A Criminal History of Mankind (86 page)

New Orleans was outraged. There was talk of lynching, and some eminent Italian families published advertisements in the newspapers, disavowing all connection with the killing. Mayor Shakespeare took over the case, and told the police: ‘Scour the Italian neighbourhood - arrest every Italian if necessary.’ Nineteen Italians were arrested, including a fourteen-year-old boy who was alleged to have signalled Hennessey’s arrival. Their trial opened in February 1891. With a single exception - Huembert Nelli in
The Business of Crime
- writers on the case agree that the evidence against the Italians was overwhelming. The chief witness for the defence was a shady private detective named Dominick O’Malley, who had been indicted several times for bribing jurors and intimidating witnesses. One of the accused admitted in court that he had been present at a meeting where the death of Hennessey had been decided. Yet in spite of this, the jury declared an acquittal. There was helpless rage among the American population of New Orleans, and rejoicing among the Italians, whose market stalls were adorned with bunting. The accused were taken back to prison for their own protection, but allowed to wander freely; they celebrated that night with Chianti and spaghetti. Two days later, angry citizens marched on the jail, overcame the guards and found eleven of the fourteen Italians. Most were clubbed to death; one was hanged from a lamp-post. Whether or not they were guilty of the murder, their end caused an abrupt reduction in Mafia activities in New Orleans.

The case served to make Americans aware that the Mafia had imported Italian methods of extortion and intimidation; for now, with the Mafia’s power in New Orleans temporarily broken, many New Orleans businessmen of Italian origin admitted that they had been blackmailed into paying ‘protection’. Meanwhile, the Italian crime syndicate was spreading quietly all over America. In 1903, it acquired a new name when a Brooklyn contractor, Nicola Cappiello, went to the police to report that he had been receiving threatening letters signed ‘The Black Hand’ (
mano nera
). He had already paid a thousand dollars, but the friends who had agreed to act as intermediaries had returned saying that the criminals were demanding another three thousand. Realising that they intended to bleed him dry, Cappiello secretly contacted the Brooklyn police. Their investigation revealed that the ‘friends’ were also the extortioners, and all were tried and found guilty.

On 14 April 1903, a barrel on a vacant lot in Manhattan proved to contain a corpse that was almost decapitated; the man had been stabbed seventeen times. One of New York’s best detectives, Joseph Petrosino, finally identified the corpse as a small-time crook named Benedetto Madonia. When Madonia’s watch was found in a pawn shop, the man who pawned it - Tomasso Petto, known as Petto the Ox - was arrested. It emerged that both Petto and Madonia were working for a ring of Italian counterfeiters, and that their job was to distribute the forged money. Madonia had been pocketing more than his share of the proceeds; so he had been murdered and left in a public place as a warning to other members of the gang. The nature of the crime attracted wide publicity. And once again, the public felt thoroughly frustrated when the case against the accused collapsed because witnesses suddenly became forgetful - even the dead man’s wife and son declined to testify.

The problem, of course, stemmed from the fact that the criminal syndicates had been tolerated in Italy because they were opposed to rulers that the people hated. This anarchistic spirit transplanted well to America, where the ‘dagoes’ were looked down on by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. And in America, the land of opportunity, many previously poor Italians became relatively affluent, and so aroused the envy of those who remained poor. Extortion was an easy - and almost foolproof - way of parting the better-off from their money. A threat to kidnap a child or dynamite a home was enough to make most Italians feel that money was a small price to pay for peace of mind. Even criminals were not immune. The head of the counterfeit gang, Ignazio Saietta (known as Lupo the Wolf) divulged at one point that he had paid $10,000 over the years for ‘protection’. He was as vulnerable as anyone because his own criminal activities made him unwilling to go to the police.

