The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (36 page)

WITH THE FAILURE OF
the appeal and their plans for escape, the reality of the sentences that stretched out before them struck both Lupo and Morello hard. Both men became morose, depressed. Disapproving comments in their prison files, noting that they laughed and joked with the other members of their gang, cease after 1911, to be replaced with worried correspondence from their families.

Morello, his loyal wife, Lina, observed in a letter that she wrote to Moyer, was “serving 25 undeserved years” and “has no comfort because he is buried alive.” The boss suffered from indigestion and heart trouble, put on nearly thirty pounds, and grew increasingly angry, first at his family’s failure to supply the constant drip of good news he needed to sustain his spirits, then at the failure of their efforts to produce results. “You are wrong,” he told his wife in one letter, “and do harm to my health, for I am worrying all the time. … I alone know how much I am suffering.” There were regular complaints about the lack of letters from his relatives and children.

Lina, though, was finding life no easier than her husband. Deprived of Mafia money, she and Lupo’s wife, Salvatrice, were forced to take jobs in the feather business down on 105th Street, work that brought in so little income that they were reduced to visiting their reviled enemy, Flynn, to beg for the return of pawn tickets that had been in Morello’s pockets at the time he was arrested. The three Terranova brothers supplied Lina with a pitiful allowance of $4.50 a week and no doubt made a similar contribution to Lupo family funds, but with five children to support between them the two women struggled to survive. As late as 1916, the Secret Service suspected both wives of passing counterfeit silver on their daily shopping expeditions in their attempts to make ends meet.

Living in such straitened circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that Morello’s wife was upset by his surliness. “Listen, Giuseppe,” she wrote at the beginning of July 1915, “I am somewhat convinced that you do not care for me, because I can see that you are not as you were at one time.” Lina hoped that the fault might lie not with her husband but with the man who wrote his letters for him: “That he might not be able to explain well, as I see other letters that other wives get that are different to mine.” In this, though, she was disappointed. Morello’s real anger became clear when he scrawled a sharp letter to his brother Nick, criticizing the failings of each member of his family in turn. Lina was shown the correspondence, and she responded spiritedly:

I remain somewhat surprised in reading your letter, especially that you are trying to forget the family. My feelings have been hurt, you are acting ungratefully.

I have shed tears for two days, thinking of your unjust treatment. I thought of stopping writing to you, because my letters disturb you. On second thoughts, I decided to drop you these few lines, asking you whether or not you care for me to continue to write.

Morello must have hastened to apologize, for his wife’s letters reverted to their usual affectionate tone thereafter; he was again “My always adored Giuseppe” and her letters closed with “many kisses from the heart, also from our children.” But even so, the comfort the boss drew from his letters was not remotely enough to make incarceration bearable. Early release was all that he and his men craved, and, once their appeal had failed, the members of the gang were willing to do almost anything to get it.

One by one, the men began approaching William Flynn. It was time to talk.

FOR FLYNN, WHO HAD BEEN
so frustrated for so long by the Mafiosi’s veil of silence, it was a happy time. He had anticipated it, predicting to John Wilkie, on the day that the sentences were handed down, that Morello’s men would barter information as soon as their situation appeared hopeless. He took satisfaction from being right.

Morello, to everyone’s surprise but Flynn’s, was the first of the men to crack. The Clutch Hand offered to make a statement in January 1911, before his appeal was even halfway done. “It was the privilege of a king,” the Chief explained, for a Mafia boss to ignore whenever it suited him the vow of silence that he and his followers had sworn to uphold with their lives.

Morello’s aim was to trade information for his freedom, and he had a shrewd idea of what the authorities wanted to know: “For weeks,” a reporter from the
The New York Times
explained, “a story has been going the rounds of the cafes and restaurants of the Italian quarters that Morello was willing, in exchange for his liberty, to name the assassins of Lieutenant Petrosino.” An Atlanta lawyer summoned to the penitentiary took down the boss’s deposition, but the contents of his confession were never made public; when the statement was translated back into Italian for the boss to read, Morello appeared to take fright and refused point-blank to sign his name to it. According to at least two journalists, the unsigned document named Carlo Costantino as Petrosino’s killer, and the Clutch Hand balked when he learned that other Mafiosi in New York had threatened members of his family.

