The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (30 page)

Later that day, back in his office, Flynn ran through all the possibilities. “At first I thought it was Poughkeepsie,” the Chief recalled. “Then I began to put two and two together, and, remembering that Lupo when he fled from New York went to Ardonia, a little town back of Highland, N.Y., I became convinced that the counterfeiting plant must be somewhere along the west bank of the Hudson River, not far from Highland. The country back of the hills that line the river is very wild and very lonesome, an ideal place for the plant of counterfeiters.”

The more the Chief thought about it, the more certain he became that he was right, and by the end of September a team of Secret Service agents had arrived in Highland and begun to question the locals. Flynn’s men soon discovered that Cecala owned a large farm outside the village—the local postmaster recalled receiving packages for him—and that he was often accompanied by Cina. Cina’s close relationship with his brother-in-law and neighbor, Vincenzo Giglio, gave the agents another useful clue.

The old stone house in the woods evaded the operatives for a little longer, but in the end they found the Highland farmer who had leased it to Cecala.

The Chief was satisfied he had enough. It was time to move in on the Mafia.

FLYNN HAD ONE REMAINING
concern: The size of the counterfeiting operation that was being uncovered was such that it would be difficult to arrest the whole group simultaneously, which meant there was a real risk that some of the gang would realize what was happening and get away. Aside from Morello and Lupo, Cecala and Cina, Boscarini and Nick Terranova, Flynn’s list included several other influential Corleonesi: Domenico Milone, a director of the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative Association and now nominally the owner of the grocery store on 87th Street; Stefano LaSala, a power in the city’s gambling underworld who had risen to become one of Morello’s chief lieutenants; and two recent additions to the ranks of the first family, the Vasi brothers, Pasquale and Leoluca. Among them these men occupied twelve different addresses in New York, from Italian Harlem to Long Island City, Queens, and at least three more in Highland. Failure to secure the counterfeiters together was likely to have serious consequences, since any who received sufficient warning would certainly try to get away.

Flynn’s great concern was that Morello himself would manage to escape. The Clutch Hand had always been a dangerously elusive man; weeks of careful surveillance in the Italian quarter had demonstrated that his movements were worryingly unpredictable, and to make matters worse there were a number of ways in and out of the tenement he occupied at 207 East 107th Street, and he appeared to use them all. The whole building, consisting of sixteen apartments, was occupied by members of Morello’s family or their tenants, and Flynn could not even be certain which apartment the boss would be in on the day the raid was planned. The only way to be certain of locating Morello and covering every possible exit was to obtain exact, timely intelligence of the internal layout of the tenement. And that meant sending an agent into the building to investigate, with all the risk that that entailed.

Flynn decided to assign the task to the youngest and most anonymous of the Secret Service team: Thomas Callaghan, a seventeen-year-old so youthful-looking that he had been posing as a shoeshine boy along the street. It was a daunting assignment for an inexperienced agent, more so because the Chief wanted the job done late at night, when the Clutch Hand came home for the evening. Decades later, when he was the storied leader of the agency’s Chicago bureau, Callaghan still recalled it as the most terrifying assignment he had ever undertaken.

“It was,” the teenage operative said,

a dangerous rookery in which to be trailing a killer. It was a four-story building with long hallways, closed stairways, and bare walls. When I finally saw Morello coming down the street around midnight, I noticed that he had his two brothers, Vincenzo and Ciro, and another man with him. I ducked into the house and sneaked up to the second floor. It was pitch dark because the janitor had turned out all the lights at ten o’clock.

I knew Morello and his companions had entered the tenement, so when I heard them coming up the stairs, I tiptoed to the fourth floor. And then I thought, What’ll I do if they keep going to the top?

Sure enough, they didn’t stop at the third, but kept coming up. They were going to find me skulking there with no reason to be hanging around their place. I figured I was a squashed bug no matter what I did. Then suddenly—I don’t know why—I decided to walk nonchalantly down the stairs.

I met them between the third and fourth floors, my heart thumping like a pile driver. When they heard me and when we came face to face, what do you suppose Morello said? “Scusa, please.” I stepped aside and they kept going. I’ll never know how I got down.

