The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (37 page)

A number of influential names make their first appearance in the Morellos’ story at this time. One was Eugene Ubriaco from Cosenza, a Calabrian who had entered the United States in 1907 and became the first man from outside Sicily to rise to prominence within the Clutch Hand’s family. Another was Joe DiMarco, an influential figure in the lucrative world of illegal gambling. DiMarco, his brother Salvatore, and another Sicilian, Giuseppe Verrazano (who ran card games downtown on Kenmare Street), gave the Morellos a larger stake in the criminal economy of southern Manhattan. The Morellos, in return, offered protection.

It was in Harlem, though, that the most unusual of the Lomontes’ allies lived. She was a dumpy, mannish Neapolitan woman named Pasquarella Spinelli—square-faced, red-haired, and nearly sixty years old—and she was the owner of the largest livery stable for miles around: a tumbledown warren of corrugated iron hideaways that stood only a short walk from the brothers’ feed store and stretched the width of a city block from its entrance at 334 East 108th Street. Though barely literate—she was well known in Harlem for keeping accounts scrawled with a lump of coal on whitewashed walls—Spinelli was rich, a successful businesswoman who lent money, leased tenements, and owned the Rex, the largest Italian vaudeville theater in Manhattan. To most of the population of East Harlem, she was also a sinister figure, and it was generally understood that most of her considerable fortune came from crime. The local police, for whom she acted as an occasional informant, knew Pasquarella as the head of a gang of horse thieves and extortionists, most of whom worked from her stable as grooms. She was worth three hundred thousand dollars, it was said.

The Lomonte brothers had good use for such an ally. For one thing, Spinelli was likely a valued customer of their feed store; for another, Nick Terranova, who ran the Morellos’ horse theft racket, could use her stable to conceal his stolen animals—a service for which Pasquarella charged her customers the rate of five dollars a day. The closeness of the relationship between Spinelli and the Mafia was demonstrated in December 1911 when Nick opened a blacksmith’s shop on her premises. What Pasquarella got from the arrangement is less clear, but it probably had much to do with her own need for protection in the Harlem underworld. Certainly a number of murders were committed on and around her property over the years (the
Herald
, in 1917, would put the total at more than twenty), so many that the place became infamous throughout the borough as the “Murder Stable.” According to New York rumor—and it was rumor that was printed as fact by newspapers as august and as cautious as
The New York Times
—Spinelli’s labyrinthine premises concealed makeshift torture chambers and murder rooms where the Morellos’ enemies were questioned and killed, and the screams of their unfortunate victims could be heard drifting out across East Harlem late at night. In truth, accounts of this sort stemmed from error and imagination, but there is no question that Spinelli had many enemies and went in fear of her life.

If Pasquarella thought that the Lomontes and the Mafia could keep her safe, though, she was wrong. Only a few months later she was dead, shot through the head and neck by a pair of gunmen who had lurked outside the main doors to her stable and who had plainly waited some time for her to show herself. The murder was never solved; Spinelli’s assassins escaped, and there were conflicting theories as to who had sent them. Some attributed the shooting to a vendetta Pasquarella and her daughter had been pursuing with some minor gangsters, while others, including the police, pointed to the machinations of her business partner, Luigi Lazzazzara.

In an underworld that was becoming more dangerous each day, no one could escape the consequences for long—not the owner of the Murder Stable, nor, as it soon became clear, even the Morellos themselves.

PASQUARELLA HAD BEEN
one of Harlem’s most prominent residents, but even her death made no difference to the smooth running of the Italian underworld. Lazzazzara took on the stable and the grooms, and the horse theft racket went on much as it had before. The same could not be said of the next murder to take place in the Sicilian quarter. That April, just three weeks after Spinelli was shot, Giuseppe Morello’s only son was also killed. This time there were repercussions—for the boy’s assassins, who were hunted down, and for the leaders of the Morello family themselves. By the time peace was restored a few months later, the Lomonte brothers had lost a good deal of their influence and a new boss had emerged from the ranks of the Harlem Mafia.

