The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (38 page)

THE LOMONTES’ FALL
had its beginnings in the weakness that they showed in failing to avenge Calogero Morello’s death in 1912, but, bolstered by their alliance with Gallucci, it was not until two years later, in May 1914, that the elder of the brothers lost his life. Fortunato, then thirty years old, was murdered in the open, in broad daylight, by a gunman who approached to point-blank range and fired three shots. The boss died almost at once, hit in the neck, chest, and stomach only a few yards from the entrance to the Murder Stable and in the heart of “King” Gallucci’s territory. His killer escaped in the confusion.

It was Salvatore Clemente who first drew attention to the oddness of Lomonte’s murder. Few shootings in East Harlem were quite such public affairs, nor was there usually much mystery about the killer. Lomonte’s death, though, might have been designed to demonstrate how powerless he was, and, asking around, Clemente discovered that the gunman’s identity was a mystery even to the leaders of the Morello family. None of the witnesses had ever seen the man before. “No one appears to know who shot Lomonte,” the informant said. “They think it was a stranger.”

Fortunato’s death left Tom Lomonte nominally the boss of the first family, but the younger of the brothers was by this time not much more than a figurehead. Certainly he lacked the power to offer any sort of aid to Giosue Gallucci, who now himself became the target of an unknown enemy. The King was well used to the ordinary feuds of Little Italy; he had survived several, and though there were inevitably casualties (his own brother, Gennaro, had been shot dead in 1909 in the depths of the Gallucci bakery), he had thus far always won his wars. As recently as 1912, the King had become enmeshed in a struggle for power with one of Harlem’s most notorious Black Handers, Aniello Prisco—a murderous cripple who gloried in the lurid alias of Zopo the Gimp—and when the extortionist unwisely attempted to levy tribute on 109th Street, he was summarily executed by a Gallucci bodyguard. The gunman who killed Zopo was later charged with murder, but few who knew the King were surprised when the man obtained an acquittal on the grounds of self-defense.

This time, though, the boss was dealing with a more implacable enemy. Half a dozen determined attempts were made on his life—he was shot twice in the body in 1913, and again during a gun battle on First Avenue a year later. By then, bodyguarding Giosue Gallucci had become a spectacularly dangerous occupation. The King himself told a friend that ten men had died protecting him over the years, and by the spring of 1915 he was so concerned for his safety that he rarely ventured more than a few yards from his 109th Street bakery and took to wearing a lightweight chain-mail vest, a rare item then obtainable only from certain arms dealers in Chinatown. When yet another bodyguard was killed early in May, shot by a sniper who had been aiming at the boss, even the King grew fatalistic. Henceforth, he told a
Herald
reporter who called on him, he would go about his business without protection. “But they will get me,” he added. “I know that they will get me yet.”

Who “they” might have been, the
Herald’s
man did not suggest, but it was evident to all Harlem that Gallucci’s enemies were well resourced, well organized, and astoundingly persistent. The assassins’ chance came a few days later, at ten on the evening of May 17, when the King ventured briefly out of his bakery and hurried four doors down East 109th Street to a coffee shop owned by his teenage son Luca—”a place where men could gather, sip coffee, chat, and play pool, and the police said that if they were well enough known they could get something in that coffee.” As the same reporter told it,

as the two men entered the coffee house they saw several strangers there. Two more followed them in. Some one in the rear opened the widows saying the place was too warm. Suddenly the lights went out and a man cried in Italian—

“We’ve got them at last!”

Then the shooting began. At least seven shots were fired. Luca threw his father back to the wall and held himself against him, crying “Shoot me! Shoot me!” They did.

Before the echoes of the shots had reached the street, the assassins, five or six of them, ran out, turned the corner of First Avenue, leaped into a waiting automobile, and were driven away. Neighbors and the police soon found Gallucci and his son, both mortally wounded. … [The killers had] sent a bullet through his stomach and another through his neck. At Bellevue Hospital it was said he could not possibly recover.

Gallucci and his son were both still conscious when they reached the hospital, but neither one would talk or help identify their killers. (“Both,” another newsman recorded, “steadfastly refused to say how their wounds were inflicted, although assured death was imminent.”) To the police, though, there were clues: Gallucci’s killers had lain in wait for him, perhaps for days; there had been half a dozen of them; and they had taken the one chance they were offered swiftly and with savage determination. That narrowed down the list of suspects quite considerably.

