- TO n.o.bODY"S SURPRISE, Salvatore Maranzano emerged as the dominant Mafioso in New York. Soon after Joe the Boss"s death, he called a general meeting of all the city"s families. It was held in a large hall on Washington Avenue in the Bronx, and four or five hundred men attended, as Joe Valachi said. When everyone was gathered, Maranzano addressed the throng.
"Whatever happened in the past is over," he said. "There is to be no more ill feeling among us. If you lost someone in this past war, you must forgive and forget. If your own brother was killed, don"t try to find out who did it to get even. If you do, you pay with your life."
In the past, the Castellammare man continued, Joe the Boss "was always shaking down members, right and left." Now things were going to be different. New York"s Mafia families were to be reorganized along military lines, "to keep everything businesslike and in line." Some of the families would get new bosses-Luciano took over Ma.s.seria"s gang. Maranzano himself would be capo di tutti capi capo di tutti capi, boss of bosses.
Years later, Joe Bonanno cautioned against interpreting this t.i.tle literally (it was a "vulgar, superficial" view, he said, to think of Maranzano as "ruler of all the Sicilian clans"). At the time, though, it appears that few of the Sicilian gangsters in the city saw the new boss as anything but an all-powerful overlord. In victory, Maranzano became as tyrannical as Ma.s.seria. Every Mafia family in the country was to pay him tribute-the sum collected after the war came to $115,000. And, much like his predecessor, the new boss of bosses expected to have a stake in every racket: "the Italian lottery, which was very big then, the building unions, bootlegging, bookmaking, all that kind of stuff," Valachi said.
Maranzano was busy now, perhaps too busy. He had to find time for his own businesses, to counsel other families, and to explore new opportunities. He was besieged by supplicants. Short of time and endlessly distracted, he aroused anger among his closest allies by failing to reward them for the risks they had taken on his behalf and profound resentment among the heads of families who were being taxed by him. By September, only five months after the war had ended, he could no longer get along with Luciano or Al Capone, the boss of the Chicago Mafia. "We got to get rid of them before we control everything," he told his bodyguards. When Luciano heard of this, he decided to strike first.
Joe the Boss had died in Coney Island deserted by even his closest friends. Six months later, Maranzano went much the same way. His murder had been carefully planned, and plenty of lesser Mafiosi seemed to have an idea of what was coming; a friend of Valachi"s advised him to steer clear of Maranzano"s office on September 10, 1931, which was the day set for the murder. When the time came, the boss of bosses was almost alone. Two Jewish hoodlums, hired by Luciano and dressed as police officers, shot and stabbed him to death.
For years afterward, rumors swirled through Mafia circles that Maranzano"s murder was only the first killing orchestrated by Lucky Luciano on that day. The boss"s death, these stories said, had been swiftly followed by the well-coordinated slaughter of as many as sixty of his followers-loyalists gunned down to clear away the clannish, murderous traditionalists who threatened to embroil their families in endless vendettas. Luciano, in this version of events, ruthlessly engineered the elimination of a number of old-school bosses-the "Mustache Petes"-who were more interested in dominating Little Italy than they were in expanding into larger and more lucrative domains. The dead men were replaced, such accounts went on, by "Americanized" gangsters-Luciano chief among them-who had less objection to working with non-Sicilians, indeed non-Italians, and were interested chiefly in making money. If they were true, Maranzano"s murder had marked the most significant shift of the period, from the first generation of Mafiosi to a new and modern Mafia, one able to dominate organized crime in the United States, and not just its Italian neighborhoods, for decades.
It is certainly true that Mafiosi elsewhere in the United States took advantage of events in New York to dispose of rivals loyal to Maranzano. There were killings in Detroit and Pittsburgh and a trio of shootings in New Jersey, which included the murder of one gangster who was thrown into the Pa.s.saic River "with an iron pipe hammered up his a.s.s." Proof that these deaths had any connection is lacking, though, and so is evidence that the Mafia of 1931 possessed anything like the resources necessary to coordinate slaughter on so grand a scale. Luciano"s rebellion had more to do with the rejection of the rigid hierarchy of bosses that Maranzano and Ma.s.seria had both attempted to enforce than it did with any modernizing impulse. Never again would the Mafia acclaim a capo di tutti capi capo di tutti capi.
The Mafia of 1900, Giuseppe Morello"s "mob," had, indeed, more in common with Luciano"s than is usually realized. The existence of strong links between branches of the fraternity in Sicily and the United States can be traced back to the Clutch Hand"s time, as can the admittance of non-Sicilians to the fraternity, as can the existence of a Mafia "council" or "commission," which even Joe Bonanno thought was a creation of the 1930s. Mafiosi who had served under Morello survived and prospered under Luciano, too; Steve La Salle, who was for years among the Clutch Hand"s lieutenants, reemerged in the 1930s as the operator of one of the largest numbers rackets in New York.
As for the Mafia"s standing as the most fearsome, most efficient, most iconic gang of criminals in the United States, that too owed as much to Morello as it did to the vastly better known hoodlums of the Luciano generation. Mafia history, in the United States, begins not with Maranzano"s murder, as it is generally written. Its roots lie several decades earlier, in the dust and blood of Corleone and in the fractured heart of the Morello family. Understanding America"s Mafia means understanding that, if nothing else.
GIUSEPPE MORELLO HAD outlived most of his friends and many enemies, chief among them William Flynn, who remained head of the Secret Service until 1917. The Chief was a considerable success, not least in the years leading up to America"s entry into the First World War, when, in the absence of the counterespionage organizations that would share responsibility for security in later years, his agency a.s.sumed some of the responsibility for rounding up the spies and saboteurs loose in the United States.
Germany was the most active power in this respect, striving not only to influence American opinion but also to prevent its enemies from obtaining munitions and supplies from America. Flynn a.s.signed eleven men to counter these efforts, and they scored some notable successes. The most celebrated incident involved a German diplomat, Dr. Heinrich Albert, whose briefcase one of Flynn"s men s.n.a.t.c.hed on a crowded streetcar. Opened, the case revealed an array of incriminating doc.u.ments, including account books showing that Albert had spent $27 million building up a spy network in the United States. German money had funded dock strikes, attacks on shipping, and bombs planted in munitions plants.
