Bruce Macintyre
4710 Early View
Las Vegas, NV 89129
(702) 689-9551
brutyre@gmail.com
THE MAFIA UNVEILED
Table of Contents
BOOK ONE — THE RISE ..................................................................................................................................................................... 2
CHAPTER ONE .......................................................................... 2
CHAPTER TWO ......................................................................... 50
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BOOK ONE — THE RISE
CHAPTER ONE
The body lying in the gutter had two gaping wounds: a large ball in the hip and
the fatal shot through the stomach. It didn’t appear to be a robbery, a wallet still in the
young man’s pocket. For some reason, one or two assailants had simply shot him as he
crossed from St. Philip to head up Chartres Street late on Wednesday evening, October
28, 1868.
The authorities identified him as Litero Barba, a twenty-seven year-old emigrant
from Sicily, learning that he’d been walking home from a party thrown by the Innocenti,
a hybrid military/political group to which he belonged. As the civil war had ended just
three years earlier, with the northern carpet-baggers stirring up politics all across the
south, the Innocenti, or Innocents, rabidly supported the Democratic faction in the deadly
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fighting going on around the 1868 presidential campaign, and that suggested a possible
motive for Barba’s murder.
The Republican nominee for president was Ulysses S. Grant and his platform,
advocating among other things what amounted to the first affirmative action program for
blacks, offered little to attract the defeated confederates. The Democratic presidential
candidate was Horatio Seymour who, as governor of New York during the war, declared
the Emancipation Proclamation unconstitutional and participated in the anti-draft riots
that included brutalities against the African-American community as some held them to
be the main cause of the war. Supporting Seymour’s candidacy, the Innocenti in New
Orleans were led by prominent local shipping magnate Joseph Macheca, and they
engaged in a level of violence that seems almost surrealistic today. The New York Times
would later recount:
[Macheca] was worth some hundreds of thousands of dollars and
was a pleasant-mannered, popular gentleman. He has always taken an
active interest in Democratic politics. In the Seymour and Blair campaign
of 1868, he organized and commanded a company of Sicilians 150 strong,
known as the Innocents. Their uniform was a white cape, bearing a
Maltese cross on the left shoulder. They wore side arms, and when they
marched shot every Negro that came in sight. They left a trail of a dozen
dead Negroes behind them every time. Gen. James B. Steedman,
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managing the [Seymour] campaign here at the time, finally forbade them
making further parades, and they disbanded.
Another leading Sicilian in the city, Raffaele Agnello, quickly began claiming
that Barba was murdered by prominent African-American Republican leader Octave
Belot, a local cigar-store owner and state legislator. Belot’s shop was ransacked and he
had to go into hiding until he was able to prove to the authorities that he was not in the
city the night of the murder and was publicly absolved of any involvement.
Joe Macheca needed no proof of Belot’s innocence. Behind his upstanding civic
façade, Macheca was the head of a Sicilian criminal Family made up of emigrants from
cities such as Messina in the east and Trapani and Monreale in the west that challenged
the Palermo Mafia’s dominance. Agnello had been a prominent Mafioso in Palermo
before immigrating to New Orleans in 1860 to join his brother Giuseppe “Joe,” and he
had quickly become Macheca’s main rival as the leader of organized crime in the city.
Macheca’s was certain Agnello had ordered the hit on Barba who was a capo in the
Macheca Family.
Two months after Barba’s murder, Agnello tried to smooth things over by hosting
a party for both factions at his brother’s home, but it didn’t quite go the way he hoped.
Late in the evening, Joseph Banano of the Macheca gang approached Alphonse Mateo
who was believed to be Barba’s killer. Mateo didn’t like the tone of Banano’s questions
and bent to draw a knife from his boot-top. Banano quickly stepped back while pulling a
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pistol and fired into Mateo’s face. As everyone scattered, Agnello wounded Banano with
a bullet in the back, Banano’s friends giving covering fire as he was picked up and
carried off, Agnello’s group likewise saving Mateo by rushing him to the hospital.
Agnello quickly went into hiding while his gang more or less routed the Macheca
forces who had to abandon their commercial stalls in the French Market and take new
ones in the smaller Poydras Market, a number of the gang leaving town for Galveston,
Texas, where they had affiliations. In February of 1869, Joe Agnello and other Mafioso,
including the recovered Mateo, broke into a house where some of the Macheca gang were
hiding and blasted away with luparas, the Sicilian sawn-off shotgun with a hinged stock
for easy concealment. The recovered Banano was wounded again along with Giovanni
Casabianca as they fled with three other gang members, again no one being killed. The
two wounded men and another gang member, Pedro Allucho, joined those in Galveston
even though it was no longer a completely safe refuge.
A local newspaper, the True Delta, picked up on the warfare and wrote:
There is now in the second district of this city a band of about
twelve well-known and notorious Sicilian murderers, counterfeiters, and
burglars who, in the last month, have formed a sort of general copartnership or stock company for the plunder and disturbance of the city.
Three or four of these men have been residing here for years and have
always formed part of an extremely dangerous class. The others are but
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recently in the country. These men have been driven out of Sicily by laws
which appear more strict and severe than any we have in this. Much as we
imagine ourselves the superiors of anything that is old, these men in
Palermo, the city whence they come, are held to a strict and careful
account. Once a man there is suspected of being a dangerous character, he
is either incarcerated altogether, or he is required by the police to report
every night at the stationhouse and be locked up. There are no American
theories of liberty there about thieves.
Finding that the license and bail bond system of this city afford
much more liberty and personal security than Sicily, these men have come
here and deliberately organized for mischief, and when it is stated that
several of the best known murders ever committed in this city have been
committed by them, it will be understood how dangerous the class is...
One of the murders committed by these men is alleged to have
been that of Lethario Barber whose death was at one time attributed to
another party. Barber, it now appears, was met at a late hour of the night,
and advantage having been taken of the political excitement of October1
he was shot down by two balls, one through his left hip, one through his
1 The political excitement of October refers to the rampage of Macheca’s Innocenti.
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abdomen. Four weeks ago, on Sunday night, these men were all together
at their place of rendezvous on Royal Street2, drinking and carousing
together. Suddenly, while all were dancing and playing together, they
commenced stabbing and shooting. About ten shots were fired and several
blows of the dagger were dealt. Two parties were seriously wounded, and
another of the party shot through the mouth. This difficulty was between
the members themselves, among whom, as is always the case in every
organization, there was an opposition party.
A week after, a similar affray occurred on Chartres Street between
Dumaine and St. Philip. On that occasion about a dozen more shots were
fired and some of the balls penetrated Leyadore’s Drug Store.
The party consists of nine ‘soldiers’ and three ‘captains.’ The
soldiers follow no regular occupation; or if any at all, it is that of fruit
sellers; and this occupation is only followed for a blind. Their more
serious occupation consists in the manufacturing of spurious nickels and
such occupation or employment as the captains may find for them.
2 This rendezvous was a bar in a building owned by Macheca with the bar run by the Matranga family, important allies of his.
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The True Delta had just recorded the outbreak of the first Mafia war in the United
States, one that would go on sporadically with shifting alliances and combatants for
decades. Over the next two weeks, three more men were killed and a number wounded,
the police managing to identify the murderers of an Agnello capo named Gregorio
Guglielmo. One of the suspects got away to Galveston, but the other was caught by the
police and, in those simpler judicial times, made to confess that he’d been paid $500 for
the killing, though fear of forces more ruthless even than the police stiffened his
backbone sufficiently that he refused to identify his employer.
When Banano, Casabianca and Allucho decided it was safe to return from
Galveston and reopen their produce stalls in the Poydras Market, Agnello made a bold
attack by sending in his brother Joe and several other gunmen who opened fire on their
rivals in broad daylight in the market, the only one hit being an innocent bystander who
died from his injuries ten days later. Casabianca and Allucho who returned fire on the
attackers were the only ones arrested.
With that, a true Mafia moment was set in motion. It’s apparent that only
Macheca could have made the reclusive Agnello act the way he did, but it’s unknown
how he so completely hoodwinked the credulous Agnello. In any case, as if ordained
King, a finely turned-out Agnello appeared one morning from his home on Royal Street
strolling the streets of the Italian section, gesticulating to his subjects with the elegant
walking stick he sported, accepting their accolades, his ring being kissed. Trailed by his
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single bodyguard3, his godson Frank Sacarro, the triumphal procession ventured farther
afield as he moved uptown onto Toulouse Street where he confidently approached the J.
Macheca and Company fruit store, an Alpha stag marking his territory.
As Agnello and his godson approached the shop, something—something planned
it seems—drew their attention to one side, and when they turned back they found a young
bearded man aiming a large, old-fashioned blunderbuss pistol directly at Agnello’s head.
The godson grabbed at the gun just as the gunman pulled the trigger. Bits of metal flew
into Agnello’s head dropping him to the pavement, the bodyguard’s hand bloodied from
the shot. The gunman turned and ran, dropping the blunderbuss while pulling out a more
modern revolver. The bodyguard had his gun out and staggered after the gunman who
ran into a nearby bakery, the two men exchanging shots, one of which wounded a baker
in the leg. The wounded bodyguard thought better of continuing the chase as the gunman
fled out the back door and when police arrived at the scene, they found him on the
sidewalk wailing over the dead body of “our Godfather.”
Macheca, the first American godfather, had just been crowned.
Leaderless, the survivors of Agnello’s Mafia proved no match for Macheca. Joe
Agnello managed to hang on for two more years until he, too, was killed and Macheca’s
power grew unchecked.
3 The position of bodyguard to the boss is a special position in the Mafia, more of a confidant than a retainer.
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The carpet-bagging policies of Washington again led to violence in 1874 in many
parts of the south, the out-of-power Democrats seeking to dislodge Republicans by means
of a militant group called The White League. Macheca reconstituted another 200-strong
company of Sicilians armed with bayoneted rifles which formed the core of the
Democratic forces in their military rout of the Republicans in New Orleans. By a quirk
of fate and a well-timed fabrication, Macheca was credited with saving the life of the
fallen general leading the Republican fighting force, emerging from the fray with friends
on both sides. His influence in the city became so great that Bolivia appointed him its
consul general in 1875, three other countries following suit the next year. Moving easily
in the upper echelons of the legitimate power structure of the city and as the absolute
head of the criminal underworld, his future appeared to be unlimited; but the Sicilian
Mafia wasn’t done with him yet.
In the spring of 1879, the most notorious Mafioso in the world, Giuseppe
Esposito, arrived in New Orleans completely unnoticed by the American authorities. A
legend for his criminal exploits and an escapee from Italian justice with a $3,000 price
tag on his head, he passed through immigration by the simple expedient of calling
himself Vincenzo Rebello. The events that had led to his flight to America had begun
two years earlier when he was second in command to a boss in the violent countryside
Sicilian Mafia, an illiterate bandit named Antonino ‘Nino’ Leone who was renowned for
sporting a Winchester rifle, a rarity in Sicily. The scheme that led to their downfall was
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the kidnapping for ransom of a wealthy young Englishman named John Forester Rose
who was in Sicily to look over some mining properties his banking family owned in
Lercara Friddi, near Palermo4. Rose was eventually freed for a $16,000 ransom paid
after the family had received in the mails, once piece at a time, both ears and a part of his
nose5. The British government, in no mind to ignore this insult to their imperial majesty,
warned the Italians that if they did not bring the bandits to justice, a British force would
be sent to Sicily to accomplish the task. An entire corps of the Italian army chased Leone
and his men around Sicily for a year before boxing him in on a hilltop near Palermo
where a pitched battle was fought over several days between the soldiers and some 160 of
Leone’s men. Finally, Leone, Esposito and twelve others were captured, the authorities
splitting the captured into two equal groups for transport to Rome. Leone’s group
arrived, but before even leaving Sicily Esposito and his group mysteriously escaped,
almost certainly through bribery. Returning to a life of banditry in the hills, over the next
year-and-a-half Esposito, now calling himself Giuseppe Randazzo, was credited with
killing nearly a dozen wealthy landowners as well as the chancellor and vice-chancellor
of one province. Recaptured as he sat in a Palermo cafe, he again bribed his way to
freedom and finally decided Sicily was too hot for him. Along with six of his men, he
emigrated to New York in November of 1878 and as Rebello bought a bar downtown on
4 Lercara Friddi was the town from which the Lucania family would emigrate in 1906, bringing to the United States their nine yearold son Salvatore who would transform himself into Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
5 Some sources say Rose was freed unharmed after the ransom was paid and the mutilations were a later embellishment.
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Thompson street to use as a front for his criminal activities6. A mere six months later,
however, he moved his operation to New Orleans, New York not yet the Mafia
stronghold it was to become.
