The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (5 page)

It was almost 1 A.M. by the time Flynn finished and the conversation turned to strategy. McClusky, headstrong as ever, was only too aware that his superiors wanted evidence that he was making progress. The press, too, would be expecting action. Now was no time to wait and see how things developed; he and his men, he said, would round up all the members of Morello’s gang next afternoon, confident that at least one of them would talk under interrogation. The fact that the arrests would take place in time to feature in the next day’s papers was not mentioned, but it was scarcely incidental to the inspector’s thinking.

Flynn was utterly appalled. His own investigation would be fatally compromised, he urged, and, anyway, it was too early to be talking of arrests. Likely as it was that Morello and his men knew all about the barrel murder, there was as yet no shred of proof that they were actually involved—and hence there was a real chance that the killers would go free for lack of evidence. The best way forward, the Chief urged, was further observation, which would almost certainly produce new leads. At present Morello did not know that he was being watched. Arrests would simply put the whole gang firmly on its guard.

Flynn pleaded, but McClusky would not be budged and the truth was that the Secret Service had no jurisdiction in a murder case; indeed, the Chief’s only role in the operation that was being planned would be to point out the members of the gang to the police. The discussion went on for nearly half an hour, but, in the end, the only concession that Flynn could wring out of Chesty George was a promise that his men would be allowed to search Morello’s home after his arrest.

By the time McClusky and his colleagues left the building, it was past 1:15 on the morning of April 16. The Chief stayed just long enough to draft a note to Secret Service director Wilkie explaining what had happened. Ten minutes later, he, too, headed home.

FLYNN’S OPERATIVES WERE
back on duty seven hours later, maintaining their usual watch on Stanton Street. Other agents were posted outside Morello’s apartment on nearby Chrystie Street and opposite Inzerillo’s café; two more loitered on the Bowery. Each group was accompanied by twice the number of plainclothes detectives, which reassured the Secret Service men but made it hard for them to remain inconspicuous.

The police plan was certainly ambitious. It called for almost a dozen members of the counterfeiting gang to be spotted, individually, by Flynn’s agents, then followed as they moved about New York until the whole gang was in the authorities’ grasp. Adding to the danger that something would go wrong, McClusky was adamant that Morello himself should be the first man arrested. His capture would be the signal for the other teams to move in on their targets—a decision almost as difficult to implement, given the communications available at the time, as the task of following a large number of wary Sicilians around New York for half a day or more without being noticed. To make matters worse, as Flynn had warned, the counterfeiters would certainly be armed.

April 15 proved to be a challenge such as the New York bureau of the Secret Service had not faced before. Almost every agent in the city had been pulled from other investigations and stationed south of 14th Street, while Flynn himself took up position at police headquarters to help coordinate the operation. The members of the counterfeiting gang were nightbirds, not early risers, but the first of Morello’s men was spotted as early as 10:45 A.M. and others were acquired one by one until, by midafternoon, Flynn’s operatives had five under observation. Snatched phone calls to police headquarters kept the Chief informed of progress, but there was still no sign of Morello. Flynn and McClusky waited, growing gradually more apprehensive, as the afternoon dragged on and the members of the gang flitted to and fro between their homes, Laduca’s store, the bar on Prince Street, and the Café Pasticceria. Abetted by frequent showers of rain, several of the Clutch Hand’s men lost themselves in the teeming streets, only to be picked up again anxious minutes later.

Flynn’s luck held through the long afternoon, but by sunset Morello was still nowhere to be seen. Since there was little prospect of continuing surveillance after dark, McClusky began reluctantly preparing to abandon operations for the night. Then, at 7:10 P.M., the inspector’s office door flew open. Standing on the threshold was Secret Service operative Henry, who had run over from Elizabeth Street. Morello had appeared in Little Italy, he said.

The news that Henry brought was critical. The counterfeiter, spotted on Elizabeth Street, had been followed until he entered the Café Pasticceria, where he fell into a long conversation with Inzerillo. McClusky and Flynn had debated what to do in this event and concluded that it would be dangerous to arrest two armed men within the crowded confines of the little café. Better to let Morello conclude his business and leave for home. Better to seize the two men independently.

