The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (47 page)

Daniello eked out the second chance his sentence gave him for about a year; then, in 1920, he got himself into an argument in a Coney Island bar, lashed out, and was arrested. This time his record as a stool pigeon failed to impress the judge—he served five years for felonious assault. It seems likely that Ralph hoped his half decade in jail would wash away the memory of his betrayals; rather than flee the vengeance of his former colleagues, he moved to New Jersey after his release, purchased a saloon, and lived there openly under his real name, Alfonso Pepe. It was a fatal mistake. Less than a month after his release, Ralph was sitting with a friend outside his Newark bar when a man approached. The stranger drew a gun, remarked, “I’ve got you now,” and fired three times into his body.

Daniello died in agony from a bullet in the gut. His killer jumped into a car driven by two other men and got clean away, aided by a fusillade of fifteen shots he and the second passenger directed back into the crowd. The Barber’s assassins were never caught, but, the Newark police declared, their most likely motive was revenge.

Among the many suspects who might have ordered Daniello’s murder, Pellegrino Marano, the Camorra boss in Coney Island, was last heard of at the trial of Tony the Shoemaker in July 1926. By then seven years into his sentence of twenty years to life for the Terranova killing, Marano flatly refused to give evidence against his associate. “I won’t talk,” he told the court. “I don’t know anybody.” His lieutenant, Giuseppe Vocaro, was just as tight-lipped. “Seven years ago,” he said, “I swore on the tomb of my mother that I would never be a witness for or against anybody.” The two Camorrists were returned to their cells.

The latter years of Alessandro Vollero, the leader of the Navy Street gang, are better chronicled, thanks largely to the chance that placed Joe Valachi in his Sing Sing cell during the 1920s. Valachi, already a sworn enemy of Ciro Terranova, was delighted to discover that his cellmate was the man who had had Terranova’s brother killed. It was the Camorra boss, he recalled, who educated him in the deep-rooted enmity between Sicilians and Neapolitans: “If there is one thing that we who are from Naples must always remember,” Vollero preached, “it is that if you hang out with a Sicilian for twenty years and you have trouble with another Sicilian, the Sicilian that you hung out with for all that time will turn on you. In other words, you can never trust them.”

Vollero became a mentor to Valachi, even offering the younger man an introduction to a fellow Neapolitan, the Chicago gangster Al Capone. It was he who first hinted at the existence of the secret criminal fraternity called the Mafia—an organization that Valachi, a streetwise Italian American criminal, had not realized existed. He pressed eagerly for further information, but Vollero realized that he had said too much. “Take it easy, kid,” he counseled his protégé. “You’ll learn all there is to know in good time. It’s not for me to say it.”

By the time Vollero was released from jail, in 1933, Valachi had fulfilled his cellmate’s prediction. Initiated into Tom Gagliano’s family during the Castellammare War, the former burglar had become a member of the organization he always referred to as Cosa Nostra, running a numbers racket under the protection of an ambitious hoodlum named Vito Genovese. There was still a good deal the low-ranking Valachi did not understand about the inner workings of the Mafia—”Well, who knows what the hell’s going on?” he once complained—but he knew enough to realize that Vollero’s life was now in danger. A friend of the old Camorra leader soon appeared to beg Valachi for his help. “The old guy don’t know nobody now,” the man explained. “But he hears you’re with Vito and them others. Can you straighten things out for him?”

Valachi did his best. The days of the Morello-Terranova ascendancy had faded into irrelevance by now, and the forward-looking Genovese was reluctant at first to intervene—”When the hell did this happen, twenty years ago?” Eventually, however, Valachi’s boss agreed to speak to Ciro Terranova, and word was relayed that the problem was resolved. Valachi passed the good news to Vollero, who was so grateful that he pressed the younger man to visit him at home. “It was really something,” Valachi said. “He had the whole family lined up to greet me. He called me his savior. Well, we ate, and it was the last time I saw him. I heard later that he went back to Italy and died in peace.”

IN SICILY, VITO CASCIO FERRO— last seen in New York on the night of the Barrel Murder in April 1903, and last heard of six years later, in Palermo, as a suspect in the Petrosino murder case—returned to his hometown, Bisaquino, to find the local Mafia waxing considerably in strength.

