Authors: Lee Lamothe

The Sixth Family (5 page)

BOOK: The Sixth Family

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The autopsy report spares little detail: “[The victim’s] mutilated and battered body was found buried in a hole in a swamp near an abandoned stone quarry. Chief cause of death: fracture of skull—comp[ound]. Other causes: rupture of liver; internal hemorrhage; simple fracture of fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth ribs on left side.” Coroner Dr. Robert Cleaver, who conducted the examination, concluded: “Homicide by crushing instrument.”

When the victim was identified as Vito Rizzuto, police were not surprised. The activities of the arson ring had already come under investigation. A month before Rizzuto’s body was found, the New York State Police had received an alert from officers in Passaic County to be on the lookout for him. He was wanted for arson after a small hotel was torched.

The police investigation moved quickly. People who knew plenty were talking too much, particularly John Chirichello, Rizzuto’s friend, whom Simon had first approached with his arson scheme. Chirichello told police the details of the printing plant fire, as well as Simon’s subsequent dispute with Rizzuto over payment. Investigators, meanwhile, had determined that Stefano Spinello was the only person in New Jersey who knew where Rizzuto had been hiding.

Max Simon, Stefano Spinello, and a third man, Rosario Arcuro, another of Rizzuto’s friends, were charged with his murder. The theory of the prosecutor was that Simon had hired the other two to track down Rizzuto and kill him. They had killed Rizzuto either to protect Simon from Rizzuto’s revenge or to shut him up in the face of an investigation into the arson ring. The names of Rizzuto’s killers remain provocative: Spinello is also sometimes spelled Spinella—the last name of Calogero Renda’s mother’s family—and Arcuro has an alternate spelling of Arcuri—the name of a Sixth Family clan from Cattolica Eraclea who would remain close to the Rizzuto family to this day. Could he have been killed by kin? Answers do not come easy.

In response to the charges against him, Max Simon pulled every string he could wrap his crooked fingers around. After being convicted of the arson, he had a soft landing, editing a newspaper and writing columns from his jail cell and, able to acquire steaks and a stove to cook them on, maintained his rich diet. He only served nine months of his three-year sentence and was released after a special session of the New Jersey Court of Pardons. The murder charge was then dropped.

Stefano Spinello was not as lucky. He had originally pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, but after a few days of hearing the damning testimony of Chirichello in court, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He was sent to Sing Sing prison for a 7-to-20 year sentence. Rosario Arcuro was never captured by police or brought to trial. He did, however, get a taste of what he had meted out to Rizzuto: he was murdered in the Bronx in August 1934.

Vito Rizzuto, one of the Sixth Family’s first North American pioneers, who would give his name and a criminal culture to a grandson he did not live long enough to see, died as a fugitive arsonist at the hands of his friends. American police could find no family who needed to be notified of his death and he ended up in a grave at the Methodist cemetery in Brewster, New York.

The American government, however, was far from closing its file on Vito Rizzuto.

WASHINGTON, D.C., 1932

Even before his murder, Vito Rizzuto had earned unwanted attention from the U.S. federal government. On Halloween, 1932, a memo marked “CONFIDENTIAL” was sent from Washington, D.C. to the New York director of the U.S. Bureau of Naturalization, asking that Rizzuto’s immigration file be pulled and forwarded. Someone had questions about the visa that had allowed Rizzuto entry into the United States.

On November 7, 1932, the quota visa that Rizzuto had presented when he disembarked in New Orleans in 1925 was found in the archives and sent to Washington. An official also dusted off the 10-year-old pages of the passenger manifest for the S.S.
Edam
that recorded his arrival in America.

To everyone’s eye, even now, Rizzuto’s visa looks perfect. Apparently issued by the American Consular Service in Palermo, Italy, certificate #2226 shows it was duly processed, approved, signed and stamped on November 19, 1924. The nine dollars’ worth of fee stamps were affixed and appropriately canceled to acknowledge payment for the visa, which bears the signature of Robert E. Leary, the diplomatic post’s vice consul.