The lights were coming on across the city as Henry and Flynn hurried out onto a damp Mulberry Street. While Henry hastened back to resume his watch at Inzerillo’s, Flynn made instead for the entrance to Delancey Street—a spot he knew, from weeks of observation, that Morello would pass on his way back to his apartment. The Chief splashed through the puddles on East Houston and jogged down the Bowery until he found two more of his operatives and four burly detective sergeants standing against a hoarding on the corner.

The seven men waited impatiently for Morello to appear, but he had not yet left the Café Pasticceria. Flynn’s resources were stretched so thin by McClusky’s operation that there was no chance of freeing any agents to carry messages, and so no way of getting warning that their man was on the move. The resultant uncertainty made the watch a nervous one, more so as the wait stretched to three-quarters of an hour. It was not until 8 P.M. that the Clutch Hand turned in to Delancey Street, his slight figure silhouetted for a moment against the bright lights of the Bowery. Flynn signaled frantically to the detectives. As he did so, a second man rounded the corner and the Chief saw that Morello had a companion. Petto the Ox was accompanying him home.

The two Sicilians had no chance; McClusky’s men were on them in an instant. The four muscular policemen hurled themselves bodily at the counterfeiters, knocking the Clutch Hand to the pavement. Petto, taller and stronger, received a punch between the eyes, swayed for an instant, and then went down as well with two detectives on top of him. The winded counterfeiters tried to reach for their inner pockets, but the policemen knocked their arms away.

Breathing a little heavily, the detectives hauled Petto and Morello to their feet and handcuffed them. Then they began to search their prisoners. Both men proved to be heavily armed. The Ox carried a pistol in a holster and a stiletto in a leather sheath; his boss was concealing a fully loaded .45-caliber revolver in his waistband and had a murderous-looking unsheathed knife strapped to his leg. “A cork,” Flynn observed—sounding impressed despite himself—”fixed on the point of the blade prevented it scratching his leg and allowed him to bring it into play with a single motion much more readily than had he carried it in a sheath.”

Forcing their way through the crowd of excited onlookers that had rapidly surrounded them, the four detectives frog-marched their prisoners off toward police headquarters, where the two counterfeiters were thrown into separate cells. Inspector McClusky then issued orders for all the other members of the gang to be rounded up, and the results were gratifyingly swift. Secret Service operative Frank Burns and his police escort cornered the Sicilian they had been watching in a basement room in Elizabeth Street and managed to get him out of the building without attracting a crowd. Pietro Inzerillo was arrested without incident in his store, and Joseph Fanaro was seized outside Morello’s restaurant on Prince Street. None were given time to draw the weapons they were carrying. The closest McClusky’s detectives came to trouble was on the Bowery, where two other members of the gang glanced up in time to see a quartet of policemen bearing down on them. The Sicilians half drew their revolvers, but the policemen disarmed both with their nightsticks, relieving their prisoners of two more guns and a set of lethal stilettos.

Eight members of Morello’s gang were arrested that evening, and a ninth at midnight. Almost all proved to be as well equipped as their boss—the next day, newspapermen were invited to photograph a table-top laden with all the daggers and revolvers found on them—and most, to Flynn’s considerable annoyance, had permits that entitled them to go about the city armed.

McClusky was jubilant at his success—”radiant,” one newspaperman described him, and “all smiles.” His men, relieved to have made so many arrests without serious incident, celebrated, too. But, the man from the
New York Sun
observed, “Flynn and his Secret Service agents didn’t smile or express any particular joy. The agents who did all the clever work in this case looked bored.” The reporter was right to note the difference in the response of the detectives and Flynn’s operatives, but he was quite wrong in guessing the reason. The Chief was not bored; he was worried. He felt sure that McClusky had just made a serious mistake.

IT WAS OBVIOUS
, as early as the next morning, that Flynn’s concerns were justified. Searches of all the prisoners’ apartments turned up large quantities of correspondence, written in impenetrable Sicilian, but no sign of any contraband—no forged notes, no bad coins, and no printing plates—nor anything to link the barrel victim directly to Morello’s men. Nor were the “strenuous efforts” that the police made to squeeze statements from the suspects any more fruitful, despite application of the brutal methods of the third degree. Not one of the arrested men would talk, and when Flynn took the Sicilians, one by one, down to the morgue to ask them if they recognized the body, none said a word to indicate they did. Morello, whom the Chief’s men had seen talking at length to the barrel victim two days earlier, “showed not the slightest sign of recognition or agitation,” a disappointed Flynn confessed. “He shrugged his shoulders and volunteered the statement: ‘Don’t know.’”