In 1907, the New Orleans Mafia was again in the national press. Seven-year-old Walter Lamana, son of a successful undertaker and landlord, walked off with a man who promised him ice-cream; a few hours later, his father received a ransom demand for $6,000. Italian businessmen decided it was time to put an end to the power of the Black Hand and formed a committee. Various arrests were made, but the men had to be released for lack of evidence. Then another Italian businessman who had received an extortion letter - demanding $2,000 - brought it to the police, telling them that he was sure it had been written by a man named Tony Gendusa. The police compared it to the Lamana ransom note and decided they were in the same handwriting. Tony’s brother Frank was arrested and, under a certain amount of ‘persuasion’ from the police, admitted that Tony had been involved in the kidnapping. A group of vigilantes called on a farmer named Campisciano - whose name had also been mentioned - and induced him to talk by the use of a time-honoured method: they bound his hands, placed a noose round his neck, and pulled it tight over the branch of a tree. Campisciano broke down and led them to the small corpse that was wrapped in a blanket, lying in the water of the swamp. The child had been crying, he said, and one of the men had strangled it. (In fact, Walter Lamana had been killed by a hatchet blow.)

Campisciano, it now emerged, inspired terror in the area, and until his arrest, few people dared to tell all they knew. The result was that six people came to trial - including Campisciano’s wife. Four more - among them Tony Gendusa - had escaped. Two brothers named Gebbia were sentenced to death - the noose that hanged one of them was given to Walter Lamana’s father. At a separate trial, the remaining four were found ‘guilty without capital punishment’. For a while, it looked as if angry citizens meant to organise a lynching party; but the governor called in the militia and the threat was averted. In New Orleans, the power of the Mafia was broken.

Other cities were less fortunate. In 1908, more than four hundred Black Hand threats were reported to the police, and one reporter estimated that for every one of these, there were probably two hundred and fifty that went unreported. In Chicago in the following year, the highly successful racketeer Big Jim Colosimo received so many Black Hand threats that he sent for his wife’s nephew, Johnny Torrio, to come from New York to protect him. Torrio’s remarkable efficiency and intelligence eventually made Colosimo the most powerful gangster in Chicago. The Black Hand also operated with impunity in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Kansas City and San Francisco. In Chicago in 1908, Black Handers even succeeded in extorting money from parents by threatening to blow up schools.

New York was particularly successful in these early years in its fight against the Mafia. This was largely due to the courage and resourcefulness of one man - detective Joseph Petrosino, the man who had arrested Petto the Ox. When the singer Caruso received a Black Hand extortion note, Petrosino tracked down the sender, broke both his arms, and put him on a boat back to Sicily. When he heard that Enrico Alfano, a Black Hander who had killed and mutilated a whole family in Naples, was in New York, Petrosino went straight to his room, intimidated Alfano and two gun-carrying bodyguards, and led them back to the police station linked together with their own ties and a sheet. Petrosino’s luck held until he persuaded his boss, Commissioner Theodore Bingham, to send him to Sicily to look for Black Handers in the Italian police files. In Palermo, he found dozens of wanted files on men he knew to be in America, and sent them back to New York. But Sicily’s leading mafioso, ‘Don’ Paulo Marchese, invited Petrosino to an expensive restaurant, and Petrosino was rash enough to accept. When the ‘don’ realised how much Petrosino knew, he ordered his death. Petrosino was told to meet an informant at the base of the Garibaldi statue on 12 March 1909; from the darkness, guns opened up and riddled his body with more than a hundred bullets. The Italian government apologised, but no one was ever arrested for the murder. Another Mafia boss, Don Vito Cascio Ferro, was one of many who claimed to have been the executioner - alleging that he killed Petrosino with one shot, then hurried back to the dinner table of a member of the Chamber of Deputies who had agreed to provide an alibi.

Petrosino’s murder caused widespread dismay in America; it seemed to prove that the criminals were immune. And it struck many poor but intelligent young men that crime was a better way of achieving ‘upward mobility’ in a democratic society than hard work. Some - like Frank Costello and Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano - were Italian; others, like Meyer Lansky, Hymie Abrams and Charles ‘King’ Solomon, were Jews. Some of the most successful - like Dion O’Banion and Bugs Moran in Chicago - were Irish. Such men realised that petty crime was a waste of time, and that real success could only come through corrupting police officers and politicians and acquiring a ‘power base’. The result was that - like the ‘godfathers’ in Sicily - they became respectable members of society, while the risks were taken by their hired thugs. In Akron, Ohio, in 1918, a racketeer named Rosario Borgio became so incensed when the police kept raiding his houses of ill fame that he called a meeting of gangsters and announced that he would pay $250 for every policeman who was murdered, the aim being to eliminate the entire Akron police force. The petty crooks were delighted at this prospect of easy money, since nothing was easier than walking up behind a patrolman at night and shooting him in the back. Akron policemen began to die with disturbing regularity - and there seemed to be no obvious motive. Early in 1919, Lieutenant Michael Fiaschetti - who had been trained by Petrosino - was told that two of the suspected police-killers were in New York. He arrested them, and persuaded one of them - Tony Manfredi - to talk by convincing him that the gang had ordered his execution and that his companion was the chosen killer. Rosario Borgio and three other gangsters were sentenced to death.