As a star of the Sicilian Mafia, Esposito was accorded a status that Macheca, born
in Italy but raised in the United States, could not challenge. Flush with funds from his
life of crime, Esposito bought a small ship that he named Leone in honor of his former
boss and took a wife to replace the one he had left in Sicily along with their five children,
eventually having two children by this second wife. This marital indiscretion, however,
may have been his undoing. Someone in New Orleans—and evidently his first wife had
family in the city—ratted him out to the Italian authorities, sending a letter at the end of
1880 to the police chief in Rome with a photo of bearded man the writer claimed was
Esposito, saying that he lived in New Orleans and had married a pregnant young widow.
The Italians forwarded the missive to their consul in New Orleans, Pasquale Corte, who
took it to the police chief asking him to investigate the validity of the claim. After
tracking down the source of the photo and locating the suspect without alerting him as to
their interest, the chief assigned his most favored detective, David Hennessy, to surveil
Rebello while the US and Italian authorities satisfied themselves that he was in fact
Esposito/Randazzo and coordinated what was to be done. To be kept apprised of
6 Storefront “social” clubs that served as Family headquarters would become a tradition for the American Mafia. In the late 1990’s
Joe Masssino, boss of the Bonanno Family, outlawed any of his capi from conducting business in such places as the authorities had
had so much success targeting them for electronic surveillance.
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Esposito’s every move, Hennessy leaned on local hood Tony Labruzzo who had worked
as an informant and was close to Rebello.
The Italian authorities were satisfied they had the right man and were so anxious
to nab Esposito that they had the chargé d’affaires in New York hire two private
detectives to go to New Orleans with an arrest warrant for the wanted fugitive. The New
Orleans police chief wasn’t keen to get involved with the out-of-town detectives, but he
authorized Hennessy to work with them as he saw fit. Hennessy enlisted his cousin Mike
Hennessy, also a detective on the force, to assist him as he executed the warrant on
Esposito. Surprising Esposito as he was about to attend Mass, Hennessy found him
armed with two pistols and a knife, none of which he got a chance to use. Hennessy
locked him in a cell at headquarters for a few hours before hustling him aboard a ship
bound for New York where he signed him over to the custody of the two New York
detectives who kept him shackled for the week-long voyage.
The uproar in the Italian community at having Esposito snatched from their midst
revealed to the authorities for the first time the scope of the Mafia and the revelation was
chilling. Crowds in the street denounced the authorities for anti-Italian bigotry and
chanted for the release of the innocent merchant Esposito. Trying to calm the situation,
the authorities revealed some of the information they’d gathered on Esposito/Randazzo,
leaking that there had been an informer. Labruzzo rightly was frightened, seeking to
cover his tracks by publicly accusing another man of being the one to betray Esposito,
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drawing both a gun and a knife when the two began fighting egged on by a crowd of
onlookers. The other man was unarmed and fled, but when he quickly returned with his
own gun, the police arrested both of them before one or the other was killed. Labruzzo’s
ruse was futile. The Mafia organized an investigatory committee called Tiro al
Bersaglio, Shoot the Target, to uncover the betrayer of Esposito and it took them less
than two weeks to zero in on committee-member Labruzzo, shooting him to death in the
street as he headed home from one of their meetings.
Esposito, meanwhile, was trying desperately to wriggle free from the hand of
justice once again. At a deportation hearing in New York before a federal commissioner,
six New Yorkers along with five witnesses who’d journeyed from New Orleans testified
that the man in custody was not the bandit Esposito but was in fact Vincenzo Rebello, a
law-abiding merchant with whom they’d done business in New York and New Orleans.
Confronted by such sworn testimony, the commissioner stayed the order of extradition
until the Italian authorities could produce more proof that the man actually was Esposito.
The internal organization that the Mafia was demonstrating in its attempt to
liberate Esposito was a harbinger of the widespread bonds between Families that would,
in the future, enable it to become the primary criminal organization in all history.
Meanwhile in New Orleans it flexed another muscle that would serve it well in
the future. Joe Macheca visited Hennessy in his office at headquarters and offered the
detective $50,000 to go to New York and testify that the man in custody was not the same
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man he’d arrested, implying that the New York detectives had made a switch before the
voyage began which would explain how the innocent Rebello ended up in New York.
Hennessy threw Macheca out of his office only to get a rude awakening to his political
connections, the city administration suddenly reorganizing the police so that both
Hennessy and his cousin were demoted in rank with the police chief no longer their boss,
reporting instead to the newly installed Chief of Detectives Thomas Devereaux, a bitter
enemy of the Hennessys. Several years earlier as a detective on the force, Devereaux had
shot and killed another detective named Bob Harris, subsequently charged with murder
but acquitted though the Hennessys made no secret that they believed him guilty of coldblooded murder.
Hennessy understood the hardball game being played but refused to give Macheca
any satisfaction. The next month, September, Italian carabinieri who had known
Esposito in Sicily arrived in New York and positively identified the so-called Rebello as
the wanted Mafia bandit Esposito, the Commissioner authorizing immediate extradition
with the police hustling him aboard a boat for Europe as fast as possible. The NY Times
reported the concern of the police that “a rescue attempt might be made by certain
Italians in this city, Brooklyn, and New Jersey who had been attending the trial.”
Esposito was convicted in Italy of six murders and spent the remainder of his life literally
in chains.
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The month after Esposito had been returned to face justice, Mike Hennessy and
Devereaux got into an argument in a brokerage office that turned into a gun battle, Mike
taking a bullet in the face while Devereaux was killed, a claim made that David shot
Devereaux point-blank in the head as he was trying to get away. Both Hennessys were
charged in the killing and, though acquitted six months later of any criminal liability, they
were dismissed from the force. Mike went to Galveston, Texas, later to Houston where
he operated a successful detective agency only to be shot in the back and killed as he
stepped off a streetcar on his way home one night. David stayed in New Orleans joining
the Farrell & Boylan Detective Corps where he became a good friend of the renowned
detective William Pinkerton whose father had started the famous Pinkerton agency.
Though Esposito was gone for good, the legacy he left was war. During his brief
reign in New Orleans, he had delegated to a Mafioso named Giuseppe “Joe” Provenzano
the authority to hire and fire all dock workers, a lucrative source of graft from which
Esposito had taken the lion’s share. Macheca had bowed to Esposito’s hegemony as a
leader of the Sicilian Mafia, but once he was removed from the scene, Macheca wanted
to gather power back into his hands (raising a question if the original anonymous letter
about Esposito came, in fact, from Macheca and not the relatives of Esposito’s first wife,
various Mafiosi later using the authorities to discreetly rid themselves of rivals).
Provenzano balked at relinquishing power and as the two skirmished for control of the
docks, Macheca found that the imprimatur bestowed on Provenzano by the Mafia royalty
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of the fallen Esposito let him draw more soldiers than Macheca could attract. While
Macheca’s chief aide, Charles Matranga, was a native Sicilian, he came from Monreale, a
small town very near Palermo that had been the birthplace of a rival secret society named
the Stoppaglieri7 (that was reputed to have originated much of the structure adopted by
the Mafia).
In Italian, Stoppaglieri means “the Draughtsmen” although in the Palermo prison
the word was slang for “saboteurs.” Arising in 1873 as a political association of wealthy
businessmen, the Stoppaglieri ’s initiation rites and command structure were more
complex than any of the various secret societies that sprang up in the late 19th century. A
candidate for membership had to pass through a “noviate” in which he was evaluated
while learning the ins and outs of the association after which, if he was accepted, he went
through a “baptism.” The initiation was almost precisely that used by the Mafia to this
day, involving a pinprick of the initiate’s blood onto the picture a saint which is burned,
the initiate taking an oath of loyalty to the association. The command structure of the
Stoppaglieri also was virtually the same as the Mafia adopted with a boss of bosses, capi
and sottocapi for each section which tended to be associated villages. Palermo as the
main city in the region eventually came to dominate both the Stoppaglieri as well as at
least one other local competing society called the Fratuzzi, headquartered in nearby
7 There are a number of other spellings for the name of this society.
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Bagheria. The original association would retain enough of its independent character,
however, to be called the Monreale Mafia.
Even though Matranga had left Monreale when he was only one year-old, the
extended family structure of the Sicilians meant that he was able to draw on personal
associations to recruit Stoppaglieri to join Macheca’s forces. As the strength of this
Macheca/Matranga Family grew, they increasingly challenged Provenzano’s Mafia with
the shipping companies caught in the middle.
Together with all the other mayhem taking place in the corrupt city, the citizenry
finally grew fed up enough to elect a reform ticket in 1888 which, as one of its first
actions, persuaded David Hennessy to leave his detective agency and accept the post of
Chief of Police. He had neither forgotten nor forgiven Macheca for engineering his
removal from the force six years earlier and he immediately began compiling a dossier on
Macheca who was soon aware of Hennessy’s disturbing interest in him. Word reached
Hennessy that Macheca, Matranga and Geraci were plotting to kill him, Hennessy taking
the precaution of informing others of his discoveries and in subtle ways favoring the
Provenzanos. He was friendly enough with the leading brother in the family, Joe
Provenzano, to sponsor his membership in a club and dine out with him, making no
secret of his friendship even if it did raise suspicions of being on Provenzano’s payroll.
Macheca played the double-cross once again when Provenzano made an overture
of peace. Macheca sent Rocco Geraci, the third most powerful man in the Family, to sit
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down with one of Provenzano’s capi, Vincenzo Ottumvo, over a game of cards to work
out differences. But Macheca also dispatched one of his men to sneak in behind Ottumvo
and cleave his skull with an ax, his body then dismembered for secret disposal.
Macheca’s declarations of innocence in Ottumvo’s disappearance did nothing to fool
Provenzano who responded in turn by murdering one of Macheca’s capi.
Alarmed at the rising level of violence, Hennessy called in the leaders of the
warring factions and warned them not to stir up trouble, making Macheca and
Provenzano agree, shake hands and drink a toast. Both were lying through their teeth.
Early in the morning of April 6, 1890, Provenzano forces ambushed Geraci, Anthony
Matranga, and five other Macheca men as they rode in a wagon home from the docks,
managing only to wound two of the opposition though Tony Matranga had one leg
shattered so badly it had to be amputated. With a full scale outbreak of violence likely,
Hennessy sought to keep the lid on by arresting Joe Provenzano and his brother, Pietro,
along with four of his men. Hennessy was taken by surprise when Matranga and the
other victims willingly identified the Provenzanos as their assailants, giving the district
attorney the evidence necessary to prosecute them. The mobster’s cooperation was an
unexpected first for the authorities who were unaware of the distinction between the
Stoppaglieri and the Mafia which already had become a catch-all term for organized
Italian criminals. The Provenzanos were remanded to Parish prison to await trial on the
charges against them.
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The fantastic level of corruption in the city was demonstrated at the trial of the
Provenzanos held in July, 1890, when more than twenty policemen from Captain on
down testified they had seen the accused Provenzanos elsewhere in the city at the time of
the shootings. The jury was too inured to city politics to believe the alibis and returned a
guilty verdict which the judge promptly overturned for lack of evidence, ordering a new
trial for October. Hennessy threw in his two-cents by telling a reporter that he would
“show up Macheca and the Matrangas, giving their records and showing that they are not
worthy of credence.” Macheca responded by telling a reporter, “Hennessy is
investigating the Provenzano case the wrong way and he will answer for it.” Hennessy
was under no illusion that Macheca meant anything less sinister than it sounded and he
decided to decimate the Macheca forces by deporting as many of his men as he could,
sending a letter to the police chief in Rome asking for photo dossiers on Mafiosi wanted
in Italy. The Italian Chief responded that he would gather the information and forward it,
but he never got the chance, murdered a week after receiving Hennessy’s letter.