It was a situation that suited the wily and ambitious gangster perfectly. Cascio Ferro worked tirelessly for two decades, first to cement his position as an influential leader in his own district, then to extend the Mafia’s rapacious grip over most forms of crime in western Sicily. In doing so, he made a fortune from rustling cattle and turned himself from an all but illiterate peasant into one of the dozen or so most influential men in the whole island. Cascio Ferro, according to one police report dating to 1909, controlled organized crime across three provinces of Sicily and had a number of influential friends in the political establishment. By the early 1920s, it is said, his power in the hinterland beyond Palermo was such that the mayors of towns he was expected to pass through would wait outside their gates to kiss his hand.

It is doubtful whether the Sicilian Mafia has ever had a more respected—even beloved—leader in all its long and fratricidal history. “Don Vito,” the Italian writer Luigi Barzini observed, “brought the organization to its highest perfection without undue recourse to violence. … [He] ruled and inspired fear mainly by use of his great qualities and his natural ascendancy. His awe-inspiring appearance helped him. He was tall, spare, elegantly but sombrely dressed. A long white beard made him resemble a sage, a New En gland preacher of the last century, or a respected judge. … Being very generous by nature, he never refused a request for aid and dispensed millions in loans, gifts and general philanthropy. He would personally go out of his way to redress a wrong. … Under his reign, peace and order were preserved.”

Attaining a position of such eminence may have gratified Cascio Ferro, but it has almost always proved dangerous for any criminal to gain such public renown. In May 1926, in the course of a vigorous campaign against the Mafia decreed by Mussolini, Don Vito was arrested. In the Sicily of old, this would have proved no more than a temporary hindrance. But when one of Cascio Ferro’s numerous godsons called on a powerful local landowner to solicit his support, he was dismissed with the bleak observation “Times have changed.” The Fascist regime took no chances when it came to indicting the old boss. Don Vito was charged with participation in twenty murders, eight attempted murders, five robberies, thirty-seven acts of extortion, and fifty-three sundry other offenses, all of which had been accompanied by threats of violence.

Sentenced, after a brief, one-sided trial, to life in prison, Cascio Ferro disappeared behind the forbidding walls of the Ucciardone Prison in Palermo. There, wrote Barzini, he established an effortless sway over warders and prisoners alike, arbitrating disputes and ending feuds. If true, it did him little good; he died in jail. According to Arrigo Petacco, an Italian journalist and the biographer of Joseph Petrosino, the old don’s end was appropriately diabolical; accidentally left behind when his prison was heavily bombed and then evacuated in 1943, “he died of thirst and terror in the gloomy, abandoned penitentiary, like the villain in some old serial story.” The truth was less melodramatic. Cascio Ferro expired in his cell of heart failure, in 1942. Don Vito left behind him the words of an old Sicilian proverb, carved painstakingly by hand into the walls: “Prison, sickness, and necessity reveal the heart of a friend.” The inscription remained visible until the late 1960s, when it was finally painted over.

CASCIO FERRO’S RISE to eminence in Sicily coincided with the panicked visit Giuseppe Morello and Lupo the Wolf made to the island in 1921. It seems possible that the powerful Mafioso, their ally in New York two decades earlier, was one of the men the pair appealed to in their efforts to have the death sentences imposed upon them overturned.

However the trouble was resolved—whether Cascio Ferro, or Nick Gentile, or some other Mafia boss intervened on the men’s behalf—Ignazio Lupo was able to return to the United States in May 1922, his difficulties with Totò D Aquila at an end. The Mafioso immediately encountered a problem of a different sort, however: A Secret Service agent stationed at Ellis Island recognized his distinctive moon face as he disembarked, and immigration officials on the island detained and held him there for three weeks as a potential undesirable and a likely deportee. It took the production of a copy of the commutation President Harding had signed for him—an impressive piece of parchment affixed with seal and ribbon—to secure his release.