Gasping like a landed fish, Callaghan stumbled back out onto East 107th Street and glanced around. He had not been followed, and he had the information that Flynn needed: the building’s layout and its exits, and above all the intelligence that Morello was spending the evening where the Secret Service wanted him, in an apartment on the highest floor.

It was a long night, the agents staking out the building would always recall—long because it was the middle of November, long because they were all so nervous, and long because Morello worked on until dawn. They waited and waited for the lights on the fourth floor to dim and for their man to fall asleep. It was not until nearly eleven the next morning, when Flynn calculated that he had to be in bed at last, that half a dozen agents and several detectives from the Italian Squad crept back into the tenement and up the creaking wooden stairs. The date was November 15, 1909.

Flynn had a key to the Clutch Hand’s flat, either a copy requisitioned from the building’s janitor or a skeleton key capable of opening a variety of doors. He turned it in the lock so gently that there was no click. The door swung open and the Secret Service men moved softly into the slumbering apartment. The detectives had their weapons drawn, but there was nobody about.

The second room that they tried was a bedroom. Morello lay sprawled out on his mattress, deep asleep. His half brother Nick Terranova dozed on a second bed alongside him. “We had virtually no desire to waken them,” the Chief remarked, “until we were sitting on them.”

A silent gesture, a flurry of movement, and the two Sicilians were roughly pinioned before they were properly awake. Flynn’s caution was justified the moment that his men began to search the room. “Under Morello’s pillow,” he reported,

we found four fully loaded revolvers; beneath Terranova’s, five. That’s bound to impress you. And two of Morello’s guns were loaded with cartridges containing buckshot—three or four pellets in each cartridge. One might compare Giuseppe to a one-man war, and I frequently wondered whether he didn’t fear himself at times.

The silence of the slumbering apartment had been well and truly shattered by this time, and the muffled sounds of the brief struggle roused the remainder of the household. Three or four half-dressed Sicilians emerged, all furious, all disputing the arrests; an Italian-speaking policeman supplied Flynn with a translation. Then Lina Morello herself appeared, an infant daughter in one arm and fury blazing white-hot on her face.

“The furore was spectacular,” said Flynn.

Morello’s wife made herself extremely unpopular with us by drawing a wicked knife. It took two of us to get it away from her. Bereft of the knife she subsided into tears. She was to be murdered by the police. Her great, good husband was to be slain. And what was to become of these magnificent children of hers?

Fatherless! Motherless! Ah, yes, she knew. They would be thrown into the river at night, like swine. Ah, but there was wickedness in the world when the police should break up this happy Christian home. The dogs of police. She would spit upon them.

The confusion in the packed apartment was indescribable. Morello and Terranova sat together on their beds, each clad only in his underclothes. The other members of the family milled around, shouting and arguing, creating the greatest possible confusion while another of their number took hurried advantage to conceal several pieces of incriminating evidence. A pack of half a dozen letters was thrust into a pocket in Lina’s apron, which lay on the table. Lina herself scooped up her daughter Mary, who was only eight months old, “and it was more or less noticeable,” said Flynn, “that she was stuffing something in to the child’s clothes.” Grasping her infant in one arm, Mrs. Morello made to leave the room, giving vent to another angry volley of Sicilian as she did so. The burden of this outburst, Flynn’s detective friend explained, was that “she would go into the next room and put her beautiful children to sleep and then she would go to the prison and be mutilated by the dogs of police.”

It took two large Secret Service men to part Lina from her daughter, and she resisted them with such determination that the agents “sustained 40 or 50 minor bruises” in the struggle. Then Operative Thomas Gallagher

suggested to Mrs. Morello that there might be something of interest to the government wrapped in the cloth that protected the little Morello, and instantly the mother became very emphatic in her native manner of making us understand that she “no understand.”

Gallagher is a man of Irish extraction from the environs of Boston. In other words, he has a humorous instinct. So he suggested that maybe the poor baby needed a fresh diaper. There was a flash of volcanic fire in the mother’s eyes and two strong arms held her secure while Gallagher removed the cloth from the infant’s limbs.

