Sadly, few mafiosi are well-educated men and their grasp on the history of the Mafia, outside their own direct experience, is tenuous. However, the American author and journalist Alexander Stille has devoted much of his career to the study of Italy, its politics and the Mafia. In 1995, he published the book Excellent Cadavers, which covers the events leading up to the crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia in the 1990s following the bloodthirsty reign of Corleonesi boss Salvatore “Totò” Riina. The book is dedicated to the memory of two murdered anti-Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Setting the scene, Stille tells how the modern Sicilian Mafia came into being.
The history of the Mafia and of the modern Italian state begin together. Soon after Garibaldi and the troops from the northern region of Piedmont invaded Sicily in 1860 and united it with the rest of the new Italian nation, they encountered the problem of rampant crime. In the chaos that followed the war of unification, bandits terrorized the countryside, murdering government troops, while criminal bands tried to control the sale and renting of land, placing their own men as guards on the lush gardens and groves in and around Palermo. The northern Italians were struck by the Sicilians’ refusal to co-operate with the new government, the stubborn silence of even innocent victims, their tendency to take justice into their own hands. The word “Mafia” entered the Italian vocabulary at this time to describe the peculiarly tenacious kind of organized crime the northern Italians found deeply embedded in Sicilian life.
Unlike bandits or common thieves who live outside respectable society, most mafiosi continued to work at regular jobs, using force or the intimidating power of the organization to extort advantage from others. Many of the early mafiosi were armed guards or administrators who ran Sicily’s great rural estates for their absentee landlords in Palermo. Traditionally, the mafioso put himself in the role of intermediary, keeping the peasants in line and guaranteeing that the harvest would be brought in, while using his control of the land to extract concessions from the landlord. In a place where government has never been particularly effective or well liked, mafia groups usurped many of the functions of the state–administering justice, settling disputes and dividing up resources. Although mafiosi have often cultivated the image of being modern-day Robin Hoods who rob the rich and give to the poor, they have always been dedicated to the task of self-enrichment, never hesitating to use violence and murder in defence of their own interests.
Centuries of corrupt and brutal government by foreign conquerors taught most Sicilians to regard government with suspicion and hostility. Justice was frequently administered not by rule of law but by the private armies of Sicily’s feudal landlords. The mafia draws on a code of behaviour – the refusal to co-operate with police authorities, the preference for private rather than public justice, even the practice of extortion – that can be traced back centuries. While it has its cultural roots in feudal Sicilian life, the Mafia, as a form of organized crime, appears to be a product of modernity, of the new freedom and opportunity of unified Italy. There was little room for organized crime in the highly static world of feudalism, where the landowners had a virtual monopoly of both economic resources and the use of violence. The breakup of the great feudal estates and the expansion of trade opened up possibilities for the lower classes to participate in the confused grab for wealth that followed unification. With no tradition of law or public administration to fall back on, violence or the threat of violence became the easiest way to gain a leg up on the competition. As Paolo Borsellino once observed: “The desire to prevail over the competition, combined with a lack of a credible state, cannot bring about a normal marketplace: the common practice is not to do better than your rivals but to do them in.”
Crime in Sicily reached such epidemic proportions that in 1874 it became the subject of an enormous national debate. The conservative government proposed emergency police measures to regain control of the island, which prompted [Italian politician] Leopoldo Franchetti’s trip to Sicily two years later. In the end, the question brought down the government and brought the Left to power for the first time in Italian history. Public order in Sicily was restored through a typically Italian compromise between Mafia and government that set the pattern for the future. The Mafia helped police track down and arrest the bandits who were the most obvious threat to public security, and in exchange the government allowed the Mafia to continue its own more subtle form of economic crime. This ability to co-opt and corrupt public authority has characterized the Mafia from its beginning and has guaranteed its impunity for more than 130 years of history. The advent of democracy and the expansion of voting rights gave organized crime new opportunities to acquire political influence. By controlling substantial blocks of votes, Mafia groups helped elect politicians who, in turn, helped them.
Even in Franchetti’s day, the disastrous consequences of this compromise were evident. “Italy, annexing Sicily, has assumed a grave responsibility,” he wrote. “The Italian government has the obligation to give peace to that population and to teach it the meaning of the law, and to sacrifice any private or political interest toward that aim. Instead we see Italian ministers of every party setting the example by engaging in those ‘interested transactions’ that are the ruin of Sicily, by recognizing and negotiating with those local powers they ought to try to destroy in order to get their help at election time. The chief of police in order to obey his superiors ends up imitating them and thus forgets the purpose of his mission . . . While the carabinieri [Italian military police] and army soldiers are marching up hill and down dale under the rain and snow, the chief brigand is passing the winter peacefully in Palermo – and not always hidden . . . People scheduled to be arrested are warned even before the warrants have been signed and the troops who come to arrest them find them gone three or four days earlier.”
It was not until Mussolini’s Fascist regime that a first serious, if bloody, attempt to suppress the Mafia was made. Between 1924 and 1929, Mussolini’s “Iron Prefect”, Cesare Mori, conducted mass arrests, surrounded and besieged entire towns, took hostages and destroyed property and livestock in order to track down suspected criminals. To some extent, the campaign was a success: according to government figures homicides in the province of Palermo dropped from 278 to only 25 in 1928. Grateful landowners wrote letters to Mori in which they reported that after being “freed” from the Mafia the value of their land had skyrocketed, with rents doubling, tripling and in some instances increasing by 1,500 per cent. But if he appeared to reduce criminal activity, Mori did little to cut the social roots of the Mafia. His campaign of terror, by using brutal and illegal tactics and indiscriminately arresting hundreds of innocent people along with the guilty, turned mafiosi into persecuted victims who enjoyed popular sympathy. The fact that the regime also used the operation to eliminate some of its own political opponents further undermined its credibility. Moreover, as the rent figures show, the chief beneficiaries appear to have been the landowners. By contrast, agricultural wages dropped by some 28 per cent during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Fascists appeared not so much to have eliminated the mafiosi as to have replaced them by acting as the new enforcers for the Sicilian landowning class. After Mussolini recalled Mori in 1929, saying his mission had been completed, the regime had to pretend that the Mafia no longer existed and ignored signs that the mafiosi were cautiously coming back out of the woodwork.
With the fall of Fascism and the liberation of Sicily by Allied troops during the Second World War, the Mafia was ready to emerge in full force. There is a widespread belief in Italy that the Allied landing was prepared with help from the Mafia, which was then rewarded with important positions of power. According to this theory, the American government contacted the Sicilian-American gangster Lucky Luciano, who enlisted the co-operation of his Sicilian counterparts to pave the way for a rapid Allied victory.
While colourful (and politically useful), the story appears to have little basis in fact. But, as with many legends, there is a grain of truth. Naval Intelligence did contact Lucky Luciano for information about German saboteurs in the docks of New York. But Luciano, who had left Italy as a boy, denied any role in the Sicilian landing: “At home, I didn’t have any contacts,” he said. After the war, either as a quid pro quo or as an expedient attempt to rid themselves of known criminals, the United States deported Luciano and some forty other American mafiosi back to Italy where they used their American experience to help modernize organized crime.
The Allied occupation undeniably gave new oxygen to the Mafia. Anxious to exclude both Communists and Fascists from power, the occupying Anglo-American army – whether knowingly or unknowingly – installed several prominent mafiosi as mayors of their towns. (An Italian-American mafioso, Vito Genovese, managed to become interpreter for the American governor of Sicily, Colonel Charles Poletti, during the six months of military occupation.) Criminal elements succeeded in infiltrating the Allied administration, often with the help of Italian-American soldiers. They managed to smuggle supplies from military warehouses and ran a flourishing black market in such scarce commodities as food, tobacco, shoes and clothing. While this black market trade may have involved the corruption of low- and middle-level officials, there is nothing to suggest that it was part of a strategy conceived in Washington. The Pentagon and the Roosevelt administration, in fact, registered their alarm about the situation in Sicily. As in the period after the Italian battle of unification, the aftermath of World War II was a time of chaotic freedom and economic expansion which the Mafia exploited ably.
Determined to avoid the persecution it had suffered under Fascism, the Mafia made a concerted effort to assure itself political protection in the new post-war order. At first, many mafiosi backed the new movement of Sicilian separatism, helping to organize its small guerrilla army. But when the cause of separatism faded and other parties, such as the Christian Democratic Party, emerged, Mafia bosses shifted their allegiances. With the Italian Left seemingly on the brink of power, the new parties accepted Mafia support as a bulwark against communism.
Between 1945 and 1955, forty-three Socialists or Communists were murdered in Sicily, often at election time. On 20 April 1947, the united Left (Communists and Socialists) won an impressive 30 per cent of the vote in Sicily against the 21 per cent of the Christian Democratic Party. Ten days later, when Communist farmers of Porrella della Ginestra gathered to celebrate May Day and their electoral victory, the criminal band of Salvatore Giuliano opened fire on the crowd, killing eleven people.
The killings took place in the new chill of the Cold War. That year, the United States announced the Truman Doctrine, stating its commitment to fight Communist expansion throughout the world. Indeed, on the day of the massacre of Porrella della Ginestra, Secretary of State George Marshall sent a telegram to the US ambassador in Rome, expressing alarm over the rise of the Communists (especially in Sicily) and the need to adopt new measures to reinforce anti-Communist, pro-American elements. Until that time, the Communists (along with all other anti-Fascist parties) had participated as equal partners in the government with the Christian Democrats – an arrangement of which (as Marshall’s telegram makes clear) the United States strongly disapproved. As a result of this pressure, the Christian Democrats kicked the Communists out of the government. With the fate of democratic Europe at stake, and Stalin swallowing up entire nations whole, the excesses of local thugs in rural Sicily seemed a minor problem.
The decision to enlist the Mafia’s help in Sicily was a quite conscious one, as one of the founders of the Sicilian Christian Democratic Party, Giuseppe Alessi, acknowledged openly many years later. While personally opposing this local pact with the devil, Alessi was outvoted by others who viewed it as a practical necessity. “ ‘The Communists use similar kinds of violence against us, preventing us from carrying out public rallies. We need the protection of strong men to stop the violence of the Communists,’ ” Alessi quoted one of his colleagues as saying. “I was in the minority and the ‘group’ entered en masse and took over the party.” (Despite his dissent, Alessi shared a rather rosy view of the “honoured society” prevalent at that time: “It was another kind of Mafia, not the kind of violent organized crime we see today,” he said.)
“The DC decided to accept the Mafia’s support to reinforce itself in the struggle against communism,” said historian Francesco Renda. “If one doesn’t understand this, it’s impossible to understand everything that happens afterwards. The people who made this choice were not criminals, nor were they joining with low-level criminals. They were allying themselves with a force that had historically played this role in Sicily. All this was justified in the name of the Cold War. The Mafia was ennobled by being given the role of the military arm of a major political force, something it had never had in the past. Naturally, the Mafia then drew on the power of the government and became not only a political and social force but an economic force and that’s when the real adventure began.”
The perpetrators of the Porrella della Ginestrra massacre, Salvatore Giuliano and his criminal band, roamed freely around the Sicilian countryside for seven years, giving newspaper interviews, meeting with politicians and even the chief prosecutor of Palermo. “The only people unable to find Giuliano were the police,” declared a court sentence issued several years later. In 1950, when his presence had become a national embarrassment, the Mafia helped wipe out Giuliano’s band, presenting the bandit’s corpse to police. “Bandits, police and Mafia are one and the same, like Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” said Gaspare Pisciotta, Giuliano’s cousin, whose betrayal was key in the outlaw’s final capture and death. Shortly after his trial in 1954, Pisciotta was himself mysteriously poisoned in Palermo’s Ucciardone prison when someone put strychnine in his coffee.
The Mafia’s valuable role as intermediary in capturing Giuliano and other bandits was openly praised by Italian judges of the period. In 1955, Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo, a member of Italy’s highest court, wrote an outright defence of the Mafia: “People say the Mafia does not respect the police and the judiciary: it’s untrue. The Mafia has always respected the judiciary and justice, has bowed before its sentences and has not interfered with the magistrate’s work. In the persecution of bandits and outlaws . . . it has actually joined together with the police.”
Well-known Mafia bosses with lengthy criminal records were all accorded places of honour in the Christian Democratic Party. And it was not uncommon for prominent politicians to appear as honoured guests at the christenings, weddings and funerals of major Mafia figures. In Sicily, being known as a friend of a mafioso was not a sign of shame but of power.
Mafia bosses could move blocks of votes and the politicians turned to them at election time, as is clear from a letter written in 1951 by a Sicilian member of parliament, Giovanni Palazzolo, of the Liberal Party, to the Mafia boss of Partinico.
Dearest Don Ciccio,
The last time we saw one another at the Hotel delle Palme (in Palermo) you told me quite correctly that we needed a bright young member of the Regional Parliament from Partinico who was a friend and would be accessible to our friends. My friend Totò Motisi has all these requisites and I have decided to help him with all my strength. If you help me in Partinico, we will make him a member of parliament.
The letter’s recipient was Francesco Coppola, known as Frankie “Three Fingers” Coppola in the United States, where he had served a long prison sentence until he was freed and deported to Italy along with Lucky Luciano after the war.
In the 1950s, after land reform helped break up the last great feudal estates (a process that the Mafia worked to its own benefit), agriculture in Sicily diminished in importance and hundreds of thousands of unemployed peasants emptied the countryside for the growing cities. Many headed for Palermo, the new capital of the Sicilian region. In order to undercut the separatist movement, the government in Rome had granted Sicily special autonomy, including the right to have its own parliament and regional government in Palermo. While failing to fulfil the promise of greater self-determination and dignity for the Sicilian population, the new arrangement provided an extra layer of bureaucracy, thousands of jobs to be distributed to political cronies, and control over millions of dollars in government funds with seemingly limitless possibilities for corruption and patronage. So much so that many Sicilians referred to their regional representatives simply as i novanta ladroni, “the ninety thieves”, there being ninety seats in the local parliament.
With the flow of both people and money toward the new regional capital, the city experienced a massive building boom known as “the Sack of Palermo”. Real estate developers ran wild, pushing the centre of the city out along Viale della Libertà toward the new airport at Punta Raisi. With hastily drafted zoning variances or in wanton violation of the law, builders tore down countless Art Deco palaces and asphalted many of the city’s finest parks, transforming one of the most beautiful cities in Europe into a thick, unsightly forest of cement condominia.
Developers with close Mafia ties were not afraid to use strong-arm tactics to intimidate owners into selling or to clear the way for their projects. One of the most important buildings of the great Sicilian architect Ernesto Basile was razed to the ground in the middle of the night, hours before it would have come under protection of the historic preservation laws. In the period from 1959 to 1964, when Salvatore Lima and Vito Ciancimino were, respectively, mayor and commissioner for public works, an incredible 2,500 of the 4,000 building licences issued in the city of Palermo went to three individuals whom the Italian parliament’s anti-Mafia commission has described as “retired persons, of modest means, none with any experience in the building trade, and who, evidently, simply lent their names to the real builders”.
The expansion of the new city was accompanied by the gradual abandonment and decay of the old. Already damaged by bombs during the Second World War, the centre of Palermo was gradually reduced to a wretched slum, through a deliberate policy of neglect. There was little money to be made in the old centre because of zoning restrictions: throwing up cheap high-rise apartments was much more lucrative than patiently restoring seventeenth-and eighteenth-century structures. Many areas were left for months or years without gas, electricity or hot water, forcing residents to move out into the new housing projects. Even neighbourhoods that had not been bombed during the war began to look as if they had been. Palermo gained the distinction of not only having a Department of Housing, but a department of edilizia pericolante or “collapsing housing” – a disgrace that continues to this day.
The residents of the city centre dropped from 125,481 to 38,960 between 1951 and 1981 – a period in which the population of Palermo as a whole nearly doubled. Many of the great monuments of Palermo – the onion-domed Arab mosques-turned-Christian churches, the Norman palaces, the Renaissance fountains and baroque churches – stand next to empty, rubble-strewn lots or abandoned buildings with broken windows. Those who remained behind were generally the city’s poorest and most wretched, prepared to put up with Third World conditions not unlike those of the bidonvilles of Cairo or Rio de Janeiro.
The story of Mafia power in Palermo can be told in terms of real estate – block by block and building by building – a legacy that is reflected both in the cheap construction and infernal congestion of the “new” city and the total degradation of the old. The changes it wrought were so fundamental that almost no one was immune. The Falcone and Borsellino families were no exception.
Born respectively in 1939 and 1940, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino grew up during this period of transformation only a few blocks apart in an old, dilapidated neighbourhood of Palermo near the seaport known as La Kalsa. For centuries the area had been one of the most elegant in the city. In the eighteenth century, the poet Goethe admired the striking axial views created by Palermo’s criss-crossing avenues, along which the city’s aristocracy rode in carriages for the daily passeggio in order to see and be seen. The Falcones lived on Via Castrofilippo, in a house once inhabited by a city mayor, Falcone’s great-uncle. Paolo Borsellino and his family lived nearby on Via della Vetriera, next to the family pharmacy. As boys, Falcone and Borsellino played soccer together in Piazza Magione. The neighbourhood had come down a bit since Goethe’s time, but it had retained some of its elegance, and remained a healthy mix of professionals and day labourers, aristocrats and fishermen, businessmen and beggars.
The Borsellinos’ house on Via della Vetriera was declared unsafe and the family was forced to move out in 1956. The family pharmacy (run at the time by Paolo’s mother and now by his sister, Rita, and her husband) remained, while the neighbourhood crumbled around it. Homeless squatters occupied their old building and, forced to live without light or heat, partially destroyed it in a fire. During the sack of Palermo, the Falcones’ own house was earmarked for demolition to make way for a road. Falcone and the rest of his family haunted the offices of various city officials, carrying photographs of the palace’s frescoed ceilings in hopes of convincing them of the building’s historic and artistic value. The building was destroyed in 1959, although the road it was supposed to make room for was never built – a testament to the blind and irrational urban planning of the period. Both families had little choice but to join the exodus to the anonymous dormitory community on what had been the outskirts of town.
It is probably not an accident that the two prosecutors who wound up together on the front line against the Mafia came from Palermo’s small but solid professional middle class. Falcone’s father was a chemist, Borsellino’s a pharmacist. The middle class in Sicily – as in the rest of Italy – was perhaps also the part of Sicilian society that had been the most receptive to the values of patriotism and nationalism promoted by the new Italian state and emphasized even more energetically during Fascism. “Our family was very religious and very attentive to the idea of civic duty,” said Maria Falcone. “We grew up in the cult of the Fatherland. Mamma’s brother died at age eighteen in the First World War, falsifying his birth certificate so he could volunteer for the army at age seventeen. My father’s brother died at age twenty-four, as a career air force official. Hearing about these relatives as children developed in us, and in Giovanni, a love of country above all. ‘They served the Nation!’ my father would say with reverence.”
The family went to church every Sunday and, for a time, Giovanni served as an altar boy. Giovanni’s mother showed few outward signs of affection but communicated a very Sicilian idea of manhood: “She would often repeat to him that boys never cry, because she wanted him to grow up to be a strong man,” Maria said. Giovanni’s father was more affectionate but remained the stern patriarch typical of the fathers of that period. “He taught us to work and to do our duty,” Falcone once said. “He was a man of strong moral principle, serious, honest, extremely attached to the family . . . He slapped me only once during my childhood. It was during wartime when I broke a bottle of oil. Someone who didn’t live through those times wouldn’t understand. A bottle of olive oil at that time was a treasure. My family was not rich, we lived on a modest state salary.” In this somewhat austere, frugal household, Falcone’s father was proud of the fact that he had never treated himself to a coffee at a café.
Falcone’s parents were not politically active. “They had a rather uncritical view of Fascism, they were loyal, law-abiding citizens,” said Maria Falcone. As a boy he had been infatuated with a phrase of the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, “Life is a mission and duty is its highest law.” In fact, Falcone considered a career in the military, spending one year at the Italian naval academy, before returning to the University of Palermo to study law.
At the university, Falcone drifted away from his family’s Catholicism and became interested in communism. “Our studies – particularly with Giovanni and me – brought us to a decidedly critical attitude toward Fascism, as with any form of absolutism,” said Maria Falcone. The Italian Communist Party, while not breaking with the Soviet Union, had long distinguished itself as the most independent and democratic Communist Party in the West. Falcone never became a party member.
Paolo Borsellino grew up with the same “cult of the Fatherland”. He, too, had two uncles who had served in the army. Although they had not been killed, both had been taken prisoner in Africa during the Second World War. Both had worked for a year in the Italian colonies in Africa during Fascism and had moved back to Palermo after the war. Because his father had died when Paolo Borsellino was only twenty-two, his uncles assumed a more important role in his life. One of them, Francesco (Zio Ciccio), lived with the Borsellinos for many years. “When these uncles talked about experiences in Africa he fell under the spell of these stories,” says his sister, Rita. In fact, to the end of his life, Paolo Borsellino’s study in Palermo was full of African masks and artifacts brought back from Somalia by his uncle. “Paolo had this great thirst for learning; completely on his own initiative he went to city hall to trace the origins of our family,” says his mother, Maria Pia Lepanto Borsellino. He also made a very elaborate and carefully designed family tree of Italy’s royal family, the Savoy. This would not have been unusual twenty years earlier, but by the time Paolo Borsellino was growing up, Italy had abolished the monarchy and the Savoy were living in exile, compromised by the Fascist regime. But he was named Paolo Emanuele Borsellino, after King Vittorio Emanuele, and was born in 1940, when the Savoy family still held the Italian throne. “He was passionately interested in history, he wanted to know about Fascism, he joked about being a supporter of the Bourbons [the Spanish monarchy that ruled Sicily and southern Italy before Italian unification],” his sister, Rita, said.
When Borsellino was at the University of Palermo, he joined a neo-Fascist student group. While this fact became the source of some scandal in later years, Fascism in the Sicilian context had a specific meaning: for better or worse, the Fascist regime was the only Italian government that had made a serious effort to wipe out the Mafia. In a land where the rule of law has generally been feeble or nonexistent, Borsellino dreamed of a State with a capital “S”. In fact, Mafia witnesses have testified repeatedly that the two parties they were strictly forbidden to support were the Fascists and the Communists. So that while starting at opposite ends of the political spectrum, Falcone and Borsellino were attracted by the two political forces that seemed the most uncompromising towards what was worst in Sicilian life.
