The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (29 page)

For all that, though, for all the Secret Service’s efficiency, Morello’s care and cunning kept Flynn from discovering for the best part of a year that new counterfeits were being struck, and though counterfeiting in the old stone house had gotten under way in November 1908, it was not until the following May that the first forged bills appeared in circulation. These were the gang’s first attempt at the Canadian bill, and thus were relatively easy to spot. They poured into Secret Service headquarters from bankers in Philadelphia and storekeepers in Pittsburgh, from Buffalo and Chicago, Boston and New York, and when it became clear that the bills were being passed in the Italian districts of each city, the order went out to mount surveillance of likely suspects. In New York, that meant Morello above all.

Flynn responded by ordering several of his men to recommence an intermittent watch, but there was nothing especially incriminating about the Clutch Hand’s movements, at least not at first. Morello was too wary, too careful to fall into any of the obvious traps. He took pains never to be seen with known counterfeiters, nor to pass any forged bills. There were no more meetings with Comito, either, and for a while the Chief was uncertain whether the first family actually was behind the flood of counterfeits.

Deprived of any useful leads, Flynn turned instead to studying the phony bills. They were moderately good forgeries, he reported—of a far higher quality than the amateurish fives that the Clutch Hand had been manufacturing in 1900 or the greasy dollars he had had printed in Italy two years later, but still not fine enough to fool an experienced eye. The counterfeits were also suitable only for small-scale use in shops and taverns; because all the notes were printed from the same plates, they bore identical serial numbers, which meant it would be highly dangerous to pass more than one of them at once. Industrial though the Mafia’s production was in scale, the operation remained at heart a minor fraud.

Thanks in large part to Morello’s caution, it was not until summer that Flynn made his first real breakthrough, and it came not in New York but in Pittston, Pennsylvania: a grim, crime-ridden coal town with a large Italian population and a significant criminal presence. Forged bills began to surface there in June, and in sufficient quantity to persuade Flynn to venture south to carry out his own investigation. The decision was, in truth, one born of desperation, but it proved to be a good one nonetheless. Detailed questioning of local storekeepers led to a Sicilian of dubious reputation known locally as Sam Locino. Locino was put under surveillance. Once Flynn was certain that Locino really was passing the forged notes, he had the man arrested.

Locino proved to be an interesting character. He was scabrous, shifty, and untrustworthy, though possessed of a broad streak of self-interest that made him potentially useful to the Secret Service. In common with all the queer-pushers employed by the Morello gang, he worried about the prospect of a lengthy prison sentence but was vastly more frightened of betraying his suppliers. It took Flynn time to persuade his prisoner to talk, and when Locino did it was only after receiving ironclad assurances that he would be protected by the government, that he would not be forced to testify in open court, and that his name would be kept out of the press.

It was only when all three promises were made that Locino offered Flynn the thing he wanted most: the name of the man from whom he had acquired his counterfeits. The notes came from another Sicilian, the pusher whispered: a man from Corleone named Giuseppe Boscarini. Boscarini, he told the Chief, was a much older man, perhaps fifty-five, of middling height, with graying hair. He lived in New York but was a regular visitor to Pennsylvania. Better yet, Locino was confident that he would be willing to sell more counterfeits.

It was the news the Secret Service had been hoping for, and Locino’s casual mention of Boscarini’s hometown was a scrap of information filled with meaning for Flynn, whose years of painstaking surveillance had taught him that Giuseppe Morello always preferred to depend on other Corleonesi when he could. Still, much needed to be done to make even the beginnings of a proper case, and the next step was to obtain evidence in writing. Locino was ordered to send a letter to Boscarini inquiring about the availability of his counterfeits and asking for samples of the latest notes. His story was that he wanted to discover how easily the bills would pass in Pittston.

Flynn had experience of counterfeiting trials and knew that any attorney worth his fee would seek to prove that correspondence produced in evidence was bogus. Taking Locino’s letter with him, he went to call on Pittston’s mayor and then the local chief of police. Both men were asked to accompany the Chief to the local post office, where they witnessed him register the envelope addressed to Boscarini and mail it to New York. Registration, Flynn calculated, would force the counterfeiter to call at the post office to collect his mail. That in turn would give his operatives the chance they needed to identify him.

