The Mafia Establishes Itself in America
Between 1901 and 1913, some 1.1 million Sicilians emigrated—a little less than a quarter of the island’s entire population. Of those, roughly 800,000 made the United States their destination. Inevitably, some were men of honour, smart and ruthless criminals who sought to establish protection regimes and other criminal activities among their fellow migrants and along the trade routes connecting the two shores of the Atlantic.
For most of the nineteenth century, men on the run in Sicily had sought refuge in the USA. The lemon trade, heavily infiltrated by mafiosi, connected Palermo with New York. In the 1880s and 1890s, American police had linked some violent deaths in the Italian community with the mafia. Particularly notable was the murder of New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy in 1890; the Sicilian suspects were lynched. But it was only from the days of the great migration after 1900 that the traffic between the US and Italy in criminal ideas, resources, and personnel became a vital part of mafia operations.
There are two fables about the mafia’s arrival in America. The first was born at the time of the mass Sicilian migration. Following a famous mafia murder in 1903, the New York Herald proclaimed in alarm: ‘“The boot” [i.e. Italy] unloads its criminals upon the United States. Statistics prove that the scum of southern Europe is dumped at the nation’s door in rapacious, conscienceless, lawbreaking hordes.’ To natives of New York, the mafia seemed like an invasion, an infestation borne in the teeming bellies of steamships. Or, in a variant on the same account, it was an international criminal conspiracy bent on expansion into the virgin territory of the USA.
The second fable is recent; it was fashioned in the 1960s and 1970s by the descendants of Italian immigrants who were by now completely integrated into American society. They recreated the mafia’s arrival in the USA as a tale that almost turned the ‘criminal invasion’ fable on its head. The Sicilian peasants who crossed the Atlantic were steeped in ancient ‘rustic chivalry’ traditions. Faced with the grimy savagery of big-city capitalism and machine politics, they adapted the cultural resources that they had brought from their rural homeland. The mafia was born when the old Sicilian values of family and honour met the dark side of the American dream—or so the story went.
In reality, urban America and Sicily were not as wildly different as either of these fables would have us believe. Corleone, for example, was not a country village. It was one of many ‘agro-towns’ where market economics, patronage politics, and organized violence held sway. Although they were poor, superstitious, and downtrodden, the peasants of Corleone were not the innocents that Italian-American journalist Adolfo Rossi suggested when he went to interview Bernardino Verro and write his sentimental portrait of the Fasci. The working people of Sicily knew how important it could be, in terms of their livelihoods, to be loyal to the right faction in town, the faction able to dole out work, land, and charity. Many had no illusions about what it took to get on in politics and business. Most aimed to accumulate money and contacts in the US and then return to Sicily. The island’s emigrants were not like the Jewish refugees who spat on the quay at Riga before setting sail for a wholly new future across the Atlantic.
Neither Sicilian politics, nor the island’s sophisticated violence industry, had much that was antiquated about it. Sicilians of all kinds were well equipped for life in the burgeoning cities of the United States. When they crossed the ocean they found a home from home, whether they wanted to or not. Their first access to American society was often through the padrone system. To get a job—typically in construction—you had to become a client of a boss. Sometimes, the boss would use intimidation to corner a sector of the jobs market. Bosses would even advance poorer emigrants the price of their steamer ticket and recoup it later, with high interest, from their wages. Like Sicily, the world of the new immigrant in North America was one where power was invested not in institutions, but in tough, well-networked individuals.
Politics in the Italian quarters of New York City would also have had a familiar look to Sicilians. Bosses farmed wards of the city for votes on behalf of the Democratic Party organization—Tammany Hall, ‘the Wigwam’. They did so by tapping into every possible source of influence and patronage on their turf, including criminal gangs. In America as in Sicily, organized labour militancy would often be met by a combination of corruption and violence.
Elizabeth Street was the heart of the New York Sicilian community. In 1905, roughly 8,200 Italians—the vast majority of them Sicilians—lived in ‘Elisabetta Stretta’, as they called it. This concentration of people constituted a territory comparable in size to many of the agro-towns of the Sicilian interior. Cinema has done a fairly good job of recreating the look of places like Elizabeth Street in the early twentieth century, with its cramped tenements, its sweatshops, and its streets lined with laden traders’ carts. (Italian export industries prospered on keeping emigrants in the US supplied with the foodstuffs they had grown up on.)
At the time of the great Sicilian influx, Americans observed the development of the immigrant quarters with a mixture of alarm and pity. As one reformer wrote of Elizabeth Street in 1909:
Here were myriads of human beings, stifling in boxes arranged like drawers in a bureau, with holes to look out upon the opposite boxes and the roaring ‘elevated’. Those who were at home hung out of the windows in as few garments as were decent; while the long seething bare canons of brick, paving stone and asphalt were swarming with children in quest of air and amusement.
It was the memory of poverty in Sicilian agro-towns and the prospect of a better future that made the conditions tolerable for the recent arrivals in New York.
But neither well-meaning contemporary accounts like these, nor today’s cinema images, manage to capture the economic dynamism of Little Italy. When Adolfo Rossi first went to America in 1878, Mulberry Bend was an Irish slum. He remembered the area’s ‘lurid, dingy hovels, mostly built of wood’. During the years of the great transatlantic exodus, he became an emigration commissioner for the Italian government, reporting on the fortunes of Italians in the US. In 1904 he went back to Manhattan and was pleased to report that, since Little Italy had been created, house prices and rents had risen, the quality of the buildings had improved markedly, and Italians themselves were the major investors in the property market. The new arrivals from the peninsula, especially the women, had also discovered a passion for education. In every way they could, Italians in the United States were grabbing the chance to better themselves.
It was into this dynamic environment—at once very Sicilian and very American—that the mafia transplanted itself. The mafia does not spread nearly as far and as fast as people often assume. When it does travel, it does so in two basic ways. The first is fast, flexible, and is usually related to a specific business initiative, such as the trade in a particular drug. With the approval and assistance of the capos back home, individual mafiosi can take the mafia brand anywhere they choose, setting up more-or-less temporary trading posts as they go.
But men of honour are not just businessmen, they are also the administrators of a shadow state. A great deal has to be in place for the mafia’s system of territorial control through cosche to spread outside western Sicily: protection rackets; political contacts; the agreement of neighbouring cosche; a friendly attitude from elements in the press, police, and local population; and so on. Exporting this privatized form of government is a slow affair at best. Even in western Sicily, the extent of the mafia’s domination varies from one place to another. And after some 140 years of history, the mafia still has only isolated outposts on the Italian mainland. The fertile criminal soil of the United States was one of the rare environments into which the mafia’s method could be transferred wholesale. The story of two Italian-American men—Joe Petrosino and Giuseppe ‘Piddu’ Morello—brings the mafia’s arrival in America into sharp relief.
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Internal letter to the Police Commissioner of New York, 19 October 1908:
Sir:
In compliance with the provisions of paragraph 3 of Rule 30 of the Rules and Regulations of the Police Department, I respectfully request that I be granted permission to receive a gold watch tendered me by the Italian government.
Respectfully,
Joseph Petrosino,
Comm. Italian Branch
Detective Bureau
Undated memorandum from the American consul in Palermo to the Police Commissioner of New York:
Petrosino was registered under the name of Guglielmo De Simoni at the Hotel de France in Palermo. On March 12, 1909, he was standing at the base of the Garibaldi statue in the Piazza Marina waiting for a trolley when two men fired four shots at him. Three hit him and he died instantly. He was hit on the right side of the back, through both lungs and in the left temple. Petrosino was unarmed. A Smith and Wesson revolver was found in his valise in the hotel. A heavy Belgian revolver with one barrel discharged was found near the scene.
New York Police Department memorandum dated 11 May 1909:
Received from the Police Commissioner, Lt. Petrosino’s gold watch and chain, pair gold cuff links, cane, two dress suit cases containing personal effects, package of letters and a check for $12.40. Signed, Louis Salino.