The investigation proceeded only slowly, nonetheless. Then, on October 13, 1915, Tom Lomonte was murdered, too—in public. He was loitering on a street corner on 116th Street, talking to a female cousin, when a skinny youth crept up from behind and shot him three times in the back. A nearby policeman heard the shots, spotted the gunman, and pursued him as he made off down First Avenue. After a short chase, the youth darted into a tenement at 36 East 115th Street, scrambled up the stairs to the first floor, and hammered on the door of an apartment owned by a Mrs. Maria Pappio. By the time the pursuing officer reached the spot, he had thrown off his clothes, dived into a bed, pulled the covers up to his chin, and was pretending to be asleep. The policeman was not fooled; he dragged the boy out, searched under the bed, and there found a machine pistol. The gunman was dragged off to the nearest precinct house, where, under vigorous interrogation, he gave his name as Antonio Impoluzzo, admitted that he was nineteen years old, and said that he lived downtown, on East 39th Street, where he had only the most modest of criminal records.

There was no clear connection between Lomonte and the boy who killed him. So far as the police were able to establish, Impoluzzo had no friends, no family, and no business whatsoever on East 116th Street; nor did the detectives who investigated the Lomonte murder obtain a confession or anything but the feeblest of alibis from him. At the boy’s trial, the same December, the jury heard a week of evidence but no mention of any motive, and he went to his death in the electric chair less than a year later without ever uttering a word about the murder.

Whether the killer kept silent out of loyalty or fear nobody knew, but the police were quietly convinced that he had been hired and sent uptown to kill Lomonte precisely because there was no chance he would be recognized in Harlem. The real question was who would need to take precautions of this sort, and the answer—as both Flynn and the police believed—was that Lomonte’s death had probably been ordered by someone who lived in Harlem—the same person, in all likelihood, who had also ordered Fortunato’s murder, and possibly Gallucci’s, too. Someone whose own men would have been only too easily recognized on 107th Street.

Looking at the murders from a detective’s point of view, the most likely killer was whoever benefited most from this series of bloody deaths. And, from that perspective, one suspect stood out. The deaths of the Lomonte brothers and Gallucci, after all, had one important thing in common: They might all have been designed to restore the Morello family to its old ascendancy.

CHAPTER 12
ARTICHOKE KINGS

G
IOSUE GALLUCCI’S DEATH IN MAY 1915 LEFT THE MORELLOS
the dominant force in Harlem’s underworld. Led now by Nick Terra-nova, the first family experienced little difficulty in seizing control of the lucrative Royal Lottery, as well as Gallucci’s share of the coal, ice, and olive trades. There were other ways of making money, too, and if some were now in sharp decline (Black Hand crime became increasingly uncommon after 1912), others soon emerged to take their place. New forms of crime included labor racketeering—often involving the exploitation of workers via their unions—and, increasingly, narcotics, in which the police suspected the Morello family dabbled from around the middle of the decade. Gambling, too, became practically a Mafia monopoly. The family was richer than ever, probably earning tens of thousands of dollars in the twelve months after Gallucci’s death.

Crime had become increasingly organized since the Clutch Hand’s imprisonment in 1910. The Lower East Side was dominated by Jewish gangs engaged in much the same rackets as the Mafia, and at least as successfully The West Side was partly Irish, and everywhere there were American criminals as well, involved in every form of business from illegal gaming houses to cocaine trafficking. The Italian underworld, meanwhile, remained as dangerous as ever, and even with Gallucci and Spinelli dead, the Terranova brothers were forced to deal with competitors based within a few blocks of their heartland on 116th Street. Most of these gangs, it is true, were weaker and less feared than the Morellos, but a handful were not, and of these the Terranova brothers’ most dangerous rivals were other members of the Mafia. The first family was no longer alone. As early as 1912, New York was home to not one family but four.

—

WHILE OTHER CITIES
, including large ones such as Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, never supported more than a single Mafia family, New York was too big and too much the focal point of Sicilian emigration for the same to hold true there. As hundreds of thousands of Italians continued to stream through Ellis Island each year, it was all but inevitable that the Morellos would eventually be challenged. Giuseppe Morello’s open preference for Corleonesi was one reason for this; men from other Mafia towns in Sicily knew that they would find it difficult to rise to eminence within the ranks of his family. The city’s sprawl was another; however strong the Morellos became, they could never dominate Brooklyn or the Bronx as they did Harlem, and it was in Brooklyn, sometime after 1902, that the second of New York’s Mafia gangs was founded.