In the absence of a confession, McClusky’s case remained slender indeed. Several cigars found in Petto’s pocket were of a variety identical to the ones Petrosino had discovered on East 11th Street. A sample of the sawdust from Morello’s restaurant, which Carey took after the arrest, looked much the same as the bloodstained shavings in the barrel. And a search of the Clutch Hand’s dingy attic room on Chrystie Street turned up a collar of the same size and make as the one worn by the dead man. It was enough to impress the newspapermen covering the story, who reported that charges were expected any day, but scarcely sufficient to convince either the district attorney’s office or the Secret Service. “The police redoubled their efforts,” Flynn recalled, “but to no avail. Every clew, and there were few enough of them, led to nothing. Each new line, which was run down to no purpose, left the case more baffling.”

THE BREAKTHROUGH THAT MCCLUSKY
had been praying for came three days later, unexpectedly, when a clerk opening the mail at police headquarters discovered an anonymous letter addressed to the inspector. “I know the man who was found in the barrel,” the note began.

He comes from Buffalo for the purpose of getting money … he was condemned for false papers. The police have made the proper arrests, bring the condemned Giuseppe Di Priemo from Sing Sing, promise him his liberty and he will tell you many and many things, do as I write and you will discover all. We salute.

Yours friends S.T.

McClusky read the letter through more than once without feeling much the wiser for it. It had evidently been composed by an Italian with a limited command of English but a rather better knowledge of Morello’s gang. The reference to “false papers” suggested that the dead man in the barrel had been a forger, too, and the suggestion that he came from Buffalo made sense—it certainly explained why no one in Little Italy had recognized the corpse. But the name Giuseppe Di Priemo meant nothing to the men of the Detective Bureau; nor did McClusky have any idea why such a person should be locked up in Sing Sing, an infamous prison on the banks of the Hudson River thirty miles north of New York, where a large proportion of Manhattan’s criminals spent at least a part of their careers.

Still, if the murder was the product of some counterfeiters’ feud, the Secret Service would most likely know more, and a brief phone call to William Flynn was all it took to enlighten the inspector. Flynn was perfectly familiar with the name: Di Priemo, he informed McClusky, was a middle-ranking member of Morello’s gang, one of four Sicilians who had been arrested on New Year’s Eve for passing forged five-dollar bills in Yonkers. He was a native of Lercara Friddi, in the Sicilian interior, had lived in New York for three years, and—thanks to his recent conviction in a federal court—had just begun a four-year sentence for counterfeiting. The Chief recalled Di Priemo as uncommunicative to a fault, but, with several years to serve, the desire to cut something from that sentence might just make him willing to talk.

It would take a man a day to travel from New York to Sing Sing and back, but the barrel investigation was going nowhere. McClusky decided to send Petrosino to see prisoner Di Priemo. An Italian speaker would have a much better chance of getting information from the Sicilian than an ordinary detective would.

THE GREAT GRIM BULK
of Sing Sing Correctional Facility had been carved out of a hillside on the steep banks of the Hudson at a point where the river swept off in a wide bend to the west, away from New York. The whole prison had been hewn from the gray marble that abounded in the district: the claustrophobia-inducing walls that enclosed the entire complex, the main block with its minute cells (each eight feet long and three feet wide), the death house, and the multitude of workshops in which the jail’s thousands of prisoners were set to work each day. It was a terrible place in which to be incarcerated: cramped, rigidly disciplined, and so close to the fast-running river that a chilly dampness permeated everywhere. Each cell held nothing but a cot, a lamp, a Bible, and a slop bucket; the bathing facilities were nonexistent; and the whole prison, in the words of one Sing Sing warden, lay in the grip of “a coldness that hovers like a pall, and a heaviness that presses down upon the spirit like a huge millstone.”