At 6 A.M. on 14 April 1903, Frances Connors, a plump, middle-aged woman on her way to work, passed the New York Mallet & Handle Works at 743 East 11th Street close to the corner of Avenue D. A coat caught her attention. It had been draped over the top of a weather-beaten sugar barrel placed near the pavement, next to a pile of timber. Lifting the coat, she saw a right foot and a left hand. When she looked into the barrel, she found it contained a man’s body, fully clothed and bent double, the head squeezed between the knees, a coarse burlap sack wrapped around the neck. Mrs Connors’ screams drew two patrolmen to the scene. The body was still warm.
Analysis would later reveal that the victim had eighteen shallow stab wounds to the neck, and a slash across the throat so deep and wide that the head had nearly been detached. The man was respectably dressed. Both of his ears were pierced. He had eaten heavily just before his death: potatoes, beans, beets, salad, spaghetti. In the bottom of the barrel there was a three-inch layer of sawdust, containing onion skins and the chewed stubs of dark Italian stogies.
The ‘body in the barrel’ mystery, as the New York papers quickly dubbed it, triggered America’s fears of an invasion of criminal hordes from ‘the boot’. But behind these scare stories, the case offers intriguing clues about the reality of the mafia presence in the United States in the era of the great Sicilian exodus. It also marked a milestone in the path to fame of an Italian-American policeman named Joseph (Giuseppe) Petrosino. It may also have led directly to his death, six years later, in Piazza Marina, Palermo—one of the most famous murders in the mafia’s history.
A day after the discovery of the body in the barrel, the police arrested nine members of a mafia gang of counterfeiters and extortionists. For some time they had been under surveillance by men from the US secret service division. It was suspected that they were importing forged US currency in the false bottoms of olive oil cans. The money was distributed to other east-coast cities through a network of agents.
The evening before the murder, the victim was seen entering and leaving a butcher’s shop at 16 Stanton Street—it was one of the gang’s haunts. A little later, he went to a saloon with a small restaurant at the rear. When he did not come out again, the surveillance ended for the night. The saloon belonged to a 34-year-old man from Corleone, Giuseppe ‘Piddu’ Morello, known to be the gang’s leader.
When Morello was arrested in the Bowery, he was armed and had cigars in his pockets identical to the ones found in the barrel. His saloon had sawdust on the floor in which were found onion skins and cigar stubs. He was not difficult to pick out: his right hand had only the little finger remaining. When interrogated, he refused to answer, and refused even to tell his interrogators how he lost his other fingers.
The barrel in which the body was found communicated more than Morello. A stencil mark on the underside—W & T 233—led detectives, via the great sugar refineries on the Long Island side of the East River, to the grocers Wallace & Thompson at 365 Washington Street, Manhattan. They had only one Sicilian customer, Pietro Inzerillo, another member of Morello’s cosca. Two more barrels with the same markings were found at Inzerillo’s pastry shop and café at 226 Elizabeth Street.
The breakthrough in identifying the victim came through Detective Sergeant Petrosino, a short, square, immensely strong man with a badly pitted face and a shapeless nose. (Ernest Borgnine would play him in a disappointing 1960 film, Pay or Die!) Born into poverty near Salerno on the southern Italian mainland in 1860, Petrosino had emigrated to the USA as a young boy. Learning to read and write in New York City’s public schools was his first step in rising above his parents’ station. He became a street-cleaner and then the foreman of a gang of ‘scow trimmers’—the men who crewed the flat-bottomed barges that ferried the city’s rubbish away. At that time the police supervised refuse collection in New York. Petrosino came to the attention of a local officer who gave him the chance to become a uniformed cop.
Petrosino’s slow rise through the ranks of the NYPD accelerated at the turn of the century when the numbers of Italian immigrants, and criminals, increased dramatically. He had already attracted attention to himself by issuing a warning that a gang of mostly Italian anarchists in Paterson, New Jersey, were planning to assassinate President William McKinley. The warning went unheeded. On 6 December 1901, McKinley was shot dead as he inaugurated the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo.
A few days after the discovery of the body in the barrel, Petrosino travelled thirty miles up the east bank of the Hudson River to the grey blocks of Sing Sing. His contacts in Little Italy had suggested that Giuseppe Di Primo, a man serving a three-year sentence for counterfeiting, might help put a name to the body in the barrel. He interviewed Di Primo in a cell that had been built seventy years before with stone hewn by inmates from the prison quarry; it was damp, cold and tiny: 2.1 metres deep and 197 centimetres from floor to ceiling, and only 97 centimetres wide. Sing Sing deserved its dreadful reputation.
When Di Primo was shown a picture of the dead man, he identified him immediately as his brother-in-law, Benedetto Madonia. Grief-stricken, and made desperate by the conditions in Sing Sing, Di Primo confessed that both he and Madonia were part of the same counterfeiting operation as one-fingered Piddu Morello. Madonia was one of the agents used by the gang to pass the counterfeit dollars into circulation; he had gone to recoup some of Di Primo’s property from Morello. That was the last time that Di Primo had seen him before he was murdered.
When Joe Petrosino returned to the city, he arranged for Madonia’s widow to identify the corpse. The murdered man had been found with a watch-chain on his waistcoat, but no watch. His widow was able to describe the missing timepiece: it had a locomotive stamped on the base.
One of the arrested gang members, a hulking, bull-necked man of twenty-four called Tommaso Petto, known as the Ox, had a receipt in his pocket from a pawnshop on the Bowery. It bore the same date that the body in the barrel had been discovered. When police returned the ticket, they found the watch with the locomotive design. The Ox was now strongly suspected of being the man who had performed the murder.
The inquest into the case came to court on 1 May 1903. None of the gang members had given in to the NYPD’s habitual, impatient interrogation methods. Only eight of sixteen people subpoenaed to serve on the jury turned up. The victim’s son was the first to be called to the stand to identify the watch. One detective involved in the case recalled what happened next:
He looked at it and was about to speak when there was a shuffling of feet and hissing in the courtroom, which was filled with swarthy-faced men. One of these jumped up and put his fingers to his lips. Young Madonia was now not sure it was his father’s timepiece.
Under identical pressure, Madonia’s widow had a comparable lapse of memory.
Di Primo was brought down from Sing Sing to give evidence. The police alleged that there had been bad blood between himself and the Ox for some while. But Di Primo cheerily asserted that they were very good friends. He had evidently decided, on reflection, to serve out his time in Sing Sing in silence. The case fell apart.
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What Petrosino and his colleagues discovered about the Morello gang can be set alongside what is now known about the mafia in its country of origin. Some of the men arrested in the aftermath of the barrel killing were described as importers of wine, oil, and other agricultural produce from the island. The trade in citrus fruit, oil, cheese, and wine provided excellent cover for criminals on their journeys back and forth across the Atlantic, and within the United States. These commodities also offered opportunities for mafiosi to extort protection money and create monopolies as they did in Sicily.
Gun licences were clearly a hinge between the gangs and the authorities in New York as they were in Sicily. The members of Morello’s gang who were arrested in April 1903 were in possession of perfectly legal permits to carry firearms within the city limits. They had been granted by the Deputy Police Commissioner on the recommendation of the Captain of the local precinct. One such permit holder had only been in the US for twenty-eight days. Criminal relationships across the Atlantic were evidently so strong that a mafioso could set off from Palermo confident in the knowledge that he would be carrying a legal weapon soon after being cleared through Ellis Island. In some embarrassment, the Police Commissioner revoked 322 firearms permits shortly after these facts were publicized in the New York Herald.