Making inquiries, Hennessy learned that his first letter to Rome had been known
to Macheca the day he’d sent it. Hennessy then talked with the Italian consul, Pasquale
Corte, who promised to get together a list of some one hundred fugitive Italians in New
Orleans. No sooner did he make the promise to Hennessy than he found himself invited
to dinner at Macheca’s house, scared to death to go and wise enough to eat as little as
possible from the table of the affable and gracious Macheca. His caution was rewarded
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when he took violently ill a few hours after returning home, telling Hennessy afterwards
that “My symptoms bore all the evidence of poisoning and I am satisfied that my life had
been attempted.” Macheca’s ruthlessness, however, made Corte think twice about
cooperating and he stalled Hennessy about releasing the list of wanted Italians, falsely
claiming he needed authorization from his embassy in Washington to release the list.
Macheca felt himself under siege. The Provenzanos were bad enough but having
Hennessy and his police friends back them up was too much. On the same day that his
informant told him of the letter Hennessy had dispatched to Rome, he decided on the
decisive act of murdering his nemesis. Using an alias he rented from the Petersen family
a front room shack on Girod Street not far from Hennessy’s home on the route from
police headquarters. Shortly afterwards, a recent immigrant from Sicily, a shoemaker
named Pietro Monasterio was moved in with instructions to keep watch on Hennessy as
he came and went: what hours he kept, who accompanied him, what weapons he carried,
whether he was drunk or sober. The illiterate but resourceful Monasterio kept his own
cryptic log of scratches on the wall, bringing in for assistance and company his fourteen
year-old nephew Aspari Marchesi.
A light rain off the Gulf of Mexico made Hennessy walk quickly as he headed
home on the evening of October 15, 1890, accompanied by Billy O’Connor8, a detective
friend who lived near him. Hennessy had been kept late by a police board meeting at
8 O’Connor would become New Orleans Chief of Police in 1908.
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City Hall and afterwards stopped by headquarters so that it was well after eleven P.M. as
the two men hurried along with their collars up and their heads down. Taking Rampart
Street which wasn’t as muddy as Basin, Hennessy suggested they make a stop at Virget’s
saloon where they shared a dozen oysters. Hennessy, something of a teetotaler at the age
of thirty-three, washed his down with a glass of milk.
Continuing on their way, they went opposite directions when they reached Girod
Street, O’Connor headed down towards the river while Hennessy turned uptown where
he shared a house with his mother. Wondering why the string of lights above the street
were still on when they were normally shut off at ten P.M., he was startled when a young
boy suddenly stepped out of a darkened doorway ahead and walked quickly up the street
while loudly whistling a tune favored in the local Italian community, La Marica Reale,
the Royal March. As the chief approached one of the houses with a second-floor porch
overhanging the sidewalk, two men came out of the yard of a shack across the street and
stepped into the muddied street. Suddenly, they pulled guns from beneath their coats and
began shooting, the tall and powerfully built Hennessy staggering as the first balls
slammed into his body. Knocked to the ground, he tried to keep moving and managed to
get out his gun and return fire but hit no one.
The shooting went on so long some residents cautiously peeked out and saw some
of the gunfire. A man in one of the houses was awakened from his sleep yet still had
time to step out onto his second floor gallery to see a man fire two shots from a shotgun,
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reload and fire again. Another witness heard one of the shooters say, “We got him,” after
which they all began to flee.
A number of people rushed out to help Hennessy who was still conscious.
O’Connor heard the shots and ran back up the street, horrified to find the chief badly
wounded though conscious and sitting up on the doorstep of a family named Gillis.
Before he was carried into the house, the chief identified his attackers as “dagos,”
evidently not recognizing any of the shooters.
O’Connor roused the owner of a nearby grocery shop that had a telephone and
called for an ambulance, then called the Central Station of the police to report the attack
on the chief, virtually the entire force soon roused and set to work to track down the
chief’s attackers.
As the ambulance rushed him to Charity hospital, Hennessy was alert though in
pain from his many wounds. In the emergency room, doctors found the most serious
injury was a shot that had punctured both lungs, not wanting to operate as the ball was
lodged near his heart. They dressed his wounds to stanch the bleeding and administered
opiates to alleviate pain, Hennessy telling of the attack and his impression of who had
carried it out, repeating that it was the Italians.
At the crime scene, officers were keeping back a crowd of milling spectators
while taking statements from witnesses. From what the eyewitnesses related, backed up
by the numerous bullet holes in the building beyond where the chief had fallen, it was
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obvious that much of the fire had come from the opposite side of the street and the
detectives learned that the three-room building was owned by a family named Petersen
who were soon located and woken. The two women who’d rented out the room told
detectives that the two back rooms had been rented for a long time by the Negro families
occupying them while the front room that most interested the detectives had been rented
two months earlier by a man who had said he wanted the property for three months for a
friend. He gave his name as Peter Johnson though they thought he looked Italian.
Hennessy was alert throughout the night, confidently telling everyone he’d pull
through fine. Early in the morning, however, he began to drift in and out of
consciousness, finally falling into a coma before dying at 9:06 A.M.
Not long after the chief died, two paperboys came into the station bringing a
shotgun they’d found in the mud of a gutter near the shooting site. The detectives noted
the modified stock that could be folded to be hidden beneath a coat, characteristic of the
favored weapon of Sicilians called lupara. When the paperboys showed the police where
they’d found the gun, yet another shotgun was located, the assailants obviously
discarding them as they fled to avoid having murder weapons on them if captured during
their getaway.
Though the detectives had been unable to identify the renter of the front room in
the shack who had called himself Johnson, apparently an alias, they learned that the
premises had been used by a recent immigrant from Sicily, a shoemaker named Pietro
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Monasterio who was quickly located and arrested, along with his brother-in-law Antonio
Marchesi and Marchesi’s fourteen year-old son Asperi. As many of the Provenzanos
were still in prison awaiting their retrial for the assault on the Matrangas and it was no
secret that Hennessy had been feuding with the Matrangas, the authorities concentrated
on them, picking them up wholesale. Within the day, five had been singled out as having
participated in Hennessy’s murder, three of them identified by the eyewitnesses. The
police were confident the investigation was on the right track as incriminating testimony
was given by the young Marchesi who related to police how his father instructed him to
wait until he saw the chief coming, then hurry past the shack on Girod whistling as a
signal.
On the morning of the second day after the shooting, the same day Hennessy’s
elaborate funeral cortege wound through the city, a young paper-carrier named Thomas
Duffy told the jailers at the local Parish prison that he might be able to identify one of the
accused, Antonio Scoffedi, who was brought down to a lock-up for the boy to view.
Looking through the door at Scoffedi, Duffy suddenly pulled a pistol and fired. The
jailers tackled Duffy and the wounded Scoffedi was rushed to the hospital where it was
expected he would die, the doctors finding a bullet lodged in his neck muscles too close
to his spine to remove. The frightened Scoffedi claimed he was innocent, as was his
boss, Joe Matranga, but he thought the instigators of the killing might have been two
Sicilians named Carusso. Unexpectedly, Scoffedi didn’t die and continued to improve.
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Meanwhile, the city was in an uproar. Hennessy had been appointed Chief of
Police by the reform mayor elected two years earlier, Joseph Shakespeare, who now
believed he was next on an assassination list. Moving quickly, he contacted a number of
prominent citizens and it was agreed that he would appoint a vigilance committee to
investigate the crime and “the existence of stiletto societies among the Sicilians in this
city.” After Scoffedi fingered the Carussos, the mayor ordered their arrest along with that
of the four Matranga brothers, their chief lieutenant Francisco “Rocco” Gerachi (usually
spelled Geraci)9, and Joseph Macheca who had backed up Joe Matranga’s alibi of having
been at dinner in a public restaurant at the time of the shooting. The next day, the city
council in a formal ty or more citizens, whose duty shall be to thoroughly investigate
tvote authorized the mayor to appoint:
…a committee of fifhe matter of the existence of secret societies or
bands of death-bound assassins, which it is openly charged have life in our
midst, and the existence of which has culminated in the assassination of
the highest executive officer of the Police Department, and to devise
necessary means and most effectual and speedy measures for the
uprooting and total annihilation of such hell-born associations, and also to
9 Exact names in organized crime are often a matter of dispute, both because original sources varied their spellings and for the logical
reason that most Mafiosi don’t want people knowing their names if they can avoid it. Often, even other criminals don’t know the real
names of the mobsters they’re dealing with.
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suggest needful remedies to prevent the introduction here of criminals or
paupers from Europe.
As the Mayor in his wrath warned, “We must teach these people a lesson that they
will not forget for all time.”
It would be, as it turned out, quite a lesson.
Four days after the assassination, the NY Times printed a dispatch from New
Orleans dated a day earlier that read:
It seems certain that the city is on the eve of a bloody race riot.
Not only has it been learned that Chief of Police Hennessy was murdered
by the Mafia, but the astounding revelation was made last night that the
murderers had planned to kill a number of other officials. Public feeling is
strongly aroused against the Italian colony, and the least thing would
precipitate a riot. A steamship is now on her way up the river from Italy
with over eight hundred immigrants on board, and a determination is
expressed to prevent their landing.
The police last night searched the residence of one of the men
arrested for the murder of Chief Hennessy and found a detailed plan to
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assassinate all city or State officers who acted counter to the wishes of the
Mafia.
The Provenzanos, fortunate to be in jail and thus beyond suspicion, took the
opportunity to denounce their rivals. An interview of Joe Provenzano along with two of
his men was published on the front page of the NY Times five days after Hennessy’s
murder in which Provenzano fingered the Matrangas as the killers “Because [Hennessy]
was going to be a witness for us and was going to expose them. He knew all about
Matranga and Geraci. He got some things from Italy about them, and he was going to tell
what he knew, and that would break them up. Matranga was the head of the Stoppaghera
or Mafia society.” Provenzano then went on to tell how “there are about twenty leaders
of them. They are the committee, and there are about 300 greenhorns who have got to do
anything the leaders say.” He claimed he had been extorted by the Mafia, describing an
initiation ceremony involving black robes and a skull with a knife lying in it, adding,
“They’ve got the Mafia Society everywhere. They’ve got it in San Francisco, St. Louis,
Chicago, New-York, and here,” claiming he certainly didn’t belong to it, his group of
dock workers just “...an association to keep up the price for work.” His men got good
pay while Matranga’s Mafia stiffed the workers. He also accused them of killing an alibi
witness who was going to testify for him at his assault trial10.
10 The Provenzano interview and later events illustrate just how confused the issue of the Mafia in the New World was. It seems
certain that Provenzano was purely Mafia—his association with Esposito, going to New York to offer a perjury alibi, certainly puts the
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The Italian community was suffering under the onslaught of outrage, many of
every ethnicity fearing there could be “a war of extermination against the Italian
element.” The newspapers and community leaders worked hard to damp the fires, and
their exhortations along with the swift work of the police in identifying, arresting and
charging perpetrators of the crime fortunately began to cool tempers and suspicions. By
the 19th, the police believed they had in custody a good number of the conspirators
including the five they identified as the shooters of Hennessy, the last arrested being the
one who had fallen and lost his gun as they fled, identified as Manuel Pietro although he
would later be identified as Manuel Politz (sometimes called Polizzi).
Two days later, the Vigilance Committee issued a press release addressed to the
Italian community that began:
The committee of fifty appointed by the Mayor and Council to
investigate the existence of stiletto societies in this city and to devise
means to stamp them out has concluded for the present to act strictly
within the limits of the law. We shall do everything in our power for the
present to allay the popular excitement and to see that your people get full
justice, and that no outrages are committed upon them. We believe that
lie to his claim of innocence—while Matranga was predominantly Stoppaglieri; but even then the distinction was not so pure as it
might appear. After all was said and done, Matranga would emerge as the dominant Mafia Family in New Orleans while the
Provenzanos found themselves having to move their operations out of the city to continue. And perhaps it is best to think of them as
Families such as would later become the norm in New York, distinct and independent yet all of them Mafia and intertwined, members
able to move between Families on occasion.
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the great majority among you are honest, industrious, and good citizens,
and abhor crime as much as we do. These are the people to whom this
appeal is directed. We want you to come forward and give us all the
assistance and all the information in your power. Send us the names and
history (so far as you know it) of every bad man, every criminal and every
suspected person of your race in this city and the vicinity. Whatever
communications are made to us are strictly confidential. In giving this
information, you may reveal your identity or not, just as you please. We
would prefer that you should give your names and addresses in order that
the committee may have personal communication with you.
We hope this appeal will be met by you in the same spirit in which
we issue it, and that this community will not be driven to harsh and
stringent methods outside of the law, which may involve the innocent and
guilty alike.
That proved to be a forlorn hope.
