Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (5 page)

After Italy’s unification, in Sicily the most prevalent image of the typical mafiosi was that of the unsparing enforcer with a
lupara
, a sawed-off shotgun, slung over his shoulder, eager to exact Mafia-style justice.

In the late nineteenth century, the strongest
cosche
sought to solidify their power and resist encroachments from rival families by adopting a new practice: the ritual of the loyalty blood oath of
omertà.
Once inducted, a new member considered himself in the select ranks of the
onorato società
, or honored society, and as a “Man of Honor” and “Man of Respect” he could mockingly boast, “The King of Italy might rule the island but men of my tradition govern it.”

The ambivalent reverence and fear inspired by each clan was epitomized by the Sicilian folklore authority and supernationalist Giuseppe Pitre: “Mafia is the force of the individual, intolerance toward the arrogance of others,” Pitre wrote misguidedly at the turn of the century. “Mafia unites the idea of beauty with superiority and valor in the best sense of the word, and sometimes more awareness of being a man, sureness of soul and audacity but never arrogance, never haughtiness.”

Risorgimento brought a new form of government but not prosperity to millions of landless peasants and impoverished laborers in southern Italy and Sicily. The nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century open-door immigration policies of the United States became a magnet for Italians, especially
rural Sicilians seeking to escape the economic and social hardships of their native land.

Between 1890 and 1920, an estimated four million Italian and Sicilian immigrants settled in America. The vast majority were law-abiding artisans, farmers, and unskilled toilers. But, as in every large ethnic immigrant category, sprinkled in were criminals, men on the run from the law who were aware of the Mafia’s traditions, and men who were minor mafiosi, seeking new opportunities or fleeing vendettas.

At the time of this immigration wave, none of the Sicilian
cosche
tried to establish beachheads or branches in the United States. After all, there was no need. In Sicily, the Mafia families were among the favored “haves,” not the downtrodden “have-nots.” They had no reason to relinquish their enviable, comfortable station in life for risky ventures in a foreign land.

New Orleans was one of the earliest American ports of call for Italian immigrants. They arrived on ships called “lemon boats” because the vessels carried citrus fruits as well as passengers from Sicily and southern Italy.

In the history of the American Mafia, New Orleans accidentally became the Cosa Nostra’s Plymouth Rock, the setting for the first Sicilian and southern Italian gangsters in America. They were petty criminals who imitated the tactics of the original Mafia, even employing the name of the secret society. Eventually, their descendants and successors became an authentic American Mafia family.

By 1890, more than one thousand Italian immigrants lived in New Orleans, and two violent gangs fought for control of the port’s stevedoring business. At the height of the feud, Chief of Police David Hennessey, who was suspected of taking bribes from one of the factions, was shot and killed. The murder infuriated a large group of vigilantes who lynched sixteen Italian men, several of whom had been charged with complicity in the police chiefs slaying.

The grand jury that investigated the affair produced the first documented recognition that some form of the Mafia had arrived in the United States, and spotlighted the difficulties in unearthing information about this obscure entity. In a report, the jury in 1891 declared: “The range of our researches has developed the existence of the secret organization styled ‘Mafia.’ The evidence comes from several sources fully competent in themselves to attest its truth, while the fact is supported by the long record of bloodcurdling crimes, it being almost impossible to discover the perpetrators or to secure witnesses.”

Although New Orleans witnessed the country’s first incident of Mafia infiltration, it was to northeastern cities like New York that the masses of Sicilian
and Italian immigrants gravitated. In addition, in the early 1900s mafiosi imitators and other predators also flocked there. These thugs preyed on their own apprehensive countrymen, who were adapting to a different language and different customs and who were distrustful of American law-enforcement authorities.

In the early stages of Italian immigration, the police in New York and in other large eastern cities often confused the Mafia with individuals and gangs operating under the name of “La
Mano Nero”
or the Black Hand. The Black Hand, which had no direct relationship with the Mafia, referred to a crude technique of random extortion used by individuals and small gangs. It was not an organization. The extortionists would deliver letters, mainly to businessmen and shopkeepers in Italian neighborhoods, warning them of dire injuries or death if they failed to pay bribes for their continued safety. To magnify the intimidation, a frightening symbol—the picture of a black hand, fringed by a knife and skull—was imprinted on each letter.

Faced with soaring crime and murder rates in Italian sections, the New York Police Department in 1883 recruited its first Italian-speaking officer, Giuseppe “Joe” Petrosino. A native of southern Italy, Petrosino immigrated to New York with his parents at age thirteen, and worked as a shoeshine boy and street sweeper before becoming a police officer. An assertive, solidly built individual, Petrosino was only five-feet three-inches tall, and officials had to waive the department’s minimum height requirement to bring him onto the force.

Unlike ineffective English-speaking officers and detectives who were unable to glean clues, let alone solve crimes, in the Italian and Sicilian precincts, the hardworking street-smart Petrosino proved his worth in rounding up dangerous suspects. In 1895 Theodore Roosevelt, then the city’s highest civilian police official, promoted Petrosino to detective. A master of disguises and able to speak several Italian and Sicilian dialects, Petrosino’s work led to prison sentences for more than five hundred criminals. His exploits earned him the rank of lieutenant, and whenever a serious crime occurred involving Sicilians or Italians, commanders would cry out, “Send for the Dago.”

Like many ambitious police officers in dangerous roles, Petrosino counted on good press accounts to further his career and he tipped off newspaper reporters to pending arrests in big cases. One instance was the help he provided to fabled tenor Enrico Caruso when he received a Black Hand demand for $5,000, a princely sum at the turn of the twentieth century. Caruso intended to pay until Petrosino persuaded him that he would be opening himself to more
and larger extortions. The detective set a trap and personally collared the man who came to collect Caruso’s payoff.