Growing up, both Borsellino and Falcone had direct experience of the Mafia. Borsellino often recalled envying a schoolmate of his who bragged about an uncle who was a mafioso. Both prosecutors had classmates who ended up as mafiosi. Because the Kalsa is a port area, it is filled with both sailors and smugglers of contraband goods. As a boy, Falcone used to play ping-pong with Tommaso Spadaro, who became known as the “King of the Kalsa”, a major smuggler of contraband cigarettes and, later, of heroin. “I breathed the odour of Mafia from the time I was a boy, but at home my father never talked about it,” Falcone said. “It was a forbidden word.” (When Falcone later prosecuted Spadaro as a mafioso, the boss could not resist reminding Falcone of how badly he had beaten him at ping-pong.)
Falcone and Borsellino became friends again while at the University of Palermo and both decided to join the magistrature. In the early years of their careers, both men left Palermo to take jobs in the Sicilian provinces, Borsellino in Agrigento and Monreale, Falcone in Lentini and Trapani. Borsellino returned to Palermo in the early 1970s and Falcone arrived in 1978, taking a job with the bankruptcy court. Borsellino was working as a prosecutor in one of the two principal prosecutors’ offices, the Ufficio Istruzione, or investigative office. By the time they became magistrates, Falcone’s and Borsellino’s early political enthusiasms were greatly tempered and became the subject of joking and teasing between them. “Camerata Borsellino,” Falcone would say, mimicking the standard form of address between members of the Fascist Party.
Like Falcone, Borsellino never joined any political party in order to avoid any appearance of partisanship in his work as a magistrate. “He refused numerous offers to become a political candidate by both the Socialists and the MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano, the neo-Fascist Party),” said Giuseppe Tricoli, an activist in the MSI and a friend of Borsellino’s from his university days. “ ‘No one should ever have any doubts about my motives, that I do what I do in order to gain notoriety for myself,’ ” he told Tricoli.
Their middle-class origins – the fact that their parents worked in professions that did not especially interest the Mafia – may have protected Falcone and Borsellino when they became prosecutors. Mafia witnesses have testified that the organization did not extort small shopkeepers (like pharmacists) in the 1950s and 1960s. Members of the Palermo upper class – wealthy landowners or businessmen – were much more likely to be on familiar terms with the Mafia, either as victims or accomplices. Some simply paid protection to be left alone, others decided to use the power of Cosa Nostra by having a mafioso as a partner in a business deal, a land sale or a development project. Many noble families participated happily in the Sack of Palermo, eager to make a quick profit by selling or developing their old estates. In fact, some prosecutors from the Palermo upper crust found themselves under pressure from friends and relatives to go easy on this defendant or not to explore the interconnections between common criminals and respected, “legitimate” businessmen. Falcone and Borsellino did not belong to any of the exclusive social clubs frequented by some of their colleagues. Even if a magistrate went purely to pass an evening playing bridge, he could very well rub elbows with someone whose name might turn up in a police report or investigation. (Michele Greco – the notorious Mafia boss known as “the Pope” – was a member of a fashionable gun club; when some members began to grumble about his presence, the club suffered a robbery that many interpreted as a warning.) Both Falcone and Borsellino led highly restricted social lives among a small circle of close friends and colleagues. They declined invitations to most social occasions and always inquired closely to find out who would be present at any event they were supposed to attend. The most innocuous-seeming event could provide an occasion for the Mafia to contact or compromise a prosecutor by having him shake hands with or be seen with a person of dubious reputation.
When Falcone returned to Palermo in 1978, he was undergoing an intensely difficult personal crisis. His wife, Rita Bonnici, chose to remain in Trapani, announcing that she was leaving him for another man. To make matters worse, the other man was one of Falcone’s superiors, the chief judge of Trapani, making the affair a hot topic of gossip in the courthouses of Trapani and Palermo. In Sicily, where the word comuto (cuckold) is reserved for the lowest forms of human life, the collapse of his marriage was a scalding humiliation and a personal loss that left Falcone smarting for years. He never discussed his first marriage with his friends and told his two sisters that he would never marry again. Instead he threw himself into his new job at the bankruptcy court, mastering a new area of the law and the intricacies of the economic life of Palermo.
At the time, a general Pax Mafiosa reigned in the city. There had been virtually no major Mafia killings in recent years, which led some people (in good faith as well as bad) to declare that the Mafia no longer existed. There had been no major Mafia prosecutions in several years. The Mafia war of the early 1960s had led to the parliament’s anti-Mafia commission and to a series of massive Mafia trials mounted by the Palermo magistrate Cesare Terranova. While Terranova had correctly identified all the major bosses of the Sicilian Mafia, the cases all ended in disastrous failure. The culture of omertà (silence) and the intimidation of witnesses and judges were so great that the government’s cases rarely held up in court.
Many pre-eminent scholars at the time insisted that the Mafia, if it existed, was not an organization but an anthropological phenomenon, a set of values and attitudes common in Sicily. The stories of initiation rites, highly structured Mafia “families”, with capi (bosses) and consiglieri (counsellors), were nothing more than the fantasy of Hollywood and the sensationalist press, they said. More attentive observers noted that the relative calm indicated something quite different, a harmony among the city’s Mafia clans that meant that they were going happily about their business with little or no opposition.
In fact, all the men whom the anti-Mafia commission had denounced as the pillars of the Mafia system in Palermo were still in place. Vito Ciancimino – the former barber of Corleone – continued to pull the strings at Palermo city hall. All of the important municipal contracts continued to be steered to Count Arturo Cassina, accused of subcontracting out much of the work to Mafia firms. The island’s taxes were collected by the private monopoly of the Salvo family, long suspected by police of being mafiosi themselves. Salvatore Lima, the mayor who presided over the Sack of Palermo, was now a member of parliament, and his political mentor, Giulio Andreotti, was prime minister, thus placing Lima at the centre of power in Rome.
Despite the apparent calm, a small number of police officials and prosecutors knew that all was not what it seemed. Deputy police chief Boris Giuliano had begun to notice suitcases full of drugs and money moving back and forth between Palermo and New York. Rather than disappearing, Mafia business was booming as never before. Moreover, a series of mysterious kidnappings, murders and disappearances taking place in the Sicilian countryside indicated indecipherable rumblings within the obscure world of Cosa Nostra.
Meanwhile, the rest of the country was preoccupied with what seemed like much more pressing and more important problems – the right to divorce and abortion, terrorism, the rise of the Italian Communist Party, Italy’s place in the international struggle between East and West. From the mid-1970s forward the headlines of the daily papers were dominated by terrorist bombings, kneecappings and killings. The Italian Communist Party had gained 34.5 per cent of the national vote, just a point less than the ruling Christian Democratic Party and the two had begun to share government power in an arrangement known as “the historic compromise”. In March 1978, the Red Brigades kidnapped former prime minister Aldo Moro, one of the architects of the new alliance between Christian Democrats and Communists.
Throughout that spring, the nation was so caught up with the Moro kidnapping that it barely noticed when the Mafia peace was briefly interrupted on the morning of 30 May, and a group of killers murdered Giuseppe Di Cristina, the boss of Riesi, a town in eastern Sicily. Although the crime was committed in broad daylight on a crowded Palermo street, there were no witnesses. There were, however, a few intriguing clues. In Di Cristina’s pocket, police found a $6,000 cheque from Salvatore Inzerillo, the Mafia boss in whose territory Di Cristina had been killed, and the private telephone numbers of Nino and Ignazio Salvo, the fabulously wealthy Christian Democrat businessmen who had the concession to operate Sicily’s private tax collection system.
Although his case was ignored, Di Cristina had left investigators a gold mine of valuable information. Only a few days before his death, Di Cristina held a secret meeting with police in a deserted farmhouse in order to tell them of his imminent assassination, identify his potential killers and alert police to the scourge that was about to afflict both the Mafia and Sicily during the coming years. Di Cristina provided police with a rare view inside the closed world of Cosa Nostra at its highest levels. He described a widening split between the traditional, “moderate” Mafia and the crude and violent interlopers from the town of Corleone and their allies. The Corleonese Mafia – under the leadership of Luciano Leggio in the 1960s – had distinguished itself for its homicidal ferocity. Leggio – an ignorant former field guard – had grown into a charismatic Mafia leader by showing his ruthless determination to eliminate anyone who stood in his way, often with his own hands and the long knife he carried with him. After Leggio’s arrest in 1974, his place was taken by two of his lieutenants, who gave nothing away, in ruthlessness, to their boss. “Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, nicknamed ‘the beasts’ because of their ferocity, are the most dangerous men that Luciano Leggio has at his disposal,” Di Cristina told police. “They are personally responsible for at least forty murders each . . .” Most dangerous of all, he added, was Salvatore Riina, “because [he is] more intelligent” than Provenzano. While the “traditional” Mafia, represented by Palermo bosses such as Stefano Bontate, Gaetano Badalamenti, Salvatore Inzerillo and Di Cristina himself – favoured a conciliatory attitude toward public officials, the Corleonesi preferred confrontation and violent intimidation. Against the wishes of the Mafia’s governing body, the Commission, the Corleonesi had murdered retired police colonel Giuseppe Russo, a tenacious investigator. They had carried out a series of kidnappings in Sicily – a practice the rest of the Mafia frowned on.
At the end of this secret confession, Di Cristina acknowledged that his life was in imminent danger: “In the next week, I’m expecting a bullet-proof car some friends are sending me. It costs about 30 million lire [nearly $40,000 at the time]. You know, Captain, I have many venial sins to my credit and a few mortal ones, as well.”
None of Di Cristina’s warnings were heeded. Just as he had predicted, the investigation into his own murder concentrated on the better-known members of the “traditional” Mafia. Police issued an arrest warrant for Di Cristina’s friend and ally, Salvatore Inzerilla, on whose territory Di Cristina had been killed – falling into the trap Salvatore Riina had prepared.
The military offensive of the Corleonesi that Di Cristina predicted came, tragically, to pass. On 21 July 1979, Mafia killers gunned down Boris Giuliano, the vigilant police officer who had shown too much interest in the suitcases travelling between Palermo and New York. In September, the Corleonesi made good on their threat to kill Cesare Terranova, the member of the parliament’s anti-Mafia commission who had returned to rake over the investigative office of the Palermo Palace of Justice. And just four months later, on 6 January 1980, they murdered Piersanti Mattarella, the president of the Region of Sicily, the most important Christian Democrat politician on the island, because he had tried to clean up the lucrative market of government contracts, heavily polluted by Mafia interests. The season of excellent cadavers had begun. The emerging new Mafia was sending a clear message that anyone who dared stand up to Cosa Nostra – even the president of the Region – would meet with instant death.
During this period, Falcone was given the opportunity to move from the bankruptcy court to join his friend Borsellino at the investigative office, the Ufficio Istruzione of Palermo. (At that time, there were two distinct prosecutors’ offices within the Italian judicial system: the Procura della Repubblica initiated criminal proceedings against a defendant, then passed the case on to the Ufficio Istruzione to be investigated and prepared for trial. The Procura della Repubblica would then review the evidence and present the case in court.) The investigative office was run by a tough Communist prosecutor, Rocco Chinnici, who was determined to pursue the strong anti-Mafia stand promised by his predecessor, Cesare Terranova, who had been murdered before he could even take office.
On the night of 5 May 1980, three Mafia killers shot and killed police captain Emanuele Basile, who had taken up the drug investigations of Boris Giuliano. The following day, Palermo police ordered the arrest of some fifty-five members of three different Mafia families in Palermo, the Inzerillo, the Spatola and the Di Maggio, accused of running a massive international heroin ring together with the Gambino crime family in New York. The arrests constituted one of the biggest anti-Mafia operations in more than a decade. The case quickly became mired in controversy. The two assistant prosecutors to whom the case had been assigned in the Procura della Repubblica of Palermo refused to validate the arrest warrants against the Palermo clans. The head of the office, Gaetano Costa, while acknowledging that the evidence against some of the defendants was preliminary, insisted it was important for the office to show it was not afraid to keep important mafiosi in jail. The two young prosecutors, who had evidently told the defendants’ lawyers that their clients would soon be out on bail, were reluctant to break their word. Costa and his assistants argued heatedly, while a crowd of journalists and defence lawyers waited expectantly in the hallway outside. In the end, Costa was forced to take the bold and unusual step of signing the arrest warrants himself. When the meeting broke up, one of the assistant prosecutors apparently said to the Mafia lawyers waiting outside. “He signed them, not us,” leaving Costa in an exposed, vulnerable position.
Immediately afterward, the Spatola-Inzerillo heroin case – with its already long trail of blood – was transferred to the investigative office, where it reached the desk of Giovanni Falcone – his first big Mafia prosecution in Palermo.
Giovanni Falcone was killed in May 1992 when a bomb hidden in a trench beside the motorway leading to Palermo International Airport blew up as he drove by. The assassination was organized by Salvatore Riina. Less than two months later, Paolo Borsellino was killed by a car bomb in the Via D’Amelio in Palermo. Five policemen were killed in the incident. Salvatore Riina is now serving life for sanctioning the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, and other killings. Palermo International Airport has been renamed Falcone-Borsellino Airport.
Soon after Benito Mussolini came to power as prime minister of Italy in 1922, he told a meeting of southern Fascists: “I have the power to solve . . . even the problem of Italy’s Mezzogiorno” – that is, the southern part of Italy that includes Sicily and Sardinia. “It is my most fervent aspiration to do so.” His aim was to crush the Mafia and other criminal organizations to bring the whole country under the leadership of Rome. However, the people of Sicily did not welcome outside interference and during Mussolini’s early years in power the Fascists made little progress asserting their power there Then in June 1924, he appointed a new prefect of Trapani on the west of the island. His name was Cesare Mori and he had instructions to wipe out the Mafia. He had been in Sicily before. In his book The Last Struggle with the Mafia he described methods he used. These were honed during his early brushes with the latitanti – “fugitives from justice” – as he outlined in this chapter “My Earlier Battles with Bandits”.
I have been engaged in chasing latitanti since my earliest years, and I could tell many stories of the chase. But I will only tell two which are characteristic because of their attendant circumstances.
In May 1916, I was ordered to go to Sicily from which I had been absent for a year, in order to assist in a special service which was being organized with the aim of remedying the deplorable state of public safety in the four western provinces of the island. These had been very sorely tried by the intense activity of numerous criminals and, in particular, by the audacity of two armed bands: one of these, the Carlino band, working on foot, consisting of three young latitanti who had been joined by some free criminals, had been for many months troubling the southern part of the province of Caltanissetta, with their centre at Riesi; and the other, the Grisafi band, working on horseback, consisting of five regular bandits who were often joined by other latitanti, had been for years plaguing the western part of the province of Agrigento and the neighbouring districts of the provinces of Palermo and Trapani, with its centre at Caltabellotta. When I reached Palermo, I was given direction of the police services in the provinces of Caltanissetta and Agrigento, so that the chase of both bands fell within my competence.
After staying some days at Palermo to organize my personnel, I went to Caltanissetta, where everything, both people and country, was new to me. I set to work by concentrating particularly on the Carlino band, round which terror had created a quite impenetrable veil of mystery and some rather baseless legends. A few months before there had been added to the various murders committed by the band, that of a brave carabiniere [military policeman] who, surprised by the bandits at daybreak while he was going from Riesi to the distant railway station to spend a few days’ leave in his own village, had fallen after a gallant fight with muskets. After this tragic episode, the police had redoubled their energies, combing out the country by general drives in force or by special operations, guided by the rare and vague information which they sometimes managed to procure – information that was always inconclusive in spite of the large price that the Government had put on the leader’s head.
All this, however, though it undoubtedly showed courage and determination on the part of the police, only produced the very same inconvenient state of things that had led to so many failures: it troubled the waters, and so assisted the hunted men. The system of congesting the countryside with armed men and of keeping them continually on the move is not the best adapted for hunting down latitanti. On the most favourable hypothesis it can only result in driving the quarry outside the district that is being searched. It is wrong to suppose that by multiplying the number of movements of the police one increases the probabilities of a chance meeting with the latitanti. In reality, exactly the opposite occurs: the greater the force and the more it moves about, the easier it is to see and, therefore, the less likelihood it has of lighting on the quarry. The battle with the latitanti is rather like that of love: vince che fugge, or he who can keep out of the way wins. That sounds a paradox, but it is true. To know how to keep out of the way is, in this field, the best way of being there at the right moment: to know how to remain inactive is the best way of being able to act when action is necessary. Eight days’ inactivity for an hour’s action; a month’s absence for five minutes on the spot: that is the way to do it. One prepares for a bandit-hunt by letting the local sediment settle; it is carried on by stealth and concluded by surprise.
When one has made up one’s mind to act in earnest, the neighbourhood should be left absolutely quiet. Only thus can it be clearly scrutinized and all the psychological and material data be collected which it is necessary to know for the direction and development of the action. From a hundred to three hundred men on foot or on horseback moving about the district make this difficult: a few men are enough, and one alone is best, with his head screwed on the right way, his heart in the right place and his nerves of steel. Two ends are attained in this way: the bandits, not being disturbed, not only stay where they are but are lulled into security and allow their movements to be more easily seen; and the structure and nature of the protective system that aids them is revealed. This is of capital importance, since according to the character, quality, behaviour and family position of the bandits, the reasons for their latitanza and their subsequent interference in all kinds of local activities and interests, the difficulties created by the protective system that surrounds them vary in kind. They may be of a passive kind, born simply of fear, or of an active nature inspired by a hundred considerations, not excluding sentimental or even – formerly – electoral ones. It is clear that, once all these factors have been observed and closely scrutinized, the subsequent action, of stealth and surprise, will at least be based on rational lines.
To come back to the particular instance I am speaking of, a few days after my arrival, I learnt that Carlino and Co. were taking advantage of the frequent absences of the police on their usual operations in the country to come into the village at night and stay there roystering with women of ill-repute. I paid special regard to this, as it seemed to me to correspond perfectly with the unbridled, dissolute character and the youth of the bandits. About three weeks passed, and then one of the usual pieces of information came in. The band had been seen going about in full warpaint on a steep mountain that rises about fifteen kilometres from Riesi. I did not believe it. I was gradually coming to the conclusion that the former reports of that kind, which had regularly been followed by unsuccessful operations, were of doubtful origin, that is, that they were put about by friends of the bandits to entice the police away from certain points and concentrate them in other places where there was nothing to find. Something told me that this fresh piece of information, which had come in an apparently urgent and circumstantial form, was of that kind, and had the same origin, perhaps with the aim of testing the probable direction in which I, the new commander, should take action. There was nothing to prove this: it was only an inner voice that came from some twist of my sub-conscious mind – a voice that has spoken to me more than once, and to which I have always listened. Perhaps what is called good luck is simply due to this inner voice, in so far as sudden intuitions sometimes lead to unexpected successes, though involving the illogical dismissal of more carefully thought out plans. However that may be, I listened to it again. And what followed was typical of its results.
I need not say that as soon as this new information was received, I was warmly recommended to undertake one of the usual operations – a sudden concentration of force by night to surround the foot of the incriminated mountain completely, and a subsequent enveloping movement by pushing the whole force up the slopes to the top of the mountain. If the bandits were there, as had been reported, they would be unable to escape. It was mathematically certain: but – were they there? I asked that question, and I was answered on all sides that they certainly were. “There is too much certainty,” I thought: “so the bandits are somewhere else.” So I enthusiastically agreed to the proposed operation, and gave orders that almost the whole of the armed force of which I disposed should take part in it. It would take four days to carry out.
Meanwhile, on my own account, on the afternoon of the third day, when the heat of the mountain would be just at its height, I got on my horse and left Caltanissetta unobserved with three men by the lonely road that leads through the open country to Riesi. As I reached the neighbourhood of Riesi it was getting dark. A long and dense procession of peasants, almost all mounted on horses, mules or donkeys, and wagons of every kind was pouring, as it did every evening, from the fields to the village in a dense cloud of dust, through which, in the growing dusk, men and animals took on indistinct and nebulous shapes. The peasants, their eyes swollen with the sun, dust, fatigue and sleep, went along in a dull and dreamy silence. My men and I scattered and worked our way into the long column; I adapted myself to its lounging pace, its sleepy appearance and its dumbness, and, under convenient cloak of dust, horse-flies and the reek of horses, I got into the village quite unobserved, though I had never been there before and did not know one stone of it from another. When it reached the houses, the long column split up as each man went his way into the lanes. I followed one lane at a venture, and caught a glimpse of the police station. Naturally I went past it, and, cautiously followed by my three men, I halted at a lonely and deserted corner from which, favoured by the darkness which the few street lamps did not make less thick, I went quietly and alone, like one of the inhabitants, to the police station: and my men joined me there a little later, they having been able to stable their horses in the barracks without arousing suspicion in the general confusion of the returning peasants.
My main object was therefore attained, since the chief thing was to get into the heart of the position unobserved. Half an hour had not gone by when news came to the office where I was, that the latitanti Tofalo and Carlino had come into the village a short time ago mingled with the same column of peasants in which I had come in, that is to say from the direction immediately opposite to that of the mountain which at that moment was occupied by the police force. It was quite obvious: profiting by the absence of the armed force which had been attracted away by false information, the latitanti had come to the village to make a night of it undisturbed. But where? In such places, it is true, the women of ill-repute are so few and so notorious that they are all known and may be counted on the fingers. Thus, the women with whom the bandits usually went were known, but nobody in the police could tell me where they assembled. And Riesi is not so small a place that one can find one’s way about it easily without knowing it, especially at night. Meanwhile, so as not to give the alarm, it was absolutely indispensable that the whole of the police (twenty-five men) who were present in the village, with their leaders and officers, should remain still and indoors. Towards midnight, the streets being deserted and silent, I decided to act.
A police official had been able to find out that the two low women who were friends of the bandits were absent from their houses. That confirmed the idea that the bandits were in the village with them. By a process of exclusions and inductions founded on a few timid words murmured by people living near, I was able at last to locate the place where the meetings were probably held and, after a quick and silent inspection, the block of buildings in which the meeting-place must be. It was a block made of a long row of hovels, consolidated into a single construction, in the heart of a populous quarter; and not even the police agents of the place knew its internal plan, its arrangement and the ways of possible communication between the hovels. It was no use losing time in conjecture or plans of operation: the thing was to find out if the bandits were there and to act at once.