There is strong evidence of close ties between mafiosi in America and Sicily. One associate of the Morello gang, who was wanted for questioning by Petrosino during the ‘body in the barrel’ investigations, was Don Vito Cascio-Ferro, later to be imprisoned by ‘iron prefect’ Cesare Mori. Before the body in the barrel murder, he had fled Sicily to avoid the special police surveillance imposed on him following his suspected involvement in a kidnapping, although he later claimed that he went to the US on business—as a lemon importer. He escaped arrest in the ‘body in the barrel’ round-up by fleeing to New Orleans, home to some 12,000 Sicilians and a strong mafia presence, before returning once more to Sicily. In 1905, Morello’s gang was joined by another new emigrant, Giuseppe Fontana—the mafioso recently acquitted of killing Emanuele Notarbartolo.
The composition of the Morello gang may well reveal important information about the level of coordination between men of honour back in Sicily. Morello was from Corleone; Cascio-Ferro from nearby Bisacquino—both in the interior, south of Palermo. Fontana was from Villabate closer to the capital. Other members were from Partinico, further away to the west. In other words, these were men of honour from different Sicilian cosche. Piddu Morello’s gang clearly constituted a trading post for particularly enterprising men of honour from across the province of Palermo and beyond. American business was becoming a matter of interest to the whole Sicilian mafia. Moreover, the sense of a common interest between men of honour was strong enough for criminal credentials acquired in various corners of provincial Sicily to be recognized and appreciated on the other side of the Atlantic.
The Morello gang based its power in New York on the same principles of territorial control as any cosca back in Sicily: protection rackets and patronage; relationships with police to ensure immunity from prosecution. Immigrant communities also made for very solid packages of votes; lacking a real interest in or understanding of the politics of their new country, many immigrants were happy to trade their votes for small favours from a patron.
Nevertheless there were some important differences between the environments that mafiosi worked in at home and in New York. The problem faced by the mafia’s system of territorial dominance was that America was a more mobile and diverse society, with a long tradition of crime and corruption all of its own. The population of Elizabeth Street, as in the other immigrant quarters, was in constant flux. People came and went from the Old World. Many new arrivals moved on to other parts of the US. Others, as they improved their living standards, moved up and out to more salubrious areas in Harlem, Brooklyn, and beyond.
Mafiosi had to be as mobile in the New World as the Italian population they preyed on. Morello had travelled within the US before settling in New York; his gang also had another base in the Sicilian community of East Harlem. Nicola Gentile, a young Sicilian, who was initiated into the mafia in Philadelphia in 1905, moved between mafia cosche in different cities several times in his career. (Gentile is the subject of the next chapter.) He had dealings with men of honour in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Kansas City, San Francisco, and Canada. What he describes in the years before the First World War is a criminal network firmly rooted in Sicilian communities across North America, but having very little influence outside those communities.
New York was where this network looked to for leadership; it had by far the largest Sicilian population, and it was the main terminal for goods and people arriving from the island. The same mafioso—as reliable a witness as there can be to such things—affirmed that Piddu Morello was the supreme boss of the whole American branch of the mafia until 1909.
Whatever Morello’s status within the Sicilian mafia nationally, it did not make his position much easier in New York. At the time of the ‘body in the barrel’ murder, the Morello cosca found its neighbourhoods bounded by crews who played by different rules, spoke a different Italian dialect, or even hailed from an entirely different country. Instead of the constant consultation that took place between cosche affiliated to the same association in Sicily, mafiosi in New York City were faced with the underworld equivalent of international diplomacy.
By the time the Morello cosca had set up operations in Little Italy, the New York criminal marketplace had already been an arena of ferocious competition for years. The tenements of Manhattan at the turn of the century were a patchwork of territories for gangs of sharp-dressed young hoodlums like the Gas House Gang, the Gophers, the Hudson Dusters, and the Pearl Buttons. In 1903, Paul Kelly’s Five Points gang controlled the area between the Bowery and Broadway that included Little Italy. Kelly had been born Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli in Naples. He took his new Irish-sounding name during a short boxing career. A dapper, soft-spoken man, he reputedly commanded 1,500 toughs, most of them Italian, but including some Jews, Irish, and others. Kelly’s organization embraced prostitution, gambling, protection, property, and machine politics. Although he never stood for office himself, he fed support upwards to Tim ‘Dry Dollar’ Sullivan, the undisputed Democratic boss of the Lower East Side. American-born politicians, particularly the Irish like Sullivan, were the only ones who seemed capable of building a power base that traversed the different ethnic slums.
If, as the papers suggested at the time, the Sicilian mafia had wanted to conquer New York, it would have needed to have arrived half a century earlier. From their base within the Sicilian communities, mafiosi had the resources and skills to carve out a competitive slot in the New York underworld. But they found it impossible to dominate.
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The Sicilian mafia in America also faced the problem of trade-mark control. It was America that turned ‘mafia’ into the best-known brand name in organized crime. Celebrated cases like the body in the barrel began to spread ‘mafia’ far and wide. Yet in the process the logo drifted out of the grasp of the cluster of local Sicilian firms who originally traded under that name. Rather in the way that, in common parlance in the UK, a ‘Hoover’ now means any old vacuum cleaner, the American press applied ‘mafia’ to all forms of Italian organized crime, and then to any gang activity whatsoever. (This was, in a sense, a notable achievement for the Sicilians, who were latecomers in an already mature market.)
The so-called ‘Mano nera’ (‘Black Hand’) offers further illustration of this brand-name inflation in the United States. The ‘body in the barrel’ case attracted press attention to a spate of extortion demands that were directed at wealthy Italian-Americans. Headlines in the New York Herald read: ‘New York Italians Kept Silent by Terror of the Far Reaching Arm of the Mafia.’ ‘Scores of New York Business Men Pay Blackmail to Mafia.’ On 3 August 1903—a few months after the discovery of the body in the barrel—Nicola Cappiello, a successful Brooklyn building contractor, received the following note (in Italian) marked with a skull and crossbones.
If you don’t meet us at Seventy-second Street and Thirteenth Avenue, Brooklyn, to-morrow afternoon, your house will be dynamited and you and your family killed. The same fate awaits you in the event of your betraying our purposes to the police.
Mano nera
Across southern Italy, demands like these were called lettere di scrocco, ‘scrounging letters’, because the authors often protested their poverty as well as issuing threats. It was a method employed in the violence industry even before the mafia emerged. Thus Mr Cappiello’s story conformed to a well-established pattern from the Old World. When he refused to cooperate, further messages followed. The amount demanded escalated to $10,000. Then three old friends, along with a stranger, came to visit and offered to mediate with the extortionists for $1,000. Cappiello decided to go along with the proposal, but a few days after he handed over the money the same men came back to ask for more. Fearing that he would be bled of his entire wealth, Cappiello went to the police. His ‘friends’ were arrested and convicted.
The name ‘Mano nera’ was destined to be more successful than this particular gang. Gradually more and more blackmail letters were signed with a black hand. The excited press coverage patently began putting the idea into criminals’ heads. The name spread from New York to Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans until it became, for a while, more popular even than ‘mafia’ as a designation for Italian organized crime.
‘Black Hand’ became a criminal fashion. Professional gangs apart, jealous neighbours, commercial rivals, hard-up workers, and pranksters also sent ‘Black Hand’ letters. In Sicily, this kind of abuse of a criminal ‘logo’ used by the honoured society would have been unthinkable. Mafia cosche, with spies in every street, brutally protected their monopoly on intimidation.
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Despite the failure to achieve convictions, the ‘body in the barrel’ case established Joseph Petrosino as a new kind of hero in the eyes of New Yorkers, a sort of frontiersman of Mulberry Bend. His own life story was a parable of America’s redemptive power: from poor dago to upstanding detective. Who better to patrol the dark and overcrowded tenements and sweatshops where the swarthy new immigrants from ‘the boot’ lurked?