Petrosino tried to educate the police brass about the reasons Italian criminals found New York and other big cities such tempting targets. “Here there is practically no police surveillance,” he reported in a memorandum. “Here it is easy to buy arms and dynamite. Here there is no penalty for using a fake name. Here it is easy to hide, thanks to our enormous territory and overcrowded cities.”

By 1909, Petrosino’s advice was being heeded and he was heading a twenty-five-man unit, the Italian Squad, when Police Commissioner Theodore Bing-ham sent him on a secret assignment to Italy and Sicily. A new American law allowed the deportation of any alien who had been convicted of a crime in another country and who had lived in the United States for less than three years. With a long list of known villains in hand, Petrosino was to seek out proof of their criminal misbehavior in Italy and return with the evidence to boot them out of America.

Unfortunately, while Petrosino was abroad, the publicity-seeking Bingham disclosed the nature of his assignment to a New York newspaper, and the Mafia in Sicily got wind of the detective’s arrival there. Sicilian mafiosi, apparently alarmed over Petrosino’s digging in their backyard and determined to send a deterrent message to other potential American investigators, caught up with the detective in Palermo on his first day in the city. He was gunned down in daylight in the crowded Piazza Marina, standing near a statue of Garibaldi. At close range, professional assassins shot him twice in the back of the head and once in the face.

Vito Cascio Ferro, a Mafia
padrino
, claimed afterward that he was responsible for the murder. Don Vito had lived briefly in New York and apparently was incensed by Petrosino’s diligent investigation of Sicilian criminals.

At Petrosino’s funeral in New York, 250,000 people lined the streets in mournful tribute as the cortege passed. To honor the fallen hero, the city dedicated a minuscule parklet in lower Manhattan as “Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino Square.” Today, that bare, benchless concrete slab serves as a road divider and pedestrian-safety island near Little Italy, one block from the old police headquarters where Petrosino got his fatal final orders from Commissioner Bingham.

Petrosino achieved the distinction of being the only New York police officer murdered on an overseas assignment. His killers were never caught. Decades
later, near the close of the twentieth century, New York’s Mafia families were still firmly in place and as defiant as their predecessors had been earlier in Sicily. Ironically, across the street from Petrosino Square, the restaurant La Donna Rosa opened in the 1980s. Its owner was Alphonse D’Arco, then a high-ranking mobster. Within easy sight of a plaque memorializing Lieutenant Petrosino’s crusade against the Mafia, the restaurant was used by D’Arco as a secure meeting site for the Lucchese crime family to map out plans for murders and other crimes.

The Castellammarese War

D
uring the first two decades of the twentieth century, Italian immigrant criminals in New York were either undisciplined street gangs or individual predators. By 1920, nearly one million Italian immigrants, predominantly from Sicily and southern Italy, lived in New York. About 15 percent of the city’s population, they were squeezed into three neighborhoods: Little Italy and East Harlem in Manhattan and Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Like other ethnic criminal groups, the newly arrived mafiosi and other Italian gangsters largely confined themselves to victimizing their own countrymen. Irish hoodlums carried out similar activities on Manhattan’s West Side; the turf for Jewish thugs was the Lower East Side.

A political and social earthquake—Prohibition—would revolutionize crime in America for these small-time Italian, Jewish, and Irish underworld characters. Combined with another upheaval—the triumph of Fascism in Italy—the two events would significantly alter the Mafia’s role in America and transform it into the nation’s preeminent criminal organization.

Prohibition, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, went into effect in January 1920, making the manufacture and sale of all alcoholic beverages a federal crime. The historian Stephen Fox described the law as an “ethnic experiment in social control,” an attempt to preserve the nation’s Anglo-Saxon character from the influx of foreign cultures. Prohibition’s supporters characterized the ban
as a crusade to protect the presumed wholesome pastoral values of rural America from decadent big cities and their huge alien populations.

Indeed, in the immoral urban centers, many Italian, Jewish, and Irish gangsters quickly recognized the significance of the law and the rich opportunities it offered for a new type of crime: bootlegging, or supplying beer and booze to a clientele that was law-abiding but extremely thirsty. Overnight in apartments, in sheds, in the backrooms of stores, primitive stills or distilleries dubbed “alky cookers” sprouted in New York’s ethnic ghettos.

At the same time, in Sicily, the Mafia’s half century of serene growth was suddenly being challenged. The Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini took control of the Italian government in the early 1920s and moved rapidly to wipe out all opposition to the absolute supremacy of the Fascist dictatorship. A northerner, Mussolini was well aware of the Mafia’s extraordinary influence in Sicily and its historical contempt for all national governments in Rome.

Mussolini’s antagonism toward the Mafia was inflamed by the cool, insulting reception he received on a visit to Sicily in 1924. The head of a
cosca
, Don Ciccio Cuccia, who was the mayor of the small town Piana dei Greci, aptly demonstrated the Mafia’s disrespect for
II Duce
(the Leader). When the haughty Mussolini rose to deliver a speech, the main piazza was empty except for a collection of seedy beggars and village idiots collected by the mayor. At a reception in another town, despite the vigilance of his bodyguards, the Mafia managed to steal Mussolini’s hat.

Mussolini’s revenge was swift and exacting. He gave a ruthless official from the north, Cesare Mori, totalitarian police powers and an army of special agents to eradicate the Mafia. Dubbed the “Iron Prefect” and aided by landowners and businessmen who resented the Mafia’s power and extortion demands, Mori brutally rounded up and imprisoned scores of clan “fathers” and their soldiers.