Part 4 (1/2)
VENGEANCE.
”CLEAR THE COURT OF ALL PERSONS HAVING NO BUSINESS HERE!”
Peter Barlow leaned forward on the magistrate's dais at Jefferson Market police court, a Gothic monstrosity that rose in gaudy red-brick tiers over 10th Street at Sixth Avenue. He was annoyed that he had to shout to make himself heard above the rising hubbub in his crowded courtroom. It was bad enough that he was hearing cases on a Sunday worse that he had been given charge of the arraignment of Giuseppe Morello and twelve of his a.s.sociates, all held since their arrest three days earlier on suspicion of involvement in the Barrel Murder. And it was certainly intolerable that, with the prisoners marshaled just outside the door, all waiting for the hearing to begin, his courtroom was filled to overflowing with a throng of incomprehensible Sicilians, most of them fierce-looking men in frayed second-best suits, and all of them talking at once.
”Clear the court!”
Barlow was new to Jefferson Market. He had been a magistrate for less than a year. But he had heard about the Black Hand and the Mafia, and knew that Italian gangsters habitually packed courtrooms with their intimidating friends. These men would sit in the front rows of the public seating and glare menacingly at the prosecution witnesses as they took the stand. Shus.h.i.+ng, hissing, threatening gestures-all were used to cow their adversaries into silence. Faced with a fierce-looking row of hoodlums, and all too uncomfortably aware that the names and addresses of those who offered testimony were routinely published in the press, many a witness stuttered and lost his chain of thought, or retracted every word of the statement he had sworn to give. Barlow had little doubt that the Morello gang hoped to dissuade as many of Chesty George McClusky's witnesses as they could from giving evidence.
”Clear the court!”
The first few people in the public seats began to move at last, but it took Barlow's ushers several minutes to eject the last of the unwanted spectators-most still protesting in their native language-and to escort in the prisoners. Morello stood flanked by Vito Laduca (whose knife, the police revealed, had been smeared with a rust-red substance that they believed was human blood) and Messina Genova, also a butcher, who Petrosino now believed had struck Madonia's deathblow. Bail on these three had been set high, at $5,000 a man. Most of the remaining prisoners had their bails fixed at a more modest $1,000, including Ign.a.z.io Lupo, who had been the last of the thirteen men to be arrested. A few minor members of the gang, including three who had been in the United States for only a month, were held on bonds of a mere $100.
It was April 19, 1903, the first day of the first hearing into the barrel killing, and the day before Joseph Petrosino would finally confirm the victim's ident.i.ty. For men who claimed to work at menial jobs, the Sicilians had secured first-rate representation. Morello and Lupo had retained Charles Le Barbier, one of the half-dozen most celebrated lawyers in Manhattan; five lesser attorneys from Le Barbier's firm had charge of the other members of the gang. According to the police, the legal fees had been met by a compulsory levy raised in Little Italy by other members of Morello's family, the total collected being as much as ten thousand dollars. Over the next few weeks, word would filter in that similar collections had been made in other cities on the eastern seaboard, a startling testimony to the boss's growing influence. In Boston, seven Sicilians appeared at police headquarters to beg for protection against the Mafia, ”by which,” a local paper noted, they claimed to have been ordered to contribute to the defense fund in the barrel murder case. Each of the foreigners showed a letter from New York. They were thoroughly frightened even when they were in the secure shelter of [the chief of police's] private office. The letters told them that everywhere they went they were marked men; that the eye of the Mafia was on them always; [and] that they were as good as dead if they did not send the required money immediately.
Le Barbier and his a.s.sociates set about earning their fat fees as soon as Barlow opened the proceedings. ”I ask that the weeding out process begin today,” Le Barbier began. ”There are a great many prisoners, and as this was a secret murder, all these men could not have had a share in it.” A ”bunch” of his clients should be dismissed at once, the advocate continued. When Barlow rejected his request, Le Barbier fired back by highlighting the single greatest weakness in the prosecution case: I am sure the police are on the wrong track. They have made a great mistake. The proof of this error is apparent when, from day to day, they have failed to establish the ident.i.ty of the victim of these murders. I ask that the a.s.sistant District Attorney point out one among the prisoners against whom there is some ground for the belief that he is guilty.
Le Barbier's interjection set the tone. Hamstrung by Inspector McClusky's insistence on premature arrests, a.s.sistant District Attorney Francis Garvan had no real answer to him, nothing but hope that an identification would be made and some prospect that he could at least prove that the gang had been engaged in a conspiracy. To make matters worse, Morello himself gave away nothing on the stand; the Clutch Hand denied so much as knowing the dead man, and answered most questions with a shrug of the shoulders and ”I don't remember.” Lupo, called next, struck the reporters in the courtroom as suave and unruffled. He ”perjured himself again and again,” one newsman thought, but there was little that even McClusky could do about such lies other than to vow to waiting reporters that ”the prisoners will be given the third degree to the limit in the hope that one of them will break down.”