Petrosino was responsible for sending hundreds of Italian criminals back to the peninsula, and for imprisoning many others. His rise through the ranks of the NYPD continued. In January 1905, he was appointed head of the force’s new Italian branch. Soon afterwards, he became the first Italian-American to make lieutenant. In 1907, he married Adelina Salino in the old St Patrick’s Church on Mott Street in the heart of Little Italy.
The following year Petrosino was assigned to police Raffaele Palizzolo’s visit to New York. The man absolved of ordering the death of Emanuele Notarbartolo came to thank those who had reputedly contributed $20,000 to his cause. Interviewed by a New York Herald reporter, Don Raffaele declared that the main purpose of his visit was to ‘instil into his Sicilian compatriots the principles of good citizenship’. He laughed when asked whether he had anything to do with the mafia.
By this time Petrosino’s reputation had spread. Criminals newly arrived from southern Italy would ask to be taken to police headquarters and have friends point out the cop of whom they had heard so much. In the autumn of 1908, the gritty lieutenant was awarded a gold watch by the Italian government for his part in the arrest of a leading Neapolitan gangster.
Despite the gold watch, Petrosino and his superiors grew tired of the Italian authorities’ failure to stop criminals and anarchists leaving Italian shores for America. In February 1909, Petrosino became head of a new secret service arm of the police department. His first mission was to go to Italy to set up an independent information network on gangsters with criminal records in Sicily. Given the difficulties in convicting mafiosi, Petrosino hoped to use the information gathered on the island to expel as many as possible from the USA as illegal immigrants.
On 21 February 1909, Petrosino arrived in the northern Italian port of Genoa. Travelling south, he stopped off to meet officials in Rome and to visit his brother near Salerno. On 28 February the scourge of the Black Hand landed in Palermo ready to take on the mafia in its homeland.
His body arrived back in New York on 9 April aboard the Slavonia of the Cunard Line. Nearly four weeks had passed since his murder; the ship had been delayed by bad weather. Petrosino’s remains were taken in procession to his apartment at 233 Lafayette Street. Five platoons of mounted police and a guard of honour accompanied the funeral carriage, which was laden with wreaths from official bodies in both Sicily and New York. The plan had been to have an open coffin while he lay in state, but there was only a photograph on the lid because the embalming had failed. The New York Herald estimated that 20,000 people came to pay their respects. It also aired the suspicion that the embalming had been botched deliberately—the Sicilian mafia’s final insult to its victim. On 12 April, another grand procession took Petrosino through the streets for a funeral service at St Patrick’s in Mott Street.
Petrosino died because he badly underestimated the power and ruthlessness of the mafia in Sicily. His street wisdom was attuned to New York, but he had an émigré’s condescending attitude to the old country. When he was interviewed about the mafia during the ‘body in the barrel’ investigation, his comments smacked of prejudice and folklore:
Practically everyone who comes here from Sicily is afflicted with this moral disease. It is inherited and ineradicable. The Mafia is a loosely organized organization, but the same spirit of opposition to all forms of law and all forms of authority is instinctive with everybody at all connected with it. In Sicily the women and children will work hard in the fields and the man will strut around with a gun over his shoulder.
Petrosino’s supposedly ‘secret’ mission to Italy had been pre-announced in the New York press. When he reached Palermo, he refused the offer of an armed escort. The only protection he thought he needed were the dollars he handed out as bribes. He used the methods that had proved so successful at home, boldly seeking to make personal contact with criminals and mafiosi out in the streets. This, of course, was what the Sicilian police did too; but they would never have dreamed of trying to do it in isolation. After Petrosino’s death, it was found that he had even left his revolver in his hotel room.
Police in Palermo suspected a link between Petrosino’s death and the ‘body in the barrel’ gang. Two members had travelled back to Sicily at the same time as Petrosino, keeping in touch with Piddu Morello using coded telegrams. The theory was that Morello and Giuseppe Fontana had asked Vito Cascio-Ferro to arrange the killing on their behalf. When Cascio-Ferro was arrested, he was found to have a photo of Petrosino. Yet there was an alibi: Don Vito’s political collaborator, a member of parliament, claimed that the mafioso had been at his house when Petrosino was shot. Much to the indignation of the American press, the case never even came to trial.
Many years later, after a life sentence had finally brought his career to an end under Fascism, Cascio-Ferro was interviewed in jail. He claimed to have only ever killed one man in his life, ‘and I did that disinterestedly’. This cryptic phrase was taken to refer to the most famous murder with which his name had been associated: that of Joe Petrosino. The implication was perhaps that he had carried out the murder as a favour to his American colleagues. This ‘confession’ does not necessarily mean he committed the crime. It might simply have been an attempt to bask in the stolen glory of another mafioso’s work. Like the ‘body in the barrel’ case, Joe Petrosino’s murder is still classified as unsolved.
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Along with most Sicilian immigrants to the United States, the members of the Morello gang probably did not intend to make their stay permanent. Like many of those same immigrants, however, the most prominent members remained in the USA for the rest of their lives. For some this was not a very long time. Inzerillo opened another little pastry shop but was shot and killed soon afterwards. Di Primo, a model prisoner in Sing Sing, was released early. Petto the Ox moved to Browntown, Pennsylvania. On the night of 25 October 1905, he was hit by five bullets from a shotgun in his own back yard. Petrosino suspected that Di Primo was the murderer. Giuseppe Fontana disappeared soon after the Petrosino killing.
Other members of the gang played a role in New York’s organized crime scene for decades. In the year of Petrosino’s death, Piddu Morello was convicted of running a counterfeiting business in East Harlem and given twenty-five years in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He lost his role at the head of the organization.
In 1916, the other members of the Morello mafia fought a war against Brooklyn Neapolitans; Piddu’s brother was shot dead in an ambush outside a coffee shop in Navy Street, Brooklyn. The Neapolitans failed in their attempt to take over the Morello monopoly on a key component of the Italian diet: artichokes. The trade in this particular vegetable was controlled by Piddu’s half-brother Ciro Terranova, who would remain the ‘artichoke king’ into the 1930s. The Morello gang emerged victorious in the war when the Neapolitan leaders were arrested and, to their great surprise, sent to jail for the killing.
Piddu Morello was released soon afterwards. He was apparently spotted in Sicily in 1919, trying to get support from men of honour in the old country because his successor as supreme boss had condemned him to death. These diplomatic efforts seem to have been successful because he survived to fight three years later alongside the same man who had condemned him. But by that time, the landscape of organized crime in America had altered radically.
The single most important turning point in the history of organized crime in America was not an execution, a meeting of senior mobsters, or the arrival of some ‘superboss’ from Sicily. It was the approval of Prohibition. In January 1919, after a boost from a ludicrous wartime outcry against brewers of German origin, the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution was passed; it banned the ‘manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors’. Later the same year the Volstead Act provided for the Eighteenth Amendment’s enforcement. At a stroke, one of the country’s most lucrative industries was handed over to criminals. From raw materials, production, packaging, and transport right down to the table at the speakeasy, gangsters raked in colossal tax-free profits from booze. Prohibition is estimated to have put $2 billion into the illegal economy before it was abolished in 1933.
At the same time, simply because many ordinary Americans liked a drink and could not see why they were not allowed to have one, the gangsters became the consumers’ friend. The high mortality rate among bootleggers added glamour to their job. ‘They only kill each other,’ was the common view. The vast profits that accrued from booze, and the benign public attitude to its illegal manufacture, also lowered the threshold of corruption. Police, politicians, and judiciary took their share of the bonanza.
The criminal free-for-all that was Prohibition made America forget its turn-of-the-century fascination with the mafia and the Mano nera. It was simply not feasible to treat bootlegging as if it were the fruit of a ‘dago’ invasion. The mass influx of people from Europe was brought to a halt by the First World War. When peace returned, a series of laws closed what Americans liked to call the ‘Golden Door’ on arrivals—or at least those who did not have the clandestine channels open to mafiosi. The classic gangster years between the two world wars were an era dominated in the public mind by multi-ethnic ‘mobsters’ and ‘hoodlums’, not by Italian ‘mafiosi’ and ‘men of honour’.