The Albert case and other triumphs made Flynn famous during the war in a way that his years combating counterfeiting had not. He reveled in his celebrity, and it is hard not to conclude that fame went at least a little to his head. Never averse to personal publicity, Flynn had always liked to take a full part in operations and share in any credit that accrued-a predilection more laudable in the chief of a small Secret Service bureau than it was when indulged by the director of a national agency. Now he set to work to rouse the country to the threat of German espionage, delivering scaremongering speeches from New York to California. In one newspaper interview, Flynn said that Germany had 250,000 spies at work in the United States. "Maybe," he added, "one of them is sitting next to you." His wilder claims resembled those of a later and less principled agitator, Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Rabble-rousing statements of this sort underlined Flynn"s bulldog patriotism, but they also aroused considerable anger in German and Irish communities. Pressure on the Chief mounted rapidly, and it came as little surprise when he tendered his resignation from the Secret Service in November 1917, saying he was exhausted and had been ordered to rest. It soon emerged that the real reason for Flynn"s departure was lack of support in Washington for his hard-line approach to counterespionage. The great detective"s nemesis, in this respect, was William Bayard Hale, a newspaperman of German ancestry and p.r.o.nouncedly pro-German views who had been an influential correspondent in Berlin until America entered the war. Hale returned to New York, where Flynn put him under investigation as a potential threat to national security.
According to a protest the furious reporter lodged with President Woodrow Wilson, this surveillance included a visit from an intimidating Secret Service man who issued threats against his family. When the Justice Department"s Bureau of Investigation (forerunner of the FBI) was ordered to check out the complaint and concluded that Flynn had acted "not only without the authority of law, but in defiance of [an] act of Congress limiting activities of [his] service," he had to go. He was replaced by his deputy, William Moran-another veteran Secret Service man, but one who would prove considerably more malleable and, on occasion, actually corrupt.
As things turned out, Flynn would enjoy one last hurrah as a detective, and it would come precisely because he held such firm views on questions of national security. Two years after his departure from the Secret Service, a tremendous explosion shook the home of A. Mitch.e.l.l Palmer, the attorney general of the United States, virtually demolishing it. Eight similar devices exploded that same evening across the country, all but one of them at the homes of judges and politicians involved in bringing cases against anarchists and radical socialists; sixteen deadly letter bombs were also discovered at the New York post office, where they had been put aside for bearing insufficient postage. A few months later, in September 1920, there was another terrific detonation on Wall Street, opposite the headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Company. On that occasion, the bombers exploded a huge device that had been concealed on a delivery wagon.
Concerted terrorist action of this sort was unprecedented in America; worse, it came at a time when fear of communism and union agitation was sweeping the country. The shaken Palmer dedicated his Department of Justice to tracking down the men responsible. To fulfill that pledge, he needed a brilliant detective, and Flynn was the obvious choice. Hastily recalled from semiretirement (he had accepted a sinecure as head of the Federal Railway Administration police), the old Secret Service chief was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation. The task of monitoring suspected radicals Flynn gave to an ambitious Justice Department clerk by the name of J. Edgar Hoover. He himself took charge of hunting down the bombers.
It was an impossible task, rendered harder by the scarcity of information or reliable informants, but Flynn still nearly managed it. In a fine example of the sort of plodding detective work that he had always believed in, his men tracked down a label found in a fragment of clothing outside Palmer"s house by calling at every laundry in each of the eight cities where bombs had exploded. In time, they identified the man responsible for the Palmer blast and narrowed their inquiry into the Wall Street atrocity to the point where Flynn felt certain that the men he was seeking were followers of an anarchist named Luigi Galleani. He even called in his old informant Salvatore Clemente and sent him to Italy to try to penetrate the gang. Clemente, posing as an Italian American radical, made some useful contacts but failed to get to Galleani, who had already fled to Switzerland. Flynn kept trying, but he could never obtain the sort of evidence that would stand up in court.
By early in 1921, opinion was shifting against the Bureau of Investigation. Flynn"s cheerful public p.r.o.nouncements, endlessly claiming he was on the verge of breaking the case, appeared increasingly hollow; people wanted arrests, not promises and theories, and the bureau was not providing them. Support within the Justice Department withered, too, as Flynn failed to address the plummeting morale among his staff. To make matters worse, Hoover had launched a series of raids that resulted in the rounding up of ten thousand suspected radicals and the deportation of more than five hundred, without having firm evidence that any of the men involved were criminals. The "Palmer Raids," as they were known, turned into a public relations debacle of such magnitude that there was no way Flynn could keep his job under the new Harding administration. At the end of August 1921 he was replaced as director of the Bureau of Investigation by another famous detective, William Burns-a man renowned in equal measure for catching the radicals who had blown up the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times building in 1910 and for running a private detective agency that had been caught jury tampering and specialized in intimidating unions. building in 1910 and for running a private detective agency that had been caught jury tampering and specialized in intimidating unions.
It was a sad end to a remarkable career. Flynn remained certain that he had been within an ace of cracking the Wall Street case, and he undoubtedly got closer to the correct solution than did the far more famous Burns, who also failed to make arrests and was convinced from the outset that the culprits were the unions he hated. The loss of his $7,500 bureau salary was, moreover, a severe blow to a man with a large family to support. ("As he has told me, he has half a dozen little Flynns, and he has been working for the Government so long that he has not anything laid by," Palmer had once observed.) Going into business for himself, as the boss of a new New York detective agency, produced some money, but Flynn had to make ends meet by turning to the one other thing that he was good at: For the remainder of his life, he earned much of his living as a writer.
Flynn had been contributing occasional articles to newspapers such as The Washington Post The Washington Post and the and the New York Herald New York Herald ever since 1914, most of them retellings of his greatest cases. After his enforced retirement from the Secret Service, he embarked on a brief career as a crime novelist and a scenario writer for the motion picture industry, turning an acquaintance with the actor King Baggot-forgotten now, but in 1917 the greatest film star in the country-into a commission to write story lines for Theodore and Leopold Wharton. The Whartons were the pioneer producers of movie serials such as ever since 1914, most of them retellings of his greatest cases. After his enforced retirement from the Secret Service, he embarked on a brief career as a crime novelist and a scenario writer for the motion picture industry, turning an acquaintance with the actor King Baggot-forgotten now, but in 1917 the greatest film star in the country-into a commission to write story lines for Theodore and Leopold Wharton. The Whartons were the pioneer producers of movie serials such as The Perils of Pauline The Perils of Pauline, a melodrama that was the first to feature what became a popular cliche, the heroine tied to railway tracks by a mustache-twirling villain; they turned Flynn"s experiences into a twenty-part spy thriller t.i.tled The Eagle"s Eye The Eagle"s Eye. A few years later, the Chief was hired to lend his name to new detective fiction magazine, Flynn"s Weekly Flynn"s Weekly, which he edited with evident relish and which eventually became the longest-running, most successful t.i.tle of its kind.