Its leader was Nicola Schiro—Cola Schiro, he was called—who had arrived in the United States from the small port town of Castellammare del Golfo around the year 1902. Castellammare had a strong criminal tradition, sending large numbers of emigrants to Chicago, Detroit, and Buffalo as well as to Brooklyn, and Schiro was thirty when he first appeared in the United States; between 1905 and 1910 he would find enough of his townsmen in New York to form a family. Like Schiro himself—who was an uninspiring leader, better at making money than he was at leading men—the Castellammare gang kept itself out of the news; the little that is known about the family survives in the words of Salvatore Clemente, who spoke of it to Flynn. Much the same can be said of the second of Brooklyn’s families, this one organized by a Palermo Mafioso named Manfredi Mineo. Mineo, who also kept himself out of the public eye, was apparently an effective leader. His family, the smallest and newest of the city’s four when Clemente described it early in 1912, would grow to be the largest in New York by 1930.

Both Brooklyn gangs seem to have acknowledged the Clutch Hand as boss of bosses before his imprisonment in 1910; both, certainly, attracted limited attention because they went about their business on the east side of the East River—where there were fewer newspapers and fewer nosy journalists—and because they steered well clear of Flynn by staying out of the trade in counterfeits. It was the third and last of New York’s new Mafia families that caused the Morellos the most trouble, in part because the two gangs lived crammed uncomfortably cheek by jowl in Italian Harlem, but also because this gang’s leader was a more formidable character than either Schiro or Mineo. Salvatore “Totò” D’Aquila was another Palermitano, which meant that he came from a city in which there were as many competing
cosche
as there were in New York. It also meant that he had been born in a town where the local Mafiosi considered themselves a cut above the yokels of the interior.

D’Aquila was less experienced than Schiro and Mineo. He was not quite thirty years old when he appeared in Manhattan, and though little is known of his first years in the United States, the first blot on his police record was a peculiar and fascinating one. In 1906, D’Aquila was arrested for working as a confidence man—an avocation that demands eloquence, quick thinking, and high intelligence of its practitioners, all useful attributes that were noticeably lacking in the majority of Mafiosi. D’Aquila was also, as he would soon prove, the toughest, strongest, and most aggressive of New York’s rival bosses. It was the Morellos’ misfortune that they shared the cramped and busy streets of Harlem with him.

Powerful new bosses such as Totò D’Aquila would almost certainly have risen to prominence whether or not Lupo and Morello had been jailed. It seems unlikely, though, that the first family would have faced quite so many threats so quickly had the Clutch Hand remained free. Morello’s position as acknowledged boss of bosses would surely have prevented that; so, too, would the almost superstitious awe in which he was held. And the Morello who had—at least if the police were to be believed—half a dozen members of his own family shot or hacked to death as a precaution would surely have dealt with emerging rivals more ruthlessly than his half brothers felt able to. The truth was that no criminal organization, even one as well established as Morello’s family, could survive unscathed the jailing of so many of its leaders. Nor could the Clutch Hand’s successors simply demand the respect that the old boss had so laboriously earned. Mafiosi, whether Sicilian or American, have always had a keen appreciation of charisma and expect more than mere efficiency from the men who lead them. From that perspective, the appointment of the colorless Lomonte brothers to lead the Harlem family had been a terrible misjudgment on Morello’s part. It permitted rival Mafiosi to rise in a manner that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. It also meant that Nick Terranova had to face threats that the Clutch Hand never had.

According to Nicola Gentile, the well-traveled Pittsburgh Mafioso, D’Aquila was a dangerous man: arrogant, ambitious, and feared rather than respected by his men. He was efficient, too, and with Lupo and Morello out of the way wasted no time in turning his own family into the strongest
cosca
in the city. D’Aquila achieved this feat in part by attracting defectors from New York’s other Mafia gangs; most came from the Morellos. Among those who joined his family in search of greater power and larger spoils by 1912 were two well-known members of the first family: Giuseppe Fontana, the old Sicilian Mafioso notorious for his involvement in the murder of the head of the Bank of Sicily in 1893, and Joseph Fanaro, a suspect in the brutal killing of Salvatore Marchiani who had also been arrested at the time of the Barrel Murder.

The defection of a man of Fontana’s experience and reputation was as good a sign as any of the shifting balance of power in Italian Harlem, and few of New York’s Mafiosi can have been surprised when, with the Clutch Hand in prison, D’Aquila maneuvered to have himself acclaimed as boss of bosses. The title still conveyed no formal powers, apparently, and the new boss engineered his elevation in the approved way, by acclamation at a meeting of the Mafia’s general assembly. According to Gentile, though, D’Aquila was ruthless in his determination to acquire influence, and Salvatore Clemente’s evidence confirms as much. Through Clemente, Flynn learned that the Palermo man possessed and exercised the power to summon all New York Mafiosi to meetings. D’Aquila, moreover, closely controlled the admission of new members into all four families. “There are four gangs in this locality,” the Chief’s informant said, “and when a new member is proposed for any one of the four gangs, it is always brought up before [them all].”