With a part of the force I surrounded the whole block on the outside: with the rest I went up to the first house in the row and demanded admission. The door was opened without hesitation. There was nobody there except the small family of peasants who lived there. While the police officials and men were finishing the inspection of the premises and asking a few questions, I went out into the street. I was slightly disappointed, and I leant against the rather rickety door of the hovel next door to the one I had left, and exchanged a few words with one of the officials. Suddenly, as I was speaking, I distinctly heard behind the door against which I was leaning the stamp of an animal’s hoof. At that time and in such a place animals were never left alone. Where an animal was shut up somebody else was sure to be shut up too. After having knocked at the door repeatedly without effect, I called: “Open the door.”
Dead silence. I was now sure I was right. “Open the door,” I repeated, “or I’ll have it broken in.”
A silence of the grave. Turning to some of the police agents who had come out of the house and were standing round, I said: “Break in that door.”
Hardly had I uttered the words than two musket shots were fired from behind the very door. The bullets slapped against the wall opposite without hurting anybody. This visiting card left no doubts and demanded an immediate and adequate reply. My men, dashing to one side and lying down, returned the fire and the battle opened very furiously. When the first fury had spent itself, I made sure that the blockade round the block of houses was such as to prevent all flight or surprise on the part of the bandits, and I took every possible means to give the greatest possible effect to our own fire. In my ignorance of the number of the latitanti that I had to deal with, and also of the internal arrangements of the place they were in, and in the impossibility of picking out a target behind that door which, rickety and weak as it was, though it allowed a free passage to the bullets of both sides, gave the bandits a certain view of their target while it completely hid ours. I decided to maintain my assault at the highest intensity so as to clear up the situation as quickly as possible. So, there, in the darkness of the night, in the radius of a few yards, a desperate and deadly battle went on between unknown adversaries firing blind and sudden volleys. Although our fire was rather oblique and low owing to the narrowness of the street, and though my men (being completely exposed) had to fire prone, the old door was gradually splintering to bits, so that I saw the moment approaching for a sudden rush that should carry the door, the bandits and everything with them. The bandits, however, in spite of the fire of three of my men which was sweeping the door and its surroundings from loopholes made, after the first exchanges, in the wall of the house opposite, had obviously found a position out of range of our fire; they kept up wild and intermittent firing from the now enlarged cracks in the door, showing how alert and well provided with ammunition they were. The village, awakened by the noise of the firing, kept within doors, in silence and in darkness. But it was summer, and dawn was quickly approaching. At the first streak, as soon as it was light enough for me to see the position, I descried an opening at the back of the block which led to a little staircase giving access to a room above that in which the bandits were. I immediately occupied it and had the floor pierced with an iron bar, thus making a loophole in it in spite of the shots which the latitanti, guessing my intention, concentrated on the hole from below. The position of the bandits was now tragic. Under fire from the front, from the flank and from above, and reduced to taking cover beneath a flight of stairs from which they could not possibly fire except for honour’s sake, they lost heart and, as they afterwards confessed, thought of surrendering, but could not make up their minds to do so for fear of losing their lives. I was now determined to carry the place with a rush.
Just at that moment Carlino’s mother and an uncle of his, who were certainly aware of the dangerous position the bandits were in, came to me and asked if they might make an attempt to induce Carlino and his companions to surrender before the fight ended in inevitable tragedy. I thought I could not reject the mother’s request, so I gave her five minutes in which to make the attempt. I ordered a ceasefire, and shouted to the latitanti that if they did not surrender in five minutes, I would resume firing till they were all killed. Then Carlino’s mother, taking cover behind the angle of the house, called “Figghiu!” (son), and Carlino replied with an equally loud cry “Matre!” Some brief motherly exhortations followed, till the bandits shouted that they surrendered and asked for their lives to be spared. I answered that they must throw down their arms and come out into the open. They obeyed immediately.
They were the latitanti, Carlino and Tofalo, with two free criminals as their companions. Two loose women were with them. They were armed with Mauser muskets, automatic pistols of the most modern kind, long claspknives and sword-bayonets, besides having field-glasses. They had fired about 300 rounds between them, and still had 200 rounds in reserve. Carlino and Tofalo confessed that, with another bandit who had left them a few days before, they had murdered the carabiniere I mentioned above, besides committing another fourfold murder, an act of attempted homicide which failed, and about twenty offences of blackmail. Their two companions swore they were as innocent as doves.
Having cleared matters up in the province of Caltanissetta, I went on to that of Agrigento, where the state of things was rather different. The latitante, Grisafi, a mountain-dweller of thirty-six years of age, originally a shepherd, who commanded the armed band there, was a consummate bandit. Fierce and cautious, most redoubtable, up to all the tricks and stratagems of guerrilla warfare, and protected by a thick net of local favour strengthened by terror, he had been a latitante for quite twelve years; and he had set up in the western part of the province a kind of special domain over which he ruled absolutely, interfering in every kind of affair, even the most intimate, making his will felt in every field, including the electoral field, and levying tolls and taxes, blackmailing and committing crimes of bloodshed without stint. Some thirty murders were put down to him, besides an unending series of crimes. Perhaps he had not committed so many: possibly he had committed more: certainly he was ready to go on committing them. They called him Marcuzzo (little Mark), but he was a man of thews and muscles, inclined to stoutness.
Aided not only by his boldness but by constant good luck, and being a good shot, he had always succeeded in escaping from the toils of the police; he had escaped unhurt from several conflicts and had sometimes inflicted loss on his pursuers. Not long after I came to the province of Agrigento, during a raid on the southern part of the province of Palermo, he had run into a group of five police agents with his whole band. Instead of opening fire, as was his wont, he had beaten a hasty retreat over the gentle slope of a small hill, disappearing from view over its shoulder. The police agents had immediately rushed in pursuit, but in their zeal they had not thought of the trap laid for them. Instead of coming on in open order, they had kept close together. Grisafi and his companions were waiting for them on the other side of the slope: and a well-aimed volley caught the pursuers full at their first appearance on the skyline, killing two brave men. For some time, too, Grisafi had had such a reputation for being uncapturable that the country folk began seriously to believe that he was maato (bewitched). The thing was ridiculous, as well as being very regrettable, and it had to be put an end to at once, not only for reasons of duty, but also for those of prestige.
I took on the job, and, with a small party of young and brave officials, including a carabiniere officer, I pitched some tents on a beach at Sciacca, a charming and hospitable little town, in whose rocky hinterland there rise, about twenty kilometres away, three typical rocky peaks, immediately overhanging the picturesque village of Caltabellotta, Grisafi’s native place. According to my system, I told my assistants that the probabilities of success would be in direct proportion to the tangible proofs we could give of inactivity, indolence and ineptitude. It was my idea, in fact, that as soon as we succeeded in being regarded as a useless party of more or less stupid idlers, we should have a nine to one chance of success.
After the end of Carlino and Co., my arrival in the province of Agrigento had aroused some anxiety. I was told that, a few days after my arrival, the Grisafi band, which apparently numbered nine men at that time, had been reduced to six. Three of the bandits had preferred to go off on their own affairs. After a little time had elapsed another bandit had gone away, owing to some dispute with the leader, and the band had been reduced to five – Grisafi, his brother, the two brothers Maniscalco and a certain Santangelo. At that rate there was the risk that the famous band would disappear into thin air, and I wanted to capture it, not to break it up. By capturing it entire, I cut the evil at the root: by forcing it to disband I accomplished nothing; or worse, I simply dissolved the evil in the neighbourhood. It was necessary, therefore, to reassure them as to my intentions by some thoroughly stupid action.
Sciacca, among other things, is famous for its hot springs, for its mullet and its soles. So I and some of my subordinates suddenly found ourselves affected with rheumatic pains and took a strict course of treatment for them – morning baths, reaction, lunch of mullet, afternoon sleep, digestive promenade, dinner of soles, a game of cards, another little walk and so to bed. We did it all openly, in the local hotel, with revolting persistence and entire want of shame. Every now and again we took an innocent little ride in the neighbourhood, and that was all.
Nobody, of course, knew that by night, in our little rooms that were tightly closed against all intrusions, the work of study and preparation was busily going on. And people began to ask if we had come to Sciacca to take the water cure or to catch the Grisafi band. I was really glad when I heard this. Meanwhile the police force at my disposal remained concentrated at certain places specially selected, so that, while apparently scattered and distant, it was really in complete readiness and quite handy. The Grisafi band, which had eyes everywhere, became reassured and remained quietly on the look-out, awaiting events, in the district between Sciacca and Caltabellotta.
It was then that I began to send out my men, cautiously, one by one, without any preparation and on the most bureaucratic excuses, into the various places that had been the scenes of the bandits’ crimes, in order to collect – without raising the alarm and so without any official formality – all possible current news on the past activities of the band and especially the necessary indications for identifying their habitual and occasional helpers, whether voluntary accomplices or compelled by fear. There was need for haste because, if the game went on too long, it would be found out. Their work was carried out quickly and quietly with as good results as could possibly be obtained in such conditions: and feverish activity, all night long, reigned in the little bedrooms of the Sciacca hotel.
Now, if in the province of Caltanissetta a certain number of helpers bound simply by terror or bonds of complicity had grown up round the Carlino band, insufficient to hinder seriously the action of the authorities, the network of assistance that had been drawn round the Grisafi band had grown wide, thick and strong in the course of time. The whole system was welded together by complicity in crimes, fear of reprisals, terror, espionage on behalf of the bandits, conflicting interests and equivocal alliances for the most varied ends, to an extent that made it almost impenetrable. To attempt victory by trying to circumvent it would have been an arduous task, and would in any case have created a danger in our rear. If we wanted to get at the band, we had to confront it, annihilate and finish it off at a blow, all in one piece and with all its ramifications. We had to arrest simultaneously all Grisafi’s helpers and keep them under arrest till the bandits were caught.
The idea in itself had not the attraction of novelty; for over and over again attempts to capture latitanti had been marked by the arrest more or less en masse of their helpers; but just because it had been abused, the manoeuvre, against which high-class latitanti always took precautions, had become particularly difficult. And in this case, through a complication of special circumstances, the difficulties of the operation were immense. But it would undoubtedly dismay and confuse the bandits, if such an assertion of will and power occurred after so many years of inaction, and would at the same time draw the neighbourhood to our side owing to the immediate rise in the prestige of the State. In its concrete effects it would isolate the bandits in a more or less neutral environment which would allow us to get direct contact with them, and mean their certain capture. But it would be necessary to gain complete and accurately timed success: even a partial failure would be disastrous. And there was no time to be lost.
One night, therefore, by sudden simultaneous action in different places, I made an attempt to arrest all the helpers we had identified and against whom – at my own request, which had been kept secret – the judicial authorities had issued warrants of arrest: 357 persons in all, of whom ninety were in Caltabellotta alone. The attempt succeeded perfectly and without incident. But there was one amusing thing. The officials found in the possession of Grisafi’s old father, who was among the arrested persons, some scrip of a national loan that was being subscribed at the time, an obvious fruit of his son’s labours. When asked to explain how he got it, the old man with a quiet and patriotic smile answered that he too had done what he could for his country. This extensive and unexpected action, not least on account of the standing of some of the arrested persons, made a profound impression and produced the effects that I had foreseen. There was only one thing that I feared, namely, that the band would be dissolved in view of the turn affairs had taken.
But this did not happen. On the dawn of the third day after the arrests, a large black flag, fixed to a mast on the highest of the three peaks overlooking Caltabellotta, appeared fluttering in the keen mountain breeze. In this way the band asserted its presence and its intentions. And now, our mutual positions being unmasked, the fight became openly declared, close and uninterrupted.
I have already said that one bandit, owing to a dispute with Grisafi, had left him a little while after my arrival in the province of Agrigento. There were some indications of his presence in a district adjacent to that held by the band to whom, perhaps, he thought of giving the benefit of his assistance. A brave police official undertook to deal with him, and one night, with a party of police and carabinieri, he succeeded in surprising and surrounding him. A violent conflict ensued. The bandit finally surrendered, but one gallant soldier was killed and the official, seriously wounded in the chest, had to be taken hurriedly to the local carabinieri barracks. The populace, who had begun to take heart after the arrests, became a little depressed. I immediately intervened, and over the bloodstained remains of the poor carabiniere who had heroically fallen in the name of duty I made a solemn, public declaration that the end of the famous band was decided, sure and close at hand. The Mafia took care to answer on the band’s behalf.
A few days after the carabiniere’s funeral, a criminal of the neighbourhood died of natural causes in prison, and the Mafia arranged to make his funeral the occasion of an imposing demonstration, summoning all its members from all the villages of the district to the function. The funeral procession with its brass bands was to march through the principal street of the place, pass in front of the barracks of the carabinieri and under the windows of the very room where the wounded official was still lying and halt at the cemetery where was the still fresh grave of the poor carabiniere. Although it was secretly prepared, the plan leaked out and came to my knowledge, so I took up my position on the main street, which I had patrolled. At a given moment the hearse arrived at the entrance to the village. After a short halt to form the procession, as had been arranged, the funeral cortège advanced along its prearranged route. At the sides of the road, and in front of the houses and shops, little groups of curious observers, especially countrywomen and girls, were standing waiting. I too stood waiting, till the procession reached the place where I was standing. First came the priest, then the hearse, then the group of relations and intimate friends. I made no movement. But when I saw, a few paces behind this group, a band playing a raucous dirge and a dense body of people who wanted to make the funeral an excuse for making a demonstration of their presence and their intimidating power, which was an insult, I came forward and stopped them. Two words were enough: “Go away!” and a point of the hand to the direction they had come from. Perhaps my voice roused some obscure echo in their consciences, for they turned about like one man and went off in a twinkling with their band.
In the other direction the hearse, preceded by the holy symbols of the Christian faith, and followed by the group of mourners, went on slowly and silently to its destination in the sad majesty of death which levels all, the bad and the good, before human pity and Divine mercy. I went off to the barracks. As I went by, there arose from the groups of women and girls who had been waiting to see the funeral a murmur of brief phrases: ci vuolía (that’s what was wanted), ’un se ne putía cchiù! (it was too much to put up with!) buono! (good!) and binirittu! (bless you!) That was enough for me. It is needless to say that, like the arrest en masse of the helpers, the episode of the funeral had some repercussions both near and far, with some due exaggeration and apposite comment. But I had been too long accustomed to such repercussions and comments to pay much attention to them.
We were now really at close quarters. The Grisafi band preferred to remain on the heights where it undoubtedly had a place of refuge. I attempted a sudden enveloping movement, and the band was caught in it. Grisafi himself, after his capture, confessed this to me, and he added that more than once on that day he had us within range from the peak on which the band was posted, but that he had not fired – very kind of him! – so as not to attract in his direction all the parties of police by which he saw himself surrounded. However, during the night, the bandits got away by impenetrable tracks only known to themselves.
But we at last found their base refuge: a cave high up in the hills which one reached through a hole in the rock that could not be singled out at a distance. Beyond the hole which formed its entrance, the cave broadened out into a large space, fitted as a stable for horses and provided with a fine manger of cement. Beyond the stable the cave gradually narrowed, funnel-wise, for a sufficient length to provide sleeping places for the men, and it ended in a kind of chimney in which had been cut rough steps, which came out in the open across a small and unsuspected rocky pinnacle. The effect of this discovery was at once apparent. Two days later five horses were found abandoned and wandering about in the country round Sciacca. These horses belonged to the bandits, for whom their mounts had now become an embarrassment. Naturally I pretended to have understood nothing and to believe that it was a case of cattle-stealing. I protested loudly at the audacity of cattle-thieves and I sent out circular telegrams to find out where the theft had taken place. On the other hand, during the two nights following, I had each of the horses mounted in turn by a police agent and left free to go where it would, so that from the direction that the animal invariably took I was able to draw precious conclusions as to the direction in which the police should move. It was the moment to come to grips.
The Grisafi band, now on foot and without support, moved very little and, owing to the fewness of the houses where it could take refuge, had necessarily to go round the caves. From certain vague information, moreover, I knew that it was keeping near the town with the strange intention of making a nocturnal incursion and giving us a “serenade” under the windows of our quiet hotel. One day, late in the afternoon, I learnt with comparative certainty that the band would be found that same night in a certain cave looking on the sea, a few kilometres from Sciacca. The indications as to the exact topographical position of the cave were rather vague, but there was no time to make sure of them. It was obviously a perfect night for the enterprise: it was the middle of January and the weather was beastly.
That night, the police officials and men having assembled, I left for the place in question, guided by an old police agent belonging to the place, whom I had suddenly called in at the last moment. When we came to the neighbourhood of the cave, we found that it was a kind of huge platform from the edge of which steep and rocky slopes led down to the sea, and the bandits’ cave opened off one of these. It was pitch dark, there was a hurricane of wind and the rain came down in torrents. I halted the party on the high ground and, accompanied by one or two officers and the old guide, I began to go down a kind of footpath to reconnoitre the place and the way to it, my companions muttering low curses against the band at every fresh squall of rain. At a certain point our path, which went straight down to the sea, crossed another that ran parallel to the beach. According to the indications I had we ought to have gone to the right: but our old guide – who had not yet been told the object of our expedition, but had evidently guessed it – said the path stopped to the right, and that we must turn to the left. I was not convinced, but he stuck to his opinion. A short turn in both directions did not clear up the doubt; and a false move might have alarmed the band and sent it flying heaven knows where. It was still the dead of night and we had not been seen by anyone. So I went back to the high ground, collected all my men and went cautiously back to the town, where I sent them all to bed, though I kept the old guide under lock and key so that he should not come into contact with anybody.
Next night I repeated the attempt. I blockaded the position according to my own principles and advanced at dawn. I had been right. The old guide had not been deceitful, but he only knew the place from hazy recollections of his far-off youth. The cave was found: a real fortress very well furnished with provisions. But the bandits were not there. There were fresh traces of them, namely, a strip of paper hung on the wall with dabs of shaving soap on it. Evidently the band had gone out on some expedition, and now that we had arrived would not come back to that place. But it would be within range. So I went back to the town and openly moved some of my men to places some way off so that the band should not go away.
Two days passed: and on the morning of the third day I heard that by night I should get information of the band’s new place of refuge. I said nothing to anyone, so that the expression of ill-concealed commiseration at our recent disappointment should stay on everybody’s face; but I had a strong party of police sent cautiously down towards the town from a village near by and concealed it a few hundred yards from the houses in a tunnel of a branch railway line then being constructed. By evening I knew that the band was in a country cottage about 800 yards as the crow flies from the town, on the opposite lip of a deep valley that runs to the west of the town and immediately below it. But the indications were not enough to ensure the certain success of a surprise, which was also made very difficult because our advance on the cottage would inevitably rouse all the watchdogs in the numerous habitations which were scattered all over the small tract we should have to pass through. I still said nothing. We had dinner as usual; we played our usual game of cards and had our little walk; then we went – to bed. Only then did I tell them all to stay in their rooms, in the dark, dressed and in readiness.
As for me, having somewhat disguised myself, I went out unobserved a little later, and in a short time got further indications as to the position of the cottage, its configuration and the way to it. Of its internal arrangement I learnt nothing. One useful thing I found out was that the cottage had a rustic courtyard in front of it surrounded by a high wall with a big, strong door. At the back it had a balcony looking on the town and particularly favourable for the bandits’ fire. I went back to the hotel, and a little after midnight I assembled all my men under the tunnel, where the force remained waiting for an hour or two.
To discount the inevitable alarm that would be given by all the dogs it was necessary that the encirclement of the cottage should take place in dead silence, with the utmost rapidity and with mathematical precision. But nobody knew its position, and in the thick darkness that wrapped the countryside it was extremely difficult to find one’s way. I formed four squads, commanded by excellent police officers and two officers of the carabinieri who were voluntarily joined by a young cavalry lieutenant who was doing police duty in the district; and I assigned them the task of surrounding the cottage at not more than thirty yards’ distance, allotting to each squad the side of the cottage it was to face.
The orders were to march quickly and silently, to reach all positions simultaneously, each squad to extend opposite the side of the house allotted to it, immediate communication to be established between all so that there should be no gaps, especially between one squad and the next, and to wait without moving from their posts on any pretext whatever. If anybody came out of the cottage, they were to fire but not move. If they were fired at from the cottage, they were to reply but not move. I said I would give final orders on the spot according to circumstances. Having assigned a particular route to each squad, so that all should reach their positions on the four sides simultaneously, I sent them off at short successive intervals, according to the distance they each had to travel. When the last squad had moved off I also went towards the place. It was a short march; it was a very dark night, as I have said: so that everything should have been favourable to surprise.
Suddenly, however, dogs began loudly barking in front of us, and the barking spread to our flanks and accompanied our footsteps. The men ducked their heads as though under a shower of hail and, muttering low curses against the friend of man, quickened their pace. I was highly annoyed, the famous cottage being too near for the bandits not to have heard the dreadful noise. Nevertheless, I did not lose heart. A few minutes later the squads were at their posts, extended in an unbroken line round the cottage. My men found some cover behind clumps of cactus, trees or bits of tumbledown wall, but most of them lay in the open. The squad in front of the balcony was entirely without cover. It was half past two in the morning when our wait began.
Many minutes had not gone by when the big door of the yard was opened cautiously to let a man out. The squad in front opened fire, just one round. The door shut with a bang, and the man who came out disappeared into the darkness. A few moments later a sudden volley was fired from the balcony at the back. The squad below it replied and there followed a rapid exchange of heavy fire. The band evidently wanted to test the position. So, to scatter any illusions or hopes on their part, I shouted to the force: “Fire from all sides!” when I could make myself heard. A heavy discharge struck the cottage on every side: the bandits now knew what they were up against.
A long pause followed on both sides. I had no interest in continuing to fire while the thick darkness still prevented our even seeing the windows. It was enough to hold on to the position. At daybreak I should have light to see my way. The bandits, however, did not take the same view. Being under cover, they began firing again with the evident intention of provoking reply from us, so that they could accurately single out our positions one by one. With this end in view they pushed some rolled-up mattresses out on to the balcony so that, standing behind them, they could bring their fire further forward. The fight went on in this way, with shots on both sides rather wildly aimed in the dark and with sudden volleys till dawn.
