The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (21 page)

Morello himself certainly felt no compunction in extorting from other Sicilians. The Clutch Hand understood instinctively how to go about obtaining cash, masking the threat of violence behind a veneer of bonhomie and adding refinements of his own. William Flynn noted a telling vignette of the boss on his rounds, which, judging from the circumstances, must date to 1902:

“Good morning, Carlo Pelestrina,” Morello would say, entering a countryman’s shop on the East Side. “Your wife is well? And the children—ah the children—they are well? It gladdens me to behold you so happy, so prosperous, so successful. People fight to enter your excellent shop, Carlo Pelestrina.” “Good morning,
padrone
Morello,” would be the reply of the uncomfortable Carlo, for the sight of Morello in one’s shop had the effect of denaturing any existing cheerfulness. “Thank you, I am well, and my wife and children too. … But is there anything I can do for the good
padrone?”
“A mere trifle. I desire silver for this small bill.” And Giuseppe would lay down the worst imitation of a $2 or $5 bill poor Carlo ever beheld. Did Carlo protest? He did not. He produced the silver and expressed his vast gratification at being able to offer so insignificant a service to
padrone
Morello.

Subtly varied techniques of extortion followed in due course. By 1903 the Clutch Hand was using bogus Black Hand letters to obtain expensive services for free, as a young Sicilian doctor named Salvatore Romano would testify. According to Romano, Morello’s scheme was cunning in its simplicity. He began by mailing threatening letters to Romano’s family, then offered his own services as an intermediary to deal with the “Black Hand gang” responsible. Carefully retrieving the notes he had sent—supposedly in order to examine their handwriting, but in reality to dispose of any evidence—the boss reported a few days later that the “threat” had been dealt with and that he had settled with the blackmailers by paying them one hundred dollars, a sum that he would easily recover when the Black Handers “found out who he was.” Romano and his family were effusive in their thanks, as Morello had anticipated—so much so that when the son qualified and opened his own practice in East Harlem, he gladly accepted the Clutch Hand as a patient free of charge.

Matters ran swiftly out of control, as many of those who encountered Morello discovered to their cost. “He began to call on me,” Romano said.

And then the brothers-in-law, and then the cousin called. … I treated all their relatives, and all free of charge. … The whole number of relatives, babies and patients amounted to about sixty. They would call me; I would examine them, prescribe them, but I got no pay, on account of the obligations, also the familiarity. Right from the start I thought I was doing a wise thing not to ask money for my services.

Again, a few small sums soon multiplied. After a year, Dr. Romano was treating so many members of the Morello family that the remainder of his practice was suffering. Eventually he was forced to relocate to Rochester, 250 miles upstate, simply to make a living.

THE MANHATTAN IN WHICH
Morello flourished after his discharge from prison late in June 1903 was growing faster than it had ever done before. The number of immigrants pouring through Ellis Island grew larger every year, reaching three thousand a day—more than a million a year—in the spring of 1906. One in five of this vast mass of naïve, eager, sometimes friendless future citizens remained in the city and became New Yorkers, and there were months when very nearly half of that great total was Italian. Little Italy burst its bounds. East Harlem, too, grew rapidly, north and south, until New York threatened to overtake Naples as the largest Italian city on earth. And though most of these immigrants were poor and some were destitute, the Italian quarter as a whole grew rapidly in wealth. The number of Italian businesses more than doubled. Incomes increased sharply, too; remittances sent home to Italy rose by more than a third between 1900 and 1906. More disposable income meant more people with jobs, more people with savings, and more people worth terrorizing. For Morello and his criminal family, this was a happy time—years in which the Mafia’s revenues increased rapidly in tandem with its influence.