It was not until the 1950s that American public opinion would again begin to confuse the mafia with organized crime per se. The publication of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather in 1969 then set in concrete the mistaken public perception that American syndicates were entirely a Sicilian import. The facts about the Prohibition era speak clearly against this perception: in the New York metropolitan area, 50 per cent of bootleggers were Jewish, compared to about 25 per cent who were Italian.
Yet within the Italian communities in cities right across America, a specifically Sicilian mafia association was already well established when Prohibition was introduced. The best witness to their history in the 1920s and 1930s is Nicola Gentile, a man born in Sicily but initiated into the mafia in Philadelphia in 1905. He was known as ‘Nick’ or ‘Cola’ depending on which side of the Atlantic he happened to find himself. In 1963, Gentile, now nearing eighty and living in retirement in Rome, made an unprecedented resolution: he decided to write his autobiography. He handed it over, part dictated, to a journalist who helped him fill in gaps in a series of interviews. Gentile was the first Sicilian man of honour ever to tell his own story in this way.
A lingering mystery surrounds the reasons for Gentile’s decision. As always in Italy, the political context probably has something to do with it. Yet the simplest motives, the ones proffered by Gentile himself, are as likely to be the most important. He describes himself as an embittered old man. His children were all established in professional careers, but they were ashamed of the criminal origins of their wellbeing and shunned the man who had paid for their education, their houses.
Cola Gentile’s narrative is an ambiguous attempt to justify his life—as much to himself as to anyone else. He strives, not always successfully, to present himself as a ‘man of honour’ in what he claims is the true sense, someone who had always sought the path of peace and justice within the organization. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Gentile had been trying to show himself in this flattering light for quite some time. One man claims to have spent a whole afternoon talking to him in 1949; indeed, he quite fondly remembers being patronized by Gentile, who addressed him half-mockingly as duttureddu (‘little professor’) throughout. The man in question—a young student at the time—says that the veteran man of honour explained his approach to being a mafioso with a hypothetical story:
Duttureddu, if I come in here unarmed, and you pick up a pistol, point it at me and say: ‘Cola Gentile, down on your knees.’ What do I do? I kneel. That does not mean that you are a mafioso because you have forced Cola Gentile to get down on his knees. It means you are a cretin with a pistol in your hand.
Now if I, Nicola Gentile, come in unarmed, and you are unarmed too, and I say to you: ‘Duttureddu, look, I’m in a bit of a situation. I have to ask you to get on your knees.’ You ask me ‘Why?’ I say: ‘Duttureddu, let me explain.’ And I manage to convince you that you have to get on your knees. When you kneel down, that makes me a mafioso.
If you refuse to get on your knees, then I have to shoot you. But that doesn’t mean I have won: I have lost, duttureddu.
Gentile apparently had problems sustaining even a hypothetical mental picture of himself without a gun in his hand.
The ‘duttureddu’ was Andrea Camilleri, now a literary phenomenon in Italy. His crime fiction, written in a mellow, ironic prose richly inflected with Sicilian dialect, dominates the best-seller list. There is no way of independently confirming how reliable Camilleri’s memory of this encounter is. But it does capture the way in which the old gangster Cola Gentile, despite his best efforts to seem noble, is honest about the violence that comes with his job. In his autobiography he conceded that ‘You cannot become a capomafia without being ferocious.’
At the same time that Nick Gentile was quietly recounting his story in Rome, a similar precedent was being set in the US. Joe Valachi, an American mafioso who feared he was going to be killed in prison by his former associates, was talking to federal agents. It was Valachi who first told the world that mafiosi in the US tend to refer to their organization as ‘cosa nostra’. Intense publicity surrounded Valachi when he testified to a Congressional Sub-Committee on organized crime in 1963. Robert Kennedy, appointed attorney general by his brother the President, described Valachi’s evidence as ‘the biggest single intelligence breakthrough yet in combatting organized crime and racketeering in the United States’. The Valachi Papers sold in large numbers.
But as more cautious observers pointed out right from the outset, Valachi did not count in the American mafia. He was a mere foot soldier who would not have been party to discussions at the highest level. By contrast Cola Gentile, the sad and lonely don in the Roman suburbs, moved in elite criminal circles. He worked closely with all the most famous bosses of the 1920s and 1930s: Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Vincenzo Mangano, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese. Surprisingly, Cola Gentile’s Italian testimony remains untranslated and unknown to all but a few people outside of the peninsula.
* * *
Gentile’s story takes place against a background shaped by the transformation of ordinary Sicilian migrants into Americans. At the same time, paradoxically, they were becoming Italian. Italy has a notoriously weak sense of national fellow feeling. The huddled masses from Palermo, Naples, and Parma would arrive at Ellis Island speaking mutually incomprehensible dialects. ‘Italy’ for many of them was an abstraction. In the encounter with new arrivals from other countries, they began to think of themselves as Italians for the first time. They adapted customs from the old country, or latched on to new ones like Columbus Day, to express this acquired Italian identity.
Italian-American criminals were going through a similar change, but in their case assimilation was a bloodier and more Machiavellian affair. By 1920, there were 1 million ethnic Italians in New York alone. Only a small proportion of them, needless to say, were criminals. But the community’s increasing wealth offered a plethora of illegal economic niches. It also brought into closer contact mobsters originating in different parts of Italy. Street lotteries were as popular in Italian-American neighbourhoods as they had been in the hundred cities of Italy. The southern Italian diet also provided targets. The threat of violence could be used to profit from the traffic in foodstuffs like olive oil that came from Europe—or increasingly from the west coast of the United States, like Ciro Terranova’s artichokes.
Italians had also become the most numerous ethnic group in New York’s docks. In 1880, 95 per cent of the city’s longshoremen were Irish. By 1919, 75 per cent were Italian. They were particularly dominant on the East Side and in Brooklyn. The Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn—Italian through and through—was the seat of a syndicate for the whole inter-war period and beyond. The system operating in the docks was all-embracing, brutal, and highly lucrative. International Longshoremen’s Association officials bullied workers to ensure their union’s monopoly over recruitment. They bribed shipping and stevedoring company managers to ensure a monopoly over the work that was available. Political protection was assured through the City Democratic Club founded in the late 1920s—it was little more than a mob front. Smuggling, robbery, and extortion were endemic. Many of the ILA officials were from the same small group of blood families. They were backed by a uniquely ruthless protection regime run by men like Albert Anastasia and Vincent Mangano.
* * *
Cola Gentile was born in a sulphur town near Agrigento. When he arrived in America in 1903 he was only eighteen years old, a tough youth with a high sense of his own worth—the classic raw material of the mafioso. He moved to Kansas City where he began work as a travelling fabric salesman. His product was based on a confidence trick: the rolls of cloth that he sold as linen were nothing of the sort—apart from a small sample.
Through his work Gentile made contacts in many US cities, gaining a reputation as a sharp kid who could look after himself and his friends. At twenty-one he was initiated into the mafia in Philadelphia. Three years later he returned to his home village in Sicily as a man with money and status. He married and had a child before heading back to America to continue his career within the honoured society. His wife and child remained on the island.
In 1915, he moved to Pittsburgh and recruited a group of ten picciotti—young thugs—loyal only himself, independent of the local capo. They were to be the instrument of his rise. Gentile found that the honoured society in the Iron City was subordinated to a large gang of Italians from Calabria and Naples whose power base was the wholesale fruit and vegetable market. Even the mafia capo collected protection money from the Sicilian community on behalf of these Camorristi, as Gentile dismissively called them. (He had in mind the Camorra of Naples—a less-organized criminal fraternity.)