The visa, issued under the American government’s recently imposed quota system that tightly controlled the number of Italians that could immigrate, carries the photograph and name of Vito Rizzuto, allowing him a coveted way into America. His paperwork to obtain the visa also seemed in order.

He had a
Certificato Di Identita Personale
, his personal identity certificate. Issued by the Italian government, featuring his photograph and signature and bearing the stamp of the commander of the Carabinieri station in Cattolica Eraclea, it acted as a passport.

He had a medical certificate: “I, the undersigned physician and surgeon, hereby certify that Rizzuto, Vito, son of Nicolò, of Cattolica Eraclea, has no contagious disease and has a sound mind and perfect physical constitution,” reads the letter, dated November 13, 1924, and signed by Dr. Mario Bellina, of Cattolica Eraclea. The letter was witnessed and notarized as authentic by P.A. Margiotta, the mayor of Cattolica Eraclea, and stamped with the seal of the town’s municipal office.

Finally, he had a
Certificato di Penalita
—a penal certificate testifying that he had never served a term in prison—signed by the vice chancellor of the court in Agrigento, the provincial capital. Everything appeared authentic, but U.S. officials were suspicious.

In October, 1934, more than a year after Rizzuto’s murder, all of Rizzuto’s documents were gathered together by the Department of State in Washington, D.C. and sent in a diplomatic package to its consulate in Palermo, in what was being classified as “the fraudulent visa case of one Rizzuto, Vito.” The government was trying to “ascertain the circumstances and facts in the case,” the accompanying letter says. The inquiry, however, did not stem from Rizzuto’s messy murder. The diplomatic note ends: “The Department also wishes to learn whether or not Vito Rizzuto is in Italy at present or still resides in the United States.” A joint investigation by U.S. and Italian authorities was launched into the visa, which found that a good portion of the documents Rizzuto used were brilliant forgeries or corruptly obtained versions of the real thing.

Alfred Nester, the U.S. consul in Palermo, reported in sworn statements that the quota immigration visa carried by Rizzuto when he arrived in New Orleans was not issued by the consulate. Further, Nester said, there was no record of the money for the fee stamps that are affixed to Rizzuto’s visa ever having been paid. Italian authorities found similar duplicity in his paperwork. They examined copies sent by the Americans and declared that Rizzuto’s medical certificate and identity papers were false because there had never been a Dr. Bellina nor a mayor named Margiotta in Cattolica Eraclea. The penal certificate, however, was genuine. (Rizzuto’s theft conviction was not listed on his record because, in accordance with Italian regulations, it was a first offense for a period of less than three months’ imprisonment, investigators reported.) When authorities went to Rizzuto’s home town in 1935 looking for him, they interviewed his wife, Maria Renda, who told them that her husband had never returned to Sicily after leaving for America and he had died there in 1933. Italian authorities could not confirm the death, however, as the vital statistics office in Cattolica Eraclea had not been informed of his death.

“Taking into consideration the circumstances,” wrote Inspector G.M. Abbate of the director general’s office of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “there is no doubt but that Rizzuto emigrated clandestinely.”

U.S. immigration investigators then painstakingly retraced Rizzuto’s steps in America, with the mandate of interviewing him as part of their probe. It was not until July 1935, that Frank Steadman, a federal investigator, learned of Rizzuto’s murder at the stone quarry two years earlier. In his report Steadman noted that other men had traveled to America with Rizzuto and that perhaps their visas should be looked into as well.

Indeed, with Rizzuto dead, the U.S. government went after the men who had arrived with him aboard the S.S.
Edam
.