It was all too much for the aging detective. Though still in his late fifties, Flynn was very overweight by now, a confirmed smoker of powerful cigars, and beset by family problems that spilled over into his working life. His daughter Veronica and son Elmer, whom he had taken on as partners in his agency, were running the detective business into the ground. Both heavy drinkers, they overspent and upset clients. The pair"s increasingly erratic behavior distressed their more abstemious father, and the worry weakened him.
William Flynn expired of heart disease at the age of sixty, in October 1928. He died a disappointed man.
FRANCESCO ORTOLEVA, the man framed by the Corleone Mafia for the killing of Giovanni Vella, was finally released from jail at the end of 1913. Age sixty-five, "broken in body and weighted with years"-so Flynn remarked-he had served twenty-one years of his life sentence for the murder. Taking into account the time that Ortoleva had rotted on remand, awaiting trial, he spent a quarter of a century in jail for a crime that Morello had committed.
Why the prisoner of Palermo was freed at this time remains uncertain. It may be that he simply served out his time and was granted parole; perhaps Flynn intervened on his behalf, as he once claimed. But the Ortoleva family had campaigned long and hard for his release, and they had been given new hope when news reached Corleone of Morello"s conviction for counterfeiting. Ortoleva"s son, James, came to New York in the summer of 1910 to see Flynn and ask if arrangements could be made for his mother to visit Atlanta; he hoped the sight of a woman who had been cruelly wronged might induce Morello to confess. Flynn was not encouraging-"While Morello is making an effort to have his case appealed, it is very doubtful he would make any admissions which would be detrimental to him," he said-but he took a liking to Ortoleva nonetheless and offered him employment as his confidential secretary. The next year, James wrote a fruitless series of letters to the federal penitentiary, attempting to persuade the Mafioso to accept responsibility for Vella"s death.
Francesco Ortoleva was healthy enough, after his long incarceration, to go to New York and live out his last years with his wife and son. He arrived in the city aboard the SS San Guglielmo San Guglielmo on January 25, 1914. "I pray for him and his family," Flynn concluded in his account, "and they give thanks to me and mine." on January 25, 1914. "I pray for him and his family," Flynn concluded in his account, "and they give thanks to me and mine."
MOST OF THE THUGS, gangsters, and counterfeiters who likewise crossed the path of the Morello family faded into obscurity or came to violent ends.
Pietro Inzerillo, the cafe proprietor who had supplied the barrel in which Benedetto Madonia"s body was placed, fled New York when news broke of the Secret Service roundup of Morello"s counterfeiting operation. He returned to Italy, where in October 1911 one of Flynn"s informants stumbled across him unexpectedly in Milan and learned that he had resumed work as a counterfeiter. Giuseppe Di Priemo did not make it that far; he died on board ship while traveling home to Sicily sometime after 1909. But two other American Mafiosi did successfully reestablish themselves on the island. Carlo Costantino, one of the a.s.sa.s.sins sent after Petrosino in 1909, stayed on in Palermo as a robber, swindler, and liquor dealer; he died in the late 1930s, riddled with the syphilis he had contracted in New York. His a.s.sociate Antonio Pa.s.sananti, on the other hand, outlived every other member of the Morello family. Jailed for four years for murder in 1911, Pa.s.sananti went into hiding during a crackdown on the Mafia in the mid-1920s and continued to crop up sporadically in Italian police reports until the early 1960s. In the first week of March 1969, by then ninety years old, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Pa.s.sananti had belatedly given up his life of crime a year or two earlier. The last note in his police file read: "He no longer a.s.sociates with criminal figures [and] can no longer be regarded as a socially dangerous individual."
A little more is known of Ralph Daniello, alias Ralph the Barber, who pleaded guilty in June 1918 to his part in the ambush and a.s.sa.s.sination of Nick Terranova. In recognition of the testimony that had convicted five of his fellow Camorrists, he was given a suspended sentence. The Barber did not walk free immediately, however; convinced, with reason, that the surviving members of his gang would kill him, he begged the judge to keep him behind bars until all his confederates had been safely jailed.
Daniello eked out the second chance his sentence gave him for about a year; then, in 1920, he got himself into an argument in a Coney Island bar, lashed out, and was arrested. This time his record as a stool pigeon failed to impress the judge-he served five years for felonious a.s.sault. It seems likely that Ralph hoped his half decade in jail would wash away the memory of his betrayals; rather than flee the vengeance of his former colleagues, he moved to New Jersey after his release, purchased a saloon, and lived there openly under his real name, Alfonso Pepe. It was a fatal mistake. Less than a month after his release, Ralph was sitting with a friend outside his Newark bar when a man approached. The stranger drew a gun, remarked, "I"ve got you now," and fired three times into his body.
Daniello died in agony from a bullet in the gut. His killer jumped into a car driven by two other men and got clean away, aided by a fusillade of fifteen shots he and the second pa.s.senger directed back into the crowd. The Barber"s a.s.sa.s.sins were never caught, but, the Newark police declared, their most likely motive was revenge.
Among the many suspects who might have ordered Daniello"s murder, Pellegrino Marano, the Camorra boss in Coney Island, was last heard of at the trial of Tony the Shoemaker in July 1926. By then seven years into his sentence of twenty years to life for the Terranova killing, Marano flatly refused to give evidence against his a.s.sociate. "I won"t talk," he told the court. "I don"t know anybody." His lieutenant, Giuseppe Vocaro, was just as tight-lipped. "Seven years ago," he said, "I swore on the tomb of my mother that I would never be a witness for or against anybody." The two Camorrists were returned to their cells.