The plan worked precisely as the Chief hoped. Agents from the New York bureau stationed themselves inside the post office closest to Boscarini’s home and identified the Sicilian when he came to collect his mail. Now armed with a detailed description of their suspect, Flynn’s men followed him home and then kept watch on the premises until their target emerged the next morning and headed back to the post office. There Boscarini purchased a special delivery envelope, scribbled down Locino’s details, added a false return address, and stamped the letter with two one-cent stamps placed upside down. Armed with that precise description, Flynn had no trouble intercepting the package at the Pittston post office the next day. It proved to contain two sample Morello notes: a two and a five. Now the Chief had the evidence he needed to arrest and convict Boscarini.

The investigation had reached a critical point, Flynn told his superiors in Washington. To swoop down on Boscarini would expose Locino to the vengeance of the Mafia, and that was something that the Chief was not prepared to do; aside from betraying a man he had promised to protect, the arrest would achieve little but drive the leaders of the gang into hiding. Flynn had a better idea, anyway. Instead of detailing men to pick up Boscarini, he gave Locino thirty-five dollars and sent his informant to Manhattan, an apparently satisfied customer eager to purchase a hundred dollars’ worth of counterfeits. Locino located his supplier on a street corner in Little Italy and made the necessary arrangements, handing Boscarini the Secret Service money in exchange for a fresh batch of counterfeits. The exchange passed off without a hitch. Neither Sicilian was aware that Flynn had subtly marked each of the genuine bills, placing an extra dot of ink among Abraham Lincoln’s shirt studs. By the time Locino had repeated the same procedure weekly for the better part of a month, it was September and the counterfeiters were holding well over one hundred dollars of the Chief’s marked bills.

Flynn still needed to establish a connection between Boscarini and his superiors, the real leaders of the counterfeiting gang. It was not an easy one to make; the Corleone man was careful, and days of discreet surveillance produced no useful leads. Still, Boscarini could not run his business indefinitely without obtaining fresh supplies of counterfeits, and one afternoon in the early autumn the Secret Service operative assigned to tail him found himself taking a train up to Harlem, where the suspect hurried down a busy street and ducked into a doorway. The agent noted the address: 233 East 97th Street. It was a spot that Flynn knew well. Boscarini had disappeared into Lupo’s old wholesale grocery store—a place now owned and operated by Morello.

The Chief felt certain that this was the spot where the counterfeiters gathered, but putting the store under observation was by no means a simple matter. Morello was certain to be wary, and East Harlem, in 1909, was more exclusively Italian than Little Italy had been six years earlier. Flynn’s English-speaking agents could not hope to loiter on the street outside for weeks without being spotted, and arousing the least suspicion would likely ruin the entire operation. The solution was to use their Italian-speaking operative, Peter Rubano, who rented a vacant room across the street. The Secret Service’s new base was sufficiently discreet to allow a succession of agents to maintain the watch; comfortably equipped, to enable them to do so constantly; and far enough above street level to shield the operatives from passersby It also offered a first-rate view across the road into the windows of Morello’s store.

The ruse worked well, and for several weeks agents noted all the comings and goings at the place. Flynn’s men spotted Boscarini several times, then Antonio Cecala, and on one occasion even Lupo—who had not been seen in New York for nearly a year, not since the day he had fled his creditors. Better yet, the Clutch Hand himself paid several visits, and various other members of the Morello family flitted in and out. All this, of course, was merely circumstantial; there was no clear proof that any of these men were engaged in a conspiracy. The agents’ logbooks, though, were certainly instructive. Boscarini and Cecala habitually entered the building separately, the operatives observed. But they were often on the premises together, and, when they were, they met in a third-floor room shielded behind “great boxes of macaroni and other Italian groceries piled high in the windows.” These meetings were brisk and businesslike—none lasted longer than fifteen minutes. And afterward Boscarini always had fresh supplies of counterfeits.

