Cosa Nostra (28 page)

Here were myriads of human beings, stifling in boxes arranged like drawers in a bureau, with holes to look out upon the opposite boxes and the roaring ‘elevated’. Those who were at home hung out of the windows in as few garments as were decent; while the long seething bare canons of brick, paving stone and asphalt were swarming with children in quest of air and amusement.

It was the memory of poverty in Sicilian agro-towns and the prospect of a better future that made the conditions tolerable for the recent arrivals in New York.

But neither well-meaning contemporary accounts like these, nor today’s cinema images, manage to capture the economic dynamism of Little Italy. When Adolfo Rossi first went to America in 1878, Mulberry Bend was an Irish slum. He remembered the area’s ‘lurid, dingy hovels, mostly built of wood’. During the years of the great transatlantic exodus, he became an emigration commissioner for the Italian government, reporting on the fortunes of Italians in the US. In 1904 he went back to Manhattan and was pleased to report that, since Little Italy had been created, house prices and rents had risen, the quality of the buildings had improved markedly, and Italians themselves were the major investors in the property market. The new arrivals from the peninsula, especially the women, had also discovered a passion for education. In every way they could, Italians in the United States were grabbing the chance to better themselves.

It was into this dynamic environment—at once very Sicilian and very American—that the mafia transplanted itself. The mafia does not spread nearly as far and as fast as people often assume. When it does travel, it does so in two basic ways. The first is fast, flexible, and is usually related to a specific business initiative, such as the trade in a particular drug. With the approval and assistance of the capos back home, individual mafiosi can take the mafia brand anywhere they choose, setting up more-or-less temporary trading posts as they go.

But men of honour are not just businessmen, they are also the administrators of a shadow state. A great deal has to be in place for the mafia’s system of territorial control through
cosche
to spread outside western Sicily: protection rackets; political contacts; the agreement of neighbouring
cosche;
a friendly attitude from elements in the press, police, and local population; and so on. Exporting this privatized form of government is a slow affair at best. Even in western Sicily, the extent of the mafia’s domination varies from one place to another. And after some 140 years of history, the mafia still has only isolated outposts on the Italian mainland. The fertile criminal soil of the United States was one of the rare environments into which the mafia’s method could be transferred wholesale. The story of two Italian-American men—Joe Petrosino and Giuseppe ‘Piddu’ Morello—brings the mafia’s arrival in America into sharp relief.

*   *   *

Internal letter to the Police Commissioner of New York, 19 October 1908:

Sir:

In compliance with the provisions of paragraph 3 of Rule 30 of the Rules and Regulations of the Police Department, I respectfully request that I be granted permission to receive a gold watch tendered me by the Italian government.

Respectfully,

Joseph Petrosino,

Comm. Italian Branch

Detective Bureau

Undated memorandum from the American consul in Palermo to the Police Commissioner of New York:

Petrosino was registered under the name of Guglielmo De Simoni at the Hotel de France in Palermo. On March 12, 1909, he was standing at the base of the Garibaldi statue in the Piazza Marina waiting for a trolley when two men fired four shots at him. Three hit him and he died instantly. He was hit on the right side of the back, through both lungs and in the left temple. Petrosino was unarmed. A Smith and Wesson revolver was found in his valise in the hotel. A heavy Belgian revolver with one barrel discharged was found near the scene.

New York Police Department memorandum dated 11 May 1909:

Received from the Police Commissioner, Lt. Petrosino’s gold watch and chain, pair gold cuff links, cane, two dress suit cases containing personal effects, package of letters and a check for $12.40. Signed, Louis Salino.

At 6
A.M
. on 14 April 1903, Frances Connors, a plump, middle-aged woman on her way to work, passed the New York Mallet & Handle Works at 743 East 11th Street close to the corner of Avenue D. A coat caught her attention. It had been draped over the top of a weather-beaten sugar barrel placed near the pavement, next to a pile of timber. Lifting the coat, she saw a right foot and a left hand. When she looked into the barrel, she found it contained a man’s body, fully clothed and bent double, the head squeezed between the knees, a coarse burlap sack wrapped around the neck. Mrs Connors’ screams drew two patrolmen to the scene. The body was still warm.

