Part 2 (1/2)

CHAPTER 3.

LITTLE ITALY.

IT WAS A SPRING DAY, BUT ONLY IN NAME. DARK CLOUDS, PREGNANT with rain, blew in from the north and sagged low over New York harbor. Squalls of wind, damp with the clammy moisture of the North Atlantic, came spinning down around Long Island and darted off across the germy water, whipping up spume and whitecaps as they hurried for the Jersey sh.o.r.e. The skies were gray. The city was gray, a jumble of drab factories and rickety tenements. The sea, green-brown at the mouth of the Hudson River, swirled with the factory filth that oozed across the bottom of the harbor until it turned gray as well. And it was cold: the sort of gooseflesh East Coast chill that the pa.s.sengers cramming the rails of the emigrant s.h.i.+p with rain, blew in from the north and sagged low over New York harbor. Squalls of wind, damp with the clammy moisture of the North Atlantic, came spinning down around Long Island and darted off across the germy water, whipping up spume and whitecaps as they hurried for the Jersey sh.o.r.e. The skies were gray. The city was gray, a jumble of drab factories and rickety tenements. The sea, green-brown at the mouth of the Hudson River, swirled with the factory filth that oozed across the bottom of the harbor until it turned gray as well. And it was cold: the sort of gooseflesh East Coast chill that the pa.s.sengers cramming the rails of the emigrant s.h.i.+p Alsatia Alsatia had never felt in Italy. had never felt in Italy.

The Alsatia Alsatia lay, hove to, in choppy seas just south of Ellis Island. She was thirty days out of Naples and fresh from a rough Atlantic crossing that had left a large part of her human cargo praying for a landfall. That had come on March 8, 1893, a Wednesday. Earlier that day, the s.h.i.+p's first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers, 150 of them, had disembarked at a Manhattan pier. They were presumed to be above the tests and examinations that awaited the eleven hundred more or less impoverished Italians still crammed nervously in steerage. Fourteen months earlier, the U.S. government had opened an enormous immigration center on the island, staffed by hundreds of inspectors and health officials and capable of processing as many as twelve thousand men, women, and children in an hour. There emigrants were questioned as to their employment prospects-men were required to have a job waiting for them-and checked to ensure that they possessed sufficient money to support themselves. They were also tested for a number of diseases. Inspectors carried sticks of chalk and marked people's coats with codes: L for lame, G for goiter, H for a heart condition. The examination for trachoma, an infectious eye disease, was particularly dreaded; it involved having a b.u.t.tonhook thrust behind an eyelid. Anyone seen bearing a chalk mark was taken off for more interrogation, and most of those who were declared unfit to enter the United States were packed off back to their old countries. A few managed to dodge this fate by smartly brus.h.i.+ng off the chalk upon their clothing. lay, hove to, in choppy seas just south of Ellis Island. She was thirty days out of Naples and fresh from a rough Atlantic crossing that had left a large part of her human cargo praying for a landfall. That had come on March 8, 1893, a Wednesday. Earlier that day, the s.h.i.+p's first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers, 150 of them, had disembarked at a Manhattan pier. They were presumed to be above the tests and examinations that awaited the eleven hundred more or less impoverished Italians still crammed nervously in steerage. Fourteen months earlier, the U.S. government had opened an enormous immigration center on the island, staffed by hundreds of inspectors and health officials and capable of processing as many as twelve thousand men, women, and children in an hour. There emigrants were questioned as to their employment prospects-men were required to have a job waiting for them-and checked to ensure that they possessed sufficient money to support themselves. They were also tested for a number of diseases. Inspectors carried sticks of chalk and marked people's coats with codes: L for lame, G for goiter, H for a heart condition. The examination for trachoma, an infectious eye disease, was particularly dreaded; it involved having a b.u.t.tonhook thrust behind an eyelid. Anyone seen bearing a chalk mark was taken off for more interrogation, and most of those who were declared unfit to enter the United States were packed off back to their old countries. A few managed to dodge this fate by smartly brus.h.i.+ng off the chalk upon their clothing.

