Blood Brotherhoods (40 page)

 
22 

T
HE CRIMINAL
A
TLANTIC

T
HOSE YEARS OF INVESTIGATION WERE PACKED WITH INCIDENT
. W
HEN
G
ENNARO
Abbatemaggio gave his original statement to the police early in 1907, Big ’Enry fled to New York disguised as a stoker on a steamer.

By that time, Italian organised crime had long since entered a transoceanic age. The first mafia murder on American soil—the first we know about, at any rate—took place on Sunday 14 October 1888: the victim, a Palermitan by the name of Antonio Flaccomio, had just had a drink in a Sicilian restaurant when he was stabbed to death right in front of Manhattan’s celebrated Cooper Union building. But the history of the mafia in America was under way well before that date. Sicilian fugitives from justice had been hiding out in the United States since before Italy was unified; New York and New Orleans were major outlets for Sicily’s lemons, and therefore became the mafia’s first bases in the USA.

At the turn of the twentieth century the tens of thousands who crossed the Atlantic every year became hundreds of thousands: an awe-inspiring 870,000 at the peak of the exodus in 1913. Emigration transformed the economy of the rural south: migrants sent money home and their absence drove up the wages of those who stayed behind.

Among the new tide of migrants there were also members of all three of Italy’s major criminal associations. From being a local nuisance in New Orleans or Mulberry Bend, Italian organised crime quickly grew into a national problem for the United States.

The two shores of the criminal Atlantic were bound together by uncountable cunning threads. Just by tugging at one of those threads—Big ’Enry’s
dash to New York—we can glimpse just how vast and densely woven the history of Italo-American gangsterism really is. (Too vast to be told in these pages.)

Big ’Enry’s bid for freedom did not last long: he was soon tracked down and sent back to Naples by Lieutenant Giuseppe ‘Joe’ Petrosino, a Salerno-born policeman who had risen through the ranks of the New York police by fighting Italian organised crime. We can think of Petrosino as a potential heir to the mantle just relinquished by Ermanno Sangiorgi: Petrosino was a suitably transatlantic cop for the new transatlantic crime.

In 1909, while the Cuocolo investigation was still progressing, Petrosino paid a brief visit to Italy in order to set up an independent information network on Italian-born gangsters. On 12 March 1909 he was standing under the Garibaldi statue in Palermo’s piazza Marina when two men shot him dead. He left a widow, Adelina, and a daughter of the same name who was only four months old.

No one would ever be convicted of Petrosino’s assassination. There were many lines of inquiry. The first, and most plausible, related to a gang of Sicilians whose counterfeiting operation Petrosino had disrupted in 1903 following the notorious ‘body in the barrel’ mystery—the body in question being one of the
mafiosi
’s victims. In 1905 the gang thought to be responsible for the ‘body in the barrel’ were joined by a
mafioso
and lemon dealer called Giuseppe Fontana—the same Giuseppe Fontana outrageously acquitted of killing banker Emanuele Notarbartolo the previous year. (In 1913, Fontana was shot dead in East Harlem.)

The chief suspect for the murder of Lieutenant Petrosino was, and still is, don Vito Cascio-Ferro, a Man of Honour who shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic in the early 1900s. Cascio-Ferro never stood trial because he had a seemingly impregnable alibi provided for him by a Sicilian MP who said that Cascio-Ferro was at his house when Petrosino died. The MP in question was called Domenico De Michele; as chance would have it, he was the son of ‘Baron’ Pietro De Michele, the Burgio rapist and
capomafia
involved in the ‘fratricide’ plot against Ermanno Sangiorgi in 1877.

In the course of their protracted investigations into the Petrosino murder, Italian police also questioned a Calabrian gangster: Antonio Musolino, the younger brother of the King of Aspromonte, whose cousin was suspected of having taken the contract to kill Lieutenant Petrosino. With surprising candour Antonio Musolino said he fled Santo Stefano in 1906 because he was afraid that his family’s many enemies were trying to kill him. In Brooklyn, he joined up with some of his brother’s former support team, among them the cousin suspected of the Petrosino murder. In a basement room in Elizabeth Street, the heart of Manhattan’s Italian community, Musolino was initiated
into a mafia gang that included both Calabrians and Sicilians. His name for the gang was the Black Hand—a catchall label for Italian gangsterism in America that derived from the menacing symbols (bloody daggers, black hands, and the like) that
mafiosi
sometimes drew on their extortion letters.

Musolino’s brief story is typical of the way that the
picciotti
who travelled from Aspromonte to New York were absorbed into a much more powerful and well-established Sicilian organisation: the poor Lads with Attitude came under the influence of the ‘middle-class criminals’. Where the Sicilian presence was not so strong, such as amid the lunar landscape of the mining districts of Pennsylvania and Ohio, the Calabrians brought across the Atlantic to cut coal were able to organise among themselves, and directly apply the methods and traditions they had learned at home.