Analysis would later reveal that the victim had eighteen shallow stab wounds to the neck, and a slash across the throat so deep and wide that the head had nearly been detached. The man was respectably dressed. Both of his ears were pierced. He had eaten heavily just before his death: potatoes, beans, beets, salad, spaghetti. In the bottom of the barrel there was a three-inch layer of sawdust, containing onion skins and the chewed stubs of dark Italian stogies.

The ‘body in the barrel’ mystery, as the New York papers quickly dubbed it, triggered America’s fears of an invasion of criminal hordes from ‘the boot’. But behind these scare stories, the case offers intriguing clues about the reality of the mafia presence in the United States in the era of the great Sicilian exodus. It also marked a milestone in the path to fame of an Italian-American policeman named Joseph (Giuseppe) Petrosino. It may also have led directly to his death, six years later, in Piazza Marina, Palermo—one of the most famous murders in the mafia’s history.

A day after the discovery of the body in the barrel, the police arrested nine members of a mafia gang of counterfeiters and extortionists. For some time they had been under surveillance by men from the US secret service division. It was suspected that they were importing forged US currency in the false bottoms of olive oil cans. The money was distributed to other east-coast cities through a network of agents.

The evening before the murder, the victim was seen entering and leaving a butcher’s shop at 16 Stanton Street—it was one of the gang’s haunts. A little later, he went to a saloon with a small restaurant at the rear. When he did not come out again, the surveillance ended for the night. The saloon belonged to a 34-year-old man from Corleone, Giuseppe ‘Piddu’ Morello, known to be the gang’s leader.

When Morello was arrested in the Bowery, he was armed and had cigars in his pockets identical to the ones found in the barrel. His saloon had sawdust on the floor in which were found onion skins and cigar stubs. He was not difficult to pick out: his right hand had only the little finger remaining. When interrogated, he refused to answer, and refused even to tell his interrogators how he lost his other fingers.

The barrel in which the body was found communicated more than Morello. A stencil mark on the underside—W & T 233—led detectives, via the great sugar refineries on the Long Island side of the East River, to the grocers Wallace & Thompson at 365 Washington Street, Manhattan. They had only one Sicilian customer, Pietro Inzerillo, another member of Morello’s
cosca.
Two more barrels with the same markings were found at Inzerillo’s pastry shop and café at 226 Elizabeth Street.

The breakthrough in identifying the victim came through Detective Sergeant Petrosino, a short, square, immensely strong man with a badly pitted face and a shapeless nose. (Ernest Borgnine would play him in a disappointing 1960 film,
Pay or Die!
) Born into poverty near Salerno on the southern Italian mainland in 1860, Petrosino had emigrated to the USA as a young boy. Learning to read and write in New York City’s public schools was his first step in rising above his parents’ station. He became a street-cleaner and then the foreman of a gang of ‘scow trimmers’—the men who crewed the flat-bottomed barges that ferried the city’s rubbish away. At that time the police supervised refuse collection in New York. Petrosino came to the attention of a local officer who gave him the chance to become a uniformed cop.

Petrosino’s slow rise through the ranks of the NYPD accelerated at the turn of the century when the numbers of Italian immigrants, and criminals, increased dramatically. He had already attracted attention to himself by issuing a warning that a gang of mostly Italian anarchists in Paterson, New Jersey, were planning to assassinate President William McKinley. The warning went unheeded. On 6 December 1901, McKinley was shot dead as he inaugurated the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo.

A few days after the discovery of the body in the barrel, Petrosino travelled thirty miles up the east bank of the Hudson River to the grey blocks of Sing Sing. His contacts in Little Italy had suggested that Giuseppe Di Primo, a man serving a three-year sentence for counterfeiting, might help put a name to the body in the barrel. He interviewed Di Primo in a cell that had been built seventy years before with stone hewn by inmates from the prison quarry; it was damp, cold and tiny: 2.1 metres deep and 197 centimetres from floor to ceiling, and only 97 centimetres wide. Sing Sing deserved its dreadful reputation.

When Di Primo was shown a picture of the dead man, he identified him immediately as his brother-in-law, Benedetto Madonia. Grief-stricken, and made desperate by the conditions in Sing Sing, Di Primo confessed that both he and Madonia were part of the same counterfeiting operation as one-fingered Piddu Morello. Madonia was one of the agents used by the gang to pass the counterfeit dollars into circulation; he had gone to recoup some of Di Primo’s property from Morello. That was the last time that Di Primo had seen him before he was murdered.