Gentile’s reputation in Pittsburgh was made quickly. He and one of his men created a sensation by executing a man in a crowded city-centre bar. Boosted by the success of this operation, Gentile decided to take advantage of the Sicilian capo’s submissiveness towards the Camorristi. His picciotti set to work: a series of rapid and efficient killings quickly brought the men from the Italian mainland to the negotiating table. The leaders of the two sides met under Gentile’s chairmanship. He humiliated the Camorristi by openly threatening them with all-out war if they so much as offended another Sicilian. They meekly submitted to Sicilian leadership. ‘From that evening the camorra in Pittsburgh and the towns around it was finished,’ Gentile concluded. Shortly afterwards he had the Pittsburgh mafia capo shot and sent back to Sicily in a luxury coffin. Cola Gentile had turned himself into the boss of Italian crime in the city. In the process he had made his own early contribution to the Americanization and Italianization of the mafia.
One of the remarkable things about Nick Gentile’s career is his geographical mobility. He transferred his membership many times from one cosca to another: first Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, then San Francisco, Brooklyn, Kansas City, and back to Brooklyn. Gentile refers to these groups as borgate, the Italian term for the kind of suburban townships around Palermo that were the cradle of the honoured society.
Each time he changed borgata, Gentile needed a testimonial from a senior boss back home in the province of Agrigento. The letters or telegrams would take the form of a character reference, as if for an ordinary job. Clearly the mafia in the old country was important enough to its wealthy new offshoot in the States for this kind of authentication of membership to be necessary. Italian investigating magistrates have good evidence that this system of references operated until at least the early 1980s.
Gentile provides a fascinating picture of the way men of honour from all over the US coordinated their activities in the years before Prohibition. Death sentences on dissident dons would be issued from one borgata to all the others in the area. A select ‘council’ comprising only senior bosses made the most important decisions. A bigger ‘general assembly’ would elect capos and debate proposed contracts to kill mafiosi. There could be as many as 150 men at such meetings—bosses and their entourages from all over the USA. Gentile is reluctant to call such meetings courts, and is scathing about the ‘judicial procedures’ followed in the general assembly: ‘It was made up of men who were almost all illiterate. Eloquence was the skill that most impressed the hall. The better someone knew how to talk, the more he was listened to, and the more he was able to drag that mass of yokels the way he wanted.’
New York’s position within the network of borgate was dominant. The boss of the mafia in Gotham was almost always boss of bosses too. His lieutenants could often settle any case in advance of big summits, which they would then use merely to broadcast their intentions.
The stresses of the job emerge between the lines of Gentile’s autobiography. Occasional bouts of ill-health and nervous exhaustion would see him return to his homeland to recharge his batteries. Not that the trips were always restful; on one occasion in 1919 he had to go into hiding from the law after a man from a rival political faction was shot. During those months in hiding he received some visitors from America. They were Piddu Morello and other remnants of the gang that Lieutenant Joe Petrosino had believed was responsible for the ‘body in the barrel’ murder back in 1903. They had been sentenced to death by the new boss of New York and were desperate for Gentile’s mediation. Gentile had invested considerable effort and courage in developing a reputation as a roving mediator, a man able to smooth out dangerous disputes. Diplomacy was one of the main reasons for his wanderings across the United States. On this occasion, in the end most of the gang was spared, but only because the New York capo was himself killed and supplanted by the pudgy, neckless mafioso Joe Masseria, who would become known simply as ‘Joe the Boss’.
Stuck in Sicily, Gentile could not take advantage of the whisky he had stockpiled just before the introduction of Prohibition. Nonetheless he was soon able to siphon off his share of the vast cash flows from the drink industry. In Kansas City he ran a company dealing in wholesale supplies for barbers. The business was a front: it gave him access to large quantities of neat alcohol on the pretext that they were destined for aftershave. Gentile also became a dealer in the corn sugar needed to feed illegal stills.
* * *
Prohibition meant bootlegging, and bootlegging brought the toughest and brightest of the multi-ethnic youth gang members to the fore. Viewed from a broader perspective than was available to Nick Gentile, Prohibition crime is not exclusively an Italian-American affair. Nevertheless, with the exception of a few veterans, the most famous Italian-American bootleggers and gangsters of the 1920s and early 1930s were young and had been born or brought up in the United States. Their rise coincided with the Italianization and Americanization of the mafia.
Salvatore Lucania hailed from the sulphur town of Lercara Friddi. He left Sicily at the age of nine in 1905. When he grew up he could only speak a few stumbling words of his native dialect. At eighteen he was found guilty of his first serious offence: unlawful possession of narcotics—he was both user and pusher. Prohibition made him into one of the most famous American mobsters of them all. He is better known as Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Both his nickname and the disconcertingly large scars around his neck date from the occasion when he was slashed and left for dead by some early rivals. From the outset Luciano mixed easily with felons from other backgrounds, working very closely with men like Meyer ‘Little Man’ Lansky, for example.
Francesco Castiglia, known as Frank Costello—one of Luciano’s associates—was another example. He was born near Cosenza in the ‘toe’ of mainland Italy in 1891; the mafia in Sicily has never recruited from that region. Costello’s family brought him to East Harlem when he was four. His first brush with the law—for assault and robbery in 1908—did not lead to a conviction because it was his first offence. In 1914, he was sentenced to a year in jail for carrying a concealed weapon. On his release he married a non-Italian and embarked on a criminal career based around cosy relations with politicians. With his business partner Henry Horowitz, he started up the Horowitz Novelty Company to produce kewpie dolls, razor blades—and gambling paraphernalia. He would become the king of New York’s slot machines.
The most famous gangster of them all, Al Capone, was also a case in point. Born in Williamsburg of Neapolitan parents, he was a member of the Five Points gang—as Luciano had been—before he moved to Chicago as a gunman, rising to the summit of the city’s underworld in the mid-1920s. His Chicago syndicate contained Italians but also men like Murray ‘the Camel’ Humphreys and Sam ‘Golf Bag’ Hunt. (The American underworld may not be as darkly fascinating as the Sicilian version, but it does produce quirkier nicknames.) Capone’s womanizing and greed for publicity would have been anathema to mafiosi back in Sicily.
As a businessman, Capone was more of a networker than the ‘managing director’ of crime imagined by many feature films about his life. His method was to make case-by-case 50/50 deals with men like truck dealer Louis Lipschultz, for liquor distribution. Or with Frankie Pope to manage the Hawthorne Smoke Shop gambling den. Or with Louis Consentino to run the Harlem Inn, a two-storey whorehouse in Stickney.
Capone is perhaps best known for ordering the St Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929, although his involvement was never proved. Seven members of a rival gang were slaughtered in their garage headquarters at 2122 North Clark Street, Chicago. Capone hoodlums, dressed as policemen, faked a raid and made them line up against a wall. Four more men with machine-guns then arrived to perform the execution. Of the seven victims (one was a dentist who just got a thrill from the company of gangsters) and six presumed trigger men, none was Italian.
It was men like Luciano, Costello, and Capone, with strong ties outside the Sicilian and Italian communities, who would accelerate the Americanization process within the mafia organization as Prohibition drew to an end. Cola Gentile, once more, provides a perceptive explanation of how it happened.
But like all autobiographies by men of honour, Gentile’s needs to be treated cautiously. Most of a mafioso’s life is spent trying to make sense of the fragments of information that come his way from within the association. Bosses often exercise control simply by being inscrutable, by the careful way they control who gets to know what. For that reason, no mafioso ever has a completely reliable map of any given situation. Gentile’s memoir is bound to suffer at points from this play of silence and second-guessing. Gentile was also deliberately selective about some aspects of his story—he gives very little information about Sicilian-based men of honour and their contacts with the US, for example.