Opportunities to make money were to all intents and purposes limitless, which was just as well, since the gang had to make up for the loss of income from its counterfeiting business while also warding off potential rivals, and there seems to have been little that Morello would not sanction in his relentless drive for profit. The Clutch Hand’s gang stole horses and wagons and resold them—an important criminal trade at a time when automobiles were rare and expensive, and one so common in New York that more animals were reported stolen in the city every year than in the largest western states. Experienced horse thieves could change an animal’s appearance so completely it was rendered unrecognizable; manes were trimmed, hooves clipped, tails docked, and wagons repainted before the stolen rigs were resold through crooked livery stables. Kidnapping, too, enjoyed a vogue in the Italian quarter in the first decade of the century, and according to the NYPD the Morello gang was involved in a number of important cases. The Clutch Hand’s police record notes that he was arrested in connection with several incidents, among them, almost certainly, the 1906 kidnapping of Antonio Bozzuffi. Bozzuffi was the fourteen-year-old son of one of the wealthiest private bankers in Little Italy, a man Morello certainly knew since he had helped to charter a front corporation for the Mafia a few years earlier. The boy was held captive for three days while a ransom said by the newspapers to amount to twenty thousand dollars was negotiated. After his release, young Antonio described being tied to a bed and tortured with stilettos by a group of masked Sicilians.

The Morellos operated many other rackets, too, and it appears that these subsidiary businesses were controlled by individual members of the family, who were given free rein to run them much as they wished so long as the appropriate tithes were paid. A good deal was little more than petty crime—one junior member of the gang described the theft of fifteen watches as a good evening’s work—but much was not. One favorite way of making money was to lodge fraudulent insurance claims. Members of the gang encouraged frightened shopkeepers to purchase expensive fire insurance policies; then, when the insurance was in place, Morello’s men would set the property ablaze and collect a substantial portion of the settlement.

Insurance fraud was the province of Antonio Cecala, a relative of Lupo’s, who came from Corleone and claimed to be a barber but in reality made his living as the head of a “band of incendiaries” whose members specialized in burning down heavily insured properties. According to Cecala—a burly, balding, thuggish man in his mid-thirties—the business was actually one of the least lucrative that the Morellos were involved with (“I am poor because I did not soon enough learn the way to profit in the society,” he said), but it still required a fair degree of expertise and daring.

“How do you do that?” the incendiary was once asked by a novice member of the gang.

“For instance,” he replied,

you own a store of some kind. You have insured it against fire. You have paid your insurance from time to time and do not wish to pay any more. Now to realize on the money paid you must burn. You do not wish to do it yourself as it is too risky. So you send for me. I in my own way will plan and start a fire that will never be questioned. When the insurance company pays you, you pay me a percentage.

Cecala claimed to be an expert in this line of work. “I use glycerine,” he explained, “mixed with other matters. It does not smell at all and leaves no traces of its own burning. It takes three or four men. I direct them and they bring the material. I pay them five dollars each a night for the time they work.” He was dismissive of the efforts of amateurs who had little understanding of how to set a fire without leaving telltale traces for an investigator to discover. Accused of starting a blaze in a dry goods store on Mulberry Street in which several innocent people had died, Cecala waxed indignant:

That is not my line. I do not set fires to cover murders. That fire was started by a Neapolitan band that were in with the proprietor of the dry goods store. … They made a mess of it because they did not start the fire right. They started it in the side of the store and afterwards put explosives on the stairs so that traces of how it started would be lost. After setting fire to it they ran away over the roofs. If I had had that job, it would have been different. All traces would have been lost from the store door and there would not have been so many accidents to the families above. They could have run out in the yard.

Crimes of such magnitude inevitably attracted the attentions of the police, but problems, the Sicilian added, could generally be smoothed over in the United States. A large part of the secret of the Clutch Hand’s apparent invulnerability, so Cecala patiently explained, could be attributed to the Mafia’s carefully maintained relationship with the local police precinct:

Morello knows how much money he has given to detectives, when and where it was given, and the names of those who have taken it. He has always gotten out of everything in which he was implicated. Only recently in the “barrel murder” he got out. They watch him all the time. Even now he is being watched. They do not like to because he knows he has paid them money. But they are ordered to and have to. When the order is given to the police to arrest Morello, policemen whom he has fed always will warn him and he will hide. When they go to his house to arrest him they can never find him. Simple, isn’t it?