At the first streak of dawn the latitanti ceased fire. They were obviously having a council of war. I took advantage of this to inspect my men and give each of them orders for the decisive action: but I was seen, and fire was opened again. I was moving along the posts in front of the yard door when, in the thick of a clump of cactus near the wall of the yard, I saw the outline of two boot soles. On my order two agents seized them and pulled vigorously. It was a man – the one who had come out of the door in the night shortly after our arrival. He was a peasant, the tenant of the surrounded cottage in which he lived with his wife. Half-dead with fear, he told us that three days before Grisafi and his complete band had suddenly turned up and ordered him with dire threats of death to give him and his men food and lodging. He had had to obey and had been even compelled to go down to the town several times on errands for the bandits, while his wife was kept as a hostage. The afternoon of the preceding day he had been told to go to the town to see what I was doing. He had come, had watched me, and when he had seen me go quietly back to the hotel with my officers and go to bed, he had come back to the cottage to say that all was quiet in the town and that I was snoring hard.
This had so reassured the bandits that, while keeping their clothes on, they laid themselves down to sleep the sleep of the just. The barking of the dogs had awakened them, but had not roused their suspicion; the first suspicions had come from the noise my men had made in surrounding the house. One of them, the poor man added, had said it was probably only some animals got loose; but Grisafi, collecting the whole band with muskets loaded, had gone down, placed himself behind the door of the yard and told him to go out and see what was up. So he had had to go out. Greeted by our first volley, the poor fellow had been forced to take a lightning decision between two courses – either to go back into the yard with the probability of being killed by the bandits on the suspicion of treachery or to go on with the probability of being killed by the police on a contrary suspicion. “In my awful doubt,” he said, “I had a sudden inspiration: to pretend to be killed. I threw myself motionless on the ground in the clump of cactus from which you have just dragged me.”
We heard afterwards from the bandits themselves that, after the volley that had greeted the owner’s exit, they had pretended to shut the door, but had remained behind it in the hope we would rush in. When this hope failed, they had shut and bolted the door and had gone out on to the balcony and opened fire from it to see if they were really surrounded.
It now became light, and after the householder’s declaration, the situation was now perfectly clear. The cottage looked like a small fortress, and it was no easy thing to get into it. So we should have to force the bandits to move. Having, therefore, assigned to each of my posts its particular target, i.e. some opening in the house, door, window or balcony, I ordered fire to be reopened simultaneously, so that a hail of bullets was poured into the house from all sides. The bandits made a vigorous reply on all sides, and the fight raged fiercely in full view of the population who, attracted by the noise of the firing, were growing every moment thicker on the opposite slope of the valley. The· curiosity and interest of the public were so great that the town authorities had to make certain groups move on, because some shots from the bandits on the balcony, aimed high, had come among them.
Suddenly, as I was looking up, I distinctly saw one of the bandits crawling out of the window of the dovecot and up on the roof of the house to get to the top and find a better field of fire there. I pointed him out at once and a violent volley went in his direction. The bandit got off unhurt, but one of our bullets broke an arm of a small stone cross that stood at that place on the roof: and the bandit saw this. The bold attempt had meanwhile put my men’s backs up and our fire was resumed more hotly than ever. On the other hand, none of us was under any delusion. It was remembered that the bandit Torrigiami, formerly, when surrounded by the police, had first fought gallantly and then committed suicide rather than surrender; and it was thought that Grisafi was of the same mettle. But that was not so. The more savage such men are, the more cowardly.
All at once, as we were still keeping up a hot fire, loud shouts came from inside the cottage: “N’arrénnemu! N’arrénnemu!” (we surrender). I was surprised and, suspecting some trick, I replied in a loud voice: “I don’t accept!” and turning to my men I shouted: “Continuous fire!” Another hail of bullets penetrated the house at every opening, and the shouts of surrender became desperate. I ordered fire to cease and went to the closed door of the yard, ordering the bandits to lay down their arms, to open the door and come out with their hands up, and giving them two minutes’ grace, after which I should break down the door and rush the house by storm without answering for their lives. The two minutes went by in silence: then, quickly breaking in the door, I went into the yard with my officers and men, resolved to put my threat into execution. As we rushed in, however, at the top of a flight of steps that went from the yard to the house Grisafi, followed by his four companions, appeared unarmed and with his hands up. It was the end of a reign!
The bandits had excellent military muskets, both 91s and Mausers, the best revolvers, armes blanches, field-glasses and a large store of ammunition, much of it with explosive bullets which were particularly dear to Grisafi. I asked him at once why, having lost nobody by death or wounds and still having so much ammunition, he had decided to surrender. He looked at me and made no answer. And at that moment, in the eyes of the man who had shed so much blood and caused so much terror for the last twelve years, I saw the frightened look of a bull that is being led to slaughter.
I shall never forget the scene of the captured band’s bringing into the town. Right from the immediate neighbourhood of the cottage the road was lined by parties of onlookers which gradually turned into a large crowd. For a good part of the way the sullen group of bandits went by in a silence of almost overwhelming incredulity. Suddenly the crowd gave tongue. There was such a shout of joy and liberation as I shall never forget. The bandits turned pale and cast down their eyes. Later on, however, one or two of them came to notice again. In fact, some months later, in the big prison at Palermo, Grisafi procured a revolver somehow and killed his prison-companion, the bandit Calla, on account of some old grudge. A little later Santangelo, who had succeeded in escaping, came back to the district of Sciacca, killed two people and then disappeared.
When Mori returned to Sicily in 1924, the Mafia had moved decidedly upmarket. They had benefited from the turmoil created by the First World War. According to a pamphlet called “The Underworld in Sicily and the Fascist Response” that was serialized in a Trapani newspaper in 1923:
They used to be called “lu zuVincenzo” or “lu zu Andrea”, but today they are pompously known as “Don Vincenzo” or “Don Andrea”, wholesale merchants now knights of the Crown of Italy. Janissaries, friends and shoddy clients follow them around en masse. What services they render is not clear; but we do know that their so-called warehouses, and their great farms and farmhouses are frequented by foul brutes who in the country wear leggings, coarse clothes, and caps like a cyclist’s, pulled down at an angle over their foreheads. But in town they sport luxury clothes and often go around in carriages and even in cars.
The author of that pamphlet was a fan of Mori who had “restored peace to the island with his strategic arrests” and said that peasants spoke of him in gratitude as their “saviour”. He was, of course, still famous for his nine-hour shoot-out with Paolo Grisafi. Stories of his bravery circulated. He was called “a man with hair on his heart”, and was said to go about disguised as a monk when on the track of criminals. Within days of arriving in Trapani, Mori wrote to Mussolini, saying:
A new feature of the situation is the attitude of the old Mafia, many members of which (above all through unbridled exploitation of specific circumstances during the war) have now reached a comfortable economic position. Through self-interest they have grown conservative and law-abiding; they have withdrawn, or are tending to withdraw, from active life, and have assumed the curious garb of law and order fanatics. But others have remained at their stations and are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their power and prestige against the steady advance of the new Mafia. This . . . sprang up in the immediate postwar period as a reaction to, and rebellion against, the inflexible and persistent domination of the old Mafia. But it has the same characteristics . . . as the old Mafia, except that its reflexes are quicker and its actions more aggressive.
After attempting to purge the Fascist Party in Trapani of Mafiosi, Mori was appointed prefect of Palermo the following year. He then began a series of mass arrests, saying:“I am fully convinced that strong measures against the Mafia can cause no serious political harm. Quite the contrary in fact.”
As well as rounding up hundreds of suspects in the villages of the Madonie inland, his men kept certain nightspots under surveillance. They seized elegantly dressed young men who frequented the bars of Palermo and drove ostentatiously along the city’s most fashionable streets on the grounds that their wealth was ill-gotten.
The most infamous operation in the crackdown was the Siege of Gangi in January 1926.Mori sent his men out into the hills around the village of Gangi. A notorious gangster’s stronghold, it was built into the side of a hill and many of the houses had two entrances, one on the ground floor, the other on the first, so it was easy to escape if the house was raided. There were also hideouts behind walls, under floors or in attics, skilfully constructed by a local handyman named Tofanella. Mori swamped the area with carabinieri, leaving the latitanti no choice but to give themselves up. The first man to do so was Gaetoni Ferrarello, who had been wanted for over thirty years. He emerged from hiding on the morning of 2 January, walked to the house of Baron Li Destri on the central square and presented himself to questore Crimi, who Mori had sent to head the operation. According to the newspaper, Ferrarello flung his stick on the table and said slowly: “My heart trembles. This is the first time I have found myself in the presence of the law. I am giving myself up to restore peace and tranquillity to these tormented people.” After shaking hands with the local police and officials, he was led away.
But Mori did not just want to capture the mafiosi, he wanted to humiliate them. “I wanted to give the population tangible proof of the cowardice of criminals,” he wrote in his memoirs. The police were told to enter the houses of wanted men at night, when they were asleep. Their cattle were slaughtered and the meat sold at cut-price to local merchants. If men could not be found, their wives and children were taken hostage – women complained of maltreatment. Their fierce sense of honour then forced their menfolk to surrender. In 1926 alone, there were 5,000 arrests in the region of Palermo, making a mountain of paperwork. Eleven thousand men were behind bars when Mori left Sicily in 1929, claiming that the Mafia had been eradicated. He was wrong.
The Mafia in America
It was pure hubris for Cesare Mori to imagine that he could stamp out the Mafia, even using the most draconian methods afforded him by the Fascist state. It had already spread beyond his jurisdiction. By the 1890s there were criminal gangs operating in any American city that contained a sizeable Italian population. As early as 1878, a gang of Sicilian immigrants was operating a flourishing extortion racket among the Southern Italian residents of San Francisco. They called themselves “La Maffia”. The San Francisco Examiner described them as “a neat little tea party of Sicilian brigands . . . a villainous gang” whose objective was “the extortion of money from their countrymen by a system of blackmail, which includes attacks on character and threats to kill”. Their activities were curtailed when the body of a Sicilian immigrant called Catalani was found near Sausolito. Evidence pointed to Salvatore Messino, Iganzi Trapani, Rosario Meli and Giuseppe Bianchi. They were arrested and, eventually, convicted – but not of murder, only of robbing Catalani prior to his death.
In 1881, a young detective named David C. Hennessy was investigating the high rate of homicide in New Orleans. His investigations led to the Mafia boss Giuseppe Esposito, a Sicilian bandit who led “a band of seventy-five cut-throats” who specialized in kidnapping and extortion. He was arrested and deported as he was wanted by the Italian authorities. Soon after, Hennessy was dismissed from the force. However, after a victory by reformers in an election in 1888, he was appointed police chief. Under his leadership, the police began investigating violence on the New Orleans waterfront involving Italian immigrants. They discovered two rival Mafia gangs – the Provenzanos and the Matrangas – were fighting for control. The Provenzanos were arrested and tried for an attack on the Matrangas. They were convicted, but granted a second trial after evidence of perjury was uncovered. The Provenzanos believed that Hennessy favoured the Matrangas and threats were made on his life. Shortly before the new trial, Hennessy was assassinated using the traditional Mafia method – the blast of a shotgun. His last words were said to be: “The Dagos did it.” Hundreds of Italian immigrants were arrested and nineteen were indicted. Allegations spread that the Sicilian Mafia were trying to take over the city. When those indicted were acquitted there was a riot. A mob stormed the jailhouse and six of the accused Italians were lynched, along with five other co-defendants who had not even been tried yet. Italy broke off diplomatic relations. There was even talk of war.
However, this did not stop the influx of Italians. Early in the twentieth century, New York became the second biggest Italian city after Naples. One quarter of the population – more than half a million people – were Italian. Bewildered by the new land and its strange language, the new immigrants flocked to the Little Italies of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans and other cities. In many cases, people moved en masse from the towns and villages of Italy to set up new communities together in America. They brought with them their old loyalties and some from the south their old vendettas.
Mafiosi often entered the US on false papers, which the Italian authorities had been only too happy to supply to get rid of them. Many had good reasons to travel to America as restrictions imposed on ex-convicts in Italy were debilitating. After leaving an Italian prison the convict would be placed on Sorveglianza Speciale – “Special Surveillance” – meaning strict night curfew, no employment without permission from the police, regular reports to the local police station, a ban on carrying weapons and a ban from frequenting all drinking places. Criminals on the run also made their way to the United States. Once they arrived in America they found that the underworld was already overpopulated with Irish and Jewish ne’er-do-wells. At first, they could not penetrate the established gangs. But they could always prey on their own community.
Plunged into poverty, facing poor living conditions, prejudice and even lynching, the law-abiding immigrants soon realized the Promised Land they had dreamt of was, in fact, a nightmare. In their closed communities they found themselves living in a microcosm of the stratified society they had left behind in Europe. Sicilians, particularly, clung on to their distrust of the law and authority. Mafiosi exploited this fact and turned to their traditional occupation – extortion. They preyed on bankers, barbers, contractors and merchants, fellow Italians who already understood the ways of the Mafia.
On 3 August 1903, Nicolo Cappiello, a prosperous contractor living in Brooklyn, received a letter that read:
If you don’t meet us at Seventy-second Street and Thirteenth Avenue, Brooklyn, tomorrow afternoon, your house will be dynamited and your family killed. The same fate awaits you in the event of your betraying our purposes to the police.
The note was adorned with three black crosses surmounted by a skull and crossbones, and signed “Mano Nera” – “Black Hand”. When Cappiello ignored the letter, he got another two days later. It read:
You did not meet us as ordered in our first letter. If you still refuse to accede to our terms, but wish to preserve the lives of your family, you can do so by sacrificing your own life. Walk in Sixteenth Street, near Seventh Avenue, between the hours of four and five tonight.
This one concluded with the line: “Beware of Mano Nera”. When Cappiello ignored this letter too, several men visited his house. Some were old friends. Others claimed to be agents of the Black Hand. They told him that a price of $10,000 had been put on his head, but if he handed over $1,000 they would do their best to persuade the blackmailers to spare his life. Cappiello delivered the money on 26 August, but within a few days four men returned for an additional $3,000. Convinced that the gang intended to rob him of his entire fortune – which amounted to around $100,000 – bit by bit, he went to the police. Five men – three friends and two Black Handers – were arrested, tried and convicted. The case was complicated by the fact that the extortion racket had begun as a plot by Cappiello to ensnare his nephew-in-law whom he considered had disgraced his family by eloping with his niece. Nevertheless, the name “Black Hand” stuck.
Cappiello and the extortionists were Neapolitan and Brooklyn was largely the province of the Camorra, Naples’ equivalent of Sicily’s Mafia. Until then, the newspapers had written about the criminal activities of La Società Cammorristi, the Mala Vita and the Mafia. But in 1903 the New York Herald and Italian-language Bollettino della Sera began to use “Black Hand” as a catch-all term for all Italian criminal gangs as, for some time, respectable Italian-Americans had petitioned them not to bandy the name “Mafia” around as it applied only to a small band of Sicilian thugs. The other newspapers soon followed suit – as did the extortionists who preyed on other Italian immigrants.
Letters demanding money were regularly adorned with a crudely drawn Black Hand symbol. On 24 May 1911, Tano Sferrazzo of 307 East 45th Street in New York City received one. It read:
Various men of my society as you know well will demand some money because we need it in our urgent business and you finally have never consented to satisfy us to fulfil your duty. Therefore today finishes your case. In a few words I will explain the matter. You must know that in cases of this kind as your own when they are handled by useless persons the matter can be easily dropped or in other words neglected, but in your case we are men of high society and of great importance, and therefore the matter cannot be dropped, or in other words we cannot neglect this matter because the society will inflict a severe penalty. Therefore today talking with the chief, I have decided that you must do your duty otherwise death will take you and you must not worry over it because these are our rules, so you are warned which road do you wish to choose. Do what you please, it is immaterial to us. Money or death. If you want to save your life, tomorrow 25 May at 10pm take the Third Avenue train, go to 129th Street, walk towards Second Avenue. Walk as far as the First Avenue Bridge that leads you to the Bronx, walk up and down the bridge for a while; two men will then present themselves and will ask you, where are you going? To them you will give not less than $200.
Signed Black Hand
Sometimes the extortionists were apprehended. This letter appeared as an exhibit in the trial of Salvatore Romano, who had been indicted along with Antonio Lecchi and Pasquale Lopipero at the Court of General Sessions in New York on 22 September 1911. Other letters were more straightforward:
If you have not sufficient courage you may go to people who enjoy an honourable reputation and be careful as to whom you go. Thus you may stop us from persecuting you as you have been adjudged to give money or life. Woe upon you if you do not resolve to buy your future happiness, you can do from us by giving the money demanded . . .
Or:
This is the second time that I have warned you. Sunday at ten o’clock in the morning at the corner of Second Street and Third Avenue, bring three hundred dollars without fail. Otherwise we will set fire to you and blow you up with a bomb. Consider this matter well, for this is the last warning I will give you.
I sign the Black Hand
Black Hand gangs also appeared in Pittsburgh. On 27 May 1908, Mr G. Satarano received a letter, saying:
You please you know the company of the Black Hands. I want you to send $2,000, all gold money. You will find some friend to tell you about it. Send it to head man, Johnstown. We don’t want you to tell no person that talks too much. If you report about this letter we will kill you. We will kill you with a steel knife. You and your family. Give me money right away, for I want to use it. And remember, keep it quiet.
Black Hand
That same year, an Italian-American in Philadelphia also received a threatening letter, which read:
You will never see Italy again if you do not give $1,000 to the person that pinches you after he salutes you. (I say one thousand.) Carry it with you always and remember I am more powerful than the police and your God.
Black Hand
And in St Louis, another immigrant received a letter:
Dear Friend,
This is your second letter. You did not answer or come. What have you in your head? You know what you did in Brooklyn and that you went to Italy and then returned to Dago Hill [St Louis’s Italian quarter] to hide yourself. You can go to hell to hide but we will find you. It will be very bad for you and your family if you do not come to an understanding. So come Thursday night at ten o’clock. If you do not come we will cut you up in pieces. How will that be, you dirty false face. So we will wait for you. Best regards, good bye.
Under these words were two pictures – one of a man in a coffin; the other a skull and crossbones. There was also a postscript: “So this will be your appearance if you do not do as we tell you. The way the blood flows in my veins is the way the blood will flow from your veins.”
Most people paid up. Italian immigrants felt that American law had no understanding of their situation and no power to help them. They knew that the threats in Black Hand letters were likely to be carried out if they did not pay up. Many Italians were armed. According to an official at Ellis Island, the clearing station for immigrants, two-thirds of all male immigrants landing were carrying knives, revolvers or blackjacks. And there was no law permitting the immigration authorities to disarm them. The police said: “Ninety-five out of every one hundred Italians are armed with some sort of deadly weapon.”
However, the New York Police Department did take the situation seriously. They set up a special Italian squad under Detective Sergeant Giuseppe “Joe” Petrosino. An immigrant from Salerno region, Petrosino had dealt with extortion rackets earlier in his career with the NYPD. In 1902, he accompanied prosperous wholesale tailor Stephen Carmenciti, who lived on East 103rd Street in the Italian neighbourhood of East Harlem in Manhattan, to a rendezvous to pay $150 to an extortion gang calling itself the “Holy House”. Two Holy House members – Carmine Mursuneso of East 106th Street and Joseph Mascarello of East 107th Street – were arrested. However, they were acquitted when Carmenciti refused to testify, fearing for the safety of his family.
Petrosino rose to prominence in 1903 when the corpse of a man with seventeen stab wounds was found stuffed in a barrel in a vacant lot at East 11th Street and Avenue D, near Little Italy on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His throat had been cut so savagely that his head was nearly severed from his body. His severed genitals had also been cut off and stuffed in his mouth. This was reminiscent of a murder the previous year when the partially dismembered body of a Brooklyn grocer named Giuseppe Catania had been found in a sack on the beach at Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The murderers had not been found, but the motive had been traced back to a criminal trial in Palermo some twenty years before when Catania’s testimony had sent a number of men away for a twenty-year stretch. The murders had plainly been gangland affairs and the bodies were left where they would be found as a warning.
The body in the barrel was not immediately identified. However, Petrosino believed that he had seen the victim before at the trial of Italian counterfeiter Giuseppe De Priemo. The detective travelled to Sing Sing to see him. When De Priemo saw a photograph of the dead man, he immediately identified him as his brother-in-law Benedetto Madonia. The victim had been a member of a counterfeiting gang who had been in hiding in Buffalo, upstate New York. He had recently visited De Priemo with a man named Tomasso Petto – better known as “Petto the Ox” – and was on his way to New York City to get their share of the loot.
A pair of gloves found near the barrel bore the label of a Buffalo store – Petto had also been holed up in the city. According to De Priemo, his brother-in-law always carried a watch with distinctive markings “on the neck”. Pawnshops were checked and the watch was found in one of them. The man who had pawned the watch for one dollar was identified as Petto. When the police went to question Petto in the Prince Street Saloon, Petto pulled a stiletto. They grappled him to the ground. Once he was restrained, they searched him and found another knife, a pistol and the pawn ticket for the watch. Petto denied murdering Madonia, or getting the watch from him. He had obtained it, he said, from an Italian named “John” whose last name he did not know, though he said they had been friends for three years. As he neither wanted or needed the watch, he had pawned it.
According to the Secret Service – which was then part of the US Treasury – Madonia had been the agent for the counterfeiting ring. It was his job to distribute the forged bills to dealers around the country. Some of the money had gone missing. Suspected of double-dealing, Madonia had been put to death.
The leaders of the gang were Ignazio Saietta – aka “Lupo the Wolf” – and Giuseppe Morello. Petto was the gang’s heavy. Physically strong but not very bright, Petto could not resist stealing the only valuable – and traceable – item in Madonia’s possession. He went on trial for murder, but went free after Madonia’s wife, son and brother-in-law refused to testify against him. He left New York and went to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he became involved in various “Black Hand” activities. In August 1904, he was implicated in the kidnapping of Morello gang member Vito Laduca, though no charges were ever filed. The following year, he was found dead outside his home in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. There were sixty-two stab wounds in his body. Giuseppe De Priemo – then out of jail – was suspected, but no arrests were made and Petto’s murderer was never found.