For all his travelling, Gentile continued to move in a very Sicilian world. For that reason he was not always able to guess the power of mafiosi in the bigger world of organized crime. For example, Anthony D’Andrea was Chicago mafia capo at the time Prohibition came in. Nick Gentile knew him and describes him as being feared across America. Yet D’Andrea lost a tussle with an Irish machine boss for control of the city’s Nineteenth Ward. By the end of the First World War the ward had become 70 per cent Italian, having previously been dominated by Germans and Irish. Despite this numerical dominance, in an election campaign punctuated by beatings and bombings in 1921, the Irish boss emerged victorious by 3,984 votes to 3,603. D’Andrea was shot dead three months later by one of his own men. Gentile’s only measure of power was internal to the mafia, yet Sicilian bosses like D’Andrea were by no means guaranteed to come out on top in struggles between gangs.
Gentile also suffers from a slightly distorted perspective when looking back at Sicily. Palermo, which dominated the Sicilian mafia, is less important to him than Agrigento or the tiny coastal town of Castellammare del Golfo. Mafiosi who travelled to make their fortune in North America tended to come from minor, poorer centres like these; the powerful Palermitani would have had less incentive to move.
Despite all of these limitations, and the fact that many of the details of his narrative cannot be independently confirmed, it is Gentile’s general line of interpretation of a crucial period in mafia history that is significant. He understands the laws of motion of the mafia in America because his survival and success depended on that understanding. Above all, more than many historians, Gentile has a sophisticated grasp of the way the mafia is constantly drawing and redrawing a simple but important boundary. As an institution, the mafia depends on a line separating ‘us’ the men of honour from ‘them’ the ordinary, lesser folk.
Gentile’s perspective is particularly telling when it comes to a moment in the history of the mafia that has now entered American folklore, the Castellammarese war of 1930–1—so called because one side was dominated by mafiosi who originated from Castellammare del Golfo. Much of what is known about the leadership of the mafia in the last years of Prohibition comes from accounts of this war by Valachi and other American gangsters, but many aspects of it still remain obscure.
Gentile’s account, where it has not been ignored, has been seriously undervalued. He sensed that the key to the devious machinations of the Castellammarese war was the way in which the line separating the mafia from the world outside was manipulated. Just like the other articles in the mafia rule-book, the crucial boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is never absolute, and always tactical. The same principles applied in Sicily, but one important reason why things were different in America is that outside the boundary were other gangsters, men from different ethnic backgrounds but with comparably powerful organizations behind them. What follows is Gentile’s particularly Sicilian view of how the Castellammarese war unfolded.
The military leader of the Castellammaresi was Salvatore Maranzano who had arrived in New York only in 1927, a mafia refugee from the Fascist crackdown. The other side was led by Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria, thought at that time to have been boss of bosses. One of the early victims of the war between the two was a mafioso of the previous generation, Piddu Morello—the one-fingered leader of the ‘body in the barrel’ gang; he was shot dead in August 1930 in his East Harlem office. Gentile, who arrived back from one of his more prolonged visits to Sicily only the following month, is unable or unwilling to shed any light on the reasons for Morello’s murder. Its motives remain unknown.
Cola Gentile relates that, on his return to the States, he was chosen by a mafia general assembly held in Boston to lead a deputation to Castellammarese leader Maranzano. The same general assembly deposed Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria, Maranzano’s opponent, and put in his place an interim leader as boss of bosses. The aim was to stop the conflict destabilizing the whole association.
In mafia wars, in the short term, superior military power often wins out against political protection and status within the honoured society. But syndicates based on force alone do not last. Maranzano was gambling that he would be able to stabilize his authority after achieving military victory. He refused to see Gentile’s deputation, probably for the simple reason that he was winning not only the war but perhaps even the political battle too. As the killings continued, and civilians were caught in the crossfire, great political pressure was brought down on Joe ‘the Boss’. According to Gentile, the Chief of Police explicitly told him to stop the bloodshed or face losing support.
Eventually Maranzano agreed to meet Gentile’s peace delegation and ordered the group to be brought to a villa 135 kilometres from New York. When Maranzano greeted them, he was surrounded by heavily armed men and had two pistols tucked in his belt—a sign that he considered himself a military leader rather than a businessman. Gentile thought he looked like Pancho Villa and referred to the Castellammaresi as the ‘exiles’ or ‘bandits’, but not because they had come from Sicily or resembled Mexican guerrillas. It was because they were an alliance of mafiosi who were recruited from across the structure of the different borgate of New York. Maranzano’s tactics were to make allies out of Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria’s enemies wherever he could.
The peace delegation was kept at Maranzano’s retreat for four days and nights. Gentile was not even sure whether he would be allowed to leave alive. But while under guard he became convinced that other members of his negotiating team had gone over to the Castellammarese camp. It was a sign that the mafia as a whole was moving from a position of neutrality to one of support for Maranzano. All that the Castellammarese leader had to do was delay. The peace delegation was eventually allowed to leave without resolving the conflict.
Maranzano’s military offensive was accompanied all the way by a propaganda campaign. He protested that Joe ‘the Boss’ was a dictator who had condemned all the Castellammaresi to death. As in Sicily, mafiosi often strenuously claim that their actions are compatible with the mafia’s own customs. The honoured society has its own laws, but everyone in it is a barrack-room lawyer, eager to interpret the rules in his own favour. Maranzano also berated Masseria for admitting Al Capone—a non-Sicilian stained by pimping—to the mafia.
The role played by Capone in the climax of the Castellammarese war is crucial in Gentile’s version. ‘Scarface Al’ was not actually a member of the mafia until the mid-1920s, claims Gentile. Joe ‘the Boss’ admitted him as part of an attempt to destabilize the authority of the then capo of the Chicago honoured society. Capone, loyal to Masseria in New York rather than to the Chicago boss, was authorized to use his own crew to make a bid for leadership in the city. Gentile does not speculate about the exact extent of Al Capone’s power in Chicago relative to the rest of the city’s extensive, multi-ethnic underworld. What concerns Gentile, as always, is the map of power within the honoured society. Once Scarface Al’s status in Chicago was secure, he started to exercise influence within the mafia back in New York. Gradually, during the course of the Castellammarese war, it became apparent to Capone that Joe ‘the Boss’ had been so decisively outfought and outmanoeuvred in New York that even his own lieutenants were becoming restless.
The first phase of the Castellammarese war came to an end at Scarpato’s restaurant on Coney Island on 15 April 1931. There Joe ‘the Boss’ ate a full lunch with one of his lieutenants, Lucky Luciano, and began to play cards. When Luciano went to the men’s room, a team of killers he had instructed came in and shot Masseria dead. Later a press photographer placed an ace of spades in the victim’s hand to add a wry touch to the scene. Cola Gentile suspected that Capone and Luciano had together decided that Masseria was too weak to bring about the peace that was necessary for business to continue.
Having removed his own capo, Luciano sought peace terms with Maranzano and the Castellammaresi. A meeting to discuss the implications of Maranzano’s victory was hosted by Al Capone. Gentile says little about the meeting other than that there was ‘indescribable confusion’. Maranzano eventually obtained what he wanted: the position of capo dei capi. He held a banquet in Chicago to celebrate his election and had tickets printed priced at $6 each. A thousand of them were dispatched to Capone who showed his deference by sending back a cheque for $6,000. Similar gestures were made by other bosses. Further tributes were expected. In the centre of the gaudily decorated table in the banquet room was a large dish in which guests placed bundles of banknotes. Gentile estimated that Maranzano gathered $100,000 from his benefit evening.
A short time later, on 10 September, the newly crowned boss Maranzano was stabbed and shot to death in his Park Avenue office by non-Italian mobsters pretending to be from the Inland Revenue Service. They had been employed by Luciano. The Castellammarese war was over, ended by the murder of both of its leading combatants.