Investigators found that Calogero Renda’s documents were also false. The same fictitious doctor and the same imaginary mayor had signed his papers and the U.S. consulate had no record of issuing his quota visa. Investigators found that after Renda’s arrival he had applied for U.S. citizenship in 1927, giving his home address as Morris Avenue in the Bronx. He had returned to Cattolica Eraclea in 1929, however, to marry Domenica Manno, the young sister of Antonio Manno, the most powerful Mafia boss in the area. On April 6, 1930, he’d returned to his home in the Bronx without her, presenting a fresh U.S. quota visa at the port of New York. He then applied for a U.S. immigration visa—legally, this time—for his bride. It was rejected. After Renda’s U.S. citizenship was granted in 1932, he again went to Sicily to spend time with his wife, returning to New York on March 24, 1933, five months before Rizzuto was murdered. In the summer of 1935, after Rizzuto’s death, Calogero Renda went to the Oradell street where Rizzuto had lived—a few weeks ahead of the U.S. immigration investigators—asking neighbors which house his brother-in-law had lived in. By the time U.S. Immigration Inspector Jacob Auerbach went looking for Renda in 1936, in the widening probe of the fraudulent visas, Renda was back living in Cattolica Eraclea with his wife, Domenica Manno.

The Manno name would prove to be important, although no one realized its significance at the time. This was one of the first official recognitions of the closeness of the Rizzuto-Manno-Renda family clique—the base of the Sixth Family. On March 17, 1937, Renda’s U.S. citizenship was canceled and, 11 days later, an arrest warrant for immigration violations was issued against him, removing any chance that he could legally return.

Mercurio Campisi, who had arrived at New Orleans with Rizzuto and Renda, was also found to have traveled on false documents. He fought to remain in America but was ultimately sent back to Cattolica Eraclea in 1938. Pleading destitution, he forced the U.S. government to pay for his return trip.

Giuseppe Sciortino, another of the S.S.
Edam
bunch, was also found. After he arrived in New Orleans he married and settled in Buffalo with his wife, where they had three children. Sciortino earned money selling bootleg alcohol made in an illicit still in his home. In 1936, police found counterfeit U.S. banknotes in his car. When the Secret Service questioned him about it, Sciortino was adamant about what kind of criminal he was: “I am not a counterfeiter, I am a bootlegger.” When quizzed about his travel documents, he claimed he properly paid the fees at the American consulate. Later, when pressed at a deportation hearing, he admitted he had bought them for about 3,000 liras from a man at the Concordia Hotel in central Palermo.

“First, he told me to go to the municipal authorities to get my penal certificate, then birth certificate and after I got them I turned them over to him,” Sciortino said. Eight or 10 days later, the man delivered the false visa. His proffered revelations brought him no slack. He was deported to Siculiana, but his wife, Jennie Zarbo, refused to go with him. He then began a 15-year letter-writing campaign—including flowery missives to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor—to convince U.S. officials to allow him back to be with his family. The government denied all requests. The letters end in 1950 on a sad note: one of Sciortino’s children had died and he himself had savagely lost an arm. “My condition requires a woman to help me out in the house,” he wrote. Since his wife was steadfast in not moving to Sicily, he begged the U.S. Attorney General to “abolish” his marriage so he could remarry. The government replied: “I am unable to offer any advice in the matter.”

Vincenzo Marino, the oldest of Rizzuto’s companions aboard the S.S.
Edam
, had more success at disappearing. An arrest warrant for Marino was issued on February 19, 1935. The search started in Los Angeles, where he had said he was going to settle. Two years later, however, Los Angeles police were still making “intensive efforts” to find him. Detectives concluded that Marino had never actually traveled to California.

The elaborate visa fraud was an important investigation for the American government. Reports on its progress were sent directly to Cordell Hull, President Roosevelt’s famed secretary of state. Curiously, documents uncovered show the government solving the visa crisis by clamping down on the gangsters who they found had used them. There is little evidence of what investigators discovered when they inevitably probed how the visas and fee stamps got out of the consulate and into their hands in the first place.

Although this Vito Rizzuto’s criminal activity led to his murder, that gruesome lesson did not dissuade his son or grandson from pursuing an outlaw life. As for Calogero Renda, he would continue to work closely with the Rizzuto family for the rest of his life. The offspring of these two men, who had tried but failed to move their clan to New York, would soon form the innermost core of the Sixth Family. And if it could not be based in America, then it would settle for the next best thing—Canada.

That would have to wait, however, for the next generation.

CHAPTER 3

CATTOLICA ERACLEA, 1940s

BOOK: The Sixth Family

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