Another man involved with the Lupo-Morello gang was Don Vito Cascio Ferro. When he first travelled to New York in 1901 he was already a seasoned criminal. It was said that he was the first mafioso “of respect” to set foot in America and was feted in Sicilian-American criminal circles. Living with his sister Francesca in an apartment on 23rd Street before finding his own place at 117 Morgan Street, he introduced the extortion method known as u pizzu, from the Sicilian expression fari vagnari u pizzu, which means “to wet one’s beak” or, colloquially, “to wet your whistle” – traditionally a glass of wine or other light refreshment offered in recognition of a service rendered. The principle was simple. Instead of asking for a large amount that risked bankrupting the victim, it was better to ask for smaller amounts that the victim could afford, then return later for more money. Don Vito decreed that no one who could afford it was to escape paying the Onorata Società u pizzu for its protection. Ferro was suspected of involvement in the murder of Madonia. The charges against him blocked his application for citizenship. To escape arrest, he fled to New Orleans, then back to Sicily, leaving Lupo and others to continue the Black Hand’s collection of u pizzu. Ferro took with him, it is said, a photograph of Joe Petrosino which he carried always in his wallet.
Despite the formation of the Italian Squad and Petrosino’s campaign against the Black Hand, extortion remained rife in New York City. Then two plain-clothed policemen were killed by a young man who had just arrived from Palermo. This prompted a citywide sweep for Italians carrying concealed weapons. The county coroner who first considered homicide cases – himself an Italian – received a letter signed by 200 Italian women, protesting that Italians were being picked on. It was the Sicilians to blame, they said:
The Sicilian is a blood-thirsty man. He belongs to the Black Hand. He exercises blackmail, is a dynamiter and, by blood, a coward . . . We must suppress the immigration from Sicily. Then you will see if the Italians in America will not be mentioned any more criminally.
The problem was that most New York policemen, who were traditionally Irish, could not tell the difference between a Sicilian and an Italian.
However Petrosino’s Italian Squad did have its successes. During the round-up, it arrested Enrico Erricone, “Generalissimo of the Camorra”, who was deported back to Italy to stand trial and Petrosino was hailed by the newspapers as the “Italian Sherlock Holmes”. It was reported that this caused “an enormous sensation among the members of the Neapolitan Camorra” and that “the Black Hand condemned Petrosino to death”.
They continued undeterred. A 6.30pm on 23 January 1908, a bomb went off outside the bank of Pasquale Pati & Sons at 240 Elizabeth Street, between Houston and Prince Streets, in the heart of Little Italy. It blew out the windows scattering $40,000 in gold and bills displayed there to show that the bank was solvent across the street. Usually there was $30,000 on display, but recently Pati had upped the amount when several other Italian banks had got into trouble. Pasquale’s son Salvatore was injured by flying glass, but managed to recover most of the money. Pati’s neighbour Paolo Bononolo, who owned the building at 242 Elizabeth Street adjoining the bank, thought the bomb was directed at him as he had received several Black Hand letters. He owned a tenement at 512 East 13th Street which adjoined a house where a bomb had gone off in the early hours of the morning two days before. Petrosino dismissed this as the Black Hand rarely make mistakes and, after fervent denials, Pati admitted that he had received Black Hand threats some time before, but ignored them. He then locked up the money that had been in the window and hired a special policeman to guard the building at night.
After the bombing, a meeting was called at 178 Park Row, above the offices of the Bollettino. Taking their cue from the White Hand Society formed to combat the Black Hand in Chicago in November 1907, those attending set up the Associazione de Vigilanza e Protezione Italiana. The editor of Bollettino, Frank L. Frugone, became president and it soon had over 300 members. It did no good. On 1 February, the Senna Brothers grocery store at 244 Elizabeth Street was blown up. Three nights later a bomb exploded in the hallway of La Sovoia restaurant and saloon at 234 Elizabeth Street. The bar was blown over, collapsing on waiters and customers. Then on 26 March, the bombers hit Bononolo’s bank at 246 Elizabeth Street. The bomb blew a hole in the wall of Bononolo’s quarters, burying Bononolo’s wife and two daughters under the debris. Though their clothes were blown off, they were uninjured except for a few scratches and bruises. All the windows in the building above were smashed and the tenants ran out into the street where crowds were crying, “Mano Nero!”
Bononolo told the police: “This has happened because I did not heed their warnings. For five years, scarcely a month has gone by when I have not received one or more Black Hand letters. They asked for sums ranging from $1 to $1,000, but nothing ever happened, and recently I had paid no attention to their threats. This is to warn me. Next time I shall be killed.”
Even so Bononolo was refused permission to carry a pistol. Meanwhile Pati had armed himself. He had made representations to the Mafia that he should be left alone, due to his connections to the Camorra. But Black Hand warnings had been given. They would not be withdrawn and Pati was still to consider himself a target. When men arrived at the bank to collect money, Pati and his son, along with a half a dozen friends, shot and killed one of them. Pati was congratulated by the police as “a brave man and the first of his race to face the Black Hand issue squarely”. Then he secretly relocated, for fear of Mafia reprisals, it was said. However, it was later discovered that, after Lupo the Wolf had first made threats against Pati, there had been a run on his bank. The man shot was actually an innocent depositor. When Pati disappeared, he made off with the rest of the bank’s money. Four years later, the police were still looking for him, but for the moment he was hailed as a hero. Perhaps more of a hero was Pietro Caropole of New Jersey, who killed one member of the Black Hand and wounded another, and in 1908 was still holding his ground, despite new death threats.
In Chicago, the White Hand Society had gained the support of the city’s leading Italian-language newspapers, L’Italia and La Tribuna Italiana Transatlantica, as well as the Italian ambassador in Washington and the Italian minister of foreign affairs in Rome. Its organizers declared “war without truce, war without quarter” against the Black Hand and looked forward to the day when there would be Mano Bianca groups “in all the cities that contain large Italian colonies, which suspect the existence of mafiosi or Camorristi in their midst”. Indeed, White Hand Societies sprang up in Pittsburgh, Baltimore and other cities. They had some early successes. Rich Pittsburgh merchants and pillars of the White Hand Giuseppe Sunseri and E. Bisis, along with friends of Baltimore Black Hand victim Joseph Di Giorgio, joined battle with the Black Hand in the Pennsylvania Railroad yards on 9 December 1907. In an exchange of gunfire, Sunseri was wounded, but he killed one of his assailants, Philip Rei.
By January 1908, the White Hand claimed they had driven ten of the worst Italian criminals out of Chicago. However, the Mano Nera fought back. On 28 February, the president of Chicago’s White Hand Society, Dr Carlo Volini, received a letter telling him:
The supreme council of the Black Hand has voted that you must die. You have not heeded our warnings in the past, but you must heed this. Your killing has been assigned and the man waits for you.
Volini told reporters that he was unafraid. “They may kill me,” he said, “but the cause I live for will go on.” However, Volini was not killed, but support for the Mano Bianca began to ebb away. Italian immigrants had little faith that the White Handers could be any more effective than the authorities in stemming the power of the Mano Nera.
But in New York, Petrosino pressed on. In July 1908, his men arrested a man they claimed to be the Black Hand’s principal bomb-maker and raided a saloon on East 11th Street they said was the gang’s headquarters. It did no good. Only a few days later a letter appeared in The New York Times. It read:
My name is Salvatore Spinelli. My parents in Italy came from a decent family. I came here eighteen years ago and went to work as a house painter, like my father. I started a family and I have been an American citizen for thirteen years. I had a house at 314 East Eleventh St and another one at 316, which I rented out. At this point the “Black Hand” came into my life and asked me for seven thousand dollars. I told them to go to hell and the bandits tried to blow up my house. Then I asked the police for help and refused more demands, but the “Black Hand” set off one, two, three, four, five bombs in my houses. Things went to pieces. From thirty-two tenants I am down to six. I owe a thousand dollars interest that is due next month and I cannot pay. I am a ruined man. My family lives in fear. There is a policeman on guard in front of my house, but what can he do? My brother Francesco and I do guard duty at the windows with guns night and day. My wife and children have not left the house for weeks. How long can this go on?
Dynamiting was a favourite Black Hand method of enforcement. There was a great deal of construction work going on in New York at the time and dynamite had recently replaced blasting powder for blasting foundations or subway tunnels in Manhattan’s solid rock substrate. Workmen used to make off with used sticks as there was a profitable black market among extortion gangs. As late as 1917, long after strict laws controlling the sale and use of dynamite had been introduced, the police commissioner warned that the “workmen at the 14th Street subway are getting away with two or three sticks of dynamite daily”.
There was a lively debate about the origin of the name “Black Hand”. There was, of course, the famous Black Hand gang in Serbia, who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, precipitating the First World War. However, that Black Hand had not been formed until 1911. Journalist Lindsay Denison, writing in Everybody’s Magazine in September 1908, said that the Black Hand had been “a secret society which fought the government and the church” in Spain during the Inquisition and “the secret societies of Southern Italy were its heirs”. The president of the United Italian Societies of New York, Gaetano D’Amato, said that the name had been used again in Spain in the 1860s by a society of thieves and murderers who styled themselves protectors and guardians for the downtrodden against persons of wealth. He also said that the term was first used in the United States “some ten years ago . . . probably by some Italian desperado who had heard of the exploits of the Spanish society, and considered the combination of words to be high-sounding and terror-inspiring”.
Denison replied that “a false report was raised in Spain” during the 1870s and 1880s that it had been revived. The story, Denison said:
. . . lingered in the brain of a [New York] Herald reporter, and one fine day he attempted to rejuvenate waning interest in a puzzling Italian murder case by speculating as to the coming to life of the Black Hand among Latin immigrants in America. The other newspapers seized on the idea eagerly, and kept it going . . .
Denison went on to speak of the organized sections of the Black Hand:
It is not possible to speak certainly of the way in which the spoils of their plots are divided. It seems most likely that the “divvy” is governed by the generosity of the head “bad-man” and the risks taken by the members accumulating the loot. The worst and greediest scoundrel in the plot takes all he dares. Most of the rest goes to the men who made the threats. Half of what the chief takes goes “higher up”. There are at least two or three old graduates of South Italian crime, who never sully their Hands with the commission of actual crimes nor trouble their minds to plan them, though occasionally the big chief or one of his nearest lieutenants may drop in on an Italian banker and ask for a thousand dollars or so. He gets it, quick. He doesn’t have to make any threats; the appearance of his face in the place is a threat . . . The very names of the Black Hand’s big chiefs are names of terror.
The success of the Black Hand methods caused the idea to spread all over the country. The Pittsburgh police were credited with “the break up of the best organized blackmailing bands in the history of the Black Hand”. One of their raids produced evidence that they had “stumbled upon a huge society combining the worst features of the Mafia and Camorra”. They had found “carefully written by-laws, with a definite scale of spoil division and with many horrible oaths”. Then on another raid they found what appeared to be a “school of the Black Hand”, two young Italians had “actually been practicing with daggers on dummy figures”. However, further investigation revealed that the Pittsburgh band was in fact the alliance of the three or four local Black Hand gangs and no connection with New York Black Handers was ever made. Lieutenant Petrosino learnt of a new, more sophisticated extortion method that was spreading through the community. A shopkeeper in Elizabeth Street told him that three men had entered his shop and said they knew he had received Black Hand letters. They offered him protection from the Black Hand threats for a small, regular fee. Many of the Black Hand bombers slowly turned into fatherly “protectors” who integrated themselves openly into society. The anonymous terrorist had become a known face in the community and the protection racket had started.
In the summer of 1908, Raffaele Palizzolo, a Mafia chief and long-time deputy for the city of Palermo in the Italian parliament, visited New York. Despite – or, perhaps, because of – having been tried for murder three times, he was acknowledged as “the political boss of Palermo; indeed, the uncrowned king of Sicily”.
Although Palizzolo was greeted as an honoured guest by the Italian community, Petrosino shadowed him. In fact, Palizzolo’s power was waning in Sicily and his visit to New York was a fund-raiser. He posed as an enemy of the Black Hand and the Mafia. Nevertheless, stories that he was the “king of the Mafia” began to circulate. The close attention of Petrosino inhibited Palizzolo’s freedom of action and he headed home sooner than planned. According to the New York Mayor George B. McCellan, on leaving, Palizzolo shook his fist at Petrosino, who had followed him to the pier, and shouted:“If you ever come to Palermo, God help you.”
During 1908, New York Police Commissioner Theodore A. Bingham kept a record of all crime relating to the Black Hand. The summary read:
Black Hand cases reported : 424
Arrests : 215
Convictions : 36
Discharges : 156
Pending : 23
Bomb outrages reported : 44
Arrests : 70
Convictions : 9
Discharges : 58
Pending : 3
The Black Hand had become such a problem that a new undercover squad had to be formed. On 20 February 1909, the New York Times ran a story on the new force:
NEW SECRET SERVICE
TO BATTLE “BLACK HAND”
------
Italian Merchants Said to Have Raised Fund
for Bingham’s Detective Force.
------
PETROSINO IS IN CHARGE
------
Identity of New Sleuths Kept
as a Profound Secret –
Italian Government Will Co-operate.
Police Commissioner Theodore A. Bingham finally has his secret service. It is a secret in every sense of the word, since no one at 300 Mulberry Street [formerly police headquarters] except Lieutenant Petrosino and Bingham himself knows its membership. Substantial funds for the maintenance of the Secret Squad have been made available to the Commissioner, but this is all he will say. He refuses to discuss their source, confining himself to the assurance that it is not public money. It is generally believed that the money was contributed by a number of prosperous Italian merchants and bankers across the city, aroused by the wave of extortions in recent years.
Petrosino was quoted as saying:
There is only one thing that can wipe out the Black Hand, and that is the elimination of ignorance. The gangsters who are holding Little Italy in the grip of terror come chiefly from Sicily and Southern Italy, and they are primitive country robbers transplanted into cities. This is proved by their brutal methods. No American hold-up man would ever think of stopping somebody and slashing his face with a knife just to take his wallet. Probably he would threaten him with a pistol. No American criminal would blow up a man’s house or kill his children because he refused to pay fifty or a hundred dollars. The crimes that occur among the Italians here, are the same as those committed at one time by rural outlaws in Italy; and the victims, like the killers, come from the same ignorant class of people. In short we are dealing with banditry transplanted to the most modern city in the world.
The only way to thwart the Mafia was to cut it off at its roots, Petrosino said. He had to go to Sicily. On 20 February 1909, The New York Times reported that Petrosino had been given a roving commission to wipe out the Black Hand and had disappeared from police headquarters. The police would only say that he was on vacation, which no one believed. In fact, he had been in Washington making arrangements for his trip with the State Department and the Secret Service. He returned briefly to New York, where he consulted with Commissioner Bingham, then disappeared again. The Herald reported that he was on his way to Italy and Sicily, “where he will procure important information about Italian criminals who have come to this country”.
Petrosino had left the country secretly on 9 February under an assumed name. However, the purser on the Italian liner Duca di Genova recognized him. Arriving in Genoa on 21 February, he headed to Rome carrying a letter of introduction from the State Department to Ambassador Lloyd C. Griscom and a list of Italian criminals then resident in the United States. Petrosino believed that around 5,000 Italians in New York had Old World criminal records. In his twenty-six-year career, he had already succeeded in deporting more than 500 Italian criminals to serve jail sentences they had eluded by emigrating.
However, when Petrosino arrived in Rome, the US embassy was closed for Washington’s birthday. Roaming the streets he met the editor of L’Araldo Italiano, a New York Italian-language newspaper, who was in Italy to cover the aftermath of the earthquake that had hit Messina on 28 December 1908. On 5 February, L’Araldo had published a story about Petrosino’s forthcoming departure, giving his itinerary and wishing him well in his mission. Together they went to a restaurant where they bumped into Giovanni Branchi, the former Italian consul general in New York who Petrosino knew well.
The following day, the embassy was open again and Petrosino got to see Ambassador Griscom who arranged for him to visit Giovanni Giolitti, the Italian minister of the interior, and Francesco Leonardi, the head of the national police. However, he did not actually get to meet Signor Giolitti, only his secretary to whom he explained his “study trip” on international crime. Police Chief Leonardi was more helpful, furnishing him with a letter of introduction to his subordinates, ordering them to give Petrosino all possible help. Apparently, Petrosino did not disclose that the actual purpose of his mission was to set up a spy network so he could keep tabs on the comings and goings of Mafiosi.
Petrosino then made a short visit to Padula, his home town, where his brother showed him an Italian paper that carried a reprint of the Herald story. His secret mission, it seems, was not so secret any more. On the train to Naples, he was recognized by a captain in the carabinieri. From Naples, Petrosino took a steamer to Palermo, arriving there on the morning of 28 February.
He registered at a hotel under a false name, then called the US consul, William H. Bishop. Bishop was the only person he confided his plans to, though he said he had informers in Palermo. He went to a bank and opened an account in his own name so that he could have his mail directed there. After that, he went to the courthouse and started collecting the criminal records of the men on his list to find out which ones were wanted.
For nearly a week, Petrosino moved around Palermo and the surrounds alone. Then, carrying a letter of introduction from Bishop, he visited Police Commissioner Baldassare Ceola. At that point, he was checking to see whether the passports carried by Italian criminals entering the United States were valid, making it plain that he did not trust the local authorities. Ceola offered him a bodyguard, which he refused. On 11 March, Petrosino told Bishop that he was going to Caltanissetta to check the records in the courthouse there. He said that he would be back in Palermo the following day as he had an important appointment at nine in the evening.
However, Petrosino was already growing wary. He wrote in his notebook: “Have already met criminals who recognized me from New York. I am on dangerous ground.”
The following day, after he had made copies of the material he had collected, he made a fresh note, concerning: “Vito Cascio Ferro, born in Sambuca Zabut, resident of Bisaquino, Province of Palermo, dreaded criminal.” After lunch at a café, where he was seen talking briefly with two men, he went to the Piazza Marina. A few minutes later shots were heard. Petrosino’s dead body was found near the Garibaldi Gardens in the centre of the square.
News of Petrosino’s assassination caused a sensation in New York. Reporters besieged police headquarters for details. The Italian community were particularly upset, fearing they might be blamed. The Bollettino said:
We will answer to the attack that the Black Hand are not all Italians and that the assassins are not all Sicilians, among whom are many honourable people deserving of respect and esteem. The assassins of Petrosino are wild beasts capable of the most terrible crimes. They have no country, no religion, no family, and no civilization.
Il Telegrafo said:
The assassination of Petrosino is an evil day for the Italians of America, and none of us can any longer deny that there is an organized Black Hand Society in the United States. The agents of the Society in Sicily were evidently aware of Petrosino’s coming, and they prepared to kill him accordingly.
L’Araldo said that it was time for Italians to take action “to prevent the spreading of that criminality which had brought so much unjust discredit on the name of the Italians in the United States”, while Il Progresso ran the Petrosino murder on its front page for several days and carried a reprint of a New York Journal editorial calling for greater police protection for Italians, in both English and Italian.
Petrosino’s body was shipped home to New York. An estimated 250,000 people turned out for his funeral. The procession was led by Mayor McClellan and Police Commissioner Bingham, but was made up largely by “men of Italian birth” according to the New York Sun, “who testified by their presence to their esteem for this valuable peace officer and their approval of the work he did.”
But the popular acclaim of Petrosino did little to dent the power of the Black Hand. A few weeks later, Pioggio Puccio, who had helped organize the funeral and a benefit at the Academy of Music for Petrosino’s widow, was shot and killed on his doorstep at East 75th Street in Manhattan. The benefit itself was not a great success as “the majority of those who promised to take part at the last moment sent excuses”. Almost everyone involved with the benefit, including Puccio, received threatening letters. Soon after an Italian grocer on Spring Street received a letter demanding money which said: “Petrosino is dead, but the Black Hand still lives.” He took it to the police. Days later, the tenement where he lived was burnt down with the loss of nine lives.
The fate of Giuseppe Petrosino surprised no one in Palermo. An article in the Sunday New York Times by “A Veteran Diplomat” said: “Petrosino’s murderers will never be brought to justice. It is just as well that the people of New York should resign themselves to the fact.”
In Sicily, Bishop, the American consul, felt that he was being “delayed and hindered” by the authorities in his own efforts to investigate the murder. However, pressure was brought to bear on Commissioner Ceola, who had been trying to purge his force of Mafia influence. In April, he issued a report calling for the indictment of fifteen men, including Vito Cascio Ferro who, since his return from the US, had risen to become the capo di capi in Palermo. His system of collecting u pizzu had been extended to those outside commerce. Everyone – lawyers, landowners, civil servants – paid this “tax” to the Mafia one way or another. Even lovers had to give “a cannila” – “candle” – tribute, which allowed the man to walk up and down beneath his sweetheart’s window.
Also on the list were Antonio Pasananti and Carlo Costantino, two men who had been involved in the barrel murder case in New York and had returned unexpectedly to Sicily a few days before Petrosino arrived. They were already in custody. Cascio Ferro was picked up a few days later.
However, Cascio had a cast-iron alibi supplied by the Honourable Domenico De Michele Ferrantelli who had been elected to the chamber of deputies in the general election held a few days before the murder. In the election, Palizzolo had been soundly defeated after backing Francesco Nitti. Ferrantelli was a supporter of Giovanni Giolitti, the minister of the interior and now premier. His administration was later described by historian Gaetano Salvemini as “the prime ministry of the underworld”.
After submitting his report, Commissioner Ceola was summoned to Rome and sacked. The suspects were freed on bail. Two years later, when people’s attention was taken up with the forthcoming war with Turkey over Libya, all charges were dismissed.
Don Vito Cascio Ferro’s criminal career continued to flourish until 1929, when he fell foul of Mussolini. Unwilling to compromise with the Fascists, he was arrested by Cesare Mori on trumped-up charges of smuggling. The trial was short. Throughout Don Vito maintained a disdainful silence, which he broke only to rebuke his counsel for making certain statements that “clashed with his principles and authority”. At the end of the proceedings the president of the court asked him whether he had anything to add. He looked the judges straight in the face and said: “Gentlemen, since you have been unable to find any evidence for the numerous crimes I really have committed, you are reduced to condemning me for the only one I have not.”
