The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (27 page)

What prompted Petrosino to make this note on this day is an intriguing question that has no certain answer. Cascio Ferro had not lived in the United States for years—he had made his escape from New York on the morning after the Barrel Murder, the only member of Morello’s gang to do so. Traveling from Manhattan to New Orleans, he had returned to Sicily in 1904 and steadily accumulated a great deal of power. Petrosino had probably been given his name by one of his informants, but when and for what reason is a mystery. As things turned out, however, the addition of Cascio Ferro’s name to the policeman’s notebook on this day of all days would seem especially significant.

Petrosino remained closeted in his hotel room until evening. As it grew dark, at about 6
P.M.
, a violent electric storm broke over Palermo, pelting the stones of the Piazza Marina with heavy rain. The deluge lasted for an hour and a half, and by the time it ceased at 7:30, most of the people of the town had sought the shelter of their homes. The square was empty when Petrosino grabbed his umbrella and overcoat and hurried to the Café Oreto for dinner.

The streets were slick with water and the clouds overhead were still so black it seemed likely the storm would resume. Petrosino did not linger over dinner. He took his usual table up against a wall, where he could keep an eye on everyone who entered the café, and ordered pasta with tomato sauce, fish, fried potatoes, and a half liter of wine, all for 2.70 lire.

According to the recollections of the café’s waiters, the detective was just embarking on the cheese course when two men entered the restaurant, looked hurriedly around, and went over to his table. The conversation was brief, and the two men did not sit down; after a few moments Petrosino waved them away. But as the strangers exited the restaurant, Petrosino rose to follow them. He threw down three lire to pay for his supper and left without waiting for the change.

On other evenings, the detective had turned left out of the café to return to his hotel. But on this night he crossed the road and went straight ahead, making his way around the Piazza Marina and keeping to the fence enclosing the Garibaldi Garden. The police who retraced his movements the next day thought he had been heading for a spot he had agreed to for a meeting with the strangers from the restaurant.

He walked exactly 220 yards, almost to the northwest corner of the square. The time was 8:50
P.M
.

Three shots rang out in rapid succession across the piazza, then, after a short pause, a fourth, which most likely was the coup de grâce. The square was almost deserted after the rain; the only people in the vicinity was a group of passengers waiting for a streetcar on the square, and of these, only one, a sailor named Alberto Cardella, was brave enough to investigate. Cardella ran the thirty yards to the corner of the Garibaldi Garden in a few seconds, quickly enough to see a small, squat man sway away from the fence and collapse and to watch two men as they burst from the shadows, crossed the road, and lost themselves in the courtyard of the Palazzo Partanna opposite. Several gates in the courtyard exited into nearby alleys, and a few moments later the sailor heard the sound of a carriage driving away. Almost immediately after that, the lights illuminating the square suddenly flickered and died. Someone had cut the flow of gas to the piazza, making it impossible to organize an effective pursuit.

By the time another of the streetcar passengers had hurried to the nearest shop for candles, almost a quarter of an hour had passed and Cardella had been joined by the medical officer from his ship. The doctor made only a cursory examination; even by candlelight it was clear that the stocky figure sprawled along the fence was dead. Petrosino had been hit three times at close range, in the right shoulder, the cheek, and the throat. The third wound had been the fatal one. He lay next to his umbrella, blood still oozing from his mouth; his derby hat—long a familiar sight in Little Italy—had rolled toward the gutter. A heavy Belgian revolver sat abandoned on the pavement a few feet away—one of the assassins’, since the detective’s gun was still in his suitcase at his hotel. Going through the dead man’s pockets, Cardella found a police badge, a checkbook, a notebook, some cash, and an unstamped picture postcard, addressed to Petrosino’s wife, which ended with the salutation “A kiss for you and my little girl, who has spent three months far from her daddy.”

IT TOOK FIFTEEN MINUTES
for the first policeman to reach the scene, and rather longer for Commissioner Ceola, summoned hastily from his box at the theater, to take command of the investigation.