The ledgers that were maintained on Ellis Island record the Terranova family's arrival on the Alsatia Alsatia and give bare details of their circ.u.mstances. There was no sign of Giuseppe Morello, for example-the Clutch Hand had slipped into the United States some six months earlier, in the early autumn of 1892. Bernardo Terranova was aboard, however, with his wife, Angela, and all six of their children: Lucia, the oldest, who was just sixteen; her sister Salvatrice, twelve; and Morello's three half brothers: Vincenzo, seven, Ciro, five, and Nicola-Coco to the family-who was only three years old. There, too, was Morello's wife, Maria Marvelesi, whom he had married soon after the Vella murder. Marvelesi came from Corleone and was the same age as the Clutch Hand. She had with her the couple's child, a two-month-old infant christened Calogero in memory of Morello's father. and give bare details of their circ.u.mstances. There was no sign of Giuseppe Morello, for example-the Clutch Hand had slipped into the United States some six months earlier, in the early autumn of 1892. Bernardo Terranova was aboard, however, with his wife, Angela, and all six of their children: Lucia, the oldest, who was just sixteen; her sister Salvatrice, twelve; and Morello's three half brothers: Vincenzo, seven, Ciro, five, and Nicola-Coco to the family-who was only three years old. There, too, was Morello's wife, Maria Marvelesi, whom he had married soon after the Vella murder. Marvelesi came from Corleone and was the same age as the Clutch Hand. She had with her the couple's child, a two-month-old infant christened Calogero in memory of Morello's father.

It was still unusual for families to emigrate together; more than eight Italian immigrants in every ten were men, and more than half of them eventually returned to Italy. Other than that, though, there was little in the Ellis Island records to suggest the Terranovas were anything extraordinary. Bernardo gave his age as forty-three and said his job was ”laborer,” which was normal enough; most Italians were unskilled, and several hundred of his fellow pa.s.sengers claimed the same menial occupation. He was the only member of the party who could read or write, and that was common, too. The only clue to Terranova's eminence in Corleone, and to his members.h.i.+p in the Fratuzzi, lies in the notes that the officials made of the Alsatia's Alsatia's baggage. At a time when the average Italian immigrant entered the country with six dollars, carrying a single case, the Terranovas mustered eighteen pieces of luggage among them. No other family on the s.h.i.+p arrived in the United States with so many personal possessions. baggage. At a time when the average Italian immigrant entered the country with six dollars, carrying a single case, the Terranovas mustered eighteen pieces of luggage among them. No other family on the s.h.i.+p arrived in the United States with so many personal possessions.

From Ellis Island, New York was only a short ferry ride away, but for the Alsatia's Alsatia's wondering Italians it was like entering another world. Gotham was an unimaginable metropolis, a hundred times the size of Corleone, and filled with the sort of modern innovations and conveniences that were barely even dreamed of in the Sicilian interior. Buildings were lit by gas or electricity, and heated-downtown, at least-by steam; running water was commonplace and not an unimaginable luxury. Travel, hitherto by horse-drawn omnibus, was increasingly by electric streetcar or elevated railway; the first subways were being planned. Telegraphs and telephones were everywhere, and even saloons had ticker-tape machines, to carry the baseball play-by-plays. There were a thousand theaters and music halls and more than ten thousand bars. The tallest building in the city was a church whose spire ascended to a dizzying 290 feet above street level. And everywhere there were people: more than two million of them in 1893, a third of whom were foreign-born, making New York not merely the most vibrant, fastest-growing city in the country, but by a distance the most cosmopolitan. wondering Italians it was like entering another world. Gotham was an unimaginable metropolis, a hundred times the size of Corleone, and filled with the sort of modern innovations and conveniences that were barely even dreamed of in the Sicilian interior. Buildings were lit by gas or electricity, and heated-downtown, at least-by steam; running water was commonplace and not an unimaginable luxury. Travel, hitherto by horse-drawn omnibus, was increasingly by electric streetcar or elevated railway; the first subways were being planned. Telegraphs and telephones were everywhere, and even saloons had ticker-tape machines, to carry the baseball play-by-plays. There were a thousand theaters and music halls and more than ten thousand bars. The tallest building in the city was a church whose spire ascended to a dizzying 290 feet above street level. And everywhere there were people: more than two million of them in 1893, a third of whom were foreign-born, making New York not merely the most vibrant, fastest-growing city in the country, but by a distance the most cosmopolitan.