The latter years of Alessandro Vollero, the leader of the Navy Street gang, are better chronicled, thanks largely to the chance that placed Joe Valachi in his Sing Sing cell during the 1920s. Valachi, already a sworn enemy of Ciro Terranova, was delighted to discover that his cellmate was the man who had had Terranova"s brother killed. It was the Camorra boss, he recalled, who educated him in the deep-rooted enmity between Sicilians and Neapolitans: "If there is one thing that we who are from Naples must always remember," Vollero preached, "it is that if you hang out with a Sicilian for twenty years and you have trouble with another Sicilian, the Sicilian that you hung out with for all that time will turn on you. In other words, you can never trust them."
Vollero became a mentor to Valachi, even offering the younger man an introduction to a fellow Neapolitan, the Chicago gangster Al Capone. It was he who first hinted at the existence of the secret criminal fraternity called the Mafia-an organization that Valachi, a streetwise Italian American criminal, had not realized existed. He pressed eagerly for further information, but Vollero realized that he had said too much. "Take it easy, kid," he counseled his protege. "You"ll learn all there is to know in good time. It"s not for me to say it."
By the time Vollero was released from jail, in 1933, Valachi had fulfilled his cellmate"s prediction. Initiated into Tom Gagliano"s family during the Castellammare War, the former burglar had become a member of the organization he always referred to as Cosa Nostra, running a numbers racket under the protection of an ambitious hoodlum named Vito Genovese. There was still a good deal the low-ranking Valachi did not understand about the inner workings of the Mafia-"Well, who knows what the h.e.l.l"s going on?" he once complained-but he knew enough to realize that Vollero"s life was now in danger. A friend of the old Camorra leader soon appeared to beg Valachi for his help. "The old guy don"t know n.o.body now," the man explained. "But he hears you"re with Vito and them others. Can you straighten things out for him?"
Valachi did his best. The days of the Morello-Terranova ascendancy had faded into irrelevance by now, and the forward-looking Genovese was reluctant at first to intervene-"When the h.e.l.l did this happen, twenty years ago?" Eventually, however, Valachi"s boss agreed to speak to Ciro Terranova, and word was relayed that the problem was resolved. Valachi pa.s.sed the good news to Vollero, who was so grateful that he pressed the younger man to visit him at home. "It was really something," Valachi said. "He had the whole family lined up to greet me. He called me his savior. Well, we ate, and it was the last time I saw him. I heard later that he went back to Italy and died in peace."
IN SICILY, VITO CASCIO FERRO- last seen in New York on the night of the Barrel Murder in April 1903, and last heard of six years later, in Palermo, as a suspect in the Petrosino murder case-returned to his hometown, Bisaquino, to find the local Mafia waxing considerably in strength.
It was a situation that suited the wily and ambitious gangster perfectly. Cascio Ferro worked tirelessly for two decades, first to cement his position as an influential leader in his own district, then to extend the Mafia"s rapacious grip over most forms of crime in western Sicily. In doing so, he made a fortune from rustling cattle and turned himself from an all but illiterate peasant into one of the dozen or so most influential men in the whole island. Cascio Ferro, according to one police report dating to 1909, controlled organized crime across three provinces of Sicily and had a number of influential friends in the political establishment. By the early 1920s, it is said, his power in the hinterland beyond Palermo was such that the mayors of towns he was expected to pa.s.s through would wait outside their gates to kiss his hand.
It is doubtful whether the Sicilian Mafia has ever had a more respected-even beloved-leader in all its long and fratricidal history. "Don Vito," the Italian writer Luigi Barzini observed, "brought the organization to its highest perfection without undue recourse to violence. ... [He] ruled and inspired fear mainly by use of his great qualities and his natural ascendancy. His awe-inspiring appearance helped him. He was tall, spare, elegantly but sombrely dressed. A long white beard made him resemble a sage, a New En gland preacher of the last century, or a respected judge. ... Being very generous by nature, he never refused a request for aid and dispensed millions in loans, gifts and general philanthropy. He would personally go out of his way to redress a wrong. ... Under his reign, peace and order were preserved."
Attaining a position of such eminence may have gratified Cascio Ferro, but it has almost always proved dangerous for any criminal to gain such public renown. In May 1926, in the course of a vigorous campaign against the Mafia decreed by Mussolini, Don Vito was arrested. In the Sicily of old, this would have proved no more than a temporary hindrance. But when one of Cascio Ferro"s numerous G.o.dsons called on a powerful local landowner to solicit his support, he was dismissed with the bleak observation "Times have changed." The Fascist regime took no chances when it came to indicting the old boss. Don Vito was charged with partic.i.p.ation in twenty murders, eight attempted murders, five robberies, thirty-seven acts of extortion, and fifty-three sundry other offenses, all of which had been accompanied by threats of violence.
Sentenced, after a brief, one-sided trial, to life in prison, Cascio Ferro disappeared behind the forbidding walls of the Ucciardone Prison in Palermo. There, wrote Barzini, he established an effortless sway over warders and prisoners alike, arbitrating disputes and ending feuds. If true, it did him little good; he died in jail. According to Arrigo Petacco, an Italian journalist and the biographer of Joseph Petrosino, the old don"s end was appropriately diabolical; accidentally left behind when his prison was heavily bombed and then evacuated in 1943, "he died of thirst and terror in the gloomy, abandoned penitentiary, like the villain in some old serial story." The truth was less melodramatic. Cascio Ferro expired in his cell of heart failure, in 1942. Don Vito left behind him the words of an old Sicilian proverb, carved painstakingly by hand into the walls: "Prison, sickness, and necessity reveal the heart of a friend." The inscription remained visible until the late 1960s, when it was finally painted over.
CASCIO FERRO"S RISE to eminence in Sicily coincided with the panicked visit Giuseppe Morello and Lupo the Wolf made to the island in 1921. It seems possible that the powerful Mafioso, their ally in New York two decades earlier, was one of the men the pair appealed to in their efforts to have the death sentences imposed upon them overturned.
However the trouble was resolved-whether Cascio Ferro, or Nick Gentile, or some other Mafia boss intervened on the men"s behalf-Ign.a.z.io Lupo was able to return to the United States in May 1922, his difficulties with Tot D Aquila at an end. The Mafioso immediately encountered a problem of a different sort, however: A Secret Service agent stationed at Ellis Island recognized his distinctive moon face as he disembarked, and immigration officials on the island detained and held him there for three weeks as a potential undesirable and a likely deportee. It took the production of a copy of the commutation President Harding had signed for him-an impressive piece of parchment affixed with seal and ribbon-to secure his release.
