The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (28 page)

The police, the paper added, were “boiling with anger” at the news, and for weeks hundreds of ordinary immigrants were routinely abused and harassed in the streets. Privately, though, there were those at headquarters who conceded that Petrosino should bear some responsibility for his own death. The lieutenant had fatally underestimated the power of the Mafia, and the influence and ruthlessness of Morello in particular; stripped of the security and the support he had enjoyed in Manhattan, the detective had made himself an easy target in Palermo, a woeful misjudgment that he had further compounded by leaving his wife with practically nothing. Unlike the great majority of New York’s policemen, Petrosino had been an honest man and had never banked a small fortune in graft. It took a public subscription, which raised $10,000, and the decision to grant the widow a $1,000-a-year city pension, to properly secure Adelina’s future.

The one thing that almost everybody was agreed on was that Petrosino had died in the service of the city of New York and that the city should do right by him. Arrangements were made to have the body embalmed by a “professor,” brought in specially from Naples, and returned to Manhattan for burial. When the casket was unloaded at the city piers on April 9, nearly a month after the murder, a large number of people were waiting for it.

The crowds were vastly greater at Petrosino’s funeral on the twelfth. The day had been declared a public holiday, and a large assembly, well over twenty thousand strong, lined the streets as the murdered policeman was solemnly escorted on his final journey. Bells tolled; flags flew at half-mast on every public building. And when the last bars of Verdi’s
Requiem
had faded in the interior of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral and the hearse set out for Calvary Cemetery in Queens, it was accompanied by a thousand policemen, two thousand schoolchildren, and representatives from sixty Italian associations, all in uniform.

Only one thing marred the dignity of the proceedings. Adelina’s wish to have an open casket had had to be refused. Something had gone badly wrong with the embalming process, and when the coffin lid was lifted in the undertaker’s parlor, Petrosino’s corpse was black and swollen with decay. The only solution was for the casket to be sealed, and when the congregation filed slowly past the bier, a large photograph of Petrosino perched on top of the coffin did duty for the policeman’s face itself.

CHAPTER 10
SHEEP AND WOLVES

T
HE NEWS OF PETROSINO’S DEATH, WHICH HAD REACHED NEW
York on March 13, took only one more day to travel the fifty miles up the Hudson River to Highland.

Lupo brought it, early in the morning, when he arrived to inspect the latest batch of counterfeit notes manufactured in the woods. The spring thaws, which were at last melting the thick drifts of snow, had turned the grounds and unpaved roads to mud and made travel from the village to the old stone house more difficult, if possible, but the Wolf was in a buoyant mood. He pronounced the latest batch of two-dollar notes excellent and said Calicchio deserved a medal for his fine work with the inks. Then Lupo turned to Zu Vincenzo. “Petrosino has been killed,” he said with a smile. “It was successful!”

“I knew it would be done successfully,” Uncle Vincent replied, and Comito heard the triumph in his voice. Cecala wanted to know where the murder had been committed.

“In Palermo.”

“Then it was surely well done,” said Uncle Vincent.

“The way it was planned, it never could have missed in Palermo,” said Lupo. “It is well he was fool enough to go there.”

“Damn him,” said Cecala, “it was a death too good for him. How many sons of mothers has he condemned for nothing!”

Zu Vincenzo thought the assassination would scare other policemen off the idea of going to Sicily in search of evidence to use against the Mafia. “No one will now dare to go to Palermo, for in going they will find death,” he said. “But it is too bad that it could not have been done here. It would have helped us a great deal.”

That thought did not bother Lupo unduly. The money used to send men after Petrosino had been raised in New York, he pointed out. “Some credit is due to us, though the Palermo crowd will get most.” Cina opened a bottle, and Morello’s men toasted their success in wine.

Production of the counterfeits continued at the same steady pace throughout March, The gang printed about five hundred notes a day, including $20,400 in American two-dollar bills, and the results improved significantly; Calicchio had painstakingly retouched the plates to tidy up the less convincing details. Cecala and Cina were delighted; the improved notes, they said, were easier to sell. Morello, in New York, also seemed pleased, since large additional supplies of paper began appearing in Highland every few weeks. According to Cina, the Clutch Hand had ordered that a total of $5 million in forged currency be produced, saying that work would cease only “when we were all rich.”