Underworld legend portrays the murder of Maranzano as the moment when Lucky Luciano ‘modernized’ the mafia. Luciano has gone down in some versions of the story as a kind of criminal management consultant, the business brain behind a top-down restructuring of the mafia on new, corporate lines. Some testimonies claim that after Joe ‘the Boss’ was murdered, Maranzano tried to impose himself as a dictator. Luciano’s response was to kill him and institute a more ‘democratic’ form of leadership. He established a governing commission comprising the capos of the New York Families plus one outsider. (Gentile suggests that the five Families already existed by this time.)
Most of the mobsters who later recalled the Castellammarese war also said that within two days of Maranzano’s death, twenty, forty or even ninety Sicilian mafiosi were eliminated across America on Luciano’s orders. This was the famous purge of the ‘greaseballs’ or ‘Moustache Petes’; the modernization of the mafia apparently involved exterminating these superannuated Sicilians. The problem with this theory is that there is no documentary evidence whatsoever of a grand transnational extermination of mafiosi at the time of Maranzano’s murder. The junior mobsters who were told of twenty, forty or ninety Sicilians being killed clearly did not read the newspapers. The oft-repeated tale of the purge of the ‘Moustache Petes’ is mythical.
The idea that the Sicilian mafia was ‘old-fashioned’ is another diehard misconception. Whatever criminal aptitudes Joe ‘the Boss’ had brought with him to New York from Palermo had been modern enough to enable him to build a career lasting more than two decades. Maranzano, the short-term victor in the Castellammarese war, had arrived much more recently. But his astonishingly rapid rise to power in the US is testimony both to the influence that Sicilian affairs still had on the American branch of the mafia, and to the ease with which some ‘Moustache Petes’ were able to adapt to the challenges of the Big Apple. In other words, the template that sets modernizing American gangsters against conservative greaseballs does not fit neatly over the events of 1930–1.
Gentile’s interpretation of the ending of the Castellammarese war is different and more convincing. The idea for a Commission was not Luciano’s; it had already been floated during the ‘indescribable confusion’ of the meeting following Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria’s murder. Gentile does not seem to regard the Commission as a particularly radical innovation; there were clearly consultative meetings of senior mafiosi in the United States before the First World War. Men of honour are forever tinkering with the rules and structures of the association. It is likely that the invention of the Commission was another instance of constitutional tinkering.
In Gentile’s eyes, Masseria and Maranzano were neither more nor less dictatorial or old-fashioned than previous senior bosses. In Sicily, mafia capos are usually smeared before and after they are eliminated; they die because they are variously too greedy, too authoritarian, too weak, too old-fashioned. Or so their killers say. Some justification has to be fabricated for executions that are, in reality, almost always driven by the same old motives of power and fear. The victors in mafia warfare also love to present their rise to power as the coming of a new era. It seems that this was also the case in New York in 1931.
Nick Gentile was too astute to believe this kind of internal propaganda. He claims that it was only after murdering Maranzano that Luciano actually entered the mafia hierarchy as such, becoming one of the members of the Commission. Luciano was obviously already a powerful man long before this, and a key element in Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria’s power base. Thus, as Capone had been earlier, Luciano was an external force enlisted to tip the balance in a struggle for power within the relatively narrow confines of the honoured society. Lucky’s contacts with the much larger universe of Jewish and Irish organized crime were the key resource that he brought to bear within the mafia.
Maranzano’s death can be taken, all the same, as marking the point when the mafia in the United States became an Italian-American organization rather than a Sicilian one. And for that reason, the American mafia will appear henceforth in these pages only when its affairs impinge upon events in Sicily. But, for all that, the Americanization of the mafia was not a dramatic transformation, a once-and-for-all break with the traditional ways of the Old World. The mafia’s ethnic make-up became slightly more mixed as Neapolitans and other southern Italians were absorbed. The two organizations gradually separated, although the Americans always recognized the prestige due to the original mafia, and there continued to be strong family and business links across the Atlantic. The core of the American honoured society’s membership remained ethnically Sicilian after 1931. In some places there was no challenge to Sicilian dominance. In Buffalo, for example, Stefano Magaddino from Castellammare del Golfo had an astonishingly long reign; he was capo from the 1920s until his death in 1974. Sicilian methods would characterize the American mafia long after the young guns of the Prohibition era—Luciano, Capone, and their like—were gone.
Above all, mafiosi in both Sicily and the US continued to think of themselves as a breed apart from other human beings and even other criminals. American or Sicilian, to be a man of honour means to operate beyond society’s measures of right and wrong.
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When Prohibition was finally abolished, America was four years into the great Depression. Organized crime survived these changes thanks in no small measure to the gaming industry. Nick Gentile entered the new boom: he became a partner in a gambling house in Manhattan’s Little Italy.
But the end of Prohibition also saw the national mood harden against organized crime. Whether in America or in Sicily, the mafia would not exist without links to the political domain. At the Democratic Party national convention in Chicago in 1932, Frank Costello shared a suite at the plush Drake Hotel with the leader of the 11th assembly district in Manhattan. Lucky Luciano shared another with the Democratic leader of New York’s 2nd assembly district. But unlike Italy before the Second World War, the United States was a democracy. The competition for power in America was more open, making it almost as easy to build political careers out of crusades against crime as it was to use the vote-gathering powers of mobsters. The Hollywood movies of the early 1930s accurately track a switch in public attitudes and political tactics as Prohibition ended. Instead of the gangster movies of the early 1930s, like Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932), Hollywood began to make films lauding the deeds of law enforcement officers. James Cagney, who had played a hood in Public Enemy (1931), was recruited to the FBI for ‘G’Men (1935). In New York, Fiorello La Guardia was elected mayor in 1933. He proceeded to drive Frank Costello’s illegal fruit machines from the city. (Costello was not unduly perturbed; he moved them to New Orleans where Senator Huey Long invited him to come and share his gambling income around.)
The appointment in 1935 of Thomas E. Dewey as New York special prosecutor was a still more worrying development for organized crime in the city. Dewey would run twice (unsuccessfully) as Republican candidate for the Presidency on the strength of his much-hyped successes against the hoodlums. In 1941 he did manage to become Governor of New York.
There were some eminent victims of the new anti-gangster campaign. Arthur ‘Dutch Schultz’ Flegenheimer, one of Luciano’s lieutenants and the king of numbers rackets in Harlem, came under pressure from all sides. He faced increased legal bills, defending himself from Dewey’s tax-dodging charges. His political protectors needed more money to respond to the challenge from reforming candidates. He was steadily losing his grip on the people who ran the numbers games on the street when he was shot dead in the Palace Chop House in Newark in October 1935. Dewey then cornered Lucky Luciano himself; he was sentenced to thirty to fifty years on prostitution charges (on which more in the next chapter). Brooklyn district attorney—and future mayor of New York City—William O’Dwyer even sent Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter, the garment industry extortionist, to the electric chair; he was the first eminent gangster to be executed by the state.
A new drive to combat the narcotics business put an end to Cola Gentile’s career in America. In 1937, he was arrested by federal agents in New Orleans for his part in organizing a drug-dealing syndicate that stretched from Texas to New York. His version is that, after consulting his capo in Brooklyn, he jumped bail and fled back to Sicily, never to return. But there may well be a great deal more to the story. A mafioso who turned state’s evidence in the 1980s claimed that the Palermo bosses asked his own Catania Family to assassinate Gentile as a favour to the Americans, and added in passing that Gentile had fled from America after talking to the police. Nobody acted on the request. ‘They left the poor old man alone. He had fallen so low at the end of his life that he only survived because of charity from neighbours who gave him the odd plate of pasta.’ Whether it really was pity that saved Cola Gentile’s life will probably never be known.
The Second World War brought respite for American mobsters after the troubles of the mid to late 1930s. It drew press attention away from crime and created profiteering opportunities; Americans were particularly resistant to petrol rationing. In a much more dramatic way, the war also proved to be the salvation of the mafia back in Sicily.