One other short dispatch from New Orleans concerning the case read: “A
telegram was sent to the Pinkertons yesterday asking them to assist in the hunt for Chief
Hennessy’s assassins. This morning a reply was received from W.A. Pinkerton saying he
would be here at once to take part personally in the work.” William Pinkerton, eldest son
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of the firm’s founder and its president following his father’s death, would not arrive, but
his firm would prove instrumental in cracking the case.
Immediately upon learning of Hennessy’s murder, William Pinkerton wrote to
Mayor Shakespeare’s secretary, another old friend of his, saying:
The murder dazed me. I could not collect my thoughts. Why
anybody as courteous and brave and gentlemanly as Hennessy should be
assassinated in the brutal manner in which he was, is a mystery to me... I
have known him since he was a boy in Chief Badger’s office and watched
him through the years develop into a fine man and wonderful police
officer. Again all I can say is I am stunned, my heart goes out to his
mother who I know he adored. Please give her my condolences... I am in
touch with Chief of Detectives Gastner to offer the full facilities of our
organization to help track down, arrest and convict these criminals...
The Pinkerton brothers, William and Robert, decided that the best chance of
breaking the case was to use an undercover operative who could infiltrate the gang in
prison and hopefully worm a confession from one or more of them, even if they didn’t
know to whom they were confessing. They chose a twenty-something year-old operative
named Frank Dimaio who already had carried out several undercover assignments.
Fluent in Italian, he would later earn the nickname “The Raven” due to his dark
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complexion and thick black hair. Recently married and about to leave on his honeymoon,
his plans were cut short by being summoned to a townhouse in Brooklyn where he found
waiting for him his immediate boss, Pinkerton Superintendent Henry “Harry” Minster,
the two of them joined in a few minutes by William Pinkerton himself, heady stuff for a
young operative who had been with the firm just four years. Not yet revealing the exact
assignment they had in mind for him, Pinkerton related that he and Minster were going to
Washington to confer with the Secret Service and that Dimaio was to go directly to
Chicago where they would meet him in a few days to lay out his assignment which he
could refuse if he so chose. Meanwhile, he was to go to the Bowery and buy a complete
wardrobe, including a derby, told to make certain they all had New York labels in them.
In Chicago several days later, Dimaio heard the whole plan. Pinkerton explained
how he had intended personally to go to New Orleans and investigate but reports from
the New Orleans police convinced him it would be futile, witnesses being bribed and
threatened. “The gang is boasting openly to the prison guards they’ll be back in business
before long and there will be more killings, including those of police officers,” he told
Dimaio. He then said he wanted Dimaio to impersonate a criminal named Anthony
Ruggiero, an international counterfeiter being held under close arrest in a small town in
northern Italy, handing Dimaio a complete dossier on the mobster. Dimaio’s true identity
would be known only to six persons: the Pinkerton brothers; Minster; New Orleans
District Attorney Charles Luzenberg; the Secret Service superintendent in New Orleans,
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A.F. Wilde; and the head of the Secret Service in Washington. Pinkerton warned him it
would cost him his life if his true identity were discovered and that Ruggiero might even
have acquaintances in New Orleans. Asked if he wanted to accept the assignment, he
recalled sixty years later how he’d responded, “With my heart in my throat, ‘Well, sir,
when do I start?’”
The plan was for him to travel to a small Louisiana town carrying a suitcase of the
finest counterfeit money available, the work of a Dutchman named Charley Becker, and
register in a boarding house as Ruggiero. There, he’d be arrested by the Secret Service
and placed in the Parish prison with the Matranga gang. His local attorney wouldn’t
know precisely what was going on but would be informed enough to act as a go-between
for any coded messages Dimaio wanted to get out to Minster, his immediate contact at
the firm.
Minster practiced with Dimaio for three days on assuming his cover then they put
the plan into practice, everything going smoothly with Dimaio arrested and placed in the
same jail block with the Matrangas though the gang was warned by a corrupt jailer
making a lucky guess that the alleged counterfeiter might be an informant. Dimaio
ostentatiously kept his distance from the Matrangas, going so far as to punch one of the
gang on his first day in the prison. The Matrangas were so obvious in their machinations,
however, that he easily overheard them giving orders to various visitors to intimidate and
bribe witnesses. (Immediately, after their arrest they had been denied any access to
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visitors, including lawyers, but a protest by the Italian consul had broken the ban, the
consul charging that the prisoners had been beaten by other inmates with the connivance
of the guards and forced to pay to stop the assaults.)
Jail life for Dimaio proved so debilitating, with desultory epidemics of dysentery,
that after only a few weeks his attorney contacted Minster who suggested to Pinkerton
that they get their operative out of the prison immediately. Dimaio, however, refused to
leave. A local madam who visited the prison regularly took pity and began bringing in
meals and wine for him, Dimaio using this bounty to strike up a friendship with the
Matranga gang member he had decked upon arrival though he was actually angling to get
close to the gang member he judged to be the weakest link in the chain, Manuel “Joe”
Politz.
As he subtly worked to win the confidence of Politz, he was able to ascertain that
a private detective working for the Matrangas named Dominick O’Malley, along with
one of the Matranga’s attorneys, were bribing witnesses to leave the state until the trial
was over, sending out the information to Pinkerton in a coded message. Dimaio began
cutting Politz from of the herd by getting him to think his fellow gang members were
turning on him, innocently asking, “What have the other fellows got against you, Joe?”
One day shortly afterwards, Dimaio instigated a violent but obscure argument with one of
the other gang members and when Politz asked him what it had been about, Dimaio told
him he had been standing up for him when the guy said he was afraid Politz “might go to
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the law.” As Dimaio’s deception made Politz grow wary of his fellow gang members,
they in turn began to be suspicious of him.
Dimaio did all he could to foster his divide-and-conquer strategy. One Sunday
when Politz came to Dimaio’s cell to share with him portions of the Matranga’s
customary private pasta feast, Dimaio knocked the fork from Politz’s hand and taking up
a pinch of the powdered cheese on top told Politz to smell it, saying, “Poison, Joe! I
know poison. That’s arsenic.” Politz, who couldn’t tell parmesan from poison, was
aghast and Dimaio brutally kept up the campaign of terrifying tales: bribing his usual
cellmate to tell Politz, ostensibly as a joke, that the others were talking about him behind
his back; insisting he first taste all his friend’s food as he was an expert on chemicals and
poisons due to his counterfeiting background; relating a horror tale of a Sicilian
murderess friend of his grandmother who poisoned wealthy landlords, the victims
writhing in agony as their stomach linings were burned away. When this last story drove
Politz to run from the cell covering his ears, Dimaio had to leave him in peace for a few
days lest he go off the deep end and alert the other gang members to how dangerously
close to breaking he actually was.
After nearly four months of imprisonment, however, Dimaio felt he could stand
little more himself and stepped up his efforts to have Politz tell him what he knew. When
one Sunday Politz brought a bottle of wine to share, Dimaio smashed the glass from his
hand just as he was about to take his first sip, telling him dramatically, “Cyanide, Joe.”
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That night, he had his cellmate switch with Politz and throughout the night he squeezed
him for information on why the others were after him. Early in the morning, Politz said,
“We murdered Hennessy... They think I will betray the society.” With that admission,
the dam burst. Under Dimaio’s insistent questioning, Politz give him every detail of the
entire conspiracy and as soon as Dimaio was alone the next day he scribbled the
information on a note to be passed out via his lawyer. A problem quickly emerged,
however, as he was told his lawyer had quit and refused to come to the prison. He later
learned the attorney had become terrified of the Matrangas after a potential witness had
been murdered, mutilated, and left on the roof of the police station.
Ill with another attack of dysentery running through the cell block, passing blood,
weak and dizzy, Dimaio chanced bribing a guard to send a telegram to “Harry Minster,
Attorney at law, Chicago,” reading, “Can you get me a writ? Tony.” Dimaio later wrote
that as he waited several days for a response, his condition was so bad that concerned
pals in the jail brought the doctor to help him, the doctor trying to take him to the
infirmary which Dimaio was convinced was a sure death sentence. The doctor also
wanted to give him another dose of saltpeter, a remedy that had bent him double when he
was far less sick earlier in his stay. Dimaio managed to put him off this time as he was
certain it would kill him. Finally, a new attorney appeared although he thought it a waste
of time to apply for a writ of habeas corpus, Dimaio having to force him to make the
application. Naturally, it was issued immediately, Minster meeting Dimaio with a
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carriage upon his release. Pinkerton and District Attorney Luzenberg rendezvoused with
Dimaio in a hotel room and were alarmed at his debilitated condition, but the operative
insisted on relating all the details he had learned. He was so exhausted by his ordeal that
during testimony before a grand jury the next day he fell asleep in the witness chair.
Dimaio wanted to testify at the upcoming trial, but Luzenberg claimed he was worried for
his safety and his testimony wouldn’t be necessary. His job finished, Dimaio returned
home to recuperate under the care of a doctor and his new wife, going on in future years
to become one of Pinkerton’s most highly regarded operatives11.
Having heard from Dimaio pretty much how the conspiracy had unfolded, the
grand jury returned indictments against nineteen individuals, nine of them also indicted
for the actual murder. These nine accused of the murder itself, who were to be tried first,
included the actual shooters plus Macheca and Charles Matranga, neither of whom were
involved in the shooting but were leaders of the Family.
The trial got underway on February 16, 1891, the first twelve days being
consumed going through seven hundred and eighty potential jurors to get the twelve who
11 In 1902, William Pinkerton dispatched Dimaio, at the request of the Secretary of State, to Argentina to track down Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid, who, along with Etta Place, were making a new criminal career for themselves far south of the border. Their
fear of Dimaio forced them to flee to Bolivia where a regiment of cavalry caught up with them and shot them to death (although there
are persistent rumors of Cassidy being alive and well years later back in the United States). Following this, Dimaio again went up
against the Mafia, compiling for the Pinkertons a detailed report on the secret society and subsequently infiltrating the organization in
the Mahoning valley in Ohio and western Pennsylvania to end a vicious series of extortions of wealthy individuals and ordinary
laborers, although the task took him the better part of a decade of intensive and very dangerous work. (The Mafia persevered,
however, the area considered in the year 2000 one of its last strongholds, dominating the criminal justice system and local
government.) The famed head of New York’s Italian Squad, Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, later to be assassinated in Palermo, Sicily,
by the Mafia, said of Dimaio, “He knows more about the Society than any other man I know.”
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would hear the case, setting a new jury-selection record in Louisiana. The defendants
were represented by outstanding counsel, including the former Louisiana State Attorney
General who hadn’t wanted to accept the Mafiosi as his clients. He set a huge retainer to
discourage them, but the next day they delivered the retainer in cash stuffed in a
pillowcase, the Mafia having raised funds for the defense from all over the country,
extorting the money when it wasn’t freely offered.
Testimony in the case ran strongly against the defendants, eyewitnesses
identifying the shooters, and then just a few days into the trial it turned sensational when
Politz stood up in open court and started talking loudly in Italian. One of the deputies
forcibly seated him, but he hopped up and kept jabbering, Matranga helpfully telling the
judge, “He wants to make a statement to your Honor.” When an interpreter arrived, the
judge, the lawyers and Politz went to the judge’s chambers where they learned that Politz
wanted to make a full confession, implicating many of those already being tried and some
that hadn’t been charged. Back in open court, Politz’s attorney resigned and another was
assigned to him, the court adjourning while matters were arranged. None of what Politz
had related was made public although it was quickly known by everyone what he’d done
and vague details of the story were leaked.
Politz understandably was in turmoil. Already believing he was a marked man
from Dimaio’s ruse, he felt himself fighting for his life and not getting much help. His
wife, for instance, appeared in the prison after the news of his confession broke, bringing
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him a meal but berating him for betraying the others which made the paranoid Politz
refuse to eat the food she’d brought. For his safety, he was removed from the prison and
quartered in the Sheriff’s office, so increasingly desperate he attempted several escapes
and had to be sedated to keep him calm. He refused to cooperate with the first attorney
assigned to him, forcing the man to resign, the second one faring no better until he
managed to win Politz’s trust by pouring a glass of water and insisting Politz drink it, the
lawyer refusing to sip from it first in a challenge to Politz to be man enough to take the
risk. When Politz drank and survived, he decided to put his complete trust in the
attorney.
