Comito was boarding his ferry up the Hudson River to Highland, the men of Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino’s Italian Squad raided a Black Hand bomb-making factory concealed in the rear of a tenement in Little Italy. The squad made five arrests and seized a total of nineteen evil-looking bombs of various designs, each of them tightly wrapped in cord or bandages and detonated by a twelve-inch fuse. Any one of these murderous devices would, the lieutenant remarked, be “fully capable of destroying a house.” Three days later Petrosino was in the news again, announcing his solution to a kidnapping mystery in East Harlem, and over the next three months the Italian Squad was called in to investigate eight bombings, several dozen Black Hand extortion threats, and fully a score of murders in the immigrant districts, at least half of which were thought to be the work of various gangs.

The year was ending much as it had begun, with crime rates rising in Little Italy. The murder rate was up. The number of bombings was up, and so was the number of threats and Black Hand letters reported to the police—a total that scarcely reflected the incidence of extortion in the Italian districts in any case, as the members of Petrosino’s squad knew perfectly well. Attempts at turning back the tide got nowhere. James March, a wealthy Italian American who lived on the East Side, set up a “White Hand” society, consisting of respectable men willing to take a stand against the criminals, but it collapsed in only a few months, as had a similar organization in Chicago. “I have tried,” March said, slumped in defeat, “to get up a society among the Italians for the purpose of giving information against blackmailing Italians to the police, but nobody will join it. Some of them would rather pay blackmail and thus encourage the scoundrels, than give information against them.”

Italian crime was increasingly businesslike, better organized, more ambitious. When Petrosino rounded up the Black Hand gang led by one Francesco Santori, he seized account books filled with meticulously detailed entries that recorded the criminals’ associates and the names and addresses of the Italians who paid the gang protection money. “The list covered four pages,” the detective wrote, “and showed that at least 60 men employed in labor camps in various parts of the state were paying to someone sums ranging from $1 to $3 a week.” The greater sophistication of the gangs posed all sorts of problems. Petrosino himself found it increasingly difficult to employ his old methods of detection anywhere in Little Italy. Once it had been enough for him to adopt some rough disguise and mingle with the clientele in the right sort of saloons. Now he was swiftly recognized wherever he went. Crooks roped in small boys and street peddlers to warn them when the detective was spotted. The name Petrosino means “parsley” in the dialect of southern Italy, and petty criminals and toughened gangsters alike soon learned to be on their guard whenever vendors’ cries of “I have some good parsley! See the fine parsley!” came ringing through the tenements.

Just as bad, in the detective’s opinion, was the continuing problem of obtaining convictions in the courts. Even the relative handful of Italian criminals who were arrested, charged, and tried still all too often escaped justice because terrified witnesses would not testify against them. The only real solution, Petrosino believed, was to deport as many undesirables as possible back to Italy and stop any more like them from entering the United States.

Petrosino had been urging New York to consider deportation as a weapon for years, ever since 1905, when the Stanton Street store once owned by Vito Laduca was blown to pieces by a Black Hand bomb and the men of the Italian Squad were driven to the point of exasperation by the impossibility of pursuing their inquiry to a successful conclusion. Italian crime had become “an epidemic,” the detective observed then, and “the only remedy [was] deportation.” He could pick out a thousand Italians who deserved to be sent back home. Within three years, Petrosino had increased that estimate; there were now five thousand Italians with criminal records in their hometowns who ought to be deported, he remarked to
The New York Times
. As for stopping such men from emigrating to the United States, the solution was to persuade the Italian government to permit the New York police to operate a bureau on its territory. American policemen in Italy could examine the credentials of would-be immigrants and bar those with criminal records from entering the country.

There was, of course, no chance that the Italian government would let a foreign police force operate on its soil, and though the immigration laws were tightened somewhat in 1907—with the result that Petrosino received from Rome a list of fifty “notorious” criminals who could legally be deported back to Italy—the problems that the detective faced were scarcely lessened for several years. The new immigration legislation was loosely drafted, and as many as half of the men that Petrosino attempted to charge under it obtained their release before they could be hustled onto a ship back home. The only really positive change, in fact, was the appointment of a tough new police commissioner to succeed William McAdoo. Theodore Bingham, who took up the post in 1906, was the first head of the NYPD to publicly back Petrosino and vow to tackle the problem of crime in Little Italy.

General Bingham—he had served with the Army Corps of Engineers and came to New York from a long posting in Washington—was one of the more active and more controversial police commissioners in New York’s long history. A brusque, inflexible character who had lost one leg and had strong views on the problem of ethnic crime, the general was soon courting outrage in an article that suggested that fully 85 percent of New York’s criminals were “of exotic origin”—more than half of them Jews and a fifth Italians, he added. The latter, in Bingham’s considered opinion, were “a riffraff of desperate scoundrels, ex-convicts and jailbirds,” views that caused such outrage that the commissioner was forced to issue a public apology. But Bingham stuck to the promises he had made to Petrosino anyway. He was willing to provide the resources needed to strike at the roots of Italian crime.