Lupo returned to New York on June 12. There, thanks largely to the protection he received from Ciro Terranova, who also provided him with a handsome sixteen-room home on Brooklyn"s sw.a.n.ky Avenue P, he experienced no difficulty in resuming his old trade as an extortionist. By early 1923, the Wolf was hard at work running a wholesale operation, the La Rosa Fruit Company, which supplied grocery stores and restaurants throughout Brooklyn with produce at the usual inflated prices. This business lasted for the best part of a decade, and, when it was sold, Lupo worked as a lemon broker for a while before shifting his attention to the bakery trade. He had long experience of running operations of this sort and soon built up a substantial racket. In 1925, it was reported, he returned again to Italy to bank the money he had made over the last three years, and the total came to $3 million. The bakery delivery round that he opened in 1933 with Rocco, his only son, began trading with a single truck; three years later there were eight, and Lupo had also became the self-appointed president of the Italian Bakers" a.s.sociation. Payment of the a.s.sociation"s dues guaranteed members the chance to run their stores unmolested, though as usual the protection that the Wolf was selling was mostly protection against himself. The New York Times The New York Times wrote that he also controlled Brooklyn"s lucrative Italian lottery. wrote that he also controlled Brooklyn"s lucrative Italian lottery.
Like his brother-in-law Terranova, the Wolf took pains to present himself as a legitimate businessman and to claim his burgeoning wealth as the product of hard work. "He especially liked to stay home with his family after his business hours and duties and did not congregate in any saloon or meeting place," his brother John would claim. "He always went to bed early so that he would be better able to take care of his business the next morning." Any complaints made about his methods, insisted Salvatrice, his wife, were lodged by rivals who were simply jealous of his success. There is not much truth in this. The reality was that Lupo made good in business by making good his threats. He was a suspect in the unsolved murder of a contractor named Ruggerio Consiglio in October 1930 and was charged a year later with killing a rival who had challenged the monopoly he had established in the Brooklyn grape trade-a racket that had yielded the Sicilian gangster Frankie Uale fifty dollars per carload of wine grapes during the 1920s. On that occasion Lupo was picked out by a witness from a ninety-four-man lineup in Manhattan.
The usual problems, not least the impossibility of finding men brave enough to testify against the Mafia in open court, prevented the DA from bringing prosecutions in these cases. But there was at least one woman in Brooklyn angry and principled enough to take a stand against the Wolf"s extortion. Rose Vitale, who ran a bakery shop at 557 McDonald Avenue, had been told to join the bakers" a.s.sociation but refused to pay Lupo"s inflated dues. Threats followed, and when Vitale still proved obdurate, a mysterious fire broke out in her shop. Later one of her delivery trucks was overturned, and stink bombs were used to contaminate the bread in others.
By July 1935, Vitale had had enough, and she went to the police with her complaints. They responded. Ign.a.z.io and Rocco Lupo were arrested at their home and held in jail for the next four months. By the time they got out, Vitale had persuaded several of the bakers" a.s.sociation"s reluctant members to join her in giving statements. The Lupos replied with more threats and several beatings.
The fact that some of the Wolf"s victims had finally found the courage to speak out against him says a good deal about the changing conditions in New York. By the mid-1930s, Lupo was nearly sixty years old and lacked much of his youthful strength and vigor. His son, Rocco, was not cut from the same stern cloth, and their old protector, Terra-nova, was himself a fading force. The new generation of Mafiosi that came to power in the wake of the Castellammare War had no reason to support a man whose friends and allies were mostly dead and gone, and Vitale may have sensed there was more bl.u.s.ter than real menace in Lupo"s threats. The political climate in the city was changing, too. A new mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, was shaking up the police and speaking out against crime and criminals. These factors combined to make Vitale"s stand against the Wolf"s rackets possible.
Retribution was not far off by now. On January 11, 1936, a few weeks after the Lupos emerged from jail, a formal complaint signed by several Brooklyn bakers was lodged with New York"s governor, Herbert Lehman. It alleged that the Wolf and his cub had been operating bakeries and selling goods at cost to undercut their businesses and punish them for their intransigence; the signatories urged Lehman to investigate the Mafioso"s "homicidal organization." The governor pa.s.sed the information to Brooklyn"s DA for action, and it was at the district attorney"s office that, at last, a c.h.i.n.k was found in Lupo"s armor. The commutation that the Mafioso had brandished on Ellis Island was not a full and formal pardon, as the Wolf believed; his release had been conditional, and President Harding"s decree would remain in force only for as long as Lupo stayed within the law. Should he return to criminal ways, the commutation clearly stated, he could be immediately recalled to prison to serve out the remainder of his term. There was no need for more investigation or a trial; the president reserved to himself the sole right to decide the case.
Acting on Lehman"s recommendation, Harding"s successor, Franklin Roosevelt, soon signed the necessary order. On July 13, at dawn, Brooklyn police arrived outside the Lupo home. The Wolf was under arrest and on his way back to Atlanta long before his friends or lawyers had any inkling of the danger.
The sound of the federal penitentiary doors slamming behind him was a shocking blow to Lupo. He had 7,174 days, or almost twenty years, of his sentence still to serve, and was not due for release until March 4, 1956-when he would be seventy-nine years old. With no hope of a further commutation and little of parole, his one chance of release was to fight the validity of Roosevelt"s summary recall, and a pet.i.tion for a writ of habeas corpus, aimed at the warden at Atlanta, was filed accordingly in 1937. Lupo v. Zerbst Lupo v. Zerbst, as the case was known, drained much of the Lupo family"s finances and was a miserable failure, though it did enough to confirm the president"s rights in cases of commutation to be cited in legal textbooks to this day. In the same year, news reached the Wolf that his son had proved incapable of keeping up the bakery business; Rocco Lupo was declared bankrupt at the end of September.
It is scarcely surprising, in these circ.u.mstances, that Lupo"s physical and mental state seemed parlous to the prison doctor. "Examination reveals ... an elderly white man, very obese, who enters the examination room promptly, and responds to questions in a lingo, but has a good understanding of the English language," the physician noted. "At the present time he is nervous, irritable, and excitable, with a tendency to self-pity and somewhat lachrymose." The Wolf was diagnosed with a heart murmur and had varicose veins in both legs. According to his brother, he experienced a nervous breakdown at the time of his arrest; examined in Atlanta, his IQ was measured at 70, on the borderline of r.e.t.a.r.dation, and the early symptoms of "senile psychosis" were detected.