Comito and Calicchio were less happy, Comito in large part because he had still barely been paid—only a few dollars here and there for five months’ work, so little that he and Katrina could not even afford new shoes. But there was also the problem of the five-dollar bills. Morello’s ambitious target would be almost unattainable without improvements in the Canadian notes, which, since they were being printed from photoengraved plates, were still blotchy and unlikely to convince anyone who took the time to study them. Cecala and Cina were having considerable trouble selling the fives; on one trip along the eastern seaboard, the pair had disposed of four thousand dollars’ worth of U.S. two-dollar notes but found no takers at all for the foreign currency.

“That was not your fault,” Lupo reassured Comito when the two Sicilians reported back to the stone house; “the plates are no good.” But the other members of the gang were not so forgiving. When word of the problems with the five-dollar notes got out, even the most junior among them became abusive. Giglio, Sylvester, and the guard, a young farmer named Bernardo Perrone, told Comito that he was stupid, ate too much, “and should be fed to the hogs.” Cina threatened the printer with a knife. And when another minor problem arose, several members of the gang lost what remained of their self-control:

Bernardo grabbed me by the throat and forced me back against the wall, his fingers sinking in my throat until I thought that I was dying. Sylvester grabbed a revolver and cocked it, and, while Bernardo held me, walked over and forced the muzzle into my mouth until the sight on the end cut my throat way back and I could feel its coldness against the back of my head inside. Giglio grabbed an axe and said he would dismember me. … They threatened to dig out my eyes and make my woman eat them raw.

It took Katrina’s desperate intervention to make the men back off, and even then, Comito thought, “they desisted unwillingly, Bernardo saying: ‘It is a shame to let such a good start go unfinished.’”

Comito took his companion’s threats sufficiently seriously to fear for his life, and once, when they were left alone for a few minutes, he found one of Lupo’s rifles and showed Katrina how to use it. “If people come with some excuse or other to get you,” the printer told her, “it will be a sure sign that they have murdered me. Before they get you into a trap where they can kill you and hide your body, shoot them dead. Do not hesitate; they are devils and will likely enough come to you smiling to disarm your suspicions. Shoot, and shoot straight.”

The real problem, as Comito knew, was that his position within the counterfeiting gang had been entirely undermined by Calicchio’s presence. The master printer, with his greater experience and his engraving skills, was now the man to whom Cecala and Cina turned when there were problems to be solved; Comito had become a mere assistant, and a largely useless one at that. Even Lupo’s mood underwent a change in time. When Cecala and Cina returned from another journey down the coast with alarming tales of angry customers and the news that a large number of five-dollar notes remained unsold, the Wolf exploded. Comito’s shoddy work had cost the gang eight thousand dollars, he said, and the poor-quality bills would have to be destroyed. “What is his use here?” Lupo demanded of Zu Vincenzo as his temper flared. “This ugly Calabrian is not worth what he eats. He should have been tied up and his work burned on his head.”

Only the risk of betrayal and, probably quite as important, the prospect of living in the woods without a woman to cook and clean for them seems to have prevented the gang from dispensing with Comito and Katrina, and both were acutely aware that the obvious solution, killing them, was unlikely to bother their companions for a moment. “What you are trying to do is get me to blow your damn brains out,” snarled Cina when the printer begged to be allowed to return to New York. “But that is too nice for a fool like you. You are dealing with gentlemen or long ago you would have been rotting in the farm here—you and the woman. Go on now and work before I stick you.”

And Comito scurried away, “like a whipped dog, with my tail between my legs.”

THE ONLY WAY TO
fix the problem of the five-dollar bills was to engrave new plates. The job took a long time, two months, and it was not until the middle of June that Calicchio completed the work. The engraving was, Comito thought, “marvelously perfect,” and the plates, for U.S. notes this time, produced fine proofs almost immediately. When Cecala took a few samples with him to show likely customers in New York and Hoboken, he returned with orders for more than $15,000 of currency.

As the pace of work increased, it became hard even for Comito to keep track of what had been produced. A stock of $10,000 worth of two-dollar notes and $14,700 of the Canadian fives was ready by the end of May, and they ran off $15,000 more in twos that month. A short while later, Cina returned from a trip through Boston, Buffalo, and Chicago demanding $13,500 more of the new twos, and Cecala had similar success in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. In all, the total value of the forged bills printed in the Highland woods almost certainly approached $100,000, and the work took Comito and Calicchio until the middle of July to finish.

How much the Morellos made from this is very hard to calculate. Cecala and Cina did not often sell at the Clutch Hand’s price of fifty cents in the dollar. The best they usually obtained was 35 cents, and often they were forced to accept as little as 20 or 25 cents—though even this was twice what other counterfeiters realized. The earliest batches of notes fetched so little that the operation was barely profitable when travel expenses had been deducted. Calicchio’s notes, though, were of better quality, and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth were printed; they alone could easily have earned $8,000 or more, which was an appreciable sum at the time. Whatever the real profits, the one certainty is that Morello kept the money for himself. Calicchio had been retained on a salary of $20 a week, which was not paid with any regularity. Comito, who had been promised $500 when the work was done, received no more than $40 for his services, and that over eight months. Katrina got nothing at all.