In prison he was treated with respect by the other inmates. He was able to help needy prisoners and their families by providing for them from the ill-gotten gains of other prisoners. He also arranged sizeable dowries for the daughters of certain prisoners. It was even said that he managed to get the dowry of the daughter of a leading Fascist in Caltanissetta transferred to the daughter of one of his fellow prisoners.
Much of the respect given to Don Vito came from the one and only murder he did admit to – that of Giuseppe Petrosino.
“In my entire life,” he said, “I killed only one person and that I did disinterestedly.”
That day, Don Vito had been invited to lunch by Deputy Ferrantelli. In the middle of the meal, Cascio Ferro absented himself for a short time, borrowed his host’s carriage, drove to the Piazza Marina where he waited outside the Palazzo Steri, the seat of the Courts of Justice. When Petrosino arrived, Don Vito despatched him with a single shot, got back in the carriage and returned to Ferrantelli’s house to finish lunch. Later, when Cascio Ferro was charged, Ferrantelli testified that he had been in his home all the time and Don Vito walked free.
For Don Vito, killing Petrosino personally was a matter of honour. Although other candidates have been put up, it is now widely accepted that Cascio Ferro pulled the trigger – while Passananti and Costantino were on hand to set him up.
“Petrosino was a courageous enemy,” Don Vito said. “He did not deserve a dirty death at the hands of just any hired killer.”
In the Vicaria, in one of the passages leading to the infirmary, Don Vito carved the motto: “Vicaria, malatia e nicissitati si vidi lu cori di l’amicu” – “In prison, sickness or need, one finds the heart of a true friend.” For many years, these words gave comfort to inmates and warders alike.
It is not known how Don Vito died. According to anti-Mafia journalist Michele Pantaleone, he died “of a broken heart after a few years”. Officially he died in 1945 at the age of 83. However, Petrosino’s biographer Arrigo Petacco believes he died in 1943, after the Allied invasion of Sicily.
“Fascism had collapsed, the Allied armies were moving north along the peninsula and the Flying Fortresses were attacking without respite,” said Petacco. “So the prison authorities had ordered the evacuation of the penitentiary of Pozzouli, which was too exposed to bombardment. In a few hours all the inmates were moved except one; Don Vito, who was forgotten in his cell. He died of thirst and terror in the gloomy, abandoned penitentiary, like the villain in some old serial story.”
For many years afterwards it was an honour to occupy Don Vito’s prison bed. Other inmates treated it with respect. Later it would be occupied by another famous Mafioso – Don Calogero Vizzini, better known as Don Calò, who lent Mafia assistance to the Allied invasion.
While the Mafia continued to flourish on both sides of the Atlantic, the Black Hand suffered irreversible setbacks. The Secret Service rounded up the Lupo-Morello gang. Convicted of counterfeiting, Lupo the Wolf was sentenced to thirty years. His brother-in-law Giuseppe Morello got twenty-five. Both sentences were to be served in the new Federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Twelve smaller fry were sentences to shorter terms. The two- and five-dollar bills had been printed in Salerno and shipped over in boxes supposedly containing olive oil, olives, cheese, wine, macaroni, spaghetti and other Italian produce. They were sold for 30 or 40 cents each to agents who then distributed them around the country. Both Lupo and Morello were paroled in 1922 in time to benefit from Prohibition.
While Lupo and Morello and much of their gang were in jail, Giosue Gallucci became “King of Harlem’s Little Italy” and was thought to be worth $500,000. However, shortly before 10pm on 7 May 1915, Gallucci left the family bakery at 318 East 109th Street and walked to the coffee shop he had just bought for his son Luca. Four men then entered the shop and fired at the Galluccis. Giosue was hit in the neck and stomach; Luca in the stomach. There were fifteen customers in the coffee shop, mostly friends of Gallucci. They returned fire but the assailants escaped. When the police arrived they arrested everyone in the coffee shop. Giosue Gallucci died that evening in hospital. Luca, who had managed to stagger back across to the family home, survived until the following day. Their bodyguard, Joe Nozzaro – known as Joe Chuck who always wore a steel vest – was found under a trolley car on 16 March 1917. There was a bullet hole in his chest and one in his right shoulder. The body had been dragged 100 feet by the car before it stopped and it took half an hour to disentangle it. The police said that he was “one of fifty or more men whose lives were sacrificed in a long-standing feud which it had been hoped ended on 7 May 1915, when Gallucci and his son Luca were murdered”.
It was the Morellos who benefited most from the death of Gallucci. The gang was run by brothers Nicolo and Antonio Morello and half-brothers Vincenzo and Ciro Terranova while Giuseppe was away. Other members of the family included the ambitious Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria and Umberto “Rocco” Valenti. It was also to become a breeding ground for future leaders of New York’s “Five Families” such as Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Frank “the Prime Minister” Costello, Vito Genovese and Giuseppe “Joe Adonis” Doto.
Salvatore Lucania
Organized Italian racketeering became a national force in the US in the 1920s with Prohibition. Along with prostitution and gambling, there was now a new illicit commodity that millions of Americans craved – alcohol. It brought gangsters riches and respectability beyond their wildest dreams. Until then the underworld had been monopolized by the Irish, Jews and, to a lesser extent, Poles. Now Italian racketeers seized the chance to move into the big time. Even before Prohibition, thousands of home distilleries had been operating in Italian immigrant neighbourhoods. This gave them a head start when it came to bootlegging.
By the end of the decade, despite the publicity given to Alphonse “Scarface Al” Capone, a vain, podgy little man named Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria had emerged as the most powerful single figure in Italian crime. In a power struggle within the Morello gang, Masseria gained the reputation of being “the man who can dodge bullets” after surviving two assassination attempts unscathed. In retaliation, he organized the assassination of his rival Umberto Valenti and did a deal with Pietro Morello, making Masseria Mob boss while Morello remained chief strategist. Allied with Al Capone in Chicago and Bronx crime boss Tom Reina, Masseria sought to take over completely in New York. Ranged against him were the Castellammarese, immigrants from the Sicilian town of Castellammare del Golfo, who had settled across the eastern seaboard. Although widely dispersed, they remained fiercely loyal to their New York chief Salvatore Maranzano. A student of the works of Julius Caesar, Maranzano had been sent to the US in 1925 by Sicily’s Mafia boss Don Vito Cascio Ferro to bring the American Mafia under his control.
Masseria himself was from Masala, less than thirty miles from Castellammare. He set out to eliminate Maranzano, as well as other Castellammarese leaders such as Joe Bonanno and Joseph Profaci in Brooklyn, Buffalo’s Stefano Magaddino and Joseph Aiello in Chicago. But Maranzano knew what was coming and set up a meeting with Tom Reina in an attempt to get him to switch allegiance.
He also put out feelers to the leader of a group of young turks named Charles “Lucky” Luciano. Born Salvatore Lucania in the village of Lercara Friddi, Sicily, in 1896, he had emigrated to the United States with his family at the age of nine. They settled in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. At the age of ten, he was already involved in mugging, shoplifting, burglary and extortion. One of the Jewish kids he tried to extort protection money from at school was Maier Suchowljuansky. Born in Grodno, then in Russia, in 1902, he had moved to New York with his family in 1911 and anglicized his name to Meyer Lansky. Lucania and Lansky became firm friends, along with Lansky’s younger sidekick who was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.
Lucania’s attendance at school was sporadic and he was sent to a special school for truants in Brooklyn. On his release, he got a job as a delivery boy for a milliner, his only legitimate job. In 1916, he was caught carrying heroin concealed under the hat bands and was sentenced to a year in jail, where he changed his name to Charlie as the diminutive of his given name “Sal” invited homosexual assaults. When he was released, he formed a gang with Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis and Vito Genovese. Together they began robbing banks, pawnshops and money lenders on the Lower East Side. Then America entered the First World War. Lucania was called up, but had no intention of serving.
“I wasn’t afraid of going to war because I’d get killed or nothin’like that,” he said. “But I knew goddamn well that if I went to Europe, by the time I came home it would be the end of me when it came to my outfit.”
He avoided being drafted by deliberately contracting gonorrhoea. He lived to regret it.
“If I’d known the way it was gonna be like to get cured,” he said, “I’d rather have run around the trenches in France with a bunch of krauts shootin’at me. I had to get treatments every other day for over a year by some doctor down on 10th Street . . And what a treatment. He put a rubber tube with some kinda solution in it all the way up my pecker, and then he’d follow this with a round metal bar I think he called a ‘sound’. He told me it’d help make the cure permanent so that my pecker would never close up again.”
At the beginning of Prohibition, Lucania’s gang went into the bootlegging business. They were financed by Arnold Rothstein, whose mythic reputation included the unfounded claim that he had fixed the 1919World Series, and veteran gangster Johnny “The Fox” Torrio – aka The Brain – the man who had originally set Al Capone up in business. Lucania’s gang, the Seven Group, soon attracted the attention of New York’s two Mafia bosses, Giuseppe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. Both wanted a share of his bootlegging business. Charlie sided with Masseria and became his chief lieutenant, directing bootlegging, prostitution, the distribution of narcotics and other rackets.
In 1928, he was arrested for robbery under the alias Luciano. As the police found that name easier to pronounce that Lucania, he adopted it. But to avoid further brushes with the law, Luciano withdrew from front-line crime and concerned himself with overall planning.
“It was like, if you’re the head of a big company, you don’t have every guy who works on every machine comin’ up to you and askin’, ‘Hey, boss, what colours should I use on the cars next year?’” he said.
However, he would not tolerate failure. There were penalties.
“Some guys got their fingers broke or their knuckles cracked or maybe had their heads busted,” he said. “They hadda learn how to do it the right way the next time.”
In the late summer of 1929, Luciano and Masseria had a falling-out over a large shipment of Scotch, worth nearly a million dollars They met in Luciano’s suite in the Barbizon Hotel to discuss the matter as Luciano recalled in his memoir The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano:
“Joe, we got a deal. We shook hands. You’re not in the whisky. We shook hands.” The repetition was to remind Masseria of the inviolate Sicilian code of the handshake.
“The whisky belongs to me,” Masseria shouted as he turned and strode to the door. “And if I want to, I drink it all myself. I break the handshake.”
Within minutes after Masseria had departed, Siegel, Torrio and Adonis had joined Luciano and Costello. Lansky and Genovese were summoned, and within a half-hour, the seven sat down to a council of war.
To agree to Masseria’s demand did not even merit discussion. Masseria was enraged at the moment, but given a little time, Luciano was certain, he would ease up, at least partially and at least from this open hostility. But Masseria had thrown down a challenge to Luciano and his independence, one he could not completely back away from. Luciano might be able to stall Masseria, but only for a time.
Could Luciano afford an open conflict with Joe the Boss? He was not, at that moment, strong enough, not even in combination with his partners in the Seven Group. They could count on a hundred soldiers; Masseria had perhaps five hundred.
“I noticed that Lansky was pretty quiet. We was like Mutt and Jeff by this time, and I could almost read his mind. So I said to him, ‘What’re ya thinkin’ about, Little Man – Maranzano?’ ”
Lansky nodded. “That’s right. We’ve all been so busy we’ve been losin’ track of what’s really goin’ on. This thing between Masseria and Maranzano’s gonna bust open any day and there’ll be a real war, not the penny-ante stuff. Charlie, we have to pick the winner now, and then go with him.”
“There you go again,” Siegel said, “always tryin’ to beat the odds. What the fuck do you think you are, some guy with a crystal ball? Between Masseria and Maranzano, it’s not even six to five. Go ahead, wise guy, you pick the winner.”
“I picked the winner a long time ago,” Lansky said. “Charlie Luciano. All we have to do is eliminate the two roadblocks and from then on, Charlie sits on top. That’s what we want, isn’t it?”
Luciano and his friends were convinced they had time to develop their plans, to choose the most propitious moment to put them into operation. Not so Tom Reina, who had come to a similar decision but was certain he had to move rapidly. The word of his meeting with Maranzano had got back to Masseria, he discovered, and knowing Joe the Boss’s reaction to any dealings with the enemy, he decided to seek the protection of Maranzano immediately. A few days after the Barbizon confrontation, Luciano received a call from his friend Tommy Lucchese, requesting an urgent meeting at a Turkish bath on upper Broadway where Lucchese had arranged for them to have the privacy of the steam room. Lucchese told Luciano that the switch was imminent. “So now I knew that Maranzano was gonna call Masseria’s hand and there was gonna be all-out war.
“I told Tommy to send out the word to Maranzano that I would finally agree to meet with him.” To set up the arrangements, Lucchese chose a Maranzano lieutenant named Tony Bender. “He was pretty good at workin’ both sides of the street and gettin’ away with it.” At the beginning of October 1929, Bender brought back the word that Maranzano was agreeable to a conference, to take place on Staten Island, a neutral territory controlled by Joe Profaci, another Maranzano lieutenant but an old friend of Luciano’s from childhood. “I agreed to go, on the condition that Maranzano and I would come alone, and that’s the way it was set up. I figured that in spite of everythin’, Maranzano wanted me with him bad enough so he’d live up to his word.”
Just after midnight on 17 October, Genovese picked up Luciano at the Barbizon. “He tried to keep me from goin’ alone; he even said he’d like to hide in the back under a blanket, but I told him to forget it.” Luciano drove himself to the Staten Island Ferry, rode across, and then went to a shipping pier about a half-mile away.
“Maranzano was already there, waitin’ for me. I got out of the car, we shook hands and he put his arm across my shoulder like he always did, and said, ‘I’m so glad to see you again, bambino.’ We walked inside this big building on the pier. It was empty and dark. We found a couple boxes and sat down. There was a couple minutes of horseshit talk and then Maranzano said, ‘Charlie, I want you to come in with me.’
“I said, ‘I been thinkin’ about it.’ ”
“‘Good, good,’ Maranzano replied. “ ‘You know, I always wanted you before and now is a good time for us to shake hands.’”
“‘Yeah, I guess it is.’”
“ ‘But tell me, Charlie, why did you make that terrible mistake and go with Giuseppe? He’s not your kind. He has no sense of values.’”
“ ‘Yeah, I found that out.’”
“ ‘Now you have thought better of that decision?’”
“ ‘That’s why I’m here.’”
“‘Good. We will work it out together. It is a delicate matter and we will solve it. As I always said before, you will be the only one next to me. But, Charlie’” – at this point, Luciano remembered, as he reconstructed the events of that night, Maranzano’s voice and manner lost their velvet and became sharp and dictatorial. “I have a condition.”
“What is it?”
Maranzano stared at him, his eyes flat, his voice emotionless. “You are going to kill Masseria.”
This, Luciano thought, was no condition at all, and he said, “Well, I’ve been thinkin’ about that, too.”
“No, no, you don’t understand, Charlie. I mean you. You, personally, are going to kill Giuseppe Masseria.”
That condition, Luciano immediately realized, was a trap. In the tradition-laden Sicilian underworld, one cannot kill the leader personally and then succeed to his throne; the killer cannot expect more than a secondary role in the new hierarchy and more likely he can expect to be killed himself in revenge.
“You’re crazy.” He had hardly got the words out when something smashed against his skull and he blacked out.
“When I come to, I felt somebody splashin’ water in my face, and I was tied up and hangin’ by my wrists from a beam over me, with my toes just reachin’ the floor. There was some flashlights shinin’ at me and I could make out maybe a half-dozen guys with handkerchiefs coverin’ their faces, so that I couldn’t tell who anybody was.” Later, he said he was convinced that Tony Bender was behind one of these masks, though Lucchese told him he was wrong. “I could make out Maranzano. He was standin’ near me and didn’t say a word. But I could tell what he was thinkin’, and I just said, ‘I ain’t gonna do it.’ So he gave a signal and those pricks without the guts to show who they was began to work on me. They did a pretty good job, with belts and clubs and cigarette butts – until I passed out again.
“I don’t know how long I was out or when I came to, but this time my hands felt like they was on fire. Because when I looked up I saw that I was practically hangin’ by my thumbs.” The more Luciano was beaten and tortured, the more stubborn he became, and the more determined that if he survived, which at that moment he very much doubted, he would make certain that Maranzano’s days would be short. The beating continued; Maranzano watched silently, occasionally calling a pause as he stepped forward to say, “Charlie, this is so stupid. You can end this now if you will just agree. It is no big thing to kill a man, and you know he is going to die anyway. Why do you have to go through this, Charlie? Why are you so stubborn? All you have to do is kill him, kill him yourself. That you must do, kill him yourself. But, Charlie, I promise you, if you do not do it, then you are dead.”
Luciano remembered later that the repetition of Maranzano’s demands, the almost ritual aspect of the beating, gave him a sudden spurt of strength and he lashed out with his feet, catching Maranzano in the groin. Maranzano doubled over, fell to the ground, and began to scream with pain and rage: “Kill him! Kill him! Cut him down and kill him!” But before that could be done, Maranzano himself staggered to his feet, grabbed a knife one of his men was holding and slashed Luciano’s face, severing the muscles across his right cheek to the bone. Luciano would bear the scars to his death, and would forever have a slightly drooping right eye that gave him a sinister look.
As Maranzano slashed at Luciano again, opening a long gash across his chest, one of the masked assailants took out a gun and aimed it at Luciano. Suddenly Maranzano calmed, snapped, “No! Let him live. He’ll do what has to be done or we will see him again.”
“Somebody cut me down and I felt like every square inch of me had a knife in it. I couldn’t even move. But I never passed out completely. A few of the guys picked me up and threw me into the back of a car and about three or four minutes later they tossed me out on the road like I was a sack of potatoes. I must’ve laid there for a good fifteen minutes before I could crawl to a little streetlight down the block. It was about two in the mornin’. Then I passed out.”
A few minutes later, a police car cruising along Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island spotted Luciano lying in the street, picked him up, and drove him to the hospital. It took fifty-five stitches to close his wounds. “I don’t think there was a part of me that didn’t have marks or that wasn’t covered by bandages.” To add to his indignity, the Staten Island police, when Luciano refused to give an explanation of what had happened, booked him on the charge of grand larceny, for the theft of a car. The charge was quickly dismissed.
Until he related this story in 1961, Luciano had never given a satisfactory explanation of that October night. He once told a story, and soon dropped it, that he had been “taken for a ride” by a gang of masked men who had beaten him and then thrown him out on the road in exchange for a promise to pay them 10,000 dollars. In his refusal to talk about that night, rumours spread; that he had been kidnapped by a rival gang at the corner of Broadway and 50th Street, beaten as a warning to stop encroaching on its territory, and then dumped on Staten Island; that he had been seized at that Broadway corner by Maranzano’s men and rescued at the Staten Island Ferry by Lansky and Siegel, who found him badly battered and who then left him on Staten Island to create a mystery; that he had been assaulted by federal agents who discovered him waiting for a narcotics or whisky shipment on Staten Island; and that he had been beaten by a cop, the father of a girl he had made pregnant.
All Luciano himself would ever say was, “I’ll take care of this in my own way.”
Still the rumour spread and was credited by many that he had been taken for a ride and had returned, perhaps the only gangster in history to survive that experience. People began to talk about his good luck, that he was “Lucky” Luciano; the nickname stuck.
As far as Luciano himself was concerned, it was not the press or the world at large that gave him that nickname; it was Meyer Lansky. When he came back from Staten Island, still battered and forced to spend some days in bed in seclusion, Costello and Lansky visited him. To them he related the entire story of the beating. “I guess I’m just lucky to be alive.”
“Yeah,” Lansky replied, “lucky. That’s you – ‘Lucky Luciano’.”
“Lyin’ in bed, I had a little time to think over what happened. For a coupla days I couldn’t understand why the fuckin’ bastard went to all that trouble and then let me live. Finally, I figured it out, Masseria was guarded like the Philadelphia Mint; nobody could get close to him unless you was part of the outfit. Maranzano knew that because he tried a couple times and come up empty. That meant he had to have somebody close to Joe. So why should Maranzano knock me off when I’m the logical guy he needs? But it was typical of the Sicilian touch of ‘Mister Julius Caesar’, that if I knocked off Masseria personally, that would be the end of my so-called career as a top man.”
Looking back on the event more than thirty years later, Luciano was able to be a little philosophical. “In a way, I don’t blame Maranzano, because maybe he knew – or maybe he didn’t know – what I was plannin’. But if he did, then he should’ve killed me. For three days every time I even moved my pinky, it hurt so bad I could hardly stand it. That’s the only time in my life I ever took narcotics. Joe A. used to come twice a day and shoot me full of morphine. Whenever I got one of them shots, I’d figure out a new way to bump off Don Salvatore Maranzano.”
It was late October before Luciano was ready to leave his suite at the Barbizon. On the 28th, Lansky and Costello stopped by late in the morning, and the three strolled through Central Park in the glow of the Indian summer. They talked about the troubled pregnancy of Lansky’s wife, Anna, which was making him distraught. They talked about the stock market, which was sliding faster than the ticker tape could keep track. “None of us guys was in the market. What the hell, we didn’t have to be. But Meyer was very interested in what was goin’ on and he said, ‘If we’re smart, we’ll hold on to all our cash. When the bottom falls out of the market the whole fuckin’ country’s gonna need money and they’ll pay through the nose for it. We’ll have the garment district by the balls; they won’t be able to live without us.’”
Costello pointed out that it wasn’t just the garment industry that would need them. They would be indispensable to the politicians and the police: “Every one of them idiots has been playin’ the market, tryin’ to make the big scene. The funny thing is they’re all gamblin’ with our free money. Yesterday, around noon, Whalen [Police Commissioner Grover Whalen] called me. He was desperate for thirty grand to cover his margin. What could I do? I hadda give it to him. We own him.”
Into this talk of national economics and its impact on them, Luciano suddenly brought up the names of Masseria and Maranzano. “Screw them,” Lansky said. “Knockin’ off Joe and Maranzano is the easiest thing in the world; all we’ve gotta do is figure it out like Charlie says: make ’em kill each other.”
“It was one of the few times I ever heard Lansky really laugh, one that comes up from the belly. He really enjoyed the idea of playin’ checkers with two big shots. Even Frank laughed, and for him that was almost unbelievable.”