As all this went on behind the scenes, the trial proceeded, witnesses implicating
the defendants ever more tightly, including Politz. One witness swore that Politz was the
man who he had seen fall and abandon his dropped shotgun while fleeing, others also
implicating him, which caused the court problems with his confession as he steadfastly
insisted that he had taken no part in the actual murder. His confession (although
obviously not in his own words but that of the stenographer), published in part well after
all the events had transpired, read:
I had joined a certain society of my countrymen, the President of
which was Charles Matranga. This society, I suppose, was formed for the
benefit of my countrymen. Macheca, Matranga, and others were
prominent members. On a Saturday night I was at a meeting of the society
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at which Matranga, Macheca, and others were present. It was there stated
that the purpose of the meeting was to decide who were to “do” Chief
Hennessy. The names of the members were placed in a box by numbers,
and ten were drawn therefrom. These ten men were notified to meet and
arrange the manner and means of carrying out the work allotted to them.
The men met in a room over a place owned by Duffee. The money was
then distributed among six men, each one receiving about $200.
I was asked to carry a sack of guns from the meeting room to the
house of the shoemaker, Monasterio, on Girod, near Basin Street. I
refused to do so, not knowing at the time why the guns were to be taken
there. Matranga was there, and said he would carry the sack. Two other
meetings were held near the Poydras market, I am not sure whether the
money was distributed at these meetings or at Duffee’s. The plan agreed
upon was that on the night of Oct. 15 every one was to meet at
Monasterio’s place. Marchesi’s boy was instructed to be on the lookout
and watch the approach of Chief Hennessy. He was to wait on Rampart
Street, and when he made sure that the chief was coming he was to pass
Hennessy and run rapidly out Girod Street, and when opposite
Monasterio’s was to give the peculiar Italian whistle.
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When the whistle was given by the boy on the night of the 15th of
October, Monasterio opened the door and said to the others: ‘The Chief!
The Chief!’ The rest then stepped out through the side door of
Monasterio’s shanty, and through the large gate into the street,
immediately opening fire upon the man upon the opposite side of the
street, who was quietly walking along. Scaffedi, Marchesi, Bagnetto, and
Monasterio killed the Chief. I was not there and did not know anything
about the killing until the following Sunday morning. I heard of
Hennessy’s shooting for the first time that Sunday morning, when my
landlord, John, was reading the paper.
With his confession obviously tainted by his insistence of innocence, there were
any number of meetings about how to proceed, Politz finally insisting to his attorney—in
English to the attorney’s surprise—that he be allowed to testify. His attorney counseled
him to stand up in court that day and make any statement he wished. As the event was
described:
Politz arose and faced the court. There was a hush. Politz appeared calm enough.
Suddenly a look of intense terror overspread his features. Then came a cry. The only
words Politz spoke were in Italian: “Scaffedi killed the Chief.” Then the luckless Italian
fell face forward upon the floor. Had the heavy hand of the Mafia reached forward and
silenced the tell-tale tongue?
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The answer appears to be, yes, at least emotionally. Politz knew only too well the
long reach of the Onorata Società. His confession was never used in the trial and on
March 12, 1891, six of the eleven defendants were acquitted by the jury—the judge also
having directed the jury to acquit Matranga and another on grounds of insufficient
evidence—the verdict for the other three, including Politz, being a mistrial. The New
Yok Times reported, “The result, when it became known to the great crowd in waiting in
the streets, was received first with an incredulous denial, but as its truth was assured the
air was filled with shouts of rage and derision. The jurymen, with a scared look on their
faces, lost themselves in the crowd as soon as possible... Some apprehension of violence
was shown, but fortunately none was offered.”
That would not last long.
The defendants were returned to Parish prison, still indicted on the second
charge—lying in wait to commit murder—which would have to be nolle pros as they
could not be made to face a capital charge twice which assured that those acquitted soon
would be freed. The Italian community was joyous, on the waterfront the men raising the
Italian flag with the Stars & Stripes upside down below it. In the prison, the defendants
were joined by their families and had a raucous feast, looking forward to being released
within a few days at most. Politz, also back in the prison, was kept separated from the
others.
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Meanwhile, the Committee of Fifty called a meeting, requesting the newspapers
not print their early editions so that they could carry the pronouncements of the
Committee which were quickly seen to be that the jury had been absolutely corrupted and
that the verdict was a farce that demanded extra-legal justice. The papers carried the call:
“All good citizens are invited to attend a mass meeting on Saturday, March 14, at 10
o’clock A.M. at Clay Statue, to take steps to remedy the failure of justice in the Hennessy
case. Come prepared for action.” This incendiary statement was followed by sixty-four
names of committee members.
A huge crowd turned out for the meeting, listening as a number of speeches were
made before the committee members marched to where arms had been gathered for them,
some of the crowd following them, other rushing ahead to the prison where the streets
became so crowded the armed committee members had to push their way through when
they arrived.
The authorities had been aware of impending trouble from early in the morning,
but the mayor conveniently absented himself and the governor was not informed so that
the Superintendent of Police was able to do little more than order an extra detail to the
prison where they were no match for the seething crowd of some ten thousand that
surrounded the building by mid-morning. The guards tried to barricade the entrances,
and when the Captain in charge of the prison guard refused to open up to the committee
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members, the crowd began battering various entrances until one gave way. The keys of
the jailer inside were taken from him giving the vigilantes access to the main prison.
Inside, the Italians had been released from their cells and begged to be given arms
to defend themselves, the jailers instead leading them over into the women’s part of the
prison hoping to hide them there. As the vigilantes surged in, one of them saw a prisoner
in a cell that he mistakenly thought was Scoffedi and fired at the man who dropped
immediately, unharmed but feigning death. At that, however, other inmates told the
armed group that the Italians were hiding in the women’s section, the keys quickly
opening the doors to it where an elderly female inmate directed the shooters up the stairs.
The prisoners had scattered when they realized the vigilantes were coming, some going to
the colored section, others to the white area of the segregated prison.
While the noise from the crowd outside thrummed, the shooters were eerily quiet
as they pursued the terrified Italians. Rocco Geraci fell from a shot to the back of the
head, dead before he hit the ground. Another sank to his knees and covered his face with
his hands as he was shot to death. The fusillade of shots tore gaping wounds in the
bodies, ripping away shreds of clothing. One victim was later found to have forty-one
shots in his body. Macheca, Scoffedi and Marchesi split off and ran up to a higher cell
block, desperately trying to find some escape. Macheca went down from a shot behind
the ear, Scoffedi turning to catch a bullet through the eye. Marchesi was shot in the head
and fell, but wasn’t killed immediately, taking the rest of the day before finally dying
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after one last convulsive effort that saw him stand up and gasp for breath, no one doing
anything to try to save his life.
Ironically, Politz suffered one of the most horrible fates. The shooters found him
locked alone in a cell, putting a shot through his body then dragging him downstairs and
outside where he was lynched from a tree to the roar of the crowd, his thrashing ended by
a volley of shots with his mutilated body left hanging. One of the men caught alive was
asked at gunpoint who killed the chief, the victim replying he didn’t know but he was
innocent, at which he was shot point blank, his lifeless body taken out and strung up next
to Politz’s to satisfy the bloodlust of the crowd. Two of the Italians not yet tried were
dragged from their hiding place in a doghouse but were identified as not part of the group
at the trial and were turned over unharmed to prison guards, along with a third found in
the washhouse and judged innocent. One defendant successfully avoided being caught
by hiding with some other regular prisoners, while the young boy Marchesi was found
sandwiched between mattresses in a cell but was spared although someone kindly
informed him his father had been killed, sending him into despair. The Underboss of the
Family, Charles Matranga, along with one of his men, hid in a pile of refuse in the yard,
staying secreted for hours until everything had quieted down and they could safely
emerge to celebrate their amazing escape with the others who’d been spared.
Altogether, eleven of the nineteen arrested were murdered, the largest lynching in
American history. That afternoon, the police had to arrest the foreman of the jury to save
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him from an angry crowd, the man fleeing New Orleans for Cincinnati, the other jurors
forced to stay hidden in their homes. The vigilantes were also searching for the detective
who had worked for the defense, Dominick O’Malley, who they believed was responsible
for bribing the jury to obtain the verdict, O’Malley keeping himself hidden outside the
city.
News of the killings galvanized opinions around the world with Italians outraged.
The Italian government immediately made a formal protest to the State Department
initiating long and acrimonious debate about what exactly should be the response. The
Federal government felt it had no standing to intervene in what was a legal issue
involving Louisiana, a separation of powers issue that generally was lost on the Italians.
Italian citizens in the US also demanded legal action be taken against the vigilantes with
reparations made to the families of the victims. One Italian citizen’s group was
interviewed in Pittsburgh as it journeyed to Washington to press for action, the leader of
the group telling the interviewer, “I believe the killing at New-Orleans will result in war.
But if the Italian Government does not force to a complete and satisfactory issue the
reparation necessary, I will say now that an army of Italians will assemble in NewOrleans which will fully and effectually avenge the murder of our countrymen.”
The reporter asked, “You believe in the Mafia and the vendetta?”
“I believe in revenge,” he responded. “Italians are revengeful when angered; we
are terribly angry.”
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“What will you demand of this Government?”
“That those concerned in the killing of Italian prisoners be brought to justice and
that full and complete reparations be made to the families of the deceased.”
“If such demands fail, what?”
“We shall demand of the Italian Government that it compel it.”
“What would that amount to, even if Italy should seek to compel acquiescence in
her demands?”
“Why, Sir, Italy has such a navy that if she so chose she could station her vessels
four miles from land and ruin your coast cities. Italy has 180 or more vessels of war.
You see what she could do!”
That threat was prophetic of basically the only significant consequence of the
vigilante killings. After members of the Italian government also made noises about using
their fleet to punish the United States, the US government was galvanized to upgrade the
American fleet, naval appropriations winging through Congress so that by the end of the
decade when the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor, America was prepared to
project her military might around the world and win the Spanish American War.
Italy finally was pacified when minor reparations were paid and it was pointed out
that nine of the eleven victims had been naturalized American citizens and the other two
were escaped fugitives, one of them having come to New Orleans with Esposito a decade
earlier. There were some inconclusive trials of persons alleged to have bribed the jury—
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they were convicted, the judge set aside the convictions, and so on—and a grand jury
issued a report establishing to judicial satisfaction the existence of the Mafia although no
follow-up action was taken. The Provenzanos were acquitted of the assault on the
Matrangas, but they lost the war anyway. Charles Matranga, as if anointed by his lucky
escape, drove the Provenzanos off the docks and out of New Orleans, the Family
establishing itself in an outlying parish. Matranga went on to a long and prosperous
career as undisputed head of the New Orleans Mafia while a respected member of the
establishment in the city, setting up a structure more reminiscent of the Sicilian Mafia
than that of the US with small Families dotted about the landscape concentrating on a
single agricultural racket, such as strawberries, oranges, etc., while watching for the odd
opportunity for a robbery or extortion, all under the central control of the New Orleans
Family. So complete was the Family’s domination in the state that to this day New
Orleans—more appropriately, Louisiana—is the most independent Mafia faction in the
country12.
The lesson the American Mafia learned in New Orleans at the dawn of its
formation in the new world was valuable, if painful. Cured of the hubris that challenged
the legitimate channels of power, it learned to work the levers from the shadows where it
12 Joe Valachi once wanted to attend Mardi Gras in New Orleans and went to his boss, Vito Genovese, to tell him of the proposed
vacation and Genovese vetoed his going, telling him if he ever intended to go to Louisiana he had to have Genovese set it up in
advance. There is also a story of Al Capone arriving by train in 1929 to see the New Orleans boss, Sylvestro “Sam” Carolla, only to
be met by Carolla and three cops, Carolla telling Capone, “You’re not welcome,” the cops underscoring the message by breaking the
fingers of Capone’s bodyguards before putting the group on the next train north. No Mafiosi just dropped in on the New Orleans
Family.
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was able to go about its business generally unmolested and unimpeded. It was a strategy
that served it well for many decades, allowing it to grow to almost unimaginable power
before being unmasked and challenged by the powers of the state. Even then, its grasp
was so firm that it would require decades of relentless legal challenge and the
implementation of new sweeping laws before it would suffer significant defeat.
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CHAPTER TWO
The first official notice that the Mafia existed in New York City came in October
of 1888 when Chief of Police, Thomas Byrnes1, forced a confession from two Sicilians
arrested for the stabbing murder of another of their countrymen on the lower eastside.
