The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (8 page)

It is hardly surprising, in such circumstances, that the Mafia had deep roots in the town. The
mala vita
was especially attractive to men whose one alternative was working in the fields, and petty theft and violence were so endemic in Corleone that one churchman wrote complainingly to his archbishop, pointing out that even the priests there carried guns “by day and by night.” Murder was all too common, too, made easier by the narrow, winding streets, lofty windows that served as snipers’ perches, and a maze of dusty alleyways that made escape simple and pursuit practically impossible.

Exactly when the Mafia appeared in the town remains uncertain, but it was well established by the 1880s. Giuseppe Valenza, a notoriously brutal landowner from nearby Prizzi, was jailed in 1866 for participating in raids on his neighbors’ properties but was freed three years later “through Mafia intrigues.” He remained the dominant figure in the district for another decade, murdering rivals and protecting bandits who hid on his land, providing him with firepower and making convenient scapegoats. Forced to flee Sicily in 1877 after being denounced for the role he had played in several infamous kidnappings, Valenza went to Rome, where he lived for a while under what the Italian police described as “the protection of a highly placed and greatly respected personage.” Three years later he was back in the neighborhood of Corleone, where he was suspected of arranging at least two murders—together with the shooting of a thief who had unwisely stolen eight head of his cattle, the attempted assassination of two local lawyers, and the wounding of a rival Mafioso who was surprised by Valenza’s men while making love to his mistress in a barn.

Valenza remained active well into the 1880s, but by 1884 another ambitious criminal by the name of Luca Patti had formed a gang of his own in Corleone itself. The fledgling Mafia had no central leadership at this point, and no hierarchy that could have decided to establish a branch of the society in the town or appointed a man to lead it. Patti, who had been brought up in the district, organized his own criminal activities, attracting followers until he had the basis of what would, in time, be known as a “family”: a leader, advisers, and lieutenants, and a larger group of ambitious minor thugs to carry out his orders. He and his men called themselves the Fratuzzi, which means “brotherhood,” and gradually formed working relationships with similar groups in neighboring towns, so that by about 1890 there was a network of loosely connected Mafia families stretching across most of western Sicily.

For all this, Luca Patti had a good deal in common with other early Mafia leaders. He was the son of a watchman paid to guard the fields and a leading figure in an extensive cattle-rustling ring that, a police report filed in 1884 explained, included Mafiosi from nearby Mezzujuso and the port of Termini. Despite his obvious initiative, however, Patti also had several rivals. Over the next five years, as the Fratuzzi of Corleone grew to a strength of forty men, several Corleonesi challenged his right to lead the fledgling family. The result was a period of internal strife that saw the rise and fall of several would-be bosses. It was during these disrupted years that Giuseppe Morello, then in his early twenties, was first heard of as a power in the Mafia.

THERE HAD BEEN MORELLOS
in Corleone for generations. Both Giuseppe’s grandfather, for whom he was named, and his father, Calogero, were born in the town and lived out their lives there. Morello’s mother, Angela Piazza, came from a family with the same deep roots in the community, and poor though he undoubtedly was, and miserable though life in Corleone could be, he always felt a fierce attachment to his home. Morello grew to manhood in Corleone, and when he left, at age twenty-five, he continued to seek the company of fellow Corleonesi. They would be his closest and most trusted allies in New York.

Almost nothing is known of the Morellos’ family history but the bare dates of birth, marriage, and death. Yet even these dry, official details are eloquent in their way. Morello’s father, for example, was born in 1839 and married, twenty-six years later, to a girl just sixteen years old. Weddings of grooms in their middle twenties and brides who were little more than children were commonplace in Corleone; this union, like many others, was likely entered into by a man who had worked long and saved hard to support a wife, and a girl whose own prospects and expectations revolved entirely around marriage. Giuseppe, the couple’s eldest child, was born fifteen months later, on May 2, 1867; a sister, Marietta, followed in 1872. But there would be no more children; Calogero’s early death, at the age of only thirty-two, speaks volumes of the harshness of life in the Sicilian interior.