When Joe Petrosino returned to the city, he arranged for Madonia’s widow to identify the corpse. The murdered man had been found with a watch-chain on his waistcoat, but no watch. His widow was able to describe the missing timepiece: it had a locomotive stamped on the base.

One of the arrested gang members, a hulking, bull-necked man of twenty-four called Tommaso Petto, known as the Ox, had a receipt in his pocket from a pawnshop on the Bowery. It bore the same date that the body in the barrel had been discovered. When police returned the ticket, they found the watch with the locomotive design. The Ox was now strongly suspected of being the man who had performed the murder.

The inquest into the case came to court on 1 May 1903. None of the gang members had given in to the NYPD’s habitual, impatient interrogation methods. Only eight of sixteen people subpoenaed to serve on the jury turned up. The victim’s son was the first to be called to the stand to identify the watch. One detective involved in the case recalled what happened next:

He looked at it and was about to speak when there was a shuffling of feet and hissing in the courtroom, which was filled with swarthy-faced men. One of these jumped up and put his fingers to his lips. Young Madonia was now not sure it was his father’s timepiece.

Under identical pressure, Madonia’s widow had a comparable lapse of memory.

Di Primo was brought down from Sing Sing to give evidence. The police alleged that there had been bad blood between himself and the Ox for some while. But Di Primo cheerily asserted that they were very good friends. He had evidently decided, on reflection, to serve out his time in Sing Sing in silence. The case fell apart.

*   *   *

What Petrosino and his colleagues discovered about the Morello gang can be set alongside what is now known about the mafia in its country of origin. Some of the men arrested in the aftermath of the barrel killing were described as importers of wine, oil, and other agricultural produce from the island. The trade in citrus fruit, oil, cheese, and wine provided excellent cover for criminals on their journeys back and forth across the Atlantic, and within the United States. These commodities also offered opportunities for mafiosi to extort protection money and create monopolies as they did in Sicily.

Gun licences were clearly a hinge between the gangs and the authorities in New York as they were in Sicily. The members of Morello’s gang who were arrested in April 1903 were in possession of perfectly legal permits to carry firearms within the city limits. They had been granted by the Deputy Police Commissioner on the recommendation of the Captain of the local precinct. One such permit holder had only been in the US for twenty-eight days. Criminal relationships
across
the Atlantic were evidently so strong that a mafioso could set off from Palermo confident in the knowledge that he would be carrying a legal weapon soon after being cleared through Ellis Island. In some embarrassment, the Police Commissioner revoked 322 firearms permits shortly after these facts were publicized in the
New York Herald.

There is strong evidence of close ties between mafiosi in America and Sicily. One associate of the Morello gang, who was wanted for questioning by Petrosino during the ‘body in the barrel’ investigations, was Don Vito Cascio-Ferro, later to be imprisoned by ‘iron prefect’ Cesare Mori. Before the body in the barrel murder, he had fled Sicily to avoid the special police surveillance imposed on him following his suspected involvement in a kidnapping, although he later claimed that he went to the US on business—as a lemon importer. He escaped arrest in the ‘body in the barrel’ round-up by fleeing to New Orleans, home to some 12,000 Sicilians and a strong mafia presence, before returning once more to Sicily. In 1905, Morello’s gang was joined by another new emigrant, Giuseppe Fontana—the mafioso recently acquitted of killing Emanuele Notarbartolo.

The composition of the Morello gang may well reveal important information about the level of coordination between men of honour back in Sicily. Morello was from Corleone; Cascio-Ferro from nearby Bisacquino—both in the interior, south of Palermo. Fontana was from Villabate closer to the capital. Other members were from Partinico, further away to the west. In other words, these were men of honour from
different
Sicilian
cosche.
Piddu Morello’s gang clearly constituted a trading post for particularly enterprising men of honour from across the province of Palermo and beyond. American business was becoming a matter of interest to the whole Sicilian mafia. Moreover, the sense of a common interest between men of honour was strong enough for criminal credentials acquired in various corners of provincial Sicily to be recognized and appreciated on the other side of the Atlantic.