Byrnes told the New York Times that the murder had been “decreed by a secret
society...by order of the Mafia.” At the trial some months later, he elaborated that the
Mafia feud began with the betrayal of Esposito in New Orleans seven years earlier.
When the jury acquitted the defendants, Byrnes expressed his disgust by saying that the
Italian mobsters could “go ahead and kill each other2.”
While the war between the Mafia and the Stoppaglieri in New Orleans pretty
much ended after Matranga’s rise to dominance, the Mafia faced other powerful rivals in
1 Byrnes instituted the country’s first Detective Bureau, the rogue’s gallery of mug shots, and is credited with coining the term “thirddegree.” He was also famously corrupt, forced from office by Teddy Roosevelt during his two-year stint as New York Police
Commissioner.
2 Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel is credited with echoing this sentiment, justifying mob violence by saying, “we only kill each other,” a
rational for mob crimes that is totally fallacious.
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New York where the tremendous influx of immigrants from all parts of Italy in the years
around the turn-of-the-century broadened the conflict and kept the various factions in
deadly combat during the first three decades of the 20th century. Much of the conflict
was between Mafia families vying to eliminate competition in various rackets, but there
was also destined to be a war between the Sicilian Mafia and the Italian mainland
Neapolitan Camorra, the original Italian criminal secret society.
In 1862, French historian Marc Monnier published a study in which he concluded
that the Camorra—a Spanish word that can be translated as “fight” or “quarrel”—had
been brought to Naples in the early 1500’s as an offshoot of the even earlier Spanish
criminal secret society called the Compagnia Della Garduna. An Italian criminal
researcher later interviewed several hundred imprisoned camorristi and came to much the
same conclusion as Monnier regarding the organization’s origins. The Camorra ruled as
a shadow government in Naples during the long period of changing rulers, but after the
Italian revolution in 1860, the government began a crackdown on the Camorra, finally
sending in several thousand troops to fight a virtual civil war against the Society that
significantly eroded the Camorra’s power. It was at this time that the criminal
organizations in Sicily transmogrified into the Mafia, the name first appearing in public
in November of 1860 in a comedic play called “La Mafia,” a sequel in 1863 entitled “I
mafiusi di la Vicaria3.” By the mid-1870’s, the London Times was regularly reporting
3 Vicaria was a prison in Palermo, reputedly more of a school for criminals.
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on spectacular crimes carried out by the Mafia, including the kidnapping of John
Forrester Rose that led to Esposito’s flight to New Orleans.
In Italy, the Mafia and the Camorra generally kept out of each other’s way, but in
the mélange of New York City such territorial respect proved more difficult to maintain.
The earliest Mafia stronghold in New York was in East Harlem around 107th street while
the Camorra established its headquarters in Brooklyn. But with members and rackets of
both scattered throughout the city, the business districts of Manhattan a coveted prize, it
was impossible not to come into conflict.
The early war centered around two principal kinship families: the Mafia Morello
Family of East Harlem and the Camorra Morano Family of Brooklyn. The Morellos,
destined to be New York’s dominant criminal Family throughout the period of conflict,
consisted of: Giuseppe “Joe”; his half-brothers Vincenzo “Vincent”; Ciro; Nicola
“Nick”4; and a brother-in-law, Ignazio Lupo (usually referred to by the press redundantly
as “Lupo the Wolf”, Lupo meaning Wolf in Italian), who also had three younger brothers.
(Lupo would later go by the name Saietta, his mother’s maiden name.)
The earliest notice of Italian crime had been in the many “Black Hand” extortions
which, the authorities noted, while favored by Italian bandits, were carried out by persons
of every nationality and were most often crimes of individuals or small gangs. By the
turn of the century, however, discerning authorities had begun to comprehend that the
4 Nick and Vincent used both the surnames Morello and Terranova at different times.
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Italian gangs were far better organized as criminal conspiracies than any of the many
gangs previously seen.
Gangs in New York were a well-established tradition from its earliest days, going
by such imaginative appellations as the Forty Thieves, Whyos, Plug Uglies, Roach
Guards, Dead Rabbits, Buckaroos, Slaughterhouses and, of course, the Bowery Boys.
Two of the most renowned, each able to field several thousand members, were the
Eastman gang named for its leader Edward “Monk” Eastman who used the name William
Delaney, and the Five Points gang headed by ex-prize fighter Antonini Paolo Vacarelli
who called himself Paul Kelly5 (later going on to labor racketeering as an official in a
number of unions). None of the gangs, however, demonstrated anything approaching the
discipline, secrecy and organizational bonds the authorities would encounter in the Mafia
and the Camorra.
The person who would come to be the early nemesis of the secret societies was
New York detective Joseph Petrosino, himself a native Italian from the mainland. In one
Black Hand investigation in July, 1908, after a local tenement owner named Francesco
Spinelli had suffered several bombings of his properties, Petrosino and other detectives
set up a stakeout on a Spinelli building on the lower eastside. Seeing a man sneak into
5 The Irish in particular were believed to be so criminal that both the term “Hoodlum” and “Hooligan” are said to be derived from
Irish names. A San Francisco newspaper writer apparently coined “Hoodlum” by reversing the Irish name Muldoon (interestingly, a
Mafia term for anything ersatz), with a typesetter mistakenly substituting an H for the final N. “Hooligan” is said to come from
London where a particularly lawless Irish family named Houlihan were a local legend.
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the building, they caught twenty-one year-old Pinzolo Bonaventura6 about to light the
fuse on a stick of dynamite. Spinella was so incensed that he actually pushed his revolver
through Bonaventura’s cheek as the detectives were arresting the bomber, other tenants
so irate the detectives had to rush Bonaventura out of the building to keep him from being
harmed further. Found on him was a stamped threatening letter in Italian to Spinelli
which read:
Great Double Carrion:
For a long time we have written to you, but you have paid no
attention to our demands. We have let you know what we are. We have
exploded many bombs, we have destroyed your houses, and yet you do not
come to terms. Now, we will explode this other bomb and see whether
you will come to your senses.
We shall not be satisfied until we have killed you and your family,
and we will make sausage of you and put you in a barrel, wretch that you
are. Our gang is large and we are all Mafias. We swear to you that you
will be destroyed and that you will never rest in peace, and while you are
6 Also called Bonaventura “Joe” Pinzolo, he would serve several years in prison and, demonstrating that Mafiosi were intimately
involved in Black Hand extortions, Pinzolo would later be shot down in the Mafia’s Castellammarese war.
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alive remember the Black Hand and that so long as you do not send us
money we will never forget you.
Brute Carrion: We will sign the Black Hand, that will never forget
you.
Bonaventura was convicted of the attempted bombing and served several years in
prison.
Joe Morello first appeared on the authority’s radar in the spring of 1900 when
several men were caught passing counterfeit currency, the Secret Service eventually
identifying Morello as the head of the ring. One of the arrested men also told authorities
that Morello had murdered the man’s girlfriend, Mollie Callaghan, who had vanished
while working as Morello’s maid, possibly having discovered his counterfeit printing
operation in his apartment. A number of the men passing the bad bills were convicted,
but there wasn’t enough evidence against Morello and the case against him was
dismissed. The New York police didn’t have the ability to surveil anyone on a long time
basis, but the Secret Service did continue to keep him under intermittent surveillance
which, in the long run, would pay off.
Petrosino began to zero in on the Morellos as the most dangerous of the organized
criminal gangs during his investigation of a murder in July of 1902, the naked body of a
supposed Brooklyn grocer named Giuseppe “Joe” Catania found stuffed in a potato sack
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on the edge of the East River in lower Brooklyn, his throat slashed, his knees trussed to
his neck in a manner that tightened the noose with each struggle, virtually every major
bone in his body broken. Petrosino eventually identified Catania an associate of the
Morello Family, hearing that he had begun to drink too much and babbled in his stupors
about the Secret Service. This suggested to Petrosino that Catania had been mixed up in
the Family’s counterfeiting and he alerted the Secret Service. William Flynn, head of the
Secret Service in New York, later learned from an informant that Morello and Saietta had
been behind the murder, but a lack of evidence kept the investigation from charging
anyone with the crime.
In April of 1903, another victim was found murdered in a similar manner to
Catania, his trussed body stuffed in an empty sugar barrel. From the on-going
surveillance of the Morello gang by the Secret Service, Flynn identified the murdered
man as an unknown associate of the Family. Markings on the sugar barrel he was found
in led authorities to search a cafe which had the same address falsely listed by Joe
Morello as his home.
The NY police decided to pick up all the men believed involved in the Morello
gang against the advice of Flynn who felt there wasn’t enough evidence to justify these
early arrests. Morello, Saietta and nine others were arrested in a sweep but none of them
would even admit knowing the victim though evidence was found that he was associated
with Morello and his gang. The police then caught a break when an anonymous letter
was sent to them telling them they’d made “the proper arrests” and that a prisoner in the
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NY state prison of Sing-Sing, Giuseppe Di Priemo, could “tell you many and many
things.” Flynn knew Di Priemo who had been convicted of passing counterfeit bills.
Petrosino was dispatched to talk with Di Priemo who identified the victim as his brotherin-law from Buffalo, Benedetto Madonia (alternately spelled Maduena). Petrosino
traveled to Buffalo to talk with Madonia’s wife and son, learning among other things that
Madonia had been convicted in Sicily for passing counterfeit currency and traveled to
Midwestern cities where Morello’s gang passed counterfeit bills. They told Petrosino
that Madonia had sent $1,000 to a person in New York City to help his brother-in-law
when he was arrested, and when Di Priemo was convicted and imprisoned with no help
being given him, Madonia had set off for New York City. His wife confided to Petrosino
that before he left, her husband had told her that there was a man, Giuseppe Morello, who
was the head of a “great society, a secret society, of which he himself was a member, but
Morello was against him and would do nothing to aid her brother.” It was a simple step
to conclude that Madonia had been killed by Morello when he showed up to get back the
money he’d sent to help Di Priemo.
A Secret Service report concluded:
Morello is the head of the Palermo society of the Mafia in this
country and directs the affairs of the various branches in many cities...
These cities include New Orleans, Buffalo, Chicago and Pittsburgh...
Lupo is believed to be the treasurer of the Palermo society of the Mafia...
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In Italy there is a general society and in each province a branch. When
residents of a certain province come to America they preserve the
affiliation with the branch organization.
One of the letters seized was an introduction to Lupo of a Mafioso from New
Orleans wanted in Sicily on a thirty year sentence, asking that the letter-bearer be assisted
in establishing himself in New York. The writer of the introduction was one of the men
arrested in Morello’s cafe, himself a fugitive from justice in Sicily, the connections
proving to the authorities the close cooperation between distant geographical Families of
the Mafia.
Despite the success of the investigation, there never was enough evidence to
charge the gang for the murder of Madonia, a coroner’s inquest finally bringing a murder
charge against a single member who had had a pawn ticket for Madonia’s watch in his
pocket. Eventually, this charge too was dismissed. Still, the scope of the conspiracy
convinced the New York authorities to back an idea of Petrosino’s for an “Italian Squad”
in the department with himself in charge, its efforts aimed at stemming crime in the
Italian community.
Using his new power base, Petrosino began a war against the Mafia and Camorra
that would not be vaguely matched until the full resources of the FBI were pitted against
the mob in the 1980’s. Over the next half-dozen years he personally arrested and/or had
deported hundreds of criminals, proving especially effective against the leadership of the
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Camorra perhaps because he himself was Calabrian from the mainland and thus accepted
better by the informers he and all police rely upon. His successes were so great that in
1908 the Italian government awarded him a gold watch—to accept the gift he sought and
received special permission—and the Mafia finally decided it had to eliminate him.
Early in 1909, Petrosino was given a post as head of a new and unprecedented
Secret Service of the New York police, fifteen detectives funded by private donations
after the Democratic political machine of Tammany Hall put the kibosh on a budget for
it, most likely fearing exposure of its own vast corruption. Petrosino was given virtual
carte blanche to carry out any investigations he desired, the identity of the detectives on
the force, even the location of its headquarters, kept secret. Meeting with the police
commissioner who had received a recommendation from an Italian law professor that
someone be sent to Italy and Sicily to gather dossiers on known fugitives hiding in New
York, Petrosino agreed to undertake the mission, planning on spending several months
abroad.