Morello’s son was still young, only seventeen, when he was killed, and his death was all the more shocking for being unexpected. Calogero’s death took place on a clear evening early in spring, a few blocks north of the Morellos’ strongholds, as the boy was strolling up Third Avenue with his friend Joe Pulazzo. Just as they reached 120th Street, a group of men emerged from several doorways. Passersby heard voices raised, then several shots. The two groups had been grappling a moment earlier, and the shots were fired from point-blank range. Morello was hit once in the stomach, invariably a fatal wound at the time; Pulazzo took a bullet through a lung. Reeling back, the Mafiosi drew their own weapons and returned fire, mortally wounding one attacker. The two Sicilians were outnumbered, though, and so badly wounded that neither could get more than a few blocks from the scene of the ambush. Calogero, trailing smears of blood, staggered as far as Lexington Avenue before collapsing against some steps. An ambulance was summoned, and as the dying boy was stretchered aboard, a passing priest climbed in and gave the boy the last rites. Morello, Pulazzo, and their wounded assailant all died the next day in the hospital. None had said a word to the police.

Word of the triple shooting filtered down to Flynn next morning, and the Chief’s inquiries soon revealed the basics of the story; Calogero’s attacker had been “one Barlow, alias Kid Baker,” a gang leader from the Upper East Side. The motive for the ambush, though, was harder to discern; Baker had no ties to the Mafia, and there was all sorts of speculation in East Harlem. One report suggested that Morello had been a police informant, killed on the orders of his family when his betrayal was unveiled. Another theory was that the ambush had had its roots in disputes over the control of prostitution in the Italian neighborhoods.

Salvatore Clemente would fill in the facts. Clemente’s version of events differed considerably from the rumors that were circulating on the street. As it was, though, the counterfeiter’s reports shone vital, unexpected light upon a little-known part of the Morellos’ saga: the eclipse of the Lomonte brothers and the rise of Nick Terranova to the leadership of the first family.

It was at Calogero’s funeral, Clemente said, that he first learned the truth about the murder. He was by then a favorite of the Terranova brothers—he had lent them the money to hire handsome carriages for young Morello’s funeral procession—and they confided what had actually happened on 120th Street. Calogero, the Terranovas explained, was not merely the unlucky victim of a street brawl. He had been shot down as part of a vendetta: revenge, on the part of the Madonia family, for the murder of the barrel victim nine years earlier. The ambush had been carefully planned; Morello had been lured up Third Avenue by an urgent message sent not by Kid Baker but by Baker’s lieutenant. The lieutenant, who was Madonia’s nephew, had begun a scuffle to create a pretext for the shooting; afterward, according to the Terranova brothers, he had gone to Lucy Madonia in search of protection and begged her to use her influence to make peace. When Mrs. Madonia refused to intervene, the nephew was forced to flee New York for Italy.

The three Terranovas thirsted for revenge. Calogero was, after all, a Mafioso—even at seventeen, he had been “carrying a gun” for the first family. The brothers were also deeply concerned at the effect the news of the murder would have on the boy’s father. “The family,” Clemente said, “did not know what to tell Morello, as they fear when he hears of the death of his son it will perhaps kill him.” They were also thoroughly disgusted by the Lomonte brothers’ failure to seek vengeance. The Morello family’s new leaders made no attempt to find Calogero’s killers. Their unwillingness to avenge his death was a grave breach of Mafia custom, and at young Morello’s funeral Nick Terranova publicly humiliated them, placing a hand upon his nephew’s coffin and loudly swearing revenge. He would “butcher every one” of the Kid Baker gang, he vowed.

Nick wasted little time in making good on his promise. A week after Calogero’s death, he vanished from East 116th Street one evening and reappeared the next morning with news that he had tracked down and killed the first member of the Baker gang. A few weeks later, the youngest of the Terranovas murdered again, this time shooting down the man who had sent his nephew the message that lured him to his death. Nick, clearly, was taking considerable risks; he and his brothers would undoubtedly be suspects if the killings were discovered. When Clemente called on them next day, he found his friends rehearsing alibis and “constantly sending out for papers and observing that there was nothing in them of it yet”—good news, of course, since it meant that the police knew nothing of the murder.

Terranova grew substantially in stature in these months. He was the youngest of three brothers, and only twenty-two years old in 1912; a year earlier, when Morello had been jailed, he had been thought too young and inexperienced to succeed as boss. Now, though, he revealed himself to be a natural leader, and by avenging Calogero’s death he acquired an influence that matched and then eclipsed that of the two Lomontes. Other members of the Morello family began to ask him for advice and to depend on his decisions. The Lomontes, for their part, backed away. The brothers severed at least one of their ties with the Morellos at about this time, giving up their saloon on East 107th Street and opening another in its stead. The new tavern stood two blocks to the north, and they ran it in partnership with a man called Gagliano. Gagliano was the family name of another group of Mafiosi from across the East River in the Bronx.