In New York, the top gangsters were discovering that the philosophy of socialism could be turned to their advantage. During the first decade of the century, New York crime was dominated by various gangs of thugs, many with membership of more than a thousand. The best known of these was the Five Points gang, led by an ex-prize fighter named Paul Kelly - who was, in fact, a Neapolitan called Paolo Vaccarelli. There was a bitter rivalry between the Five Pointers and the Lower East Side Gang led by Monk Eastman and - later, when Eastman was sentenced to ten years - by ‘Kid’ Twist. Twist was murdered in 1908 at Coney Island fairground, but the battles between the gangs had exhausted both sides by that time. Kelly moved to Harlem and became a labour racketeer - or, as he would have preferred to express it, a Union organiser. He organised the rag-pickers, and used his position to ‘shake down’ employers. Since this was a far safer way of making a living than dealing in stolen goods and prostitution, Kelly extended the field of his activities to other forms of labour; he became president of the International Longshoremen’s Union and a member of the American Federation of Labour. The New York waterfront was controlled largely by the Irish; under Kelly’s leadership, an increasing number of Italians became longshoremen. By 1919, three-quarters of the longshoremen were Italian. A man who wanted a job had to be prepared to ‘kick back’ a percentage of his earnings to Kelly. Kelly remained a respectable union leader until 1953, when he was expelled for taking bribes.

By 1919, New York was the criminal capital of America. The Mafia existed in most other major cities but it remained an underground criminal organisation; only in New York had it achieved something like political control. And New York was regarded by the rest of America - particularly the rural communities - as a pit of corruption and wickedness. America was a religious country, and the forces of law and order were well in control. And then, in 1920, the law-abiding citizens handed the gangsters a mandate for unlimited expansion. It was called the Volstead Act.

Prohibition was not a sudden visitation of the spirit of religious intolerance. The crusade for total abstinence had been launched as early as the 1840s - largely by Methodists. It sprang up in the frontier towns, on the great plains of the west. In most small towns, the saloon was a shack that sold cheap whiskey and gin, and the men who used it were prone to drink themselves unconscious because they might not be back in town for another month. The women who could be picked up in such places were usually worn out drabs suffering from venereal disease. When the face of vice was so ugly, the Anti-Saloon League had no difficulty persuading the virtuous that the answer lay in total prohibition. Boredom and sexual frustration also played their part in the psychology of the temperance crusader. Carrie Nation, who used to wreck Kansas saloons with a hatchet around the turn of the century, was always stirred to additional destructiveness by the sight of ‘immoral’ pictures over the bar. As Americans became more aware of the growth of organised crime, the abolitionists used it as an additional argument for prohibition; if alcohol was banned, the vices that depended on it would wither away.

But in spite of this aggressive puritanism, America would probably never have taken the fatal step if it had not been for the First World War, when many states banned the manufacture of alcohol merely in order to conserve grain for food. This caused no problems, since Americans were ready to take any measures to defeat the Kaiser. The ‘dry’ lobby in Congress saw success within its grasp and pushed through the eighteenth amendment, banning all alcohol; Senator Andrew J. Volstead proposed an act for its legal enforcement, and it was promptly passed. On 17 January 1920, America became ‘dry’; the Anti-Saloon League declared that it presaged an ‘era of clear thinking and clean living’.

What Congress had done was to create in America the same conditions that had made Italy the most lawless country in the world. Government suddenly became the enemy of the people. Americans had always been inclined to cynicism about politicians - the comedian Will Rogers remarked: ‘With Congress, every time they make a joke it’s a law, and every time they make a law it’s a joke.’ Now Congress had made a particularly bad joke, and commonsense revolted. The gangster who was willing to defy the new law suddenly ceased to be a public enemy and became a benefactor. By the time America realised its mistake - after ten years of murder and violence - it was too late. Organised crime had come to stay.