The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (40 page)

There was a long police investigation, naturally; the deaths had been too violent and too public, too close to children playing in the streets, to be brushed aside as gangland killings often were. The Camorrists, though, were unconcerned; they made regular protection payments to the local Italian detective, Michael Mealli, who was one of the first policemen on the scene and who conspicuously failed to turn in much in the way of evidence. They also felt safe on their own territory. “The police cannot get any witnesses down there,” Vollero was heard to boast of Navy Street. “We can take care of the witnesses, we can get witnesses to prove anything we want. … They dare not come forward to testify against me.”

Nick Terranova’s death shook the Morellos to their core. Caught unawares by the sudden outbreak of hostilities, the Harlem Mafia was reduced to something close to disarray and soon lost another half dozen of its members. Four Morello associates were shot dead in Philadelphia; a gambler named Joe Nazarro was taken up to Yonkers, shot, and thrown under a streetcar simply for talking to the Mafia. Then, a month after Terranova’s murder, Vollero managed to corner another Mafia leader, Giuseppe Verrazano. Verrazano met his end in a restaurant on the Bowery, shot down by two more Camorra gunmen. After that, Ciro and Vincenzo Terranova felt vulnerable even on East 116th Street. The Terranovas stuck close to their headquarters, and their confidence was further shaken when neighbors reported that a group of Neapolitans had been attempting to hire rooms that overlooked the entrance to their apartment block.

In fact, Vollero’s and Marano’s efforts to dispose of the Morellos were even more determined than the Mafia realized. There was a plan to smuggle an enormous bomb into the cellar of the Terranovas’ tenement and blow up the building with everyone in it. When this proved to be impossible, the Coney Islanders schemed to have poison slipped into the brothers’ food. The Camorra had no choice but to end matters, Marano said; if they did not, the Terranovas would. Morello gunmen were spotted on Johnson Street, and in January 1917 Vollero himself only narrowly survived an attempted Mafia ambush. The Camorra boss spent several weeks in the hospital, recovering from shotgun wounds, and another member of the Navy Street group summed the position up succinctly: “We have to leave this game, because this game will be the cause of the death of all of us, [and] because after this game is given up, we are able to work and we will remove each and every one of them from our presence.”

The Camorra never did account for Vincenzo and Ciro Terranova, but fear of imminent assassination certainly did gravely disrupt the Sicilian brothers’ criminal businesses. With its leader dead and his successors scattering for cover, the first family was in no position to maintain its usual firm grip on its rackets, and Vollero and Marano wasted no time in moving in on the Morellos’ operations. Gamblers who had paid tribute to DiMarco and Verrazano found themselves forced to make weekly journeys over to Brooklyn with their books.

The Camorra’s dominance of the New York rackets lasted only a few months, roughly from November 1916 to the spring of the following year. Vegetable wholesalers were informed that they would henceforth pay dues of $50 a railroad car to Navy Street on all the artichokes arriving in the city, and similar efforts were made to wrest the coal and ice trades from the Mafia. The wholesalers, though, proved unexpectedly resistant, and to Vollero’s fury, results were mixed; in some cases the Camorra’s demands were so high that their intended victims could not afford to pay; in others, men who had been dealing with the Morellos for years resisted because they nursed suspicions that the Sicilians would soon strike back.

The Camorrists had had great expectations for the Italian artichoke trade, and their plans had beem ambitious. Marano’s original idea was for his men to open their own store at Wallabout Market and use that as a base to drive rival dealers out of business. He was soon disabused of that notion by one Gaetano Migliaccio, an outspoken veteran of the vegetable wholesale trade who flatly declined to sell solely to the Camorra and who gave the Neapolitans a sharp lesson on the realities of his business. “Are you crazy?” Migliaccio demanded. “To begin with, you need a capital of ten or eleven thousand dollars, and then the persons will go to the police and have each and every one of you arrested. Leave it to me—if you want to sell artichokes, I will give you the opportunity. I know what I am doing.” The dealer eventually calculated that he could supply the gangs’ Wallabout Market store with a maximum of forty boxes of artichokes—an offer that Vollero meekly accepted.