The next day, 29 October, catastrophe overtook the United States. The stock market, which had been falling chaotically every day, crashed carrying with it fortunes and hopes. Fear and despair settled like a shroud over the nation, and it would be years before they lifted. The decade-long boom of the Roaring Twenties was over; the Great Depression had begun.
The world of the bootleggers and the racketeers was not unaffected. “One day, everybody was buyin’ cases of booze. And the next day they was glad to have enough dough to buy a pint. Every angle of our business was hit. Like by a tornado. The jewellery heists that Adonis loved didn’t mean a thing no more. All them rich broads was out of diamonds; they had everything in hock. Costello’s slots still did some business, but it was down to less than half. The only place where we didn’t have a drop-off was in Harlem and wherever the numbers was runnin’. The little guy who was sellin’ apples still wanted to put a few pennies on a number, prayin’ he’d hit somethin’, not a big bundle, just somethin’. So what happened was that pennies became the backbone of our dollars, our bread and butter. On the other stuff, we took a bath along with the other losers.”
With the crash, Luciano and his friends became convinced that Prohibition would soon die, that repeal was only a matter of time. “The public won’t buy it no more,” he told his close allies. “When they ain’t got nothin’ else, they got to have a drink or there’s gonna be trouble. And they’re gonna want to have that drink legal.” It was necessary, they decided, to begin to plan for ways to get into the legal whisky business when that day came. At the same time, they decided to re-examine their whole operation in light of the country’s economic crisis, to see if it might be necessary to get out of some rackets and to put extra effort into others.
One thing they knew; they had some time. On the eve of the crash, Luciano had been caught in the middle. His ambitions and his very life had been threatened by both Maranzano and Masseria; both were issuing ultimatums and he could not satisfy both and still live, yet he was determined to satisfy neither. But the pressure now eased, for both the gang lords were too concerned with putting their own businesses into shape in the aftermath of that black week in October, and too busy with their own intensifying rivalry, to devote themselves to the Luciano problem.
In the course of the daily meetings at his apartment, Luciano and his friends realized that in a time of no hope the man who could provide some hope, no matter how ephemeral, some escape, no matter how temporary, would not lack for clients. Such hope could be found in the bottle, in games of chance and in other rackets.
Vito Genovese had another plan to provide the public with escape. Despite Luciano’s admonitions, he had not ceased dealing in narcotics. Now he wanted to expand. The profits, he said, were so much greater than in anything else and once a sale was made, the customer was hooked and he had to keep coming back for more. Luciano was just as convinced that narcotics led only to trouble; he knew that from his own experience. “I kept tryin’ to argue Vito out of it, but he wouldn’t listen. Maybe I should’ve thrown him out, but you can’t just throw a guy like that out cold. Especially not after all the things Vito done for me.”
In Genovese, Luciano had a sure gun, and at that moment he needed all the guns he could find, guns that were trustworthy and unquestioning. So he told Genovese, “I don’t wanna know nothin’ about it. If you wanna do it, do it; anybody you wanna do it with, do it with. But don’t tell me about it. I don’t want it and I don’t wanna know about it. Just remember, Vito, if you get in trouble with that stuff, you’ll have to bail yourself out.”
If Luciano, then, ruled out narcotics, he ruled, in a bigger way than ever, in favour of the old idea of usury. The bankers were extremely chary about lending what little money they had, and so potential borrowers had to look elsewhere. Elsewhere meant the underworld, which had amassed millions of dollars in cash during Prohibition – for it did little else than cash business. Within a year after the crash, so fast did their shylocking business grow that millions of dollars had been put into the street in the form of usurious loans. With companies failing at a disastrous rate, it became senseless to wreak physical violence on the defaulting borrower. So more and more companies in the garment industry, meat-packing, milk, trucking and other industries vital to the city’s economic life began to fall under Mob control, to be used as legitimate fronts for illicit activities.
Luciano himself, in these days, had his money out on the street not merely as a loan shark. As the economic panic worsened, some of his society and Wall Street friends, with no little trepidation, came to him for help, prepared to receive it at exorbitant rates. But since they were friends, Luciano was generous. “I wanted to prove to them guys that even a gangster had a heart and was willin’ to help a friend out of a spot. I loaned lots of ’em whatever they needed, and I charged ’em like I was a bank – two or three per cent interest.” Some never repaid, and Luciano merely shrugged off the losses.
While loan-sharking preyed on the need to borrow, gambling in its various forms played on the dream of a windfall. The numbers racket took a sudden upsurge beyond the expectations of Luciano, Lansky, Costello and the others; Costello’s slots, after a letdown, began to regurgitate a never-ending stream of nickels, dimes and quarters. Betting on everything and anything seemed to be the passion of those who had nothing but hope that a bet would pay off.
The nationwide betting syndicate that had been seeded by Moses Annenberg in Chicago now flourished. If people wanted to bet on horses, they didn’t care about going to the track; what they wanted was to place their bets and get the results as soon as possible. A national telephone wire service, which could bring the results into every bookmaking parlour, was necessary. “I always thought of Annenberg as my kind of guy,” said Luciano. He had provided Annenberg with the goon squads to seize and hold prime corners in Manhattan when Annenberg, as circulation director at the time for Hearst, had led the Daily Mirror into New York to challenge the Daily News. “And I used to think of the Mirror as my newspaper.”
When Annenberg developed the racing wire, Luciano was a prime customer and a prime backer. “The new racin’ wire had been worked out with the telephone company; to this day that high-class corporation knows that it’s the heart of the biggest gamblin’ empire in the world. As far as Annenberg was concerned, he never could’ve operated without us. He needed us and we needed him. It was a good thing all around.”
So, while the nation around him was falling deeper into depression, Luciano’s star continued to rise. Even his family was coming at least partially to terms with his activities. “My old man never really changed. I have to be honest, sometimes he knew me better than I knew myself. But he got tired of tryin’ to tell my mother that I’d always be in the rackets. To keep peace, he finally learned how to shrug it off. That Christmas of 1929 was the nicest one we had all through the years up to that time. Everybody was together and for the first time I actually sat down to dinner with my whole family and nobody talked about me bein’ a truant or gettin’ out of the can or nothin’. There wasn’t even no mention of the marks on my face, but every once in a while when my mother would walk past where I was sittin’ at the table, she’d sort of run her hand over my cheek where Maranzano knifed me and I could see that she was cryin’ to herself. Outside of that, it was all very happy and for a fast few hours I almost wished I had a nine-to-five job, like the rest of the crumbs. Then I looked out the window and I seen my Cadillac parked at the kerb and I knew that I’d never give that up.”
But moments of calm and a time for major involvement in his own business could not last long. Soon the pressures began to mount. His friend Tommy Lucchese came to see him one day with disturbing news. The negotiations between Reina and Maranzano had reached a climax, and Reina was about to make his move and take Lucchese with him. “This was gonna put us in one lousy spot. Lepke and Lucchese was doin’ great in the moneylendin’ business and they had a guy with them named Abe Reles who was doin’ a lot of the enforcin’ for them. And Tommy said if we could put together a big enough kitty – I mean millions in cash – we could control everythin’ in the district. So if Tommy’s break with Masseria come too soon, it was gonna fuck up the whole combination that I put together in the garment district. Lucchese would be part of Maranzano’s outfit and Lepke was still, through me, with Masseria. I told Lucchese to see if he could keep Reina from makin’ the move too soon so we could have enough time to set up the garment district with a good foundation.”
But there was to be little time. Soon after the new year of 1930 began, Masseria told Luciano he finally had complete proof of Reina’s impending treachery; he ordered Luciano to devise a plan to stop Reina. “I have to prove to every punk who’s in our outfit,” Masseria said, “that there’s only one boss in the city of New York and only one head of the brotherhood in America – and that’s Don Giuseppe Masseria. If I close my eyes to Reina, then Maranzano will win this war without firing another shot. You must keep Reina with me and I don’t care how you do it, but do it.”
It was a delicate assignment; Luciano called his friends together to discuss it. They met early in January on a fishing boat off Oyster Bay, Long Island, on a cold, snowy night. Along with Luciano there were Adonis, Costello, Genovese, Siegel and Lucchese. Lansky was unable to attend. His wife, Anna, was seriously ill as a result of her pregnancy; with a premature delivery imminent, she became nearly hysterical whenever Lansky left the house. “How the hell could I ask Meyer to leave Anna? So we went on without him.”
The following day, 15 January, Anna Lansky gave birth to a son, who was named Bernard after a favourite Lansky uncle. The delivery was difficult and the child was born a cripple. Anna Lansky suffered a breakdown as a result, seeing the physical defect of her child a Judgment from God on both her and Lansky. Distraught at his wife’s outbursts at him and over the birth of a crippled child, Lansky fled from New York in the company of a good friend, Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo, holed up in a Boston hotel for several days drinking himself into oblivion before coming to some kind of terms with his tragedy, and then returned to pick up his life back in New York.
Even without Lansky, the decisions were made. “Tommy Lucchese showed up at last and he brought some very bad news. He’d had dinner with Reina a couple of hours before and he’d learned somethin’ that Masseria didn’t tell me – that Masseria was plannin’ to knock off both Joe Profaci and Joe Bananas [Joseph Bonanno], who was Castellammarese, with Maranzano. If he done that and Reina could be persuaded to stay with Masseria, maybe it would keep everybody else in line. We all agreed then that there was no way to stop the war, and the only thing we should think about was how we could win it.
“That’s when we suddenly realized we had to switch our old plans around – that Masseria had to go first instead of Maranzano. Now, when you’re dealin’ with a Sicilian, you gotta think Sicilian or you ain’t got a chance. So I tried to put myself into Masseria’s head and figure out why he wanted to keep Reina alive while he was plannin’ behind my back to knock off Joe Profaci and Joe Bananas. That’s when it got very clear. Masseria would make it look to Maranzano like I had masterminded the hits on those two big shots who was on his side and at the same time I was workin’ to keep Reina from goin’ over to him. The result would be that Maranzano would come after me with everythin’ he had.
“The minute I explained it, Bugsy Siegel said, ‘We’re always wastin’ time. You Italian bastards are forever chewin’ it over and chewin’ it over until there’s not a fuckin’ thing to swallow. There’s only one way to go – we gotta knock off Reina as soon as possible and Tommy’s gotta pass the word on to Maranzano that it was a hit from Masseria. And we gotta make sure nothin’ happens to Profaci and Bananas.’
“That’s the way we set it up. I picked Vito for the job, with instructions that Reina hadda get it face-to-face, accordin’ to the rules. I really hated to knock off Tom Reina, and none of my guys really wanted to neither. Reina was a man of his word, he had culture, and he was a very honourable Italian. He practically ran the Bronx except for what Dutch Schultz was doin’ with beer and meat, and he had control of the whole ice racket, which was pretty important when you figure that seventy-five per cent of the city didn’t have electric refrigerators and was usin’ ice. But he hadda be eliminated so I could keep on livin’ and keep on movin’ up.”
Luciano learned that every Wednesday night, Reina had dinner with an aunt on Sheridan Avenue in the Bronx. On 26 February 1930, Genovese was waiting outside that house about eight o’clock in the evening. When Reina emerged, Genovese called to him. “Vito told me that when Reina saw him he started to smile and wave his hand. When he done that, Vito blew his head off with a shotgun.”
The suspicion was immediate and widespread, as Luciano and his friends had hoped, that Masseria had ordered the killing and that it had been carried out by one of his assassins, Joe Catania. Masseria compounded the suspicion when he summoned Reina’s top lieutenants – Gaetano “Tom” Gagliano, Tommy Lucchese and Dominic “The Gap” Petrilli – to announce that he was taking over and appointing Joseph Pinzolo as boss of the Reina family interests. “I always thought Masseria was a stupid pig, but I honestly didn’t believe that he was that stupid, to expect Reina’s top guys to swallow all that. As big a shit as Masseria was, he didn’t hold a candle to Pinzolo. That guy was fatter, uglier and dirtier than Masseria was on the worst day when the old bastard didn’t take a bath, which was most of the time.”
Pinzolo immediately tried to emulate his master in dealing with Reina’s lieutenants. Outwardly, they offered few objections, though their dissatisfaction was barely disguised and they carried many of their complaints to Luciano. He was, after all, a close friend to all three, particularly to Lucchese and Petrilli – he had got his nickname, “The Gap”, when, as a child, two of his front teeth had been knocked out in a fight. “I sent him to my own dentist on Columbus Circle, and he fixed up the Gap’s mouth with a bridge. Girls used to laugh at him and he had a hard time. After that, he become a real ladies’ man and from that minute on, if I asked him to jump off a buildin’ he would’ve done it.” As Pinzolo became more arrogant, the three lieutenants began to plot his elimination, and in September, Lucchese asked Pinzolo to meet him at an office he maintained on Broadway near Times Square. Lucchese left Pinzolo alone to check out some receipts and, as Lucchese later told Luciano, Petrilli entered and put two shots into Pinzolo’s head, right to his face, according to the rules.
“Nobody mourned, not even Masseria. He told me afterwards, ‘The hit on Pinzolo was a good thing. Now maybe Lucchese and the rest of them guys will stop squawkin’.’ The whole thing was dropped right then and there and Pinzolo didn’t even get the regulation funeral.”
While the plot against Pinzolo was maturing, Tom Gagliano picked up the negotiations Reina had started with Maranzano. Early in the summer, accompanied by Joe Adonis, he met Joe Profaci at Peter Luger’s, a famous Brooklyn steak house. As Luciano was told soon afterwards, “When Adonis, Profaci and Gagliano came out of the restaurant, Maranzano was sittin’ in the back of Joe A.’s car with Joe Bananas, waitin’ for ’em. That’s where and how the deal was made for the Reina family to make a secret switch to Maranzano.
“While this was goin’ on, I talked privately to [Albert] Anastasia. I knew I could count on him and I knew he would kill for me. When I told Albert what the plan was, he grabbed me in a bear hug and kissed me on both cheeks. He said, ‘Charlie, I been waitin’ for this day for at least eight years. You’re gonna be on top if I have to kill everybody for you. With you there, that’s the only way we can have any peace and make the real money. But I gotta warn you, you gotta get rid of Pete Morello before anybody else – take my word for it; you don’t know him like I do – because this guy can smell a bullet before it leaves the gun. You’ll never knock off Joe the Boss unless you get Morello outa the way.’”
Pietro “The Clutching Hand” Morello was a veteran gunman and Masseria’s constant bodyguard and shadow. His elimination was, indeed, a necessity, and Luciano handed that assignment to Anastasia and Frank Scalise. On 15 August 1930, the two trapped Morello in his loan-sharking office in East Harlem and gunned him down. “There was another guy with him in the office, and he hadda get it too. Later on, I found out that his name was Pariano and he was a collector for Masseria. Albert told me that when he and Scalise walked in, Morello was countin’ receipts, and they grabbed the dough after they knocked him off; it come to more than thirty grand.”
Unaware of the Luciano-Anastasia involvement, Masseria was convinced that the murder of Morello had been committed at Maranzano’s orders and he bought the rumours that the gunman was a hired import from Chicago. He immediately sought revenge, and it was to Chicago that he turned to exact it. There Masseria was supported by Capone, while Maranzano was receiving both moral and financial support from Capone’s bitter enemy, Joseph Aiello. “To make sure the job was done right, Masseria sent Al Mineo to Chicago to handle things.” Aiello was machine-gunned to death on a Chicago street. The police blamed Capone mobsters for the killing.
On 5 November 1930, Maranzano retaliated. Three of his gunmen had been holed up in a Bronx apartment overlooking the residence of top Masseria aides in hopes of catching Joe the Boss in a crossfire if and when he paid a visit. That afternoon, Masseria, indeed, showed up, accompanied by his number two and three leaders, Steven Ferrigno and Al Mineo. Maranzano’s gunmen opened up, killing both Mineo and Ferrigno. But Masseria still seemed impervious to bullets; he escaped unharmed.
The climax to the Castellammarese War was rapidly approaching. Soldiers on both sides were in hiding, gunning for each other on sight. A climate of fear had been created, diverting time and attention from the real business of the underworld, making money out of the rackets. If the war continued, public attention would focus sharply on the underworld and would lead to a severe crackdown. Once more, Luciano met with his friends at Oyster Bay. This time, Lansky was present. The time had arrived, it was decided, to put their plans into operation. Word was promptly sent to Maranzano that Luciano was now prepared, “for the good of everybody”, to do what Maranzano had demanded more than a year before on Staten Island. “I knew the time for this was absolutely perfect. Masseria’s luck was holdin’ good, and Maranzano couldn’t get within a mile of him. He’d have to have me, and nobody else but me, to settle this thing once and for all. If I was gonna negotiate, this was the time to move.”
Through Tony Bender, a meeting was arranged. “Maranzano knew goddamn well, after what happened on the pier, I wasn’t gonna give him the right time when it come to pickin’ the place. I finally made the meet at the Bronx Zoo. I had Tommy Lucchese, Joe A. and Bugsy Siegel with me; I wanted to have a Jew so Maranzano would know he couldn’t pull the ‘exclusive Sicilian’ crap again. He had Joe Profaci and Joe Bananas with him. It was late in the afternoon when we met in front of the lion cage. I said to him, ‘I hope you appreciate that the lion is supposed to be the king of the animals.’ That done it. Maranzano laughed, and his belly started to shake like jelly. He put his arm around me, but before he could open his mouth, I said, ‘Maranzano, there’s somethin’ I been wantin’ to tell you for a long time. My father’s the only one who calls me bambino.’ Jesus, you might think I hit him. He stopped smilin’ and he really got sore.
“He said somethin’ like that he couldn’t understand why I should resent it, that didn’t I understand that he could look on me like his own son. I said, ‘After what happened between us last year, I’ll never look on you as my old man, so let’s stop that horseshit and get down to business. If we work everythin’ out, then we’ll be friends. That’s it.’ ”
Everything was, indeed, worked out. Maranzano guaranteed the personal safety of Luciano and his friends and followers once the Masseria murder had been accomplished and peace restored. He guaranteed that he would not interfere with Luciano’s business or that of Lansky and Siegel, Adonis or Costello. “And he agreed to get rid of all that exclusive Sicilian crap when I pointed out to him that it was crazy and didn’t mean a fuck.” When the agreement had been struck, Maranzano pointed to Luciano’s face and expressed a regret that he had been provoked into doing such a thing. “Never mind. I’m ready to forget it. Let’s look ahead,” Luciano said.
Maranzano, reverting to his papal attitude, stretched out his hands and placed them on Luciano’s shoulders. “Whether you like it or not, Salvatore Lucania, you are my bambino.”
Spring had come to New York, and 15 April 1931 was a beautiful warm and sunny day. That morning at nine o’clock, Luciano and Masseria were alone at one of Joe the Boss’s headquarters, on lower Second Avenue in downtown Manhattan. Masseria leaned back and listened as Luciano outlined the blueprint for the murder of a score of Maranzano’s lieutenants, a bloodletting that would bring complete victory to Masseria. “I must’ve talked for a couple of hours and old Joe was beamin’ and laughin’ like he could just taste Maranzano’s blood out of a gold cup. Finally, he leaps out of this leather chair about twice as big as he was and he starts to do a dance in the middle of the office. The only time I ever seen anythin’ like it was in the newsreels durin’ the war when they showed Hitler doin’ a dance like that when he beat France. It reminded me of Masseria – two fruitcakes in search of a brain.”
About noon, Luciano suggested that, the day being so pleasant, they drive out to Coney Island for a leisurely lunch to celebrate the impending victory. “I could see Masseria’s eyes start to shine the minute I mentioned this great food and when I was makin’ the arrangements over the phone, I swear I could see the spit droolin’ out of his mouth, because I ordered enough food to stuff a horse.”
Luciano and Masseria reached the Nuova Villa Tammaro in Coney Island shortly after noon, and the restaurant’s owner, a friend of Luciano and many other mobsters, named Gerardo Scarpato, showed them to a table in a corner of the crowded restaurant. Never a big eater, Luciano ate slowly and sparingly, sipping a little red wine. Masseria gorged himself on antipasto, spaghetti with red clam sauce, lobster Fra Diavolo, a quart of Chianti. He was still eating when most of the other diners had departed. He still had ahead of him cream-filled pastry and strong Italian coffee. “It took him about three hours to finish that meal.”
Just before three-thirty, the last customers had gone and so had most of the help. Luciano and Masseria were the last patrons. Luciano suggested that they relax for a while and play a game of Klob, a Russian-Hungarian two-handed card game that Masseria had learned from Frank Costello. Masseria hesitated for a moment, then agreed to a short game, reminding Luciano that there was still work to be done back at headquarters. Scarpato brought a deck of cards to the table and then left, saying that he was going for a walk along the beach.
They had played only a single hand, had just dealt the cards for a second, when Luciano got up from the table and told Masseria he had to go to the men’s room. Masseria relaxed, enjoying a second bottle of wine.
As soon as the lavatory door closed behind Luciano, the front door of the Villa Tammaro opened. The car that Luciano had driven from Manhattan had been followed at a discreet distance by a black limousine, driven by Ciro Terranova and carrying Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia and Bugsy Siegel. Those four burst into the restaurant, pulled out pistols, and began firing at Joe the Boss. More than twenty shots ricocheted around the room, six smashing directly into Masseria, who slumped over the table, face down, his blood staining the white tablecloth; in his right hand dangled the ace of diamonds.
Even before silence returned, Genovese, Adonis, Anastasia and Siegel were out the door and into the waiting car, its motor still running. But Terranova was so shaken that he was unable to put the car in gear. Siegel pushed him away, took the wheel himself, and sped off. The killing had taken less than a minute; there were no witnesses.
And Luciano? He emerged from the lavatory, took a look at the dead Masseria, called the police, and waited for them to arrive. “When the cops come, naturally they wanted to know whether I seen what happened. I said no, I didn’t, and I didn’t have no idea why somebody would want to kill Joe. They asked me where I was when it happened – and every newspaper printed that I said, ‘As soon as I finished dryin’ my hands, I walked out to see what it was all about.’ That’s an absolute lie. I said to them, ‘I was in the can takin’ a leak. I always take a long leak.’ ”
Masseria was given the funeral befitting his status. His body lay in state for some days, and then was followed to the cemetery by cars laden with flowers and limousines filled with mourners. When it was over, Luciano took Genovese aside, the first opportunity that they had to talk about the events at Coney Island. “How did it go?”