Deprived of his father when he was not yet five years old, Morello acquired a stepfather before he reached the age of six. Widowhood meant penury in Corleone, and Angela Piazza could not afford the luxury of grieving. With two young children to support, she observed the bare minimum of mourning before remarrying in the summer of 1873. Calogero Morello had been dead for fourteen months when his wife wed Bernardo Terranova—another Corleone native, but one much closer to her in age. With Terranova at her side, Angela’s prospects improved dramatically. Years later, in papers prepared to gain admission to America, Morello’s stepfather would describe himself as a “laborer,” which in Sicily meant he worked the land. Other papers, however, show that Terranova was no ordinary farmhand. He was, in fact, an early member of the Fratuzzi, his name known from documents in the Palermo archives compiled by Corleone’s sometime mayor. The writer, Bernardino Verro, was a socialist and a firebrand who to his lasting shame allowed himself to be lured into joining the Mafia in 1893, at a time when he was desperate for protection from the local land barons. According to Verro’s detailed account, written as a form of exculpation and discovered among his papers twenty-two years later, Terranova was one of the dozen or so Mafiosi who oversaw his initiation early in 1893.

When Terranova himself joined the Fratuzzi is uncertain, but it was probably at some point during the 1880s, when he was still young and strong and had a growing family to feed. Certainly Bernardo’s association with the local Mafia helps to explain his stepson’s acceptance into the same group, which began at some point later in the same decade. By 1889, when a man named Salvatore Cutrera had secured a brief ascendancy as boss in Corleone, the twenty-two-year-old Morello had risen to the position of lieutenant to one of Cutrera’s chief subordinates. He had become a key associate of Paolino Streva—and Streva was the nephew of one of the richest men in town.

The reasons for Morello’s rapid rise within the ranks of the Fratuzzi remain unknown, but they can be inferred. The Clutch Hand had his stepfather to teach him. He was a fine organizer, cunning, and ruthless to a degree always valued by the Mafia, as his years in the United States would show. He was also literate—by no means a common accomplishment in the Sicilian interior—and unusually intelligent. All these qualities would certainly have been of value to Streva when, backed by his uncle’s money, the Mafiosi became involved in cattle rustling, the most lucrative of rural rackets. They would also serve Morello well when he ran up against that rarest of obstacles in Sicily: an incorruptible policeman.

THERE WERE TWO POLICE
forces in Corleone, and Giovanni Vella, the man responsible for catching Streva, was the chief of one of them. Vella was captain of the local Guardie Campestri, the Field Guards, a group of about a dozen men who patrolled the landed estates outside the town walls, mostly on foot. The Field Guards’ task was to protect the peasantry from bandits and the cows from rustlers, while the carabinieri—the state police—kept order in Corleone itself.

So far as Streva and Morello were concerned, Vella should have been no more than a minor irritant. The Field Guards enjoyed a mixed reputation in Sicily; unlike the carabinieri, who were generally recruited on the mainland and knew little or nothing of the island when they arrived there, the men of the Guardie Campestri had been brought up in the communities that they protected. That made them, potentially at least, formidable detectives—they certainly possessed a detailed knowledge of the local criminals—but it also meant that they were easily corrupted. Only captains in the Field Guards received regular pay; their men subsisted solely on the rewards handed out by landowners or their
gabelloti
. Since several of these aristocrats and a large proportion of their overseers were active members of the Mafia, the guards were naturally reluctant to pry into their affairs. (“The Campestri,” the mayor of Borgetto complained as early as 1884, “far from obeying their leaders, receive their cue from whoever happens to be their protector.”) A good number were Mafiosi themselves. As Antonino Cutrera, a Palermo policeman of the period, cynically observed, “Frequently a Field Guard enjoys the reputation of having already committed one or two murders. Once he is surrounded by this aura, his career is made, and he had become a person who demands subjection—a necessary and therefore a better paid person.”