During his first term in Atlanta, Lupo had flouted prison regulations. He had been placed in solitary confinement for "crookedness" in 1910, for fraternizing with other prisoners in 1911, and for breaking rules in 1919, and there were other reprimands and warnings. Now, though, he was more or less a broken man. Two minor incidents were recorded in 1936, soon after his return to prison, but the prisoner"s record was otherwise spotless. Lupo even earned a commendation from the tailors" shop, where he was put to work, for his exemplary behavior while engaged in sewing flies.
The years pa.s.sed slowly. There were fewer visits from family and friends; many were already dead, of course, his daughters had married, and Salvatrice, in New York, was too old and too impoverished to make the journey down to Georgia anymore; if there was any truth in the rumors of a fortune banked in Italy, the money was lost when the United States declared war on Mussolini"s regime in 1941. There was little companionship; most of the Wolf"s fellow prisoners were far younger than him. He kept to himself during exercise periods, circling the vast prison yard alone, and, in his loneliness, became increasingly religious. According to Zia Trestelle, a fellow Mafioso who once took the train to Atlanta to see him, Lupo regularly attended Ma.s.s and had come to feel some sort of contrition for the life he had chosen. In a letter to his eldest daughter, Onofria, he wrote: "I am overcome by my memories. All these years in America, sometimes I think they never existed. I"d like to be a boy again in Sicily and die young, very young, and never know all these years of struggle and evil."
The Wolf was still in Atlanta when peace returned in 1945, by now well past retirement age. A year later, on the tenth anniversary of his return to jail, the prison doctor noted that the old man was "failing fast, becoming more and more senile and childish." Lupo"s case was reviewed over the summer, and it was recommended that he should be released while his family was still able to take care of him. There was a further legal tussle over the legality of granting a parole violator renewed parole, however, and the old man was not actually discharged from Atlanta until the morning of December 21, 1946. He had $7.83 in his pocket, the sum total of his prison savings. The warden advanced him just sufficient money to get him to New York.
Ign.a.z.io Lupo returned to the city in time for Christmas, a living example of the maxim that crime does not pay. A fifty-year career in murder and extortion had left him and his elderly wife quite dest.i.tute. At some point in the 1940s, Salvatrice, penniless and alone, had been forced to sell their heavily remortgaged home, and the couple moved into a rented room in Queens, visited occasionally by their children. Lupo the Wolf died three weeks after his release, on January 13, 1947, at the age of sixty-nine. The story failed to make the papers.
THE MATRIARCHS OF the Morello-Terranova clan lived longer but died in the same obscurity as Lupo. Angela Terranova, Bernardo"s wife, the mother of four brothers who had terrorized New York, died in Queens in 1941, age ninety-two. Twice widowed, she had survived her second husband by more than three decades; at least seven of her ten children predeceased her, among them all her sons. Angela had lived quietly in the United States for nearly fifty years, and as befitted a Mafia wife, she left no record of her thoughts and feelings. The life had brought her a certain affluence-relative, that is, to the existence she could have expected had she remained in Corleone-but she was certainly not rich; she died in her daughter-in-law"s apartment on 222nd Street, where she had lived for just eight months. Whether she believed the violent deaths of three sons and a grandson were a price worth paying for that modest comfort is impossible to say.
Not much more is known of the last years of Morello"s wife. Lina of the volcanic eyes never remarried after the murder of her husband, though she outlived him by nearly forty years. She raised four long-lived children, the last of them a sufferer from Down syndrome, and died in New York, at the age of eighty-three, in 1967.
THE LAST MEMBER of the Terranova clan was Ciro. The Artichoke King retained his influence throughout the Castellammare War and remained a significant figure in the New York underworld of the early 1930s. He lived with his family in a large pink house in Pelham Manor, an affluent village on the northern outskirts of the city, kept up his power base in Harlem, and maintained an interest in his old vegetable racket. Under Lucky Luciano, he also kept his stake in the Harlem numbers racket, as a junior partner to Dutch Schultz.
To the casual observer, Ciro appeared serenely untroubled by the vicious undercurrents in the New York underworld. He survived the 1935 murder of his ally Schultz and the upheaval surrounding Luciano"s conviction, a year later, for organizing prost.i.tution-an arrest that resulted in a punitive sentence of thirty to fifty years" imprisonment. By then Terranova was popularly supposed to be a millionaire, and certainly the high living continued. He threw a lavish wedding for his daughter Anne in 1935. That same year, a reporter describing the comfortable lives lived by New York"s racketeers sarcastically observed that "Ciro Terranova, the high lord of the Harlem rackets, loves a canter in the park or among the lovely hills of Westchester, because you meet such interesting people on the bridle path." In truth, however, Terranova was never quite so rich as he appeared. The artichoke racket, which he pa.s.sed on to an old subordinate named Joseph Castaldo in 1931, was then reported to gross well under a third of a million dollars a year, and when, after Schultz was murdered, Luciano relieved him of his share in the Harlem numbers racket, he was left without a source of income.
By 1936, Terranova had been "encouraged" to retire, and his lack of ambition-the sheer unlikelihood that he would strike back at the younger bosses who were ousting him-was probably all that saved him from a violent end. In some respects it might have been better for the old Mafioso"s reputation if he had been killed. Stripped of his wealth and power, Ciro became an easy prey for a New York Police Department under pressure from Mayor La Guardia to take a tougher stance on crime, and for several years he was hara.s.sed every time he came within the city limits. Taking advantage of the fact that Terranova had no visible means of support, the police detained him as a vagrant, subjecting the old boss to repeated humiliation.
"I have to come down here sometimes," Ciro complained to Captain Daniel Courtayne on one of these occasions.
"You are supposed to be a bigshot racketeer," Courtayne taunted him. "You"re just a cheap pushcart peddler. That"s about your speed."
"I never was a pushcart peddler," snarled Terranova. He was furious.