Marano and his men had little more luck with the other vegetable wholesalers of the district. Brooklyn’s artichoke dealers bravely clubbed together and simply refused to pay Vollero’s “tax” of $50 a car; the Camorrists responded with a counteroffer of $15, and the two sides eventually settled on a compromise of only $25. Marano had even less luck with the policy bosses who ran Italian lotteries and turned out to be “pretty hard characters themselves.” The Coney Island gangster’s first demand was for $1,000 a week. The gamblers flatly refused to make any such concession, bluntly stating that they would sooner close their games down than hand over such enormous sums; in the end Marano had to settle for a verbal agreement that his gang would cream a 60 percent share in the profits—a sum that came, apparently, to far less than the $1,000 he had originally demanded. In practice, even that proved to be a crippling amount; a few weeks later, after further negotiation, the Coney Islanders settled for a paltry $150 a week. Only in a single game in Harlem was the Camorra able to extort an 80 percent share of the winnings, and by early 1917, when Vollero found himself short of cash, he was glad to hand control of the Harlem lottery back to the gamblers who ran it in exchange for a mere two hundred dollars. As for the coal and ice merchants of Manhattan, many of whom were based in Italian Harlem, they proved even less easy to coerce, and the Camorra made practically no headway with them. In the end, for all their bluster and all their threats, the Navy Street and Coney Island gangs were bitterly disappointed by the income that they squeezed from the Morellos’ rackets. They had anticipated giant profits.

There was, also, another problem: A man named Ralph Daniello had taken his teenage mistress and run off with her to Reno to get married.

ALFONSO PEPE, ALIAS RALPH DANIELLO
, better known as Ralph the Barber, was a Neapolitan thug of little consequence right up to the moment that he vanished from New York after Nick Terranova’s murder. Daniello was nothing special to look at—of medium height and stocky build, with a squared-off face, blank eyes, and an eight-inch scar that ran right across one cheek—and he was nothing special as a criminal. In his years as a member of the Navy Street gang, he had never risen above the lowest rung of the Camorra’s rigid hierarchy, a station so far below Vollero and Marano that he was practically beneath their notice. Now, though, in the autumn of 1917, Ralph had his bosses’ full attention. In Reno, and in trouble, he was threatening to reveal enough about their operations to get half the members of the gang locked up for life.

Daniello’s problems had their roots in a murder he had committed eighteen months earlier. It was May 1916, and he was working in the lucrative narcotics trade, selling quantities of the new wonder drug, cocaine, that had arrived on the scene. Business had been good, but not long before the DiMarco shooting the Barber had been involved in a violent argument over a drug deal. Ralph’s contact drew a weapon. Ralph fired first.

Prudence dictated that Daniello leave the city, which he did—though only when he was certain that the police were onto him, and then only in the company of his sixteen-year-old mistress, Amelia Valve. Exiled to the dusty streets of Reno, the Barber soon ran out of cash. It was at that point that Ralph wrote to his boss, Vollero, asking for money to be wired to him and for further payments to be made to his parents in Italy. That, he thought, was no more than his due recompense for years of faithful service. When Vollero failed to respond to any of Daniello’s letters, Daniello grew bitter—so bitter, in fact, that the next time he picked up a pen it was to write instead to the New York police. The men of the Brooklyn Italian Squad recognized the Barber’s value better than Vollero did. By the last week of November 1917, Ralph had been brought back to Brooklyn, telling the detectives everything he knew.

No Italian gangster had ever talked in such great detail. Even Comito’s damning confession, seven years earlier, had lacked the range and the authority of the Barber’s testimony. The information that Ralph gave cleared up twenty-three unsolved murders—among them Nick Terranova’s—and supplied leads for hundreds of lesser crimes. Then there were the gangster’s detailed recollections of day-to-day life in the Camorra, laying bare what it actually meant to serve a master like Vollero.

There was, at least according to Daniello, not much glamour in a Camorrist’s life. He himself had lived for several years on a fixed wage of around fifteen dollars a week, and, in exchange for this paltry sum, he was expected to collect protection money and commit whatever assaults or murders his bosses might deem necessary. Married gang members earned a little more, some twenty dollars, but for many others the pay was less. “Members of the gang who just did odd jobs, and did not work regularly … would get seven dollars a week,” the Barber said.