The largest immigrant communities were still the Germans and the Irish, who between them accounted for more than half a million of the city's population-this at a time when there were fewer than three thousand Chinese in Manhattan, a thousand Spaniards, and three hundred Greeks. They still lived largely in their own communities, the Irish in Five Points and h.e.l.l's Kitchen, and Germans in Williamsburg or ”Kleindeutschland,” east of the Bowery. Immigration from northern Europe had slowed by 1890, though. For the next two decades, by far the greatest number of new citizens would come from Eastern Europe-mostly Jews, fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire-and Italy. The number of Italians in New York, which was well under 1,000 in 1850 and only 13,000 in 1880, had grown to nearly 150,000 by the turn of the century. By 1910 it had more than doubled again, standing in excess of 340,000. In Italy as a whole, between 1860 and 1914, five million people, one-third of the entire population, left to find work overseas.

The earliest Italian settlers in New York came from the industrial cities of the north. They were skilled workers and middle-cla.s.s professionals, and they received a cordial welcome. It was not until the 1880s that this pattern changed and much poorer, less educated peasants from the southern provinces began to flood into the city. These Neapolitans and Sicilians were escaping harsh conditions in their homeland: high taxation, an endlessly depressed economy, compulsory military service, and an unprecedented slew of natural disasters-droughts, floods, earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions-that followed one upon the other so relentlessly that they were seen as signs from G.o.d.

Unskilled, illiterate, and speaking mostly in impenetrable dialect, the men of the south were despised even in Italy, where a bit of doggerel popular at the time perfectly described their position in society: At the head of everything is G.o.d, Lord of Heaven.

After him comes Prince Torlonia, lord of the earth.

Then come Prince Torlonia's armed guards.

Then come Prince Torlonia's armed guards' dogs.

Then, nothing at all. Then nothing at all.

Then nothing at all.Then come the peasants. And that's all.

In Manhattan, they were still less welcome. Though useful, insofar as they did dirty jobs that earlier immigrants now thought of as beneath them, Italians from the southern provinces were regarded with hostility by many New Yorkers. Their dark complexions, lack of English, and devotion to an alien food were all regarded as distasteful. They were much more volatile than northern Europeans, it was commonly supposed, and p.r.o.ne to deadly knife fights and vendettas. Worse, only a minority embraced American inst.i.tutions with the fervor expected of immigrants. Few Italians mixed with men of other nationalities, and well under half actually applied for U.S. citizens.h.i.+p. For many Sicilians and Neapolitans, the United States was a place to work hard, spend little, and save ferociously; many planned to return home with their savings. These were habits many Americans regarded as ungrateful and insulting.

Opinion hardened further at about the time the Terranova family first came to Manhattan. There was concern at the number of anarchists and socialists pouring into the country to preach revolution. There was concern at the number of criminals. Nineteen Italians in every twenty of those pa.s.sing through Ellis Island were found to be carrying weapons, either knives or revolvers, and there was nothing in American law to stop them from taking this a.r.s.enal into the city. The Sicilian police were said to be issuing pa.s.sports to known murderers in order to get them out of the country-a calumny, it transpired, but there were still real reasons to take such problems seriously. So many Italians were pa.s.sing through Ellis Island every day that it was not possible to check their statements properly. But when the 1,400 pa.s.sengers on board the SS Belgravia Belgravia were subjected to a spot investigation, one in six was found to have given false information. ”Statistics prove,” the were subjected to a spot investigation, one in six was found to have given false information. ”Statistics prove,” the Herald Herald trumpeted in one alarmist feature article, ”that the sc.u.m of Southern Europe is dumped on the nation's door in rapacious, conscienceless, lawbreaking hordes.” trumpeted in one alarmist feature article, ”that the sc.u.m of Southern Europe is dumped on the nation's door in rapacious, conscienceless, lawbreaking hordes.”