Lupo returned to New York on June 12. There, thanks largely to the protection he received from Ciro Terranova, who also provided him with a handsome sixteen-room home on Brooklyn’s swanky Avenue P, he experienced no difficulty in resuming his old trade as an extortionist. By early 1923, the Wolf was hard at work running a wholesale operation, the La Rosa Fruit Company, which supplied grocery stores and restaurants throughout Brooklyn with produce at the usual inflated prices. This business lasted for the best part of a decade, and, when it was sold, Lupo worked as a lemon broker for a while before shifting his attention to the bakery trade. He had long experience of running operations of this sort and soon built up a substantial racket. In 1925, it was reported, he returned again to Italy to bank the money he had made over the last three years, and the total came to $3 million. The bakery delivery round that he opened in 1933 with Rocco, his only son, began trading with a single truck; three years later there were eight, and Lupo had also became the self-appointed president of the Italian Bakers’ Association. Payment of the association’s dues guaranteed members the chance to run their stores unmolested, though as usual the protection that the Wolf was selling was mostly protection against himself.
The New York Times
wrote that he also controlled Brooklyn’s lucrative Italian lottery.

Like his brother-in-law Terranova, the Wolf took pains to present himself as a legitimate businessman and to claim his burgeoning wealth as the product of hard work. “He especially liked to stay home with his family after his business hours and duties and did not congregate in any saloon or meeting place,” his brother John would claim. “He always went to bed early so that he would be better able to take care of his business the next morning.” Any complaints made about his methods, insisted Salvatrice, his wife, were lodged by rivals who were simply jealous of his success. There is not much truth in this. The reality was that Lupo made good in business by making good his threats. He was a suspect in the unsolved murder of a contractor named Ruggerio Consiglio in October 1930 and was charged a year later with killing a rival who had challenged the monopoly he had established in the Brooklyn grape trade—a racket that had yielded the Sicilian gangster Frankie Uale fifty dollars per carload of wine grapes during the 1920s. On that occasion Lupo was picked out by a witness from a ninety-four-man lineup in Manhattan.

The usual problems, not least the impossibility of finding men brave enough to testify against the Mafia in open court, prevented the DA from bringing prosecutions in these cases. But there was at least one woman in Brooklyn angry and principled enough to take a stand against the Wolf’s extortion. Rose Vitale, who ran a bakery shop at 557 McDonald Avenue, had been told to join the bakers’ association but refused to pay Lupo’s inflated dues. Threats followed, and when Vitale still proved obdurate, a mysterious fire broke out in her shop. Later one of her delivery trucks was overturned, and stink bombs were used to contaminate the bread in others.

By July 1935, Vitale had had enough, and she went to the police with her complaints. They responded. Ignazio and Rocco Lupo were arrested at their home and held in jail for the next four months. By the time they got out, Vitale had persuaded several of the bakers’ association’s reluctant members to join her in giving statements. The Lupos replied with more threats and several beatings.

The fact that some of the Wolf’s victims had finally found the courage to speak out against him says a good deal about the changing conditions in New York. By the mid-1930s, Lupo was nearly sixty years old and lacked much of his youthful strength and vigor. His son, Rocco, was not cut from the same stern cloth, and their old protector, Terra-nova, was himself a fading force. The new generation of Mafiosi that came to power in the wake of the Castellammare War had no reason to support a man whose friends and allies were mostly dead and gone, and Vitale may have sensed there was more bluster than real menace in Lupo’s threats. The political climate in the city was changing, too. A new mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, was shaking up the police and speaking out against crime and criminals. These factors combined to make Vitale’s stand against the Wolf’s rackets possible.

Retribution was not far off by now. On January 11, 1936, a few weeks after the Lupos emerged from jail, a formal complaint signed by several Brooklyn bakers was lodged with New York’s governor, Herbert Lehman. It alleged that the Wolf and his cub had been operating bakeries and selling goods at cost to undercut their businesses and punish them for their intransigence; the signatories urged Lehman to investigate the Mafioso’s “homicidal organization.” The governor passed the information to Brooklyn’s DA for action, and it was at the district attorney’s office that, at last, a chink was found in Lupo’s armor. The commutation that the Mafioso had brandished on Ellis Island was not a full and formal pardon, as the Wolf believed; his release had been conditional, and President Harding’s decree would remain in force only for as long as Lupo stayed within the law. Should he return to criminal ways, the commutation clearly stated, he could be immediately recalled to prison to serve out the remainder of his term. There was no need for more investigation or a trial; the president reserved to himself the sole right to decide the case.