Ciro was a husk of his old self by now. In 1935, the government began pursuing him for unpaid tax on his earnings-the same ruse that had been employed to convict Al Capone a few years earlier. Two years later, apparently unable to pay a $543 bill, the Mafioso slipped into bankruptcy. His bank foreclosed the mortgage on the house at Pelham Manor, and he moved back with his wife to 338 East 116th Street, the old headquarters of the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative a.s.sociation, a property that the family had owned for many years. His other a.s.sets were listed as two hundred dollars in cash owed to him, two shares in a realty company, and a "possible cause for action for wrongful arrest."
Less than a year later, still only forty-nine, Terranova was crippled by a stroke that left him paralyzed down his left side and incapable of speech. He was taken to Columbia Hospital, where he expired half an hour after midnight on the morning of February 20, 1938, the only one of the four Morello-Terranova brothers who died in bed. The police had long since dropped their campaign of hara.s.sment against him. Ciro, an officer told The New York Times The New York Times, died not only virtually penniless but also "criminally, financially and physically irrelevant."
It is hard to imagine a more humiliating epitaph for a Mafia boss from Corleone.
WILLIAM FLYNN, WITHOUT whose efforts practically nothing would be known of the first years of America"s Mafia, has no monument in New York or anywhere else. His grave in Valhalla, just north of the city, lies in a family plot that n.o.body much visits anymore; he himself has been virtually forgotten. Joe Petrosino, on the other hand, survives-if only barely-in the collective memory of the city that he loved. His resting place, in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, is marked by a pillar topped with an elaborate bust. It continues to attract visitors, and a handful of tributes-a card, a withered flower-lie scattered at its base. By an appropriate coincidence, the plot lies less than a policeman"s beat away from the bare and unremembered graves in which Giuseppe Morello, Ign.a.z.io Lupo, and the Terranova brothers were interred.
In 1987, as a gesture to the policeman"s memory, a tiny triangle of land at the junction of Kenmare and Lafayette streets, in Little Italy, was designated Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino Park. A small plaque next to the entrance identifies the place, but the park itself remains unused. It stands forlorn and empty aside from a single tree, and the ground has been concreted over from end to end. To add to the atmosphere of uncaring neglect, both pillars guarding the entrance lean at crazy angles, and the gate that once secured it has disappeared.
A few years after the park opened, with fine irony, an Italian restaurant across the street was purchased by Alphonse D"Arco, a capo in the Lucchese family-one of the five Mafia gangs that had emerged from the Castellammare War, and a family that at one time included several members of the old Morello clan among their ranks.
For many years, Al D"Arco used the restaurant as a secure meeting place where numerous Mafia crimes were planned. In 1991, however, he learned that the bosses he had served so loyally and so long had lost confidence in him and were plotting his murder. Fearing for his life, he ran to the FBI and, to save himself from prison, gave the bureau every sc.r.a.p of information he possessed about the Luccheses.
Almost all of the details that D"Arco provided were unknown to the bureau and the police. The capo explained in detail how his Mafia family profited from protection rackets in the construction, air freight, and rubbish industries, controlled as many as twenty union locals, and maintained discipline by murdering anyone whom it thought of as an enemy. He also pa.s.sed the police details that enabled them to close about a dozen unsolved murder cases.
Amid this welter of sensational disclosures, D"Arco supplied one piece of information that went unremarked in the press. The Luccheses, he explained, ran lucrative protection rackets in both of New York"s gigantic wholesale produce markets, in Brooklyn and the Bronx. No one in the city sold fruit and vegetables without paying off the mob.
For someone with a sense of history, the disclosure was sobering. Three quarters of a century after Morello and Ciro Terranova had set up the first New York vegetable rackets, their direct descendants in the Mafia were still taking a cut on every single artichoke sold in the five boroughs.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTSWRITING THE HISTORY OF CRIME POSES UNIQUE CHALLENGES to any author. No more than a handful of records written by partic.i.p.ants on either side of the divide between criminals and police survive; private papers are conspicuous by their absence; memoirs are distorted by evasion, fading memories, and special pleading. Worse, few among the partic.i.p.ants in the events described had a clear picture of what was going on; fewer still elected to explain their actions, or those of their bosses, in print; and none did so dispa.s.sionately. Accurate, reliable, and comprehensive firsthand accounts are, in short, entirely lacking.I have done my best to surmount these obstacles, though inevitably narrative history is not always the ideal medium in which to explore conflicts in testimony and gaps in information, and my work has been made vastly easier by the unstinting a.s.sistance I have received from dozens of people who had no motive, other than kindness, to help.Recollections, anecdotes, private papers, and photographs provided by members of the Morello, Flynn, and Farach families have, I hope, added depth to my portrayal of characters who are generally depicted entirely one-dimensionally In this context, I would like to thank Giuseppe Morello"s great-grandson Steven Gargiula, Chief William Flynn"s grandson William Flynn Sanders, and Carmelo Farach"s great-grandnephew Dean Farrish, for their help.In the United States, my old friend and colleague Dr. Henk Looijesteijn-who fortuitously happened to be in Albany and New York just before I arrived to conduct my own research there-got the search in the New York State Archives and the Munic.i.p.al Archives, New York, under way on my behalf. I was also the grateful recipient of a.s.sistance from Ellen Belcher of the Lloyd Sealy Library of John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Spencer Howard of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa; Richard Gelbke and Gregory Plunges of NARA-Northeast in New York; Arlene Royer of NARA-Southeast in Morrow, Georgia; Leonora Goodlund of the New York Munic.i.p.al Archives; Stuart M. Cohen, clerk to the New York Court of Appeals, Albany; Bill Gorman of the New York State Archives, Albany; Tiffany Levandowski of Osterhout Free Library in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Amy Veracruz-Gregory of the Brazos County Genealogical a.s.sociation, Texas; Colin Brown and Nancy Abrahams of Brooklyn Heights; and Parry Desmond of Philadelphia. Dino Paternostro, of Corleone, a noted authority on the local Mafia, most generously conducted new research on my behalf in Sicily. In the United Kingdom, Dr. Serena Ferente, of King"s College London, was my guide to research on the subject in Italian, Carolyn Keim helped with electronic resources at the Seeley Historical Library, Cambridge, Kevin Brownlow shared his knowledge of William Flynn"s brief film career-a fascinating period I would have liked to devote more s.p.a.ce to-and Dr. David Critchley whose knowledge of early American Mafia history is unrivaled in its depth, very generously swapped leads and doc.u.ments. I owe a considerable debt, too, to Fiona Jerome for her a.s.sistance with the plates sections.My indomitable agent, Patrick Walsh, worked miracles on my behalf and deserves a large slice of the credit for helping me to realize this project on a large scale, and my editors, Kerri Sharpe in London and Tim Bartlett in New York, showed huge enthusiasm for this project from the start; each in turn improved it. Thanks, too, to Tim Rostron at Double-day in Canada, Diana Fox and Lindsay Schwoeri at Random House, Rory Scarfe at Simon & Schuster, and to Rob Dinsdale and Jake Smith-Bosanquet at Conville & Walsh.At home, Penny and Ffion provided more support, in every way, than I deserved during a seemingly endless period of writing and rewriting. This book is for them, for the shade of Mollie Callahan, and for every other innocent victim of the Morello family.