The discovery that Antonio Cecala was implicated in the counterfeiting scheme was the biggest breakthrough yet in Flynn’s expanding investigation. Another team of Secret Service men was drafted in to track the stocky arsonist, and, as their reports came in, the whole thrust of the inquiry changed. It was Cecala, the Chief realized, who was managing the distribution of the forged bills, and Cecala who could lead him to the shadowy Sicilians wholesaling notes from Chicago south to New Orleans. As more and more operatives were pulled from their duties across the country to assist with the surveillance, Flynn gradually uncovered the most ambitious counterfeiting scheme the Secret Service had encountered in its fifty-year history.

The network so painstakingly unraveled was a pyramidal distribution operation. Cecala, Flynn calculated, “made frequent trips to various cities, establishing agencies for the circulation of the bills,” and there were six of these in all, each headed by a man who came from Corleone and was unswervingly loyal to the Morello family. These deputies in turn recruited half a dozen assistants to distribute forged currency in the various districts of their towns. Here, too, reliability was paramount. “It was,” Flynn found, “necessary for these deputies to vouch for any person before Cecala would allow them to have any of the bogus money. … Thus the notes passed through at least three hands before they reached the purchaser, and sometimes the transaction was even more complicated.”

The great virtue of this carefully designed system, from Morello’s point of view at least, was that it insulated the Mafia leaders in New York from the distribution of the currency. It was Cecala’s associates and their deputies who ran the greatest chance of discovery and the risk of arrest, but to arrest them would in no way help to secure Lupo or Morello. Cecala had issued each of his men dire threats regarding the violent consequences they and their families would face if anybody dared to talk, and “the prisoner, even if he had desired to testify against the counterfeiters, would not know who the leaders were.”

It was all highly frustrating. “Like malignant spirits,” Chief Flynn mused,

Lupo and Morello lurked in the dark and directed the movements of the pawns under them in the great counterfeiting scheme that was to make them wealthy and get them out of the difficulties into which the Ignatz Florio Association had plunged them. They took no chances—at least they thought they took none—and certainly they were not in the danger to which they exposed their aides.

It was they who pulled the strings, and their puppets responded. … Their system was mysterious, baffling, and almost perfect. But there were flaws in it, and the Secret Service found those flaws.

IT WAS LUPO WHO
unwittingly supplied the final piece of evidence that Flynn required to bring his case to a conclusion.

The Secret Service never fully understood what prompted the Wolf to return to New York that autumn of 1909, with the creditors of his failed grocery business still not satisfied. Lupo told the few who dared to ask that his mind had been disturbed, that he had been working for his brother, a grocer, in Hoboken, and that he had been unable to discharge his debts only because he himself had been a victim of extortion—forced to hand over ten thousand dollars to a Black Hand group that had been threatening his chain of stores. Flynn believed that the more likely explanation was that Lupo had simply grown bored of hiding in the wilds of the surrounding countryside. Whatever the reason, the Wolf was soon a common sight in Little Italy again. He hired lawyers to fight his creditors on his behalf and took up many of his old activities, exuding much of his old self-confidence. Luckily for Flynn and his investigation, he also continued to make trips to Highland to inspect the latest batches of counterfeits.

The Secret Service operatives detailed to follow Lupo had strict orders not to risk discovery, and the first time they trailed the Wolf to Grand Central Terminal they found that he was taking extensive precautions against being spotted. First Lupo purchased a cigar and went into a smoking room, where he sat for some time watching the activity around him. Next he had his shoes polished, while he sat perched in a chair high on the bootblack’s stand from which he carefully surveyed the crowd. From there he left the station altogether, walking along West 44th Street until he reached a second entrance to the terminal. At that point he ducked back inside the station and hastened to the ticket office.

Flynn’s men had dropped well back in order to avoid detection, and by the time they reached the ticket line Lupo was completing his purchase. The closest agent was too far away to hear the destination, but, as he watched, the Wolf proffered a two-dollar bill and received fifty cents in change. Wherever Lupo was headed, at that fare it had to be a spot no more than sixty miles outside New York.