SO FAR AS THE members of the Morello-Terranova family were concerned, though, New York was a welcome haven. They were safe there from the Italian authorities. Cooperation between Sicily and the United States was all but nonexistent at the time; certainly the police in Palermo and Corleone made no effort to discover if any of their wanted men were hiding in the United States. And only when an Italian became so notorious that the American government wanted to expel him would the New York police trouble to discover if the man had a criminal record in Italy. Any immigrant who had been in the United States for three years or more became, in any case, immune from deportation. All Giuseppe Morello and his stepfather had to do was steer clear of trouble for that long. Then they could put their difficulties in Sicily behind them. members of the Morello-Terranova family were concerned, though, New York was a welcome haven. They were safe there from the Italian authorities. Cooperation between Sicily and the United States was all but nonexistent at the time; certainly the police in Palermo and Corleone made no effort to discover if any of their wanted men were hiding in the United States. And only when an Italian became so notorious that the American government wanted to expel him would the New York police trouble to discover if the man had a criminal record in Italy. Any immigrant who had been in the United States for three years or more became, in any case, immune from deportation. All Giuseppe Morello and his stepfather had to do was steer clear of trouble for that long. Then they could put their difficulties in Sicily behind them.

Where Terranova and his family went when they disembarked from the Ellis Island ferry remains unknown; nor do we know exactly when they were reunited with Morello. In all likelihood, however, the clan took lodgings in the main Italian quarter of Manhattan. Speaking no English and already pining, like most immigrants, for the familiar staples of the old country, they would have made straight for Little Italy.

The Italian district of New York, centered around Mulberry Street, was still in its infancy in 1893. It had been predominantly Irish as late as 1890, when Mulberry Bend, a kink in the road a few blocks north of City Hall, was the most reviled slum in the city: rife with disease, thick with litter, and home to communities of the desperate and dest.i.tute with names such as Bandit's Roost and Bottle Alley. ”There is not a foot of ground in the Bend that has not witnessed some deed of violence,” wrote the reformer Jacob Riis, whose after-hours visits to the rotting lodging houses and drinking dens of Mulberry Street produced some of the most memorable images of old New York. Among the horrors Riis described were homes so caked in filth they would not burn when set afire and ”stale beer dives” in windowless, earth-floored cellars, where patrons desperate for oblivion sank rotgut whiskey and the flat dregs of empty beer barrels discarded by saloons.

It was largely thanks to Riis's eloquent campaigning that the worst excesses of Mulberry Street were swept away in 1890, leaving the district to the next great wave of immigrants from southern Europe. Three years later there were already tens of thousands of men, women, and children crammed into the seething streets around the Bend, a population larger than that of most Italian towns.

Conditions in the tenements of Little Italy were grim, though certainly no worse than they had been at home. Most of these dilapidated premises had been built before new zoning laws improved the standards of New York housing. They typically sprawled over almost the entire lot, so there was little light and no room for recreation; in the absence of gardens and public parks, children played on rooftops or in the streets. Almost every building was cold and damp in winter, when walls became so saturated with damp that they steamed whenever fires were lit. In summer the same apartments baked, so much so that even Sicilians, well used to infernal heat, preferred to sleep out on the rooftops or the fire escapes.

Privacy was nonexistent in the district. Bedrooms doubled as parlors and kitchens as bedrooms; every toilet, down the hall, was shared by fifty or sixty people. There were no bathing facilities; was.h.i.+ng meant a visit to the public bath. There was no central heating; the only source of warmth in some apartments was the kitchen stove. Those lucky enough to have fireplaces in their rooms stockpiled coal on the floor, in corners, under beds, making it impossible to keep things clean. Every tenement, in any case, was infested with c.o.c.kroaches and bedbugs. All had rats.

”More than anything I remember the smells of the old neighborhood,” said one old Corleone Mafioso of the Little Italy of his youth.

You can't believe how many people lived together in those old houses. There were six or seven tenements on Elizabeth Street where we lived and in those buildings, which were maybe five or six stories high, there must have been fifteen or sixteen hundred people living. And everybody took in boarders, too. A lot of the guys who came over from Sicily were not married or had left their families in Italy. They were only there at night since they were out working all day, and at night there must have been another seven or eight hundred guys sleeping in the building. We had it pretty good because there were only four of us in three rooms, but in some other apartments you had seven or eight adults and maybe ten kids living in an apartment the same size.Some of the smells were good. I can remember, for example, that early in the morning, say five o'clock, you could smell peppers and eggs frying when the women got lunches ready for their sons and husbands. But more than anything else I remember the smells of human bodies and the garbage. There was no such thing as garbage collection in those days and everybody just threw it out in the street or put it out in the hallways. Christ, how it stank!