Petrosino was invited to submit his views in a report soon after Bingham took up his new job. His recommendations were sweeping and almost entirely impractical. The detective wanted a regulation banning more than one family from living in an apartment, which would reduce overcrowding in Little Italy and help “break up the gangs.” He wanted pushcarts banned as well, “because they are used to transport bombs,”

and much tighter controls on the sale of explosives to Italians. Above all, Petrosino said, criminal law in general should be made more severe, “more Italian,” because legislation enshrining the rights of individuals merely encouraged Sicilians and Neapolitans, who were not used to it, “to let loose all their lowest instincts.” The best place to start, he added, would be to tighten the existing regulations on deportation and then encourage the Italian government “to send us the record of every criminal who has moved to America.”

It was a remarkable document, one that reflected Petrosino’s years of frustration more than it did practical policy, and of course there was not the slightest prospect that most of its recommendations would ever be acted on. Bingham, after all, had no power to change the laws of the United States. In fact, the only one of the detective’s recommendations that could easily be pursued was the suggestion that more effort be put into obtaining copies of Italian penal certificates, which were documents that detailed the criminal records of men who might seek to emigrate to the United States, and so highlighted who should be denied admission to the country.

Bingham decided to start with those.

IT WAS THE
Herald
that announced the news, on February 20, 1909.

Theodore Bingham had taken stock of the situation in Little Italy and decided on a radical solution, the New York newspaper reported. There would be no further expansion of the Italian Squad, no revisions to existing regulations. Instead, a brand-new squad had been created, a “secret service” branch of the Police Department, and Petrosino had been appointed to head it. The lieutenant had been given fourteen men and instructed to use them “to crush the Black Hand and anarchists of the city”—extortionists and political radicals alike being more than willing to use bombs in order to achieve their aims. That was not all, however, for the Secret Service branch was to have a far wider jurisdiction than the Italian Squad. Bingham reserved the right to deploy Petrosino and his men “for any purpose that [he] may see fit”—which, as the
Herald
noted in a worried aside, meant, at least in theory, that “New York now has a secret police service similar to those in Paris and other national capitals.”

For the moment, though, the Secret Service branch was to be devoted to Italian crime, and it was to work covertly. Petrosino aside, none of its officers were named; nor were its men to be subject to scrutiny by the NYPD. Petrosino was to answer directly to the commissioner, and Bingham had secured thirty thousand dollars of private funding, almost certainly from the same rich Italians who had tried and failed to set up the White Hand society seeking to take a stand against Italian criminals. It was enough to keep his new squad running for at least a year without the need to account to New York’s aldermen, or anybody else, as to what the cash was being spent on.

What persuaded Petrosino to accept a transfer to the Secret Service branch is not known. Quite probably he was persuaded by the commissioner’s promise that the new squad would be better equipped to tackle Italian crime and that someone would be sent to Europe to obtain the longed-for penal certificates. If so, the lieutenant’s enthusiasm failed to survive the general’s next bombshell. Bingham wanted Petrosino himself to travel to Italy.

Going home as an important emissary, nearly forty years after arriving in the United States, ought to have appealed to the detective; it might have been seen as one of the great challenges of his career, perhaps even as an opportunity to recuperate from his exhausting round of work in Manhattan. As it was, though, the offer was not welcome. The mission demanded a diplomat, someone capable of establishing warm relations with the Italian police, which Petrosino assuredly was not. It might also be dangerous. Bingham’s man knew perfectly well that plenty of his former adversaries were now at large in Italy, particularly Sicily, and that many would be only too pleased to renew acquaintance with an old enemy on their home ground.

In truth, though, the reason why the detective preferred to stay at home was more personal. At the age of almost fifty, after long decades of bachelorhood and lonely devotion to the force, Petrosino had married in December 1907. And on the last day of November 1908, his first child, a daughter, had been born. Traveling to Italy would mean leaving his wife and baby girl behind.

Most people were surprised at Petrosino’s marriage, perhaps even the policeman himself. He was known among his colleagues as a determinedly solitary man, one who worked long hours and endless overtime and devoted his few moments of leisure chiefly to music. Petrosino was an inveterate operagoer, haunting the stalls and the standing areas of the Metropolitan Opera in his snatched hours away from work; at home, in his own small apartment, he liked to practice on the violin. In the autumn of 1906, though, at an Italian restaurant on Spring Street, his eye had fallen on the proprietor’s daughter. Her name was Adelina Saulino, she was a widow, and she was thirty-seven years old, nine years the detective’s junior.

The courtship was protracted, conducted in the few hours Petrosino was able to snatch away from the demands of the Italian Squad. Mostly it was conducted at the restaurant, under Adelina’s mother’s eye. It was two years before Petrosino proposed, and according to a family tradition, the betrothal was not especially romantic. “You too must be very lonely,” the detective began the wished-for conversation. “We could get along well together.”

The marriage was a happy one, however, and Petrosino began to spend less time at work and more at home, particularly after his first child was born. By February 1909, his old enthusiasm for police work had noticeably diminished. He felt tired, even dispirited, and that was hardly surprising, since he had served very nearly three decades with the NYPD, more than almost any other officer, and half of them as a detective, with all the long hours and the dangers that entailed. He was forty-nine years old, he was due a pension, and he hated the idea of being away from his new family. Bingham had told him that the round trip to Italy, traveling via Genoa, Rome, and Palermo, would take almost three months.

According to the faithful Sergeant Vachris, who came down to the pier to wave him off, Petrosino left New York in “the worst of moods.” He knew that he would be taking risks traveling in Sicily. “Watch out, boss,” Vachris would remember warning him. “Down there, everything’s Mafia.”