Morello remained eternally tight-lipped thereafter, but it was not long before Lupo’s lawyer indicated that he, too, might be willing to make statements. Then came Sylvester, then Cina. Calicchio would have talked if Flynn had asked him to, but the master printer had always been an employee, not a member of the gang, and he knew little. Cecala considered talking. Giglio did not get the chance; he dropped dead in the prison church, the first member of the group to die.

Flynn’s interest in these lesser fry centered on the printing plates that had vanished when the Highland plant was broken up. The Chief wanted to locate them to forestall further appeals and also because he knew Nick Terranova hoped to resume the counterfeiting operation. The Secret Service was willing to trade a commutation for the plates, but not one of the men would talk about it. There was a savage irony, from the prisoners’ perspective, that the one piece of information that could secure their release was the very scrap of knowledge that they dared not divulge. Disclosing the location of the plates in a corner of Morello’s private graveyard meant signing their own death warrants. Any attempt on Flynn’s part to excavate the burial site would risk the disinterral of the Clutch Hand’s victims—and hence bring the likelihood of murder charges.

The men kept their mouths shut and stayed in prison.

—

IN TRUTH, AS EVEN
Flynn conceded, any man connected to the Morello family had good reason to hold his tongue. The betrayal of Mafia secrets had long been an unforgivable sin—the most unforgivable sin, perhaps, one punishable by death—and with Morello scheming in Atlanta and the Terranova brothers thirsting for revenge, the Mafia’s search for possible traitors was pursued with vigor and savagery from the moment the Clutch Hand was jailed.

Comito, the great betrayer, remained beyond their reach, but other informers were identified and hunted down, among them several whose identities Flynn had never revealed, even in court. The first to be found was Sam Locino, the Pennsylvania counterfeiter whose statements had given the Secret Service its break in the hunt for the Morello gang. Not long after the Clutch Hand’s trial concluded, Locino was returning to his home in Pittston when he heard a rustling from some bushes as he crossed a vacant lot. Flynn’s informant span around and was hit by two bullets fired by a man who had crawled out from the undergrowth. Locino was very lucky; the shots merely grazed his skull, and the killer ran rather than making sure his man was dead.

Others were less fortunate. Luigi Bono, a middle-aged Italian from Highland, fled back to New York for fear of the Morellos’ vengeance and opened a small grocery store on Houston Street. Soon after his return to the city, Bono was badly frightened by some incident or warning and began returning home not along the street but across the rooftops to his tenement. This precaution was not enough to save him; on November 17, 1911, the grocer’s body was found huddled against a fence on a nearby roof, a deep and ugly gash behind one ear. Bono had been struck down from behind by a man wielding an ax; one ear and his tongue had then been severed from his head, and what appeared to be ritual incisions were carved into his chest and legs. On his body, Flynn recorded, the police found a card that read: “This man was Morello’s enemy.”

It is not surprising, in such circumstances, that the Secret Service found it harder and harder to persuade its informers to talk. Even Nick Sylvester, who had been so desperate to cut his fifteen-year sentence that he quietly passed Flynn details of the location of the printing press, produced little or no worthwhile intelligence when he was finally released from jail. Flynn could still rely on his existing informants to a great extent; several, especially Charles Mazzei, continued to supply information from the fringes of the Morello family at great risk to themselves. But something more was needed, and it was not until October 1910 that Flynn found what he had been looking for: an informant who had access to the Morellos’ innermost councils.