Giovanni Vella was not like other leaders of the Field Guards, though. He was “a brave fearless man,” one Corleonese declared, and “a great enemy of the Mafia, having sent many of its members to jail.” When Streva’s cattle-rustling ring began to make its presence felt, stealing dozens of valuable animals and shipping them off to markets on the coast, Vella launched a vigorous investigation. Rustling was an ambitious crime, one that required good organization and considerable resources; with all his contacts in the town, it did not take the captain long to discover who was behind the sudden spate of thefts. “[He] was nearing a solution of some crimes,” the same Corleone chronicler learned. “In fact he was ready to make some important arrests.”

Vella’s problem was that in a place as small as Corleone, the Fratuzzi were just as well informed of his activities as he was of theirs. Streva soon heard of the Field Guards’ plans. Knowing Vella’s reputation, the Mafioso realized that there was no point in attempting to intimidate or bribe him. The solution to his difficulty would need to be more permanent than that.

There were only two ways to deal with Vella, Streva thought. One was to kill him, but that would invite unwelcome attention from the carabinieri. The other was to deprive him of his job. The post of captain of Corleone’s Field Guards was an elected one, and Vella was due to stand for reelection in the autumn of 1889, a matter of a few weeks away. With the help of the right man, Streva could do more than simply remove a thorn from his side. He could replace Vella with someone much easier to manipulate.

Searching around for a viable candidate—someone electable, a transparently honest man, but one more naïve and much less worldly than the incumbent captain of the Field Guards—Streva’s choice fell upon Francesco Ortoleva. Ortoleva was forty-one years old at the time, the son of a former mayor of Corleone, and the nephew of one of the most famous priests in western Sicily. He had no Mafia connections and no idea that the acquaintances who came to talk him into running against Vella were actually emissaries from the Fratuzzi. He was perfect for Streva’s purposes.

Flattered by the attentions of his visitors, Ortoleva announced his candidacy for the post of captain of the Corleone Field Guards soon afterward. Streva exulted, but not for long. Vella heard the news almost immediately and, bitterly resentful, went straight to a bar, where he drank himself into a stupor. Later that evening, still in an alcoholic haze, he staggered up to his rival’s home on the fourth floor of an apartment block and hammered on the door. When Ortoleva opened up, Vella launched into a sozzled tirade. The mayor’s son, he slurred, was out to deprive him of an honest living. He was a tool of Paolino Streva and probably a member of the Mafia himself.

Thoroughly alarmed by this performance, Ortoleva told his visitor to leave and, when he would not, pulled a gun from a drawer and brandished it in Vella’s face. The Field Guard was not so intoxicated that he could not hear the anger in his rival’s voice. He reeled off into the darkness, unaware that his drunken visit had had the effect that he desired. Upset and just a little frightened, Ortoleva withdrew from the election next day.

It was the worst news imaginable for the Fratuzzi, and Streva panicked. The vote was only a few days away, and there was no time to field another candidate. Vella, reelected, would soon complete his investigation of the cattle-rustling ring. He had to go, and quickly.

The job of killing the Field Guard was passed by Streva to his deputy, Morello. Morello knew enough of Vella’s routine to feel confident that shooting him ought not to be a problem. Vella patronized the Stella d’Italia café in Corleone and could be found drinking wine there most evenings. Apparently secure in the belief that no one in town dared to touch him, Vella came and went alone. He was also in the habit of taking shortcuts through the backstreets when returning to his wife. Surveying the route, Morello concluded that his target would best be ambushed in an alleyway a few yards from his home.

The Clutch Hand brought in another member of the Fratuzzi to help him—his associate’s name was never discovered—and chose a dark night an evening or two later. The two assassins waited at a spot that they knew, presumably from observation, Vella would have to pass on his way home. There was enough light by which to see their intended victim but plenty of shadows in which to hide.

Vella spent that evening drinking at the Stella d’Italia with an old friend—the captain of the Corleone police—and several other public officials. By closing time, as usual, his head was swimming. Passersby watched as the captain rested against a lamppost for a moment and waved away a neighbor who offered to help him to his home. He stumbled through several deserted passageways unmolested and had almost reached his door when he all but walked into the two men waiting for him in the darkness. Stepping aside to let Vella to pass, Morello and his companion drew their guns. Both men were armed with large-caliber revolvers.