Work was finally suspended for the summer when the last of the two-dollar notes were printed, trimmed, and packed in bundles of a hundred. It would begin again in four months’ time, Cina announced, when the first batch of notes had been disposed of. Until then, the press, the plates, and inks would be nailed up in boxes and hidden on his farm.

The next day, the dismantled press and plates were loaded onto Cina’s wagon and hidden beneath a pile of hay. “Boys,” the counterfeiter said, “the work is done. From tomorrow each man can attend to his own business.” The gang dispersed. Comito was handed a single genuine five-dollar note and used it to take a train back to New York.

The enforced nine-month stay in Highland had had one beneficial consequence. Economic conditions had improved throughout the country while Comito was away, and there were jobs to be had in printing once again. It took only three days for the Calabrian to find work in an Italian-owned print shop in Brooklyn, and there, for the first time in nearly a year, he felt secure. Cina had promised to find him and pay the five hundred dollars he was owed, but Comito neither believed him nor even wanted the money. He was glad merely to have escaped Highland alive and vowed never again to risk his life for such a paltry reward. To keep the Morellos off his back, Comito wrote one last time to Cina, informing him that he planned to leave the United States for Italy. Then he went instead to live in Brooklyn, studiously avoiding places where he might encounter members of the gang.

And all went well for the best part of a month. Then, on August 12, 1909, Comito picked up one of New York’s Italian-language newspapers and read of the arrest of a number of Sicilians. They had been charged with passing two-and five-dollar counterfeits. He checked the description of the bills: They were all forged Morello notes. Cecala and Cina were no longer the only people looking for him. Now he was wanted by the Secret Service, too.

CHIEF WILLIAM FLYNN
had spent the six years since the Barrel Murder working hard to improve the Secret Service’s efficiency. He had added several more agents to the strength of the New York bureau and assigned one of them, the Italian-speaking Peter Rubano, to undercover work in the immigrant quarter, where the latter spent time hanging around street corners and saloons. Rubano had started this work around 1905 and gradually became familiar with several members of the Morello family, most notably Lupo the Wolf. Lupo took Rubano into his confidence on several matters but never mentioned forgery to him; to compensate, Flynn also developed several new Italian informants, whose identities he kept strictly confidential.

Under Flynn’s energetic leadership, the agency’s New York bureau had become everything that the NYPD might have been but was not: efficient, discreet, and above all extraordinarily persistent. Known counterfeiters were subject to “life surveillance,” not consistently, since the Secret Service lacked the manpower for such ambitious operations, but every few months at least, so that Flynn kept up to date with where the men lived and what they were doing. Thanks to this policy, Giuseppe Morello had been placed under intermittent observation ever since 1903, and over the years the service had come to know him fairly well, certainly well enough to have a firmer grasp than the police did as to how dramatically his power and his influence had spread. According to John Wilkie, Flynn’s boss in Washington, the Morellos lay behind as much as “60 percent of the Black Hand extortion that has gone on in the United States for the past 10 years … as far west as Chicago and as far south as New Orleans.” But Wilkie also knew that intermittent harassment by the detectives of his local police precinct didn’t cause the Clutch Hand much concern:

The oftener Morello was arrested, the more insolent he became. By this time he had come to sneer at the police and dictate whatever orders he saw fit; to the Italians he had come to dominate. … [His] maimed hand interfered with him as an outside man, so he did the thinking and ordered others to execute his plans.

A rough and hard-faced scoundrel, he sat in his office and sent out orders.

Flynn, who had a love of personal publicity quite at odds with the professional discretion he maintained at work, would sometimes talk to newsmen about the tactics he employed to tackle counterfeiters, at least in general terms. The Chief stuck to two sensible but vital principles, a reporter from
The New York Times
explained (“First, hide your evidence-getting methods. Second, make the detection of crime not so much the result of one-man cleverness as a mosaic of information gained from many sources by specialists”), and both were plainly in evidence in the New York bureau’s tracking of Morello. But the same journalist identified two other important reasons for the Chief’s success: “His ideas are big. He shows it by the way he sweeps aside minor details and goes to the very heart of a subject. [He is] a man with suggestions of a bulldog’s tenacity and words fewer than those of the average New Yorker.”