The notion that the police protected criminals was hardly news in turn-of-the-century New York, where endemic corruption was a fact of life. Several exhaustive judicial inquiries had shown that the police were tools of the city’s ruling politicians, who kept firm control over all appointments to the NYPD. Novice patrolmen paid as much as three hundred dollars for a position on the force, a substantial sum that could be recovered only by their agreeing to help channel bribes paid by Manhattan’s brothels and illegal gambling houses upward to the city’s ruling class. Vice was thus tolerated, licensed, and controlled, creating a hugely profitable, wholly illicit criminal economy that turned over an estimated $3 million a year by 1900. Revelation of the existence of “the System” made the entire city cynical; in Cecala’s opinion, laws prohibiting various crimes existed not to protect citizens, or even because the authorities were puritan, but to provide politicians with opportunities to make vast, almost entirely risk-free profits. “In this country, money counts and nothing else,” the Sicilian explained. “Sooner or later it all goes into the one pocket. Give money to the police and the detectives and they will leave you in peace. Kill someone and if you have money you will get out of it. The American newspapers prove that every day. But if you are poor and cannot buy your way out, they will kill you for it.”

The ease with which the police could be bribed and the political authorities corrupted made possible far larger and more profitable rackets than Cecala’s insurance frauds. Prices in virtually all of New York’s major industries were set artificially high as a result of gangsters extorting large sums in “protection,” and the most profitable of these illicit businesses were those involving goods that all consumers simply had to buy. The coal racket, the ice racket, and the “wet wash”—that is, laundry—racket all brought in substantial sums, and, most important of all, there were also numerous food rackets involving milk, fruit, vegetables, fish, and meat. Run efficiently, with all the major wholesalers fixing prices and paying a percentage to the racketeers, the latter could be astoundingly lucrative. The chicken racket in West Washington Market, which cost Barnet Baff his life, was estimated to be worth at least one hundred thousand dollars a year, and a few years later the artichoke racket—a major source of income for Italian gangs, since artichokes were an indispensable ingredient of minestrone—was estimated to be worth twice that, the Morellos levying assessments of up to fifty dollars per truck of vegetables entering the city. Enforcement was vicious and uncompromising, as Baff discovered to his cost. Anyone trying to evade the cartel that controlled the markets was liable to find his transport damaged or his stock adulterated, and as usual it was all but impossible for the police to trace such acts of terrorism to their source. In time, the Morello family and their rivals refined their operations further by moving into labor racketeering, infiltrating and increasingly controlling the powerful trade unions in the markets. With the workforce doing the gangsters’ bidding, it was a relatively simple matter to inflict intense pressure on recalcitrant dealers by calling strikes or ordering persistent minor acts of sabotage.

The scale of all these operations was substantial. The Manhattan wet-wash racket was controlled by three large corporations, which agreed among themselves to charge no less than $1.50 a bundle for laundry. Investigation of the Baff murder revealed that the Washington Market “poultry trust”—a cartel of more than twenty wholesalers—collected ten dollars from every dealer in the market for each railroad carload of birds to reach New York. The trust protected its position by doing business solely with unionized shippers and butchers, and its enforcers meted out blackjackings and beatings to those who refused to cooperate. Dealers who resisted or complained were further punished by being made to pay a 6 percent surcharge on their purchases, and that for poultry of an inferior standard.

The importance of rackets to the Morellos increased considerably over time. The first family’s earliest involvement in such schemes probably dated to about 1905, and for perhaps half a dozen years they made up only a part of the family’s business, though an increasingly lucrative one. So important were the rackets to the Morellos that the Terranova brothers became increasingly involved. Vincenzo, the eldest of the three, became an iceman, with his own company, Morello & Barbero. In the years before the advent of refrigeration, ice was among the most vital of commodities and the only way of preserving both foodstuffs and medicines. Ciro, meanwhile, became gradually more powerful in the vegetable rackets while still supposedly employed by Bernardo Terranova’s plastering business. Only Nick, the youngest brother but also the most natural leader among the three, played no recorded part in this side of the family’s activities. He certainly was involved in the theft and resale of horses and wagons, but his real role in the Morello gang made him far more influential than that. Increasingly, as the years went by, the youngest Terranova began to oversee the whole of the family’s businesses. While he did that, his stepbrother, Morello, was devoting more and more of his attention to the problem of how to handle all the cash his family was making.