Ceola knew the murder would be a sensation. Petrosino was a U.S. citizen, and no U.S. police officer had ever before been killed outside his country in the line of duty. The Americans were bound to be outraged at the murder and to wonder why their man had not been afforded better protection. And the killing itself—with the getaway carriage standing waiting and the perfectly timed extinguishing of the piazza’s lights—had clearly been meticulously planned. There was also the mystery of the dead man’s willingness to follow two strangers out into the Palermo night. For some reason, Petrosino had trusted the men who had killed him.

Ceola’s men rounded up as many witnesses as they could to the events in the Piazza Marina, but to little effect. No one had heard much, and only Cardella would admit to having seen a thing. A mechanic named Luigi Schillaci, whose job it was to oil and lubricate the streetcars at the nearby terminus, said that he knew the men who had fled into the Palazzo Partanna, but by the time he reached police headquarters he had changed his mind. “I didn’t see anything and I didn’t hear anything,” the engineer now insisted.

With Ceola to urge them on, the Palermo police were nothing if not energetic. They rounded up 140 suspects, among them Ernesto Militano and Paolo Palazzotto, the crooks Petrosino had encountered outside the American consulate. Both men excited a good deal of suspicion; they had been in the Café Oreto earlier that evening, and Militano had suddenly shaved off his famous mustache—”Because my woman likes me better without,” he protested. In the end, though, Ceola and his men decided that the murder had been too well planned and too cleanly executed to have been the work of petty criminals. As the days went on, they became increasingly convinced that Petrosino had been murdered by the Mafia.

The most important targets of Ceola’s roundup were Sicilians whom Petrosino had helped deport from the United States, and one of the first men held was Carlo Costantino. A porter who came from Costantino’s hometown, Partinico, told the police he had seen Morello’s man reclining on a bench in the Piazza Marina only a few hours before Petrosino was shot. Antonio Passananti had been sitting next to him, the witness added; he remembered the two men clearly because he had thought that both were in America. A report from the police in Partinico brought more incriminating evidence. Vito Cascio Ferro, Ceola learned, had turned up in the town a few weeks earlier, asking after Costantino and his partner and evidently well aware that they were due in from New York. There was also the peculiar matter of a pair of telegrams that Costantino had sent and received. The first, addressed to “Giuseppe Morello, New York,” had been wired the day after the Mafiosi arrived in Sicily, and it was so peculiar—apparently in code—that the telegraph operator at Partinico had forwarded a copy to the local chief of public safety. “I Lo Baido work Fontana,” the message said. Morello’s equally inscrutable reply was found in Costantino’s pocket. “Why cut his whiskers off?” this cable read.

Only Antonio Passananti and Cascio Ferro were not among the 140 suspects whom Ceola detained. Both men had disappeared from their usual haunts on the day of the murder, and neither could be found by the police.

AS SOON AS WORD
of the Petrosino murder got out, the Sicilian authorities were deluged with letters and telephone calls offering theories, tips, and information. The correspondence came from all over Italy and from the United States, thousands of pieces in all, but though Ceola had his men review every page of every letter, he took only three of the items seriously. All came from New York, and two were, apparently, written by the same man—someone who possessed a remarkably close knowledge of the inner workings of the Morello gang. The third letter, postmarked Brooklyn, had been written in Sicilian dialect but was probably composed by a man who had been born in New York. All three communications were anonymous.

None of the letters made complete sense by itself, but by reading the three of them together it was possible to piece together what had happened. According to the first—sent from New York on March 13, only hours after news of Petrosino’s murder reached Manhattan—the killing had been ordered by Morello, Lupo, the Terranova brothers, Giuseppe Fontana, and three or four other Mafiosi, who had banded together to send a pair of agents to Palermo. The second communication, mailed two days later, added the names of several other members of the Morello family and explained that the detailed planning of the killing had been turned over to Cascio Ferro. The third letter was the only one to mention Costantino and Passananti by name. According to this missive, the two Partinicans had actually murdered Petrosino.