It was most certainly a foolhardy mission. Petrosino had had many threats against
his life, one by a Mafia chief named Raffaele Palizzolo who also had been Deputy of the
city of Palermo in the Italian Parliament when convicted of being involved in the murder
of the mayor of Palermo, his conviction overturned with a new trial acquitting him.
Palizzolo had arrived in New York in 1908, feted by the Italian community and even
welcomed by Petrosino who initially thought him simply a politician, a naiveté he was
finally disabused of by a number of informers relating that Palizzolo was head of the
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Mafia, at which time Petrosino placed him under intensive surveillance. Palizzolo found
the police scrutiny so obtrusive that he soon returned to Sicily, reportedly shaking his fist
at Petrosino who had come to the pier to see him off, shouting at the detective, “If you
ever come to Palermo, God help you.” Petrosino was so well known in Italy that a
publisher had cashed in by putting out a series of penny novels called Giuseppe Petrosino
Il Sherlock Holmes d’Italia, romanticizing his police exploits. Traveling under a false
name did nothing to disguise his presence as he journeyed from Rome to Naples and on
to Palermo. After running into a man he’d deported, he noted in his journal, “Have
already met criminals who recognized me from New York. I am on dangerous ground.”
The entry proved prophetic.
At dinner in a cafe on the night of March 12, 1909, two men stopped by his table
and spoke to him waiters reported. When he left the café, he didn’t return directly to his
hotel as he’d done on other evenings but headed through the main square in Palermo, the
Piazza Marina with its Garibaldi Garden. People nearby waiting for a streetcar heard
three shots ring out then, after a pause, a fourth. One of the waiting men ran towards the
place where the shots came from and saw two men fleeing through a nearby courtyard
and, shortly afterward, a carriage rumbling away just as the gaslights in the Piazza went
out. Petrosino’s body lay on the pavement and soon others arrived with candles to show
blood oozing from his mouth, wounds in his right shoulder, his cheek, and his throat. A
ship’s medical examiner on the scene examined Petrosino and found him dead most
likely from the throat wound. Nearby lay a discarded Belgium revolver.
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Anonymous letters from New York convinced the authorities that Petrosino’s
murder had been the work of Morello and his associates. Two men, Carlo Costantino and
Antoinio Passananti, had been sent from the United States to carry out the killing under
the guidance of a Sicilian named Vito Cascio Ferro whose power was coalescing to make
him the leader of the Sicilian Mafia. Cascio Ferro had lived in New York from 1901 to
1904, associating with a number of Families. When picked up in Sicily, a search of his
things uncovered a photograph of him with Morello, Morello’s wife and another known
Mafiosi murderer named Giuseppe Fontana. It was also found that Constantino had sent
a telegram to Morello the day after he arrived in Sicily which read: “I Lo Baido work
Fontana.” The operator had thought it so suspiciou he’d sent a copy to the Chief of
Public Safety, and when Constantino was arrested, in his pocket had been Morello’s reply
telegram which read: “Why cut his whiskers off?”
When Cascio Ferro was arrested, he had a deputy to the Italian Parliament testify
they’d been having dinner together at the time of the murder and that his “guest had never
left the house7.” The police commissioner in charge of the investigation was transferred
soon after submitting his report and eventually all charges against the men were
dismissed, American authorities openly charging the Italian authorities of being in league
with the Mafia.
7 Years later, bragging of committing the coup d’grace on Petrosino personally, Cascio Ferra claimed that he and the Deputy were fact
dining together, Cascio Ferro excusing himself midway through the meal to use his host’s carriage to ride to the square and return
after firing the fatal shot into Petrosino’s face. It is accorded a mark of honor for a victim to be shot while facing his executioner.
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The murder and the Mafia’s spiteful treatment of Petrosino’s widow in which they
allegedly attempted to use their political power to deny her rightful pension and sent
threatening letters to everyone who was to appear at a special benefit concert to provide
her funds, murdering the personal friend of the family who had organized it, cost the
Morellos dearly. With financial reversals in their above-ground investments in real estate
due to the financial panic of 1907, they had gone into counterfeiting on a grander scale
than ever before. They’d installed a hapless printer, Antonio Comito, and his girlfriend
in a remote house north of New York City and forced him to print counterfeit bills in
greater quantities than ever before, Morello hoping for some five million dollars of bogus
currency to be sold for fifty cents on the dollar to those who passed the bills. But even
after engraving new and better plates, the best they could get generally was thirty-five
cents, often less, and sold no where near the quantity Morello had hoped for. In July,
1909, after Petrosino’s murder, work was suspended and Comito and his girlfriend were,
to their relief, allowed to return to New York City. They had thought, with reason, they
might be murdered by the gang and immediately moved to a new location in the city and
carefully avoided any place where any of the gang might notice them. But one day,
Comito did run into one of the gang and was surprised when the man bad-mouthed others
of the gang, revealing where he and his girlfriend were now living. The man in turn told
another of the gang members, and ironically it was just the break the authorities would
need.
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The Secret Service had been closing in on Morello’s counterfeiting operation,
painstakingly moving from one suspect to another, even pinpointing the remote
farmhouse where the printing had been done. In November, 1909, they struck by
arresting fourteen members of the gang, including Morello and Nick Terranova. During
their arrest, Morello’s wife tried to conceal sensitive letters in their infant’s diaper and
had in her apron pockets several unsent Black Hand extortion letters. The only one to
escape immediate arrest was Lupo who was finally caught two months later when police
were investigating the theft of an upright piano, finding the thief was the fugitive Saietta.
The break in the case came when one of the gang who was cooperating with the
authorities revealed Comito’s new address, having been told of it by the other gang
member who had run into Comito on the street. When Flynn realized that Comito,
nicknamed “the Sheep,” wasn’t a Mafioso like the others, he persuaded him to testify by
moving Comito’s girlfriend to a protected location and guarding Comito himself,
promising the authorities would protect both of them in exchange for his testimony.
As had been the case in New Orleans during the Hennessy trial, the Mafia raised a
huge defense fund through extortions in the Italian community—a tried-and-true Mafia
tactic—the great opera tenor Enrico Caruso allegedly forced to contribute $3,0008. But it
was to no avail. With Comito telling all he knew, in January of 1910 the defendants were
convicted with the angry judge sentencing Morello to twenty-five years, Saietta to thirty.
8 Some reports relate that Caruso and Saietta were great friends, Caruso actually visiting Saietta in prison.
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With the Family leadership removed to the Federal prison at Atlanta, the second
tier took over in the Terranova brothers, Nick having been dismissed from the case due to
a lack of evidence. Ciro Terranova would become known as “the Artichoke King” due to
his monopolization of the market in New York for the delicacy so loved by the Italians, a
key ingredient in minestrone, and he also organized a widespread cocaine operation
whose power base was the Bronx. He also parlayed his political contacts with the corrupt
Tammany Hall into some of the first of a long line of labor rackets that would become the
strength of the Mafia in New York.
As the Morellos worked to recover from having their two leaders sent to prison,
the Camorristi in Brooklyn continued building their organization. In Italy, the Camorra
was a more urban phenomenon than the Mafia, making it less autocratic and more
inclusive, and this looser structure carried over to America. In the early decades of the
twentieth century, the Godfather of the American Camorra was a man named Andrea
Ricci who lived in Philadelphia. In New York, two more-or-less equal factions of the
Camorra rose up. The first and slightly dominant Family was that of Pelligrino Morano
who worked out of his Santa Lucia restaurant on Coney Island. Further north in
Brooklyn was a Family headed by Leopoldo Lauritano along with his underboss
Allesandro Vollero, operating from a café on Navy Street that they owned jointly.
With the Mafiosi Morellos headquartered across the river in East Harlem, the two
traditional rivals butted heads mostly as they sought to exploit the possibilities in
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downtown Manhattan, a condition that Terranova, with his growing American sensibility
of crime as a business enterprise, found wasteful and unnecessary.
Terranova opened negotiations by contacting Morano to request a meeting to
discuss cooperating in the Manhattan rackets, agreeing to Morano’s stipulation that they
meet at his Coney Island restaurant. On the night of June 24th, 1916, Terranova, Nick
Morello and Family capo Steve LaSalle made the journey out to the beach area on Long
Island’s south shore to meet with Morano and Lauritano. As the meeting developed,
Morano stressed his interest in consolidating control of the gambling racket in Little Italy,
the card games especially popular and lucrative.
For both groups, a major impediment was an independent named Joe DeMarco
who had gambling operations uptown in East Harlem as well as in the Mulberry Bend
section of Little Italy. He and the Morellos had been at each other’s throats for a long
time, DeMarco once shooting at Nick Morello while the Morellos had twice put DeMarco
in the hospital with attempts on his life. DeMarco would be tough for the Morellos to
catch unawares they all agreed, but, unfortunately for him, he’d had no trouble with the
Camorra. In fact, Lauritano’s underboss, Vollero, was a friend of his and the thinking
was that this trust was the chink in his armor they needed. Lauritano proposed that they
work on a plan and meet again at his Navy Street café.
Three weeks later, the Morellos went over to Brooklyn for this follow-up meeting,
bringing with them the key to their plan, Giuseppe Verizzano, an associate of DeMarco’s
who had been persuaded to betray him. The scheme they’d worked out was that
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Verizzano would make a call to the Morellos when DeMarco would be at his downtown
James Street card game, the Morellos would alert Lauritano who would dispatch the
gunman with Verizzano accompanying him inside and discreetly pointing out DeMarco.
Their first attempt, however, was botched. When the call came from Verizzano,
Lauritano sent John “The Painter” Fetto to carry out the hit, but either through
incompetence or trepidation, he was late getting to James Street and DeMarco had
already left.
Verizzano gave earlier notice for the next attempt, learning that DeMarco would
be coming to James Street around dinnertime on July 20th. But on the morning of the
scheduled hit, the Morellos learned from another DeMarco insider who had been brought
into the plot, Nick Sassi, that a DeMarco gunman named Giuseppe “Chuck” Nazzaro was
planning on accompanying DeMarco to James Street. Believing he could be trouble,
Terranova and his lieutenants drove over to the Navy Street café to consult with
Lauritano about their concern. Lauritano quickly arranged for more muscle to go along
in the person of John “Lefty” Esposito, a contract killer.
Esposito, born in Brooklyn, was known to the Morellos from East Harlem where
he and his brother had worked as bodyguards of one of the most powerful of the early
East Harlem mobsters, Giosue Gallucci. In 1914, the Espositos quit Galluci (a bad
defection for Galluci who, along with his son, was murdered not long afterwards) to go to
work for the head of a Camorra associate named Gaetano Del Gaudio after the Morellos
killed the head of the Family, Nicolo Del Gaudio, with shotgun blasts from behind a
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fence as he walked on 104th street next to the East River. Lefty soon ran into local police
problems and relocated to Brooklyn where he went to work for Morano while his brother
George stayed with Del Gaudio.
For the DeMarco hit, Esposito was joined by Fetto, Tom “The Turk” Pagano and
Rocco Valente (sometimes spelled Valenti) who all gathered in the afternoon at an
Elizabeth Street saloon a few blocks north of DeMarco’s place to wait for the word to
move. Verizzano came in just after 5:00 to tell them DeMarco had arrived at James
Street and they headed out. Nick Sassi met them outside and got them past the guard at
the door with no questions, Valente and Sassi pretending to be old friends as they waited
in front to cover the getaway.
Inside, Verizzano led the way to the back bedroom where a card game was
underway, DeMarco and a number of others at the table with spectators looking on.
Verizzano took a seat at the table across from DeMarco and tried discreetly to alert
Esposito and Pagano which man was DeMarco. Esposito promptly pulled out his
revolver and put two shots into the man sitting next to DeMarco, his bodyguard Charles
Lombardi. In the mayhem, Verizzano saved the day by opening up on the correct target,
the others then joining in to riddle DeMarco with ten shots before they broke off and
escaped through the bedroom window and across a courtyard to the far street. Both
DeMarco and Lombardi were killed.
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To celebrate the successful hit, a party was held later that night at the Navy Street
café with Terranova and Nick Morello giving Lauritano $50 to be distributed as a bonus
to the gunmen.
With the way cleared, Morano opened a new gambling house at 167 Hester Street,
but he found himself in competition with none other than Verizzano who, under the
protection of the Morellos, had wasted no time in opening his own joint on Kenmare
Street with plans to open others. It might have seemed to Verizzano just reward for his
part in the hit, but to the Camorristi it merely made their problem worse. They’d done
the heavy lifting to knock off the independent operator DeMarco only to see him replaced
with what amounted to a stooge for the far more competitive Morello Family.