Poverty was an everyday reality for most of the families of Elizabeth Street, just as it had been at home in Italy. Higher incomes in New York, where it was possible for even an unskilled laborer to earn $1.50 a day-a sum thirty times the five-cent wage typical in Sicily-were offset by the higher cost of living, and many families willingly endured privation in order to remit larger sums to relatives at home. Pasta and vegetables formed the staple diet, purchased from the innumerable street cart peddlers who thronged the streets of Little Italy, and meat remained a luxury for most. Delivery vehicles inched along the pulsing thoroughfares pursued by a procession of small children who scavenged for anything that fell-or could be made to fall-from them. Few people owned more than the clothes on their backs and perhaps a single item of Sunday best. Even sheets and blankets were scarce commodities. Joe Valachi, born to Italian parents in New York a few years after the Terranova family arrived from Sicily, remembered that ”for sheets my mother used old cement bags that she sewed together, so you can imagine how rough they were.”

Simply finding accommodation in the overcrowded tenements of Little Italy was hard enough. Work, good work with decent conditions and some prospects, proved a good deal more elusive. Many emigrants, hundreds of thousands of them, had been lured across the Atlantic by tales of the immense wealth of the United States and so arrived in New York filled with the hope that they, too, would acc.u.mulate an easy fortune. The reality proved very different. The only jobs available to unskilled Italians were the filthy, menial ones that Americans thought were beneath them. Rag picking-sorting through heaps of stinking rubbish in search of bottles, bones, and cloth that could be resold for a cent or two-was one source of casual employment for the men. Others labored on sewer repairs, did construction work on the new subway, or manned the city's garbage scows. Women worked in dimly lit sweatshops, ruining their eyes by staring at the fast-moving needle of a sewing machine for nine hours at a stretch, or labored stripping feathers for mattresses and pillows in workshops that brought on lung disease.

This sort of casual work was monotonous and poorly paid. It was also frighteningly insecure. Men were hired by the day to labor on contracts that might last for a week or two, rarely longer. Women did piecework, perhaps gluing envelopes at the rate of three cents for every thousand, and lived with the threat that any dip in productivity would result in dismissal. The endless stream of immigrants pouring through Ellis Island meant that there was compet.i.tion for even the basest work, and for many Italians of Bernardo Terranova's generation the solution was to go to work for a padrone padrone, an overseer who spoke some English and who contracted to supply cheap labor to a variety of businesses. The more fortunate-those with some wealth, some skill, or some connections-got help from friends and relatives who had already settled in the United States. This is almost certainly what Terranova and Morello did. Small colonies of Corleonesi already existed in the New York of 1893, one in Little Italy and another in East Harlem, where a second Italian quarter was taking root in the blocks around East 107th Street. Terranova had some skill as an ornamental plasterer, and he and his stepson most likely got at least a little temporary employment in this way.

Whatever the men of the family tried, though, it soon became apparent that it was not enough. The American economy was stalling. Fewer and fewer were able to find even temporary jobs; by summer there was almost no work to be had anywhere in New York. The American economy, foundering since 1890, was sliding into full-blown depression. It was the worst economic crisis yet experienced by the United States. The great crash of 1893 was under way.

THE CRASH OF 1893 was a slump as bad in almost all respects to the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was a run on gold; the value of stocks and shares plummeted; thousands of companies went bankrupt; and at least five hundred banks failed. It was no time to be an impoverished immigrant in a frightened New York. By December, fully a quarter of the working population had no job. was a slump as bad in almost all respects to the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was a run on gold; the value of stocks and shares plummeted; thousands of companies went bankrupt; and at least five hundred banks failed. It was no time to be an impoverished immigrant in a frightened New York. By December, fully a quarter of the working population had no job.

Morello and the Terranova family spent that terrible year living in Manhattan. How they survived there is unknown, but their position must have been precarious. Even with the help of fellow Corleonesi, Terranova and Morello had two wives and seven children to support; none of the family spoke English; and only one of their offspring was old enough to earn-Lucia, Terranova's eldest daughter, turned seventeen that year. Their savings and even the sale of their personal possessions would have stretched only so far. When it became clear that the economy would not recover quickly, the only realistic solution was to search for work outside New York.