HIS NAME WAS
Salvatore Clemente, and he had been known to the Secret Service ever since 1895, when he had earned an eight-year jail sentence for counterfeiting. Short but dapper, well turned out, with a handsome, open, smiling face that radiated bonhomie, Clemente was an ideal informant in almost every respect. He had a lengthy record, sufficient to establish his criminal credentials. He was also a Sicilian, born in 1866 and acquainted with practically every counterfeiter in New York. He was a close friend of the Terranova brothers, for whom he was a valued sounding board and confidant. And he had no wish to return to jail. A second lengthy prison sentence in the early 1900s had given Clemente his fill of life behind bars, and when the Secret Service picked him up again during the autumn of 1910, he was only too willing to deal with Flynn. The two men came to an agreement that October: Clemente’s freedom and a small retainer, in return for reports from inside the Morello family.

Clemente began to prove his worth at once. It was his information that alerted the Chief to the existence of the Oddo farm and its grisly private graveyard. It was also he who warned Flynn that the Terranova brothers were making plans to snatch his children. But perhaps the most important details that the Chief’s new man supplied were insights into the family’s struggle to maintain its dominance in Little Italy. With Lupo and Morello locked away, potential rivals had begun to rear their heads. The Harlem Mafia had faced few threats on its home ground for years, not since the Barrel Murder showed just what the likely fate of any challenger would be; now, with the family seemingly leaderless, allies and old enemies alike began to circle. The next ten years would be bloodier by far than the preceding decade for every member of the first family.

The problem was lack of leadership at first, and for this Giuseppe Morello himself was chiefly responsible, since he refused to cede power without a struggle. For months the Clutch Hand tried to run his family from a prison cell, passing instructions to New York in elliptic Corleone slang that baffled even the Italian speakers assigned to read his letters and eavesdrop on his conversations. It was only in 1911, with the failure of the appeal—and with it the realization that there would be no swift return to Manhattan—that he yielded control to two lieutenants. His chosen successors were the Lomonte brothers, Tom and Fortunato, both Sicilians, both racketeers, and co-owners of a saloon on East 107th Street, which they ran with Morello’s crooked brother-in-law, Gioacchino Lima.

Why Morello’s choice fell on the Lomontes is not known. There was little to recommend them, superficially at least. They were not family. Both were still young, in their late twenties, and neither had been prominent in Harlem’s underworld, nor had either ever been charged with any serious crime. The brothers may simply have been the last men standing after Flynn jailed the family’s established leaders. Whatever the truth, they were at least well known to the Clutch Hand; he had first met them when they organized a plasterers’ union years earlier, and he employed one of their cousins in his grocery business. Whether the brothers were the right men to lead the Morellos into a new and far more complex criminal era, though, was doubtful even at the time that they were given command of the first family.

The years from 1911 to 1916 are among the darkest in the history of New York’s Mafia—dark, in that they were a period of bloodletting and turmoil, but dark, too, because they are so poorly chronicled. Personal testimony is absent, police records are lacking, and, since the Morello family steered well clear of counterfeiting after 1910, even Flynn, with all his bulldog’s tenacity, could devote no more than a fraction of his scant resources to keeping an eye on events in Little Italy. Manhattan’s newspapers, too, cut back their coverage of crime after 1914. With the Great War raging in Europe, the disputes of a few bloodthirsty gangsters began to seem more petty than thrilling.

For the Morellos, their enemies, and their allies, though, the years that followed the counterfeiting trial of 1910 were deadly—the most violent that they had ever known. The first family had lost its leaders and nearly half its men; Flynn, who had estimated the strength of the Clutch Hand’s gang at 110 late in 1909, convicted 45 of them in 1910, this at a time when the rising tide of Italian immigrants was sweeping a flood of young, ambitious criminals into New York. Districts that the Morellos had dominated a decade earlier now seethed with likely competition.

The Lomontes responded to these threats as best they could. They rebuilt the strength of their family, initiating a number of new members. They also made deals and forged relationships with other gangs. By doing so, the brothers buttressed their position, but the protection they obtained through their alliances was gained at the expense of the family’s clannishness and independence. Few of the newcomers who joined its ranks after 1910 were Corleonesi; some were not even Sicilian. And while the Lomontes’ allies supplied extra strength, the Harlem Mafia was inevitably dragged into the disputes of its new friends.