It took time, of course, for the inexperienced Terranova to accumulate enough support to rival the Lomontes; Clemente was still referring to the first family as the “Lomonti gang” as late as 1913. What does seem indisputable is that the brothers’ influence declined as Nick gained power. When that happened, the Lomontes turned to yet another ally for support. They turned to the King of Little Italy.

GIOSUE GALLUCCI, THE MAN
who gloried in that title, was generally agreed to be the most influential Italian in New York. He had arrived in the United States in 1892 from Naples and gradually established himself as a power in East Harlem. By 1912 he had business interests throughout the district. He ran much of the ice trade in the summer and controlled the coal trade in the winter. He was also one of the biggest moneylenders in the Italian quarter, owned a string of cobbler’s shops, dealt in olive oil, enjoyed a near monopoly on hay and feed sales to the district’s livery stables, and was the owner of a popular bakery at 318 East 109th Street, where he lived in an apartment over the store. Everybody knew him; hundreds owed their living to him, and thousands more paid him in one way or another. “To Gallucci,” said Salvatore Cotillo, who would rise from a middle-class home in Harlem to become the first Italian-born Supreme Court justice in New York, “all people were either hirelings or payers of tribute. It was a matter of concern in the neighborhood if you were looked down upon by Gallucci.”

So far as the city’s newspapers were concerned, the King was a legitimate businessman—the epitome, in fact, of the successful immigrant. He was a physically imposing man, large without being particularly tall, and always immaculately dressed in tailored suits. He sported magnificent waxed mustaches, and, at a time when New York’s Mafia bosses still dressed in ordinary working clothes and only the dandified Lupo the Wolf had any pretensions to elegance, he flashed a $2,000 ring and fastened his shirts with diamond studs worth an additional $3,000, as he swaggered around Harlem swinging his loaded cane.

In Little Italy, however, Gallucci was generally understood to have made much of his immense fortune from crime—from racketeering, mostly, and extortion. Unlike the Morellos, though, he had taken the profits of his criminal enterprises and used them to insinuate himself into every aspect of life in the immigrant quarter. The King ran what purported to be the New York office of the Royal Italian Lottery but was in fact nothing more than a front for his own numbers racket, and he sold thousands of tickets every month throughout Harlem. More important, he was also heavily involved in politics. He was “certainly the most powerful Italian politically in the city,” one newspaper remarked, “and during campaigns was exceptionally active.”

Gallucci’s ability to mobilize the vote in Harlem, to get immigrants registered and to make sure they cast their ballots as he told them to, allowed him to wield the sort of power that Morello never had: power that stretched beyond the confines of the Italian neighborhoods. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants meant hundreds of thousands of valuable votes cast, and, as a partisan of the all-powerful Democratic political machine, which ruled Manhattan from its headquarters at Tammany Hall, the King possessed influence that his rivals could only dream of. Tammany rarely lost an election, and that meant that it controlled the city’s police, not to mention the huge army of bureaucrats responsible for handing out city construction contracts and licensing saloons. With Tammany at his back, Gallucci was all but immune from prosecution, and though he was occasionally arrested for minor crimes, the cases never seemed to come to court. The
Herald
observed in the spring of 1915 that the King was then “out on $10,000 bail on a charge of carrying a pistol, and so strong has been his political influence that it even reached Washington, and in two years he has not been tried on the charge.”

Thanks to their interest in the feed store on 108th Street, the Lomonte brothers had known Gallucci for several years, and an alliance offered them security and influence. To other members of the Morello family, however, the friendship between the Lomontes and the King was deeply shameful. Gallucci, after all, was Neapolitan, and, in the Morellos’ diminished state, he was also the Lomontes’ superior, at least in the districts around his 109th Street base. It was a distinction so obvious that it was even noted by the New York newspapers. For the
Herald
, which followed Italian affairs more closely than the other English language dailies, the Sicilian brothers were actually nothing more than
mani forti
—strong men, bodyguards—in the retinue of the King.