Three notes, written by Morello to the heads of Mafia families elsewhere in the country, were found inside the infant’s diaper. Lina’s apron pocket contained several lurid Black Hand letters. All in all it was, Flynn thought, a first-rate morning’s work.

Morello was allowed to dress and was led away. His half brother Terranova attempted to escape arrest by posing as “a crazy man … he just rolled his eyes, stuck out his tongue, and babbled incoherently,” as the Chief recalled. “Still, he was brought in, and though he quit the crazy routine, he proved to be about as garrulous as a clam.” And, up and down the city at much the same time, other operatives were raiding other addresses. Fourteen Sicilians were detained in all, and careful searches of their homes produced some incriminating finds. A bag containing $3,600 in counterfeit two-dollar bills was found under a bed in the Vasi brothers’ flat, and the news from Antonio Cecala’s home on East 4th Street was even more rewarding. Agents Burke and Henry seized $221 in genuine currency from the counterfeiter’s wallet, and this, when carefully inspected, proved to include two of the subtly marked notes that Flynn had passed to Sam Locino. Another link between the counterfeits and their suppliers had been made.

The only member of the Morello gang to elude arrest was Lupo, who was then living incognito in Brooklyn. To Flynn’s irritation, his men had lost track of the Wolf some days before, and he continued to evade pursuit for almost two months, only to be trapped when a characteristic piece of opportunism went badly wrong. Detectives from Hoboken had been investigating the theft of an upright piano and succeeded in tracing their suspect to a rented house in fashionable Bath Beach. The man they were after turned out to be Lupo. When the detectives recognized their quarry, they called the Secret Service bureau and invited Flynn to send an agent to assist in their planned raid. Flynn sent Peter Rubano, and Lupo was picked up without incident on the morning of January 8 as he strolled along the street outside his home. The Wolf was unarmed, and his pockets proved to contain nothing but a nail file and seven dollars in cash.

Lupo joined nine other prominent members of the Morello family in jail. Bail had been set at unheard-of levels: $10,000 for Morello, $7,500 for Cecala and Boscarini, and $5,000 apiece for the other members of the gang. None of the Mafiosi could raise such sums, so Morello and his men stayed in the cells while Flynn began preparing for his day in court.

THERE WAS STILL ONE
yawning gap in the Secret Service case: the lack of a confession from a member of the Morello family. Flynn was not optimistic of obtaining it, nor was it strictly necessary; the Secret Service had obtained plenty of convictions in the past without the assistance of admissions from any of the defendants. A confession, though, would make it vastly easier to guarantee a guilty verdict, and though the Chief was certain none of Morello’s men would talk, there was one member of the counterfeiting gang who might.

It’s not certain when Flynn first heard Comito’s name. He had not realized that the printer so much as existed when he raided the Morellos’ tenement in mid-November. By the middle of December 1909, Flynn had discovered that two men working together had produced the Clutch Hand’s counterfeits, and by Christmas, thanks to an informant, he knew about Calicchio. But as late as the first days of January, as his reports to Washington attest, the Chief was still referring to the second of Morello’s printers as a mysterious “Calabrian,” and he had no idea who he was or where he lived.

It was luck, pure chance, that led the Secret Service to Comito only a week or two before the gang was due in court. Charles Mazzei, one of the Italian informants so carefully cultivated by Flynn, knew Calicchio, and it was Mazzei who passed Flynn word that the master printer had been working for Morello. Through Calicchio, Mazzei then heard that there had been a second man printing notes at Highland. But though Flynn hung back in the hope of learning more, his new lead yielded little more than that until, one day early in January, Calicchio unexpectedly saw Comito scuttling toward him down a Brooklyn street. The two men exchanged wary greetings; they had not seen each other for six months. When Calicchio spoke critically of Cecala and Cina, though, Comito, suddenly emboldened, supplied his colleague with his new address. That crucial scrap of information, passed by Calicchio to Mazzei and by Mazzei to Flynn, led almost immediately to a raid.