By the autumn of 1913, in short, D’Aquila had established himself in a stronger position than Morello had ever claimed. His increasing dominance greatly worried the Schiro and Manfredi families of Brooklyn, as well as the Terranovas, and the strength of the D’Aquila family, which was by now equal to that of the other three Mafia gangs combined, posed such an obvious threat that for a time his subordinates combined their strength and openly opposed him. Clemente set all this out for Flynn, explaining that

there are four gangs, that three of them are working together: the Manfredi gang, the gang headed by Nicola Schiro, both of Brooklyn, and the Lomonti gang of Harlem; that the fourth gang, led by D’Aquila of Harlem, is opposed by the other three gangs; that [men have] been shot on account of the feud between these gangs in all probability; that no doubt there will be more shooting soon.

Clemente’s predictions were soon proved correct when, taking advantage of D’Aquila’s absence from New York on a trip home to Sicily, the Terranovas took revenge on both defectors from their ranks. In November, Fontana was ambushed on his way to work on 105th Street by gunmen from the Morello and Mineo families. Fanaro followed him into oblivion three weeks later.

Two deaths still amounted to a squabble, not a full-blown war, and D’Aquila’s response, whatever it was (Clemente remained infuriatingly silent on the subject), did not include an escalation of hostilities. That left the Terranovas free to deal with another of their sometime allies, the most powerful of all the gambling lords in Little Italy. Still smarting from Fontana’s and Fanaro’s betrayals, Nick Terranova went gunning for the DiMarco brothers.

JOE DIMARCO HAD FEARED
for his life for several years. Stocky, clever, smallpox-scarred, and twenty-eight years old, he owned a stake in the Lomontes’ feed business and passed in the immigrant quarter as a restaurateur. DiMarco’s real business, though, was running profitable card games throughout Italian Harlem, an avocation that required him to be nearly as well connected politically as Giosue Gallucci. He had been a Morello ally since at least 1910 but had fallen spectacularly from favor with the Lomontes’ decline, not least because he would not give the Terranova brothers the larger share of gambling profits they believed to be their due. That had been uncomfortable, and over the next three years DiMarco had seen enough of Nick Terranova to recognize the murderous ambition in the rising boss. Word in the Italian underworld was that the two men cordially hated each other, that DiMarco had tried to have Nick shot, that the attempt had failed, and that the gambler’s own life was now in danger.

The Terranova brothers first struck back at DiMarco in April 1913, when an assassin hidden behind a fence on East 112th Street opened fire as he walked past. The gunman knew his job; DiMarco was shot through the neck, leaving a deep and bloody wound. Taken to the hospital still conscious, he was told that he would die. It took several skillful surgeons and an “unusual operation” at Harlem Hospital to save him.

A year later, the Terranovas tried again. This time DiMarco was an even softer target: he was reclining, helpless, in a barber’s chair on 106th Street when two men armed with sawed-off shotguns burst into the shop. This time the gambler was even luckier. Instead of closing to decisive range, his would-be killers opened fire from the doorway, turned, and ran. Lying there smothered in lather and blood, DiMarco felt cautiously about his body and found he had been wounded. A dozen pellets had struck home, but none had done serious damage. Again he survived.

Two narrow escapes would have been enough to persuade even an optimist to leave Harlem, and DiMarco was scarcely that. Late in 1914, he moved his operations more than a mile downtown, opening a large restaurant at 163 West 49th Street and hiring two gunmen to act as bodyguards. He rented an apartment above the premises and lived there with his brother Salvatore, seldom venturing out. These precautions were enough to keep him alive for another eighteen months, but they could not do so indefinitely, and in the summer of 1916 the Terranova brothers made a final effort to dispose of his elusive enemy and seize control of his gambling rackets. Everything was carefully arranged. There was to be no possibility, this time, of a mistake.

DiMarco, the
Herald’s
man in Little Italy reported,

liked to play poker, and his enemies used that fact to lure him to his death. Some one guided him to a dark little room in the rear of a tenement down in James Street in the afternoon, where it was understood there was to be a poker game. DiMarco took one, or maybe two, of his bodyguards along. [One, Charles] Lombardi sat beside him at the poker table.