Ciro Terranova, the second youngest of Bernardo's sons, was the only member of the family who ever spoke about these early years. Five years old in 1893, just old enough to grasp something of the problems that his parents faced, he recalled his half brother Giuseppe leaving New York to hunt for work soon after their arrival. Morello traveled south, to Louisiana, a well-worn route for Italian migrants in those days. Severe labor shortages in the Deep South, where the cotton fields and sugar plantations had never recovered from the emanc.i.p.ation of their slaves a quarter of a century earlier, made the landowners of the state eternally anxious to hire immigrants. Sicilian laborers were particularly highly valued; they worked hard, were inured to backbreaking toil, and were often skilled farmers, too-plantation managers never ceased to be amazed at the variety and quant.i.ty of food that their Italians conjured from the little kitchen gardens they were allowed to tend. Italians, Southern gentlemen discovered, worked willingly at even the dirtiest jobs, and unlike Chinese laborers, who were readily tempted by offers of better jobs, they generally fulfilled their contracts.

According to Ciro Terranova, Morello worked at first as a fruit peddler, ”selling lemons with a bag on his back.” In two months he acc.u.mulated sufficient money to send for the rest of the family, and, when they arrived, he and his stepfather went to work on a plantation. It must have been early in 1894 by then, at the time that the seed cane was planted, and there was plenty of work in the fields. Afterward, in spring, laborers were needed to pull weeds and clear drainage channels. In August and September, the growing cane was thinned, and in the autumn it was harvested.

October marked the beginning of the zuccarata zuccarata-the grinding season-in the sugar parishes of Louisiana. Gangs of Sicilian laborers spread out through the fields armed with machetes with which to hack down the giant canes, then hauled them to nearby wagons and transported them to mills where they were washed, cut into pieces, ground, and clarified. Sugar crystals, mixed in with mola.s.ses, went from the mill to enormous centrifuges, where they were separated; from there the sugar was loaded into wagons and s.h.i.+pped to a refinery.

It was hard, physical, unrelenting work, a test for any able-bodied man, much less one as crippled as Morello. Work began at sunrise and went on until dusk, sometimes considerably later. In that time, a good man could harvest three or four tons of cane, but, in order to maximize production, plantation owners would hire entire families and give work not only to women but to children as young as five. Probably all of the Terranova children cut and stacked cane together from October until the harvest season ended in January 1895.

The work did not pay badly by the standards of the time. Men could expect to receive sixty-five cents a day outside the grinding season and as much as $1.50 for working an eighteen-hour day during the zuccarata zuccarata itself. Women and children got less, perhaps $1 and ten cents respectively. But rough accommodation was provided free, and even if only by stinting themselves, eating nothing but bread and the vegetables they grew themselves, a thrifty family could save as much as $2.50 a day for the duration of the season. This must have seemed a fortune to men and women used to the sort of wages paid in Sicily, and it even compared favorably to the $200 a year that unskilled workers earned in New York at this time, from which the costs of rent and food would have to be deducted. itself. Women and children got less, perhaps $1 and ten cents respectively. But rough accommodation was provided free, and even if only by stinting themselves, eating nothing but bread and the vegetables they grew themselves, a thrifty family could save as much as $2.50 a day for the duration of the season. This must have seemed a fortune to men and women used to the sort of wages paid in Sicily, and it even compared favorably to the $200 a year that unskilled workers earned in New York at this time, from which the costs of rent and food would have to be deducted.

Louisiana had other attractions for Italian immigrants. Temperatures during the winter months were close to what Sicilians were used to and were far more comfortable than chilly New York. And for the duration of the harvest season, anyway, a large Italian community flourished in the sugar fields. More than two thousand Sicilians came to Louisiana in 1893-some direct from their homeland, in boats that sailed between Palermo and New Orleans, depositing the workers that they carried directly into the fields-and others from distant parts of the United States.

It is legitimate to wonder whether Terranova and Morello took advantage of this fact to extort from and to terrorize their fellow workers, as the Mafia had done in Corleone, and whether either found his way to New Orleans, where there was a fast-growing community of Sicilian criminals. A decade or so later, certainly, Morello would travel frequently to the Crescent City, where a cousin lived and he apparently had numerous acquaintances. There is no evidence, however, that any member of the family took part in such activities when they were working in the sugar parishes, and when Morello and the Terranovas left Louisiana after a year, it was to go not to New Orleans or New York but to an agricultural community in Texas where the Mafia held no sway.