NOTES.
The First Family is narrative history, but it is also intended to be is narrative history, but it is also intended to be good good history. I have provided the most precise source notes that I can. Considerations of s.p.a.ce, unfortunately, have meant that the discursive footnotes that accompanied my previous books have had to be omitted. As this is a subject of considerable importance, however, I have written detailed footnotes anyway, amounting to some forty thousand words of additional material-nearly half as much again as the main text of this book. Anyone wishing to find out exactly where I got my information from and why I have interpreted it in the way I have, or who wishes to have a fuller a.n.a.lysis, see transcriptions of original doc.u.ments and other background material, and read a much more voluminous discussion of various contentious points, is welcome to consult them. Bound copies have been deposited in the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the British Library. Readers can also download the notes, for free, by visiting my history. I have provided the most precise source notes that I can. Considerations of s.p.a.ce, unfortunately, have meant that the discursive footnotes that accompanied my previous books have had to be omitted. As this is a subject of considerable importance, however, I have written detailed footnotes anyway, amounting to some forty thousand words of additional material-nearly half as much again as the main text of this book. Anyone wishing to find out exactly where I got my information from and why I have interpreted it in the way I have, or who wishes to have a fuller a.n.a.lysis, see transcriptions of original doc.u.ments and other background material, and read a much more voluminous discussion of various contentious points, is welcome to consult them. Bound copies have been deposited in the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the British Library. Readers can also download the notes, for free, by visiting my The First Family The First Family pages at pages at www.mikedash.com.
ABBREVIATIONS U USED IN THE N NOTES.
ASP.
Archivio di Stato, Palermo. These doc.u.ments are arranged by section (b.), then category (c), and finally by bundle (f.). Archivio di Stato, Palermo. These doc.u.ments are arranged by section (b.), then category (c), and finally by bundle (f.).
Barrel file New York District Attorney"s papers concerning the "Barrel Murder" case of April 1903. File 42841, District Attorney"s Closed Case Files 1895-1966, NYMA. New York District Attorney"s papers concerning the "Barrel Murder" case of April 1903. File 42841, District Attorney"s Closed Case Files 1895-1966, NYMA.
Comitoconfession "Antonio Comito"s statement in re the Morello-Lupo case," August 1910, in "Black Hand confessions 1910," Box 1, Lawrence Richey Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa. Two versions of the confession, the first 48 pages long and only partial, and the second 109 pages long and complete, are contained in this file; in the notes that follow they are numbered I and II. "Antonio Comito"s statement in re the Morello-Lupo case," August 1910, in "Black Hand confessions 1910," Box 1, Lawrence Richey Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa. Two versions of the confession, the first 48 pages long and only partial, and the second 109 pages long and complete, are contained in this file; in the notes that follow they are numbered I and II.
Dailies Daily reports of Secret Service agents, summarizing activities, intelligence, and the movements of suspects. These reports have Daily reports of Secret Service agents, summarizing activities, intelligence, and the movements of suspects. These reports have been microfilmed and make up the several hundred reels of National Archives Microfilm Publication T915 in Record Group 87 of NARA at College Park, Maryland. The series referred to are: been microfilmed and make up the several hundred reels of National Archives Microfilm Publication T915 in Record Group 87 of NARA at College Park, Maryland. The series referred to are:
Flynn Reports of William J. Flynn, chief of the New York office 1901-10 (31 vols.) Reports of William J. Flynn, chief of the New York office 1901-10 (31 vols.) Hazen Reports of William P. Hazen, chief of the New York office 1898-1901 (11 vols.) Reports of William P. Hazen, chief of the New York office 1898-1901 (11 vols.) NewYork Reports of successive chiefs of the New York office 1911-18 (30 vols.) Reports of successive chiefs of the New York office 1911-18 (30 vols.) Taylor Reports of Richard H. Taylor, chief of the New York office 1910-11 (5 vols.) Reports of Richard H. Taylor, chief of the New York office 1910-11 (5 vols.)
Federaltranscripts Trial transcripts of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of New York, 1790-1912, held in NARA-NE, New York. These include stenographic records of counterfeiting cases brought in U.S. federal courts. The trials referred to are: Trial transcripts of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of New York, 1790-1912, held in NARA-NE, New York. These include stenographic records of counterfeiting cases brought in U.S. federal courts. The trials referred to are:
Giallombardo Transcripts of the trial of Giuseppe Giallombardo, Giuseppe Di Priemo, and others, March 1903, in Transcripts of the trial of Giuseppe Giallombardo, Giuseppe Di Priemo, and others, March 1903, in USA v. Salvatore Romano, Isidore Crose, Joseph DePrima and Giuseppe Giallombardo USA v. Salvatore Romano, Isidore Crose, Joseph DePrima and Giuseppe Giallombardo. Case file C-2832.
Morello Transcripts of the trial of Giuseppe Morello, Ign.a.z.io Lupo, and others, Jan.-Feb. 1910, in Transcripts of the trial of Giuseppe Morello, Ign.a.z.io Lupo, and others, Jan.-Feb. 1910, in USA v. Giuseppe Calicchio, Giuseppe Morello, Nicholas Sylvester, Ign.a.z.io Lupo, Salvatore Cecala, and Giuseppe Palermo USA v. Giuseppe Calicchio, Giuseppe Morello, Nicholas Sylvester, Ign.a.z.io Lupo, Salvatore Cecala, and Giuseppe Palermo. Case file C2-347.