Amid this welter of extraordinary testimony, several facts stood out. Murder had played a large part in Vollero’s strategy. Gamblers who refused to pay tribute to the Camorra might receive a single warning (“A rebel is first slashed with a stiletto on the cheek”), but any further failure to comply meant death. “Different methods were used,” Daniello added, describing how he and his associates carried out their murderous instructions. “One man was caught in an ambush. More often, one of us started a quarrel over a game of cards so that the other could ‘do the trick’ in the confusion.” In part, this willingness to use violence was almost certainly a function of the gang’s small size. Among them, the Volleros, the Maranos, and the Morellos numbered no more than about fifty men, according to the Barber. This, in turn, suggested to District Attorney Edward Swann that the Camorra might be crippled by even a handful of convictions.

Daniello’s confessions were certainly almost sufficient in themselves to doom both the Navy Street gang and their friends in Coney Island. Swann’s star witness named names, identifying Vollero and Marano as the leaders of the Camorra and gunmen such as Tony Notaro and Tony the Shoemaker as the killers of Nick Terranova and Giuseppe Verrazano; all four men were soon picked up, as was Alphonse Sgroia, who had four murders to his name and went by the name of “the Butcher.” The Barber’s richly detailed testimony, which took the best part of two months to give, not only utterly disrupted the operations of both Camorra gangs but shone a penetrating light into other murky aspects of the Brooklyn underworld. Most of the borough’s Italian police officers were taking bribes, Daniello revealed, and he named names—implicating not only Mike Mealli, the precinct detective firmly in Vollero’s pocket, but even such storied officers as Charles Carrao (the subject of a recent and admiring profile in
The New York Times)
in efforts to protect the Neapolitans from retribution. This part of the Barber’s testimony caused a small sensation, and though Carrao escaped apparently unscathed, the same could not be said of the unfortunate Mealli, who was reduced to the ranks and put back on the streets as a beat patrolman.

The arrests of so many members of the Navy Street and Coney Island gangs severely disrupted the Camorra, and the Harlem Mafia was affected, too; Daniello’s careful account of the part that he and his fellow Navy Streeters had played in arranging Joe DiMarco’s murder made it clear that the killing had been committed to please the Terranova brothers. When that bit of underworld cooperation was exposed, Vincenzo and Ciro were arrested, too, along with several of their followers.

Most of the Mafiosi detained for the DiMarco shooting were eventually released, including Vincenzo. The district attorney’s office muttered darkly that the first family “possessed influence” of a substantial and helpful kind. Ciro, though, actually stood trial—twice—for ordering the gambler’s murder, making him the first of the Morello family’s leaders to face a capital charge in court. The middle Terranova brother stayed in prison for more than half a year, and the case dragged on long after the initial hearing in February 1918—the first trial was halted when the judge fell ill, and the retrial could not be heard until the summer. Ciro was very fortunate in his choice of advocate; he was represented by Martin Littleton, a wizard from Texas who, despite having a mere nine months of formal schooling to his name, had somehow turned himself into the greatest American jury lawyer of his generation. It was Littleton who spotted the great flaw in the DA’s case. Under American law as it then stood, no man could be convicted solely on the evidence of an accomplice, and, placing Ralph Daniello on the witness stand, the smooth-tongued Texan soon tied the hapless Barber in such knots that he was able to convince both judge and jury that Ralph and Terranova belonged to the same gang. With that admission on the record, Littleton moved for the whole case to be dismissed, and even his counterpart in the district attorney’s office was forced to admit that “it was entirely hopeless to go to the jury” with an argument so heavily dependent on an informant’s evidence. Ciro was discharged from custody on June 6, a relieved man, and returned to a rapturous welcome on East 116th Street.

The Camorrists who had been betrayed by the Barber enjoyed no such luck. Andrea Ricci died in 1917, shot dead by his own friends for fear he would betray them, and the cases against Pellegrino Marano, Alessandro Vollero, and their followers would occupy the Brooklyn district attorney’s office and the courts for much of 1918 and drag on well into the 1920s; the last in this protracted series of prosecutions took place as late as 1926, when Tony the Shoemaker unwisely returned to the United States from Italy, where he had fled after the murder. Ralph Daniello was the chief prosecution witness in almost all of these trials, supported in several cases by a fellow Camorrist named Tony Notaro, who drew reams of press coverage by describing in some detail the Society’s elaborate initiation rituals.