Big ’Enry’s brief trip to New York set in motion a third theory about the murder of Lieutenant Joe Petrosino, one implicating the camorra: Big ’Enry himself was the suspect. Interest in the Cuocolo case in the United States became intense after the Petrosino murder. The huge investigation in Naples seemed to have exposed something much more powerful than even the most disquieting speculation about the Black Hand in the United States. In the
New York Times
, journalist Walter Littlefield boldly asserted that Big ’Enry had issued the order to kill Petrosino, and that the Honoured Society he ruled was the umbrella organisation for all Italian-American criminals on both sides of the Atlantic.

It is the fond hope of modern, civilised Italy that the trial will stamp out forever the largest and most perfectly organised society of criminals on earth, with its profitable ramifications in America and its willing slaves in Sicily. If this object shall be attained, it will be like severing the head from the body. It will mean the dissolution of the brains of the Black Hand in America and the Mafia in Sicily.

Around the world, the expectations surrounding the Cuocolo affair were becoming as acute as they were unrealistic.

The latest historical research reaches less panic-striken conclusions than Walter Littlefield.
Camorristi
from Naples and its surrounds were certainly operative in the United States at the time of Big ’Enry’s visit, and some of them even created autonomous territorial pockets in Brooklyn, next door to the dominant Sicilian gangs. Johnny the Teacher, Big ’Enry’s bookkeeper,
seemingly had links with a savings institute in New York that gathered immigrants’ money and sent it back home. Once Big ’Enry had been extradited, New York
camorristi
toured Italian-owned restaurants to pay for his lawyers.

Meanwhile the man at the centre of the approaching Cuocolo trial, the stoolpigeon Gennaro Abbatemaggio, spent his time in custody reading a serialised life of Joe Petrosino.

As the preparations for the Cuocolo trial ground on, the most newsworthy event of Italy’s new media era occurred shortly after 5.20 a.m. on 28 December 1908 when a massive earthquake, with its epicentre in the narrow Straits separating Sicily and Calabria, devastated Messina, Reggio Calabria, and many of the towns and villages of Aspromonte. It is estimated that some 80,000 people died; many of the traumatised survivors emigrated to the New World. This cataclysm, the most lethal seismic event in the history of the west, aroused the whole world’s sympathy for weeks.

Once the media agenda had moved on, the drab and sorry story of the reconstruction began. The stricken zones of Calabria had been a slack society before the disaster, they became slacker still in its aftermath. In Reggio Calabria, it took eleven years to rebuild the Prefecture, and six more to finish the Palace of Justice where the criminal courts were housed. The protracted struggle over reconstruction funding from the state became the new centre of gravity of political and economic life in much of the disaster area. The picciotteria wanted a share of the spoils. In Reggio Calabria, mobsters were spotted in the shebeens where the builders drank: such a large workforce offered plentiful opportunities to profit from gambling, extortion, robbery and gangmastering. In 1913 the police would go on to successfully prosecute eighty-three members of a mafia group operating across the city. They had a hierarchy of ranks, like
picciotto, camorrista
, bookkeeper and
fiorillo
—little flower. But of course this was a matter of interest only for the local press, as were other trials of the early twentieth century that showed that the picciotteria was spreading north into the other provinces of Calabria.

Of the people who saw the way the picciotteria was quietly entrenching itself in Calabrian society in the years before the First World War, precious few have left us any kind of testimony. One of them is the San Luca–born writer Corrado Alvaro. In 1955 he retrieved a vivid memory from his adolescence that encapsulated how the picciotteria had become what he called an ‘aspect of the ruling class’, a normal and broadly accepted part of community life—scarcely a generation after it emerged. On
one occasion Alvaro returned home to San Luca, which had avoided the worst of the 1908 earthquake, from a term spent at his distant grammar school. His mother casually told him that his father was busy in the upstairs room with ‘men from the association’. Alvaro, full of his textbook notions of public-spiritedness, assumed she meant a group promoting some kind of local interest. ‘So there is an association in our village at long last?’ His mother gave a flat reply: ‘It’s the association for delinquency’.

 
23 

G
ENNARO
A
BBATEMAGGIO
: Genialoid

A
T LAST
,
IN
M
ARCH
1911,
THE
C
UOCOLO TRIAL OPENED IN THE CAVERNOUS
B
AROQUE
church that served as the Court of Assizes in Viterbo, a small city between Rome and Florence that had been chosen to host the whole show for fear that a Naples jury might be swayed either by camorra threats, or by the camorra fever the case was generating.

Newspaper readers and newsreel viewers around the world could finally see the eloquent pictures of the defendants crammed into a large cage in the court, and put faces to the quirky nicknames in the Cuocolo story.

For his own protection, Gennaro Abbatemaggio was confined to a smaller cage by himself. Now twenty-eight years old, small and well-dressed, he had a long razor-slash scar running down his cheek to the point of his chin. He wore a short, pomaded moustache that turned perkily upwards at its points to form inverted commas around his mouth.