Genovese smiled. “The old man would’ve been proud of it.”
Giuseppe Bonanno
Giuseppe Bonanno was Salvatore Maranzano’s chief of staff during the Castellammarese War. Born in Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily in 1905, he emigrated to the US with his parents when he was one. They settled in Brooklyn. However, when Joe was six, his parents returned to Sicily after the family’s business interests were threatened by a rival family. His father and mother died there, while Joe was still young. Orphaned at fifteen, he enrolled in the nautical college in Palermo, but was expelled for anti-Fascist activities. When Mussolini’s Prefect Cesare Mori began his crackdown, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Bonanno. He and his cousin Peter Magaddino were forced to flee, arriving in America illegally via Cuba. Back in Brooklyn, Bonanno stayed with his uncle Peter Bonventre, a barber, and went to work for the local Mafia, nominally under the leadership of Nicolo Schiro, where he quickly rose in the ranks. However, at the beginning of the Castellammarese War, Joe “the Boss” Masseria sought to assert himself in Brooklyn. He demanded a $10,000 tribute from Schiro, who paid up and went into hiding to be replaced by Maranzano. Bonanno predicted that, under the guidance of Masseria’s chief strategist Pete Morello, Joe the Boss would hit Bonanno’s cousin Vito Bonventre, a wealthy bootlegger and the only Castellammarese rich enough to finance the War. He was gunned down outside his home. While Bonanno remained loyal to Maranzano throughout the Castellammarese War, he sympathized with the American-born “young turks” under Lucky Luciano, realizing that the day of the “Moustache Petes” – as they called the Sicilian-born old-timers – was fast drawing to a close. When the war was over and Maranzano was dead, Bonanno was awarded what was left of Marannzano’s crime family and married the sister of Mob boss Frank Labruzzo. He ran what became the Bonanno family – one of the Five Families of New York – until 1969 when he retired to Tucson, Arizona. He died of heart failure at the age of 97 in 2002. Bonanno is thought to be the model for Don Vito Corleone in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather. In his own book, A Man of Honour, he recalled his involvement in the Castellammarese War.
Maranzano was ready.
He shunned his home and office. No one, except those closest to him, knew where he would be from one day to the next. He designated several places, most in New York and one in Long Island, as “safe houses” where he and his personal staff would find shelter, food and supplies. No one knew ahead of time in which of these houses Maranzano would spend the night.
Maranzano divided his “army” into squads and designated a leader over each group. Each “soldier” pledged to totally obey his squad leaders. Only these group leaders knew who the other group leaders were and their whereabouts.
He also established an extensive system of supplies. Some people were responsible only for supplying our hideouts with food and equipment. Others were responsible only for delivery of ammunition.
Maranzano and his personal staff rode in armoured cars. These cars, two Cadillacs outfitted especially for us in Detroit, had special metal plates on the sides and bullet-proof windows. Maranzano’s Cadillac was always preceded by the other Cadillac. Sometimes a third car would ride behind his car, making it nearly impossible to ambush our leader.
If anyone was foolhardy enough to attack our vehicles, we were more than capable of defending ourselves. We carried pistols, shotguns, machine guns and enough ammunition to fight the Battle of Bull Run all over again.
Maranzano would sit in the back seat of his car with a machine gun mounted on a swivel between his legs. He also packed a Luger and a Colt, as well as his omnipresent dagger behind his back.
Just as the President of the United States has his Secret Service men, the King of England his palace guards and the Pope his Swiss guards, so did Maranzano have his personal bodyguards and staff.
We called ourselves “the boys of the first day” because we were with Maranzano from the start.
During the war, I acted as Maranzano’s chief of staff. Needless to say, I didn’t attain that position by being a spectator. I had to prove myself by undertaking dangerous missions. Most of the time, people had to go through me first before they could see Maranzano. Maranzano could entrust me with a diplomatic mission, in addition to entrusting me with military assignments. I rode in Maranzano’s car, in the front passenger seat.
Maranzano’s driver was Charlie DiBenedetto. Charlie had a quick mind and a fluent tongue. Born in America, he was the best English speaker among us. If a policeman stopped our car for some reason, you could count on Charlie to talk his way out of it. Like the rest of us, Charlie could handle a gun without embarrassing himself.
The lead escort car would usually contain Gaspar DiGregorio, Bastiano Domingo and Vincent Danna. Gaspar was a deliberate and fussy soldier, almost the opposite of what he was in normal life. For example, before an engagement, Gaspar would usually take the longest of all of us in selecting a firing position. He would examine and reject several covers before finally choosing one that met his stringent standards concerning line of sight.
Gaspar’s snail’s pace would usually spur Bastiano to make some wisecrack:
–Whenever you’re ready, Gasparino. Take your time. If the rest of us start without you, it doesn’t mean we don’t like you . . .
Bastiano, or Buster, was the quickest to set up and the best shot among us. He could shoot from any angle and from any direction. His specialty was the machine gun, with which he was a virtuoso.
Vincent we referred to as “Doctor”. He and I had been school cronies in Castellammare, where Vincent’s father was a pharmacist and his uncle was a doctor. Medical know-how seemed to run in the family. Vincent acted as a sort of medic for us, in addition to being a sharpshooter.
We also had a sixth musketeer among us, Joe Stabile. Joe owned one of the homes we used as a safe house. A sharpshooter extraordinaire, Joe volunteered for many missions. We were all tall, except for Joe, who was short. Once during the pandemonium of a street brawl in which he took part, Joe escaped arrest by crawling between the legs of a cop.
To keep track of enemy movements, Maranzano utilized taxi drivers, among whom he had many friends. Hacks roam the streets at all hours. They make excellent spies.
Within our Family, only a minority were combatants. The majority were non-combatants such as bakers, butchers, undertakers, masons, doctors, lawyers and priests. They all pitched in, helping us out with their special skills. We all saw nothing wrong in us Sicilians settling our differences among ourselves.
In order to chip away at Masseria’s support in New York City and elsewhere, Maranzano would stress that the war was not only to defend the honour of Castellammare but also to free everyone else from servitude and slavery to Masseria.
Maranzano’s challenge to Masseria soon had its effect on the fence straddlers. In private, Tom Reina of the Bronx expressed admiration for Maranzano, the only one who had the guts to stand up to Joe the Boss. An informant within Reina’s Family relayed these sentiments to Reina’s paesano from Corleone, Peter Morello. And Morello reported it to Masseria.
Early in 1930, Tom Reina was shot to death in the Bronx. As he had done in Detroit, Masseria quickly backed one of his own supporters to take charge of the Family. In this case, Masseria endorsed Joe Pinzolo to become the new Father. In the meantime, Gaetano Gagliano, a member of the Reina Family, formed a splinter group within the Family in open opposition to Masseria and Pinzolo. Gagliano’s group attracted Tommy Lucchese, Steve Rondelli, John DiCaro and others.
At the same time that Maranzano was trying to draw defectors from Masseria’s side, he also had to extirpate quislings within our own Family.
After Cola Schiro went into hiding, Masseria had supported Joe Parrino to become the new Father of the Castellammarese clan. That tactic failed when we elected Maranzano as our leader. Parrino was a despicable sort. For a chance at becoming Father, Parrino was willing to serve a tyrant. He was also willing to overlook the slaying of his brother, who was shot with Gaspar Milazzo in Detroit. Joe Parrino was shot to death in a restaurant.
The inability of Masseria to gain a foothold in the Castellammarese Family in Brooklyn and the erosion of his influence in the Reina Family were minor setbacks. Masseria still reigned supreme. His chief adviser, Morello, felt so safe that he openly went to his office every morning. The Castellammarese were thought to be in disarray and on the defensive. No one expected them to strike.
Maranzano used to say that if we hoped to win the war we should get at Morello before the old fox stopped following his daily routines, as Maranzano had already stopped doing. Once Morello went undercover, Maranzano would say, the old man could exist forever on a diet of hard bread, cheese and onions. We would never find him.
Morello never got a chance to go on such a severe diet. He went to his Harlem office as usual one morning, along with two of his men. All three were shot to death.
Masseria had lost his best man, the brains of his outfit. “The Clutch Hand” was gone.
At the outbreak of the war, Maranzano had sent Al Capone a message warning him not to meddle directly in the New York conflict. Although Capone had supplied Masseria with money, Capone was too busy fighting Aiello and his supporters to do anything else. Until the end of summer in 1930, therefore, Capone had not sent any reinforcements to Masseria.
After Morello’s death, however, Masseria leaned on his allies all the more. In exchange for Capone’s more direct help, Masseria went ahead and accepted Capone, the Neapolitan, into our Sicilian orbit.
In September of 1930, Maranzano received a tip that some of Capone’s people were to arrive in New York, perhaps as many as a dozen men, reinforcements for Masseria. They were supposed to rendezvous in an office building on Manhattan’s Park Row. We didn’t know how reliable the information was, but just to play safe Maranzano prepared a welcome for Capone’s men.
The rendezvous was supposed to be held in a spacious office room. A locked door separated this large room from a smaller adjacent room. Maranzano’s plan was for me, Bastiano Domingo and Charlie DiBenedetto to hide in the small room and wait for our out-of-town visitors. At the proper time, we were to kick down the door and welcome everyone to the Volcano. We loosened the door hinges ahead of time.
For this mission we needed “fresh” machine guns – weapons that could be abandoned on the spot and not traced to any of us individually.
On the day of the ambush, Charlie went to pick up the machine guns. I waited for him in the park in front of City Hall, which borders Park Row. City Hall is located just about at the entrance to the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. After picking up the weapons, Charlie was supposed to pick me up. Buster was going to meet us outside the Park Row building.
It was a Thursday. I remember that because every Thursday a band would play on the park pavilion in front of City Hall. I listened to the band that pleasant afternoon, idly watching the office workers and strollers.
It had been almost a year since the Wall Street stock market crash. The economic boom of the 1920s was over. Prohibition itself had but a short time to run. Franklin Roosevelt was governor of New York and being mentioned as a Democratic candidate to run against President Herbert Hoover. I supposed most people were worried about the hard times ahead.
Uppermost on my mind, however, besides my immediate mission, was winning the war and getting back to my sweetheart, Fay Labruzzo. After not having seen her for nine months, I had impetuously gone to her house late one night. I told Fay how much I had thought of her and declared she had grown lovelier during my absence. Her father wanted to hear all the news about the war. Don Calorio said he would like to meet Maranzano one day. I couldn’t take a chance on staying very long . . .
I abandoned my reveries when I saw Charlie’s car pull up to the kerb. I dashed to the car, but I had barely opened the door and sat down when I heard the bark of policemen:
–Hold it, you two. You’re under arrest.
Since I didn’t have a gun permit, the first thing I did was take my pistol off me and stash it under the seat. When I looked up, police detectives had us surrounded.
Buster watched the arrest from across the street but was helpless.
The detectives, as I later found out, were homicide investigators working on a machine-gun slaying unrelated to the Castellammarese War. In the course of their investigation, they had staked out a suspected machine-gun supplier. By coincidence, this was the same man who was getting us our machine guns from Detroit. When the police saw Charlie’s car entering and leaving the building, they followed the car to Park Row. When I got in the car, they decided to apprehend both of us. They thought they had stumbled on a lucky break, but they didn’t know who we were or what the machine guns were for.
Charlie and I were driven a short distance to New York City police headquarters on Centre Street. Inside the car, police found one pistol, three machine guns and about six hundred rounds of ammunition. At my preliminary interrogation, I told the police that I was listening to the band music at the park on my day off from work. I was about to take the trolley car across the bridge to Brooklyn when I saw my friend Charlie and decided to catch a ride with him.
I was then left alone in a room for about half an hour. Charlie and I had been segregated and I didn’t know what was happening to him. I couldn’t imagine how the police had found out about the machine guns. Had someone snitched on us? What were the police after? I was in the dark and totally on my own.
Presently, two tall and hefty detectives came in my room and began taunting me:
–Oh, so you’re the guy with the machine guns.
I didn’t say anything. Without warning and with no trace of emotion, the two policemen began working me over. They punched me, kicked me, kneed my head and threw me on the floor. They struck me repeatedly until I was nearly unconscious. Then they raised me from the floor and flopped my bruised body on the chair next to the solitary table in the room. They left.
Two other detectives entered shortly thereafter. One of them said,
–What’s happened here?
He took off my jacket and used it to wipe my blood off the floor. I started to mumble a reply when his colleague grabbed the chair from under me and crashed it across my shoulders and neck. I passed out.
It must have been around midnight when I received my next visit. This time, three detectives entered the room. Two of them didn’t say anything. The third did all the talking. He wore eyeglasses.
–I just came on duty, he said, and I’m sorry for what happened. It’s not right. If I was here this wouldn’t have happened.
He identified himself as a captain. He had a suave, even-tempered manner.
–How do you feel? You want anything?
It hurt to talk. I shook my head sideways, my lips curling derisively.
–It’s my duty to question you, the captain with the eyeglasses continued. What I want to know first is your name. What’s your name?
–Joseph Bonanno.
–What work do you do?
–I’m learning how to be a barber.
–And where do you live?
–4009 Church Avenue, Brooklyn.
–What’s your name?
–Joseph Bonanno.
–You’re lying.
–I’m telling the truth.
–So why do you have two names?
The captain was referring to the two licences I carried. One was my driver’s licence, which was under the name of Joseph Bonanno. When I went to work for my Uncle Vito Bonventre, the baker, I took out a chauffeur’s licence because I had to drive trucks. The chauffeur’s licence was under the name Giuseppe Bonventre. The name Bonanno didn’t mean anything to the police. However, my distant cousin Vito Bonventre (with the same name as my uncle the baker) was known to the police as a “mafioso” and a leader of the Castellammarese clan in Brooklyn. Since his death was publicized, police also knew that Vito Bonventre had been slain in what they described as gang warfare. The police figured that I was a Bonventre and that Bonanno was an alias. If my name was Bonventre, as they thought, they assumed that I also was mixed up with gang warfare and I could provide the police with valuable information. In nabbing me and Charlie, the police thought they had found a way into the maze of Sicilian warfare current in New York. It seemed like a big break for them.
–My name is Joseph Bonanno.
The Captain looked down on me dubiously. Unknown to me, while I had been unconscious, police had questioned my Uncle Peter Bonventre, whose address, 4009 Church Avenue, was on my driver’s licence. Before the war my uncle and I had agreed that if anyone ever asked him who I was he should say I was his apprentice barber.
–What’s your uncle’s name? the detective said.
–Bonventre.
–Then your name is Bonventre.
–My name is Joseph Bonanno.
The captain said he wanted to help but that my replies were beginning to agitate him.
–How can I help you if you don’t co-operate? he said. Don’t you realize you could go to prison for a good long time?
The telephone rang. Its shrill jingling seemed to irritate every nerve in my body. The captain answered and mainly listened to the person at the other end. Periodically, the captain would alternately say,
–Ah huh . . . . Right. . . . Ah huh . . . . I see.
He hung up and turned to me.
–You know what that was about? the captain said. That was about your friend Charlie. He’s a nice boy, that Charlie. He’s going to tell us . . . everything.
The captain circled me, giving me time to absorb this information. Although I didn’t know how Charlie was being treated, I had to believe that Charlie was not going to betray me, just as he had to have faith I wouldn’t betray him. Silence and trust were virtues inculcated into us by our Tradition. And yet, since we were both young, we had never really been tested. Would we live up to our principles under actual duress?
As it turned out, Charlie was undergoing a somewhat easier test of his manhood than I was. While I was being pummelled unconscious, Charlie was leading police on a wild goose chase.
Charlie, the glib musketeer, had told police he was from Buffalo on a visit to New York City. A friend of his in Brooklyn, Charlie told police, had lent him his car for the day. Charlie said he drove the car to Manhattan, went sightseeing and paid quick visits to several places, including the building being observed by the police. On the way back to Brooklyn, Charlie told police, he noticed a friend in the park at City Hall and stopped to give him a ride.
Charlie swore he didn’t know anything about the machine guns that police had found wrapped in a blanket on the floor by the back seat. Those guns must have been there all along. Charlie said when he picked up the car he hadn’t even looked at the back seat. The first time he saw the guns, Charlie told the police, was when the police searched the car.
Why don’t we go to your friend in Brooklyn? the police told Charlie. Okay, Charlie replied, anything to please the police.
Once they drove to Brooklyn, Charlie pretended to be lost. He said all the apartment buildings in Brooklyn looked alike. And the streets in Brooklyn were confusing. After all, he was from Buffalo. On and on they drove, and around and around, never finding their destination.
I didn’t find out about Charlie’s escapades until later, of course.
At the time, the captain wanted me to think that Charlie was co-operating with the police. The captain even received a second call about Charlie.
–That was from the Empire Street station, the captain said after the second call. Charlie’s taking us to see his friend in Brooklyn. Charlie’s a real nice boy. He doesn’t want to spend his life in prison. You know what Charlie told us? He told us you know everything. You see, you’re ruined.
–I’m tired, captain, I said in my first voluntary statement of the night. I want to say this one last time. My name is Joseph Bonanno, my address is 4009 Church Avenue . . .
Before I could continue the captain mimicked me, saying,
–4009 Church Avenue. 4009 Church Avenue. From now on I’m going to call you Mr 4009.
The captain began pacing. I was weary and becoming defiant.
He was weary and reaching the threshold of his patience. His face looked sterner. Time for him to drop the nice-guy pose. In an angry, loud voice, the captain said:
–Charlie’s going to go free and you’re going to jail. Do you hear me? We’re going to send you away!
I didn’t answer, having decided to ignore him from then on. But the captain made it difficult to do that. He suddenly took out his gun and pointed it directly in front of my lips. The man was bluffing, but a nervous twitch of his finger and it would have been all over for me.
–Are you going to talk? the captain demanded, putting the tip of his pistol in my ear.
I had now reached the point where I almost didn’t care what happened as long as these police stopped tormenting me. If I was going to die, I told myself, I was going to die without giving my captors any satisfaction.
–Go ahead, I shouted, shoot.
He slammed the butt of his revolver on my nose. On impact, my nose felt as if it were flying across the room while my face was trying to pull it back. My rage made me forget everything but retaliation. I struck with my fist, landing flush in the captain’s eye. The lens of his eyeglasses shattered and blood oozed out of his eye socket. After my fist landed, my leg instinctively shot up and I kicked him in the groin.
That’s all I remember. The other detectives in the room grabbed me. Everything went black.
In the morning, a lawyer hired by Maranzano came to police headquarters and arranged for Charlie and me to be released on bond. But we had to appear later that same day before a magistrate for a hearing.
Charlie briefly took me to a hospital to have my wounds checked.
My face was puffy and bluish. My broken nose canted to the left.
Our lawyer swore up and down that the police would not get away with it. He said we would have our retribution in court. This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen in America, he assured us.
The late morning papers had already printed a story about our arrest. In the articles, I was identified as Joseph Bonventre, alias Joseph Bonanno. Police had told reporters I was suspected of being a machine-gun runner for Al Capone. At that time, because of all the publicity he had received, the public automatically associated machine guns with Al Capone. The allegation that I worked for Al Capone seemed plausible both to the police and to the naive reporter.
To this day, whenever newspapermen search for something to say about me during Prohibition, they refer to me as a gun runner for Al Capone. And although I’ve just now explained how this error originated – a ludicrous mistake considering that during the Castellammarese War Al Capone was on the other side – I’m certain that long after I’m dead reporters will continue to refer to me as a gun runner for Al Capone.
When Charlie and I showed up at the courtroom later that day, I noticed the captain had a black eye and a bandage over his eyebrow. I recognized several other detectives in the courtroom. They all looked serious but slightly disoriented, as if it was the morning after a night of revelry.
Our lawyer wasted no time in telling the judge that during my detainment the night before, the police had assaulted me.
–Tell the court how this happened, the judge instructed me.
–Your Honour, my lawyer doesn’t know the true story. He thinks I was beaten. But what actually happened was that while I was being booked last night I accidentally fell down the stairwell and broke my nose.
The magistrate scowled and snuffled.
I never had any intentions of accusing the detectives in court. It wasn’t in me to squeal on anyone, not even a cop. What good would it have done anyway? I think everyone in the courtroom realized I was prevaricating.
After my statement, the prosecution huddled and then the state attorneys had a few words with the detectives. By holding my tongue, I let the prosecution off the hook. Theirs was a weak case to begin with. Instead of a celebrity case, they were stuck with two unknowns, me and Charlie. When they understood I wasn’t going to make any trouble for them, they realized my silence was contingent upon them not making trouble for Charlie and me. The prosecutor told the judge he wasn’t ready to press charges against us.
This unexpected twist made the magistrate very grumpy. He said we were all wasting his time. He told me he didn’t believe my story but there was nothing he could do if I didn’t speak up. He was forced to dismiss the case.
This ordeal at the hands of the police was one of my proudest moments. I had remained silent in the face of physical danger. I had not betrayed my friends. I had proven to myself that I would not break under pressure.
What’s more, because the newspaper accounts referred to me as a gun runner for Al Capone, everyone in my world knew without doubt that I had kept my mouth shut.
My friends, my relatives, and, most important of all, Maranzano praised my valour. I had lived up to the principles of my Tradition. Charlie DiBenedetto also received praise, but it was fainter than mine. After all, I was the one who got the lumps. Charlie didn’t even get scratched.
–One of these days, I would tease Charlie, I’m going to give you the beating you missed.
Charlie called me that “one and only notorious gun runner for Al Capone, Joseph Bonventre”.
–You expect anyone to believe your real name is Bonanno? Charlie would say. If I had a name like that, I’d change it too.
He would kid me constantly about my broken nose. He would stare at it, reflect and then say,
–I don’t know, Peppino. Maybe I should hit your nose from the other side to make it look even.
Indeed, even after it healed, my nose made me look like a pug, and in 1937 I underwent an operation to straighten it out a bit.
Maranzano rewarded Charlie and me with a little rest and recuperation. He had us check into a private sanatorium in Long Island, where we shared a room. Charlie and I were under orders to behave and to enjoy our vacation. The sanatorium food was lousy, lacking all tang or zest. That’s what I remember most about the place. Our therapy, such as it was, consisted mainly of alcohol rubdowns administered by young female attendants.