Ceola included all three of the letters in the report he was preparing for the Criminal Court in the Sicilian capital. They deserved to be taken seriously, he said, in large part because they contained information that was known to the police but had never appeared in the newspapers—most especially the involvement of Costantino and Passananti and the fact that the two men had sailed from New York to Palermo. There was also a clear motive for the murder: if not, as Ceola believed, because Morello feared deportation back to Italy, then certainly because of the threat that Petrosino posed to his family’s criminal activities. Cascio Ferro’s involvement also made a good deal of sense, given the boss’s influence in Sicily—more so when Don Vito was finally arrested three weeks later, stepping off a train at Bisaquino station. A police search of his home turned up several incriminating bits of information, among them a photograph, taken in New York, that showed Cascio Ferro with Morello, his wife, Lina, and Giuseppe Fontana.

“Lieutenant Petrosino’s arrival in Palermo frightened too many people and threatened too many interests,” Ceola concluded in his interim report.

For this reason an international coalition was organized against him. Furthermore, the fatal ambush, carefully set up by the murderers, with the assistance of false confidential agents who succeeded in convincing the ingenuous detective that he could manage without the co-operation of the police, clearly shows that the preparation of the crime must be laid to an association of criminals possessing substantial resources.

Who else could that be but the Mafia?

CEOLA’S CASE WAS
compelling but it was not watertight. It made perfect sense, and the circumstantial evidence apparently confirmed it, but it was doubtful that it would convince a jury. It was not enough for Costantino and Passananti to have been seen in the Piazza Marina hours before the shooting when there were no witnesses to put them there at 8:50
P.M
. The mysterious telegrams might mean nothing as well as something. And to nobody’s surprise, Cascio Ferro, who had had nearly a month to prepare for his inevitable arrest, turned out to have the strongest alibi imaginable. On the night of the murder, he explained to the police, he had been staying with the Honorable Domenico De Michele Ferrantelli, a nobleman who also happened to be a member of the Italian parliament. Ferrantelli, for reasons best known to himself, had recently employed the Mafia boss as an agent and placed him in charge of the sale of produce from his landed estate.

Cascio Ferro’s story was not enough to stop Ceola from obtaining a warrant for his arrest, nor from confining him in a Palermo prison pending further hearings—though the Mafioso made light of that restriction by paying for a comfortable private cell. It was, however, easily sufficient to damn any attempt to bring Don Vito to trial, particularly after Ferrantelli confirmed, on his honor, every word of his friend’s statement concerning his whereabouts on the night of March 12. And as things turned out, the combined influence of the two men was also easily sufficient to cost Baldassare Ceola his job. On July 17, 1909, a little over three months after the Petrosino murder, Commissioner Ceola received notification that he was being recalled to Rome and compulsorily retired. Four months later, on November 16, Cascio Ferro and Costantino were quietly released from prison and the charges against them both were dropped.

The Petrosino murder continued to crop up in the American press from time to time for years to come; there were rumors that the detective’s murderer was working in a Pennsylvania coal mine or hiding out in Mexico. But none ever amounted to much. The killing remains officially unsolved.

NEWS OF PETROSINO’S DEATH
reached New York within hours. The
Herald
, with its network of European correspondents, was the first paper to receive the word; its man in Rome cabled an account shortly after midnight, New York time, less than eight hours after the shooting and in time to make the morning edition. The
Herald’s
story was on the streets by dawn, and it was exclusive. A few hours later, just before ten, the first official telegram arrived—

PALERMO, ITALY

PETROSINO SHOT. INSTANTLY KILLED IN HEART OF CITY THIS

EVENING. ASSASSIN UNKNOWN. DIES A MARTYR.

BISHOP, CONSUL

—and by noon, the evening papers were already hawking their first extras. The shooting was front-page news in every paper, and all in all the press coverage of the story was enormous, even greater than it had been when President McKinley had been murdered eight years earlier. Most New Yorkers felt a sense of outrage, mixed with shock. Adelina Petrosino, woken at 2
A.M
. by one of the
Herald’s
men, broke down in tears at the news; she had just received a letter from her husband in which he spoke of the risks he faced and told her how much he was looking forward to coming home. Emotions in the Italian quarter, though, were mixed. “Not in years has there been as much excitement in Little Italy,” the
Tribune
observed. “A stranger in one of the cafés last night was an unwelcome guest. … Italians discussed the murder on corners and in cafés, and while some showed sorrow there were others who gloated over the death of the Italian detective.”