Lauritano’s partner, Vollero, who had been a friend of DeMarco, was especially critical
of breaking their traditional enmity with the Mafia.
The leaders of the New York Camorristi traveled to Philadelphia to consult with
the Godfather, Andrea Ricci, and it was agreed that this cooperation with the Mafia was
absurd. They had been the ones to successfully hit DeMarco when the Morellos couldn’t
do the job. For every meeting, the Morellos had been the ones to leave their homes,
come hat-in-hand to the Camorra with offers of friendship and sharing. If they were so
weak, so incompetent, why not now just get rid of them and take over the whole thing?
The answer to that was only too apparent.
Early in September, less than two months after the murder of DeMarco, Nick
Morello accepted an invitation to sit down again with his new partners at the Navy Street
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café, making the journey across the river with a single bodyguard, Charles Ubriaco
(sometimes identified as Umbriaco). Neither Morano nor Lauritano were at the café
when they arrived, but Ralph “The Barber” Daniello, whose real name was Alfonso Pepe,
served them drinks until a gofer arrived to escort the Mafiosi to another nearby location
to meet the Camorra leaders. As they walked, a man suddenly appeared out of a
darkened doorway with two revolvers in his hands and opened up on the unsuspecting
Mafiosi. Ubriaco jumped behind a tree and started firing back, but then two more
gunmen appeared and began shooting, Morello falling dead on the sidewalk. Ubriaco
managed to empty his gun, but hit no one before he, too, was killed.
The gunmen—Lefty Esposito, Antonio Notaro and Alfonso “The Butcher”
Sgroia—joined the bosses at Morano’s Coney Island restaurant where the celebration was
highlighted by Morano’s toast, “Health to all Neapolitans; death and destruction to all
Sicilians.”
Police investigating the case that evening had little doubt what local gang was
responsible for the murder of the well-known Mafioso Nick Morello so far from his home
turf, and in a nearby pool hall detectives arrested known Camorra member Rocco Valente
when they found he was carrying a gun. How effective they were likely to be was
demonstrated by the fact that one of the arresting detectives, Michael Mealli, later would
be identified in court as being on the payroll of the Camorra. Allesandro Vollero was
brought in the next day and put in a line-up for witnesses to the shooting, but as he hadn’t
been one of the gunmen, no one recognized him and he was allowed to leave.
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Terranova had come to the morgue on the night of the murders to identify the
bodies and he knew only too well what the hit meant as did everyone in the Family—the
war was on.
Not long afterwards, Verizzano was passing Ferrara's café on Grand Street in
Little Italy when he spotted one of Morano’s men from Coney Island, Lorenzo Liccari, at
a table sipping espresso and having a pastry for which the café was (and still is) famous.
He started around to the side entrance to sneak inside and kill Liccari, but he’d been
spotted and Liccari took off.
Verizzano himself wasn’t so lucky. On October 7th, Angelo Giordano, an
important member of the Camorra who owned a saloon on Staten Island, met up with
Tony Notaro and Ralph Daniello and informed them that they were going to kill
Verizzano that evening. Notaro protested that he didn’t want to kill anyone without
orders from his immediate boss and Giordano told him that was fine, he’d carry out the
hit himself and then Notaro would be killed for not doing what he was told. Notaro
wisely rethought his position and agreed to the job.
Around midnight, Giordano drove Notaro, Daniello, Antonio Sgroia and John
Mancini into Manhattan where they scouted for Verizzano, checking a saloon he favored
before finding him in the restaurant of the Occidental Hotel on Broome Street. Notaro
and Sgroia were sent inside to carry out the hit with the others providing backup and
cover should it be needed. The restaurant was nearly empty at that late hour giving the
gunmen a clear line of fire and they began shooting as soon as they reached the doorway.
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Verizzano staggered from his seat and managed to crawl a few feet before falling dead
from multiple wounds, the gunmen getting away cleanly.
The next victim was the friendless Salvatore DeMarco, the brother of Joe
DeMarco. He had taken over his brother’s restaurant on 49th Street and moved into the
apartment above it even while knowing that hanging around wasn’t good for his health.
Four days after Verizzano was murdered, he held an auction and sold the restaurant, but
his efforts did him no good. On the 11th, he was found in an empty lot out in Astoria,
Queens, with his head smashed in and his throat cut.
The Morellos got on the scoreboard early in November when George Esposito,
brother of Lefty Esposito and bodyguard to Camorra associate Gaetano Del Gaudio, was
shot to death as he walked down East 108th Street. Having his bodyguard shot to death
was a bad sign for Del Gaudio that he failed to read well enough. Around 3 A.M. on
November 30th, he was in his restaurant on 1st Avenue bringing coffee to two men at a
table when suddenly the window exploded from a shotgun blast that peppered his body
with pellets. The men rushed him to Flower Hospital where surgeons operated and, when
he came out of the anesthesia, he told police that he knew the identity of his assailant, but
he’d deal with the man himself. He never got the chance, however, dying from his
wounds.
A chance observation led to the next killing, the Camorra taking out one of their
own associates when Tony Paretti told Lauritano and Vollero that he’d seen Chuck
Nazzaro talking with a capo of the Morellos. With war fever raging, such minor
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infractions were enough to earn a sentence of death. Nazzaro, suspecting nothing, was
told that Francesco “Frank” Fevrola had become a police informant and had to be killed.
He was to join the Paretti brothers and Sgroia in taking Fevrola to a deserted spot in
Yonkers, north of the city, to kill him. Instead, Nazzaro was the victim, shot to death
with his body thrown on the trolley tracks to be mutilated.
With these early successes against the Mafia, the Camorra had actually succeeded
in becoming the top dog in organized crime in New York. Their orders to the gambling
operators to show up in Brooklyn to have their books checked and pay the tax was
obeyed. They also made demands on the extortion rackets against the ice and coal
delivery services as well as the artichoke dealers, Terranova’s specialty. The merchants
paid up only with great reluctance, feeling themselves caught between a rock and a hard
place as the Morellos continued to insist on being paid as well. Something had to give.
The first tremor of the earthquake that would topple the Camorra a minor event on
the periphery. Ralph Daniello had fallen in love with Amelia Valve, a fetching South
Brooklyn beauty in Daniello’s eyes anyway. His newfound rapture made it especially
painful when the police picked him up on charges of robbery and kidnapping. Released
on bail, he promptly fled with Amelia to an unlikely place for an Italian organized crime
figure in 1917—Reno, Nevada9.
Predictably, Daniello soon had money problems and started bombarding his
compatriots in Brooklyn with letters imploring their financial help. Also predictably, no
9 Gambling in Nevada was still illegal, not legalized until 1931.
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one was seriously concerned about Daniello’s problems in the wild west and ignored his
desperate pleas. His salvation came when the police learned of his whereabouts and had
the Reno sheriff arrest him and hold him for extradition.
Brought back in handcuffs, he found himself facing the earlier charges plus new
ones for perjury and, most shockingly, murder. This was serious if he ever wanted to see
his sweetheart again and he promptly offered a deal that he would spill his guts about
everything he knew if they’d go easy on him. They agreed, asked what he might know
and stood back in amazement as the tales began to pour out of him. Notara, who had
been virtually shanghaied into joining the Camorra, also agreed to tell what he knew and
described the induction ceremony of the Camorra with its dramatic blood oath.
As the detectives came back with corroboration of the many murders the pair
described, the authorities began rounding up the Camorristi. The first trial of Morano and
Vollero10 the testimony of Daniello and Notaro backed up by Esposito and Sgroia
desperately trying to save their necks, ended in a mistrial when Daniello began talking of
payoffs to a New York detective following the murder. At the second trial in May of
1918, in which everyone carefully avoided any mention of police corruption, Morano and
Vollero were found guilty, Morano sentenced to life and Vollero to death. Nearly a
dozen other New York Camorristi were also convicted, Fevrola, Aniello Paretti and
Anthony Paretti also sentenced to death though the only one to be actually executed was
10 They were defended by celebrated attorney Edward J. Reilly who later unsuccessfully defended Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindberg
baby kidnapping case.
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Anthony Paretti. Fleeing to Italy, he didn’t return until 1926 when he thought himself
safe from prosecution. To his dismay, he was promptly arrested and put to death in the
electric chair at Sing Sing prison, thirty miles north of Manhattan, in February 192711.
Daniello was given a suspended sentence on all his crimes in return for his
cooperation, but the mob had as long a memory as the law and he was found shot to death
on the Lincoln Highway in Metuchen, New Jersey, in 1925 (part of the reason Paretti
believed it was safe to return).
The only Mafioso to face charges from Daniello’s confession was Ciro Terranova,
charged with murder for his complicity in the killing of DeMarco and Lombardi. At trial,
Daniello testified about Terranova’s part in the conspiracy to murder DeMarco which had
also resulted in the death of Lombardi. Joining him on the stand to testify against
Terranova was Lefty Esposito who was trying to lessen his sentence for the murder of
11 One of his last visitors was fellow Neapolitano Vito Genovese who also visited Vollero. Joe Valachi relates in his memoirs of
meeting Vollero at Sing Sing when Valachi was doing time there in the mid-1920’s on burglary charges and had not yet been inducted
into the Mafia, the two men becoming friends. Vollero told Valachi, “If there is one thing that we who are from Naples must always
remember, it is that if you hang out with a Sicilian for twenty years and you have trouble with another Sicilian, the Sicilian that you
hung out with all that time will turn on you. In other words, you can never trust them.” Vollero also told Valachi, “Talk to me just
before you get out of here, and I will send you to a Neapolitan. His name is Capone. He’s from Brooklyn, but he’s in Chicago now.”
It was from Vollero that Valachi heard hint of the Mafia, but when he pressed for information Vollero put him off saying, “Take it
easy, kid. You’ll learn all there is to know in good time. It’s not for me to say it.” When Vollero was paroled in 1933, he was afraid
Ciro Terranova would seek a vendetta for the killing of his half-brother, Nick Morello, and asked Valachi to intercede on his behalf.
Valachi went to his boss, Vito Genovese, who reluctantly got assurances from the fading Terranova that no revenge would be sought,
a grateful Vollero insisting that Valachi come to a feast at his home where he was introduced to Vollero’s entire family. Vollero
reportedly later returned to Italy.
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Nick Morello and Charlie Ubriaco.12 But with only those two able to connect Terranova
directly to the crime, both of them involved, the state lacked the necessary independent
witness required under New York State law and Terranova went free.
With the ranks of the Camorra decimated by the legal onslaught, the Morello
Family had a real chance to lock up organized crime all over the metropolitan New York
area, but instead they were content to take over the few rackets cut loose from the
Camorra, mostly confined to the Italian neighborhoods.
The problem was Terranova who exemplified one side of a split that would haunt
the Mafia throughout its history: the racketeers versus the gangsters.
Terranova was a classic racketeer. There’s no record of him being personally
involved in any act of violence13 while he depended on the strong-arms to do his dirty
work. Going out to rob a bank, hijack a truck or beat to a pulp a delinquent loanshark
customer, would never have occurred to him. As a result, he didn’t require a crew of his
own and had little appreciation of the difficulties of making a living for those less
12 Esposito and Notaro received sentences of 6 to 10 years for the murder; Sgroia’s sentence of 12 years was shortened in return for
his testimony, and he was deported to Italy upon his release.
13 He would be credited with driving the getaway car when Joe the Boss Masseria was murdered in 1930, one story being that after
stalling it twice, Ben Siegel pushed him aside and drove them away.
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connected than he was. This lack of appreciation for the day-to-day grind has more than
once proven a fatal ignorance for the racketeer.
The problem is that every racketeer fundamentally depends on those associates
willing, sometimes eager, to get their hands dirty and project the power that the
racketeers use to their advantage. After a time, it seems almost inevitable that the
gangsters grow resentful at being used to enrich the remote, and almost always wealthier,
racketeer. And sooner or later it occurs to them that they have the power to remove the
racketeer and run things for themselves.
What it usually takes in the mob to initiate a takeover from below is a figure with
the soul of a gangster and the brains of a racketeer. The Morellos, as it turned out,
happened to have among their ranks a gangster of such boldness and guile to rank with
the all-time champions in Mafia lore, Giuseppe Masseria, whose skills eventually would
earn him the respectful moniker “Joe the Boss.”