It was not until the hearing's second morning that Garvan got his stroke of luck. The a.s.sistant DA was halfway through another unproductive examination when a clerk from his office crept into the courtroom with a piece of paper on which was scribbled information just phoned in from Buffalo: a name, and the details of the dead man's home and circ.u.mstances. It took Garvan a moment to digest the news. Then he smiled, put down the note, and started to recall the prisoners, beginning with Morello. Had they ever met a Benedetto Madonia? The result was the closest thing to a sensation the newsmen covering the hearing had yet witnessed. ”Each denied knowing the man,” a reporter from the Sun Sun observed, ”but the first time the question was asked, there was a great babbling in Italian among the prisoners and they were apparently very much excited.” observed, ”but the first time the question was asked, there was a great babbling in Italian among the prisoners and they were apparently very much excited.”
Garvan got in a few more good blows after that. His best moment came the next day, when he produced the ledger Flynn had found in Morello's apartment, with its entries relating to Madonia, and with it a letter Petrosino had recovered from the dead man's family. The letter, addressed to Buffalo, had been scrawled in red ink in the same crabbed Sicilian script as the ledger entry, and Garvan forced the Clutch Hand to admit that he had written it. It was proof that Morello knew the barrel victim. The letter was also, at least in the eyes of the police, the dead man's death warrant. ”In the Mafia,” one officer explained to the Evening Journal Evening Journal, it is not customary to threaten. The leader does not communicate to a suspected member that his acts have rendered him subject to the death penalty. Their method of procedure is more subtle.
To the offending member of the Mafia a letter written with red ink, in lieu of blood, is sent. ... Compliance with the contents, or the contrary, will not affect the doom of the recipient. To an Italian versed in the ways of the Mafia, the receipt of such a letter is equivalent to a sentence of death.
The press made a good deal of this revelation, and the prosecution could now prove, by way of the letter and the ledger, that Morello had lied under oath in swearing that he did not know Madonia. But neither the written evidence nor anything that the ADA pried out of the prisoners proved that any one of them had partic.i.p.ated in the Barrel Murder. Madonia had last been seen by Flynn's operatives walking off down Prince Street at eight in the evening with several of Morello's men. But what had happened to him after that remained a mystery. Speculation, circ.u.mstantial evidence, tips from several informers-all had helped the police to reconstruct those last few hours. But none of it was admissible in court. There was insufficient information, Barlow concluded on the fourth day of the hearing, to hold any one of the prisoners on a charge of murder. That meant that all thirteen would have to be discharged.
Word of the prisoners' impending release spread quickly to the crowd of friends and relatives waiting outside the courtroom. But Morello and his men got no farther than the courthouse steps before McClusky rearrested them, this time on charges of perjury-each man having denied on the witness stand that he so much as knew Madonia.
Lupo was held on a separate counterfeiting charge; correspondence that Flynn had taken from his room showed that he had been mailing forged notes to Italian laborers in Canada.
So far as most New Yorkers were concerned, all this legal maneuvering meant little. Morello was still under arrest in the House of Detention with his men. The police were searching for more evidence. There was still time for them to make a case, and Petrosino had brought Salvatore Madonia, the dead man's son, to New York to give statements. The young Madonia indeed proved to be a font of useful information: He gave the police details of his father's thoughts, his movements, and the belongings he had taken with him on his travels. At times Salvatore amplified or contradicted the information Petrosino had obtained from the young man's mother. She had described her husband's pocket watch as a valuable gold one, for example, but Salvatore said Benedetto had actually taken his son's cheap tin watch when he left for New York. It was easily identified, Madonia added, being stamped with an image of a locomotive on its cover.
Salvatore had little doubt about the murder. ”I believe my father was killed by the Mafia because he threatened to reveal secrets which had come into his possession,” he told Petrosino. ”He knew a great deal about the members of Morello's gang, and I believe that through fear or revenge they murdered him.” His statement was so persuasive that even the usually cautious sergeant made a bullish statement of his own when cornered by a reporter from the Evening Journal Evening Journal. (”This murder,” the Italian detective said, ”has done more to reveal the extent to which the Mafia flourishes in New York than anything else that ever happened before. Heretofore the name 'Mafia' has been a.s.sociated with the Italians of New Orleans. It is now made clear to every one that the largest and most dangerous branch of the society in existence has its headquarters right here in New York.”) But there was plenty more that Petrosino wanted from his witness, not least his statement in an open court. The inquest into the barrel victim's death had just been scheduled for the first of May, and that would give the police another opportunity to interrogate Morello under oath. That evening the detective booked Madonia into a hotel on Bleecker Street and left him there under the protection of a Sergeant Illich.
Petrosino planned to return next morning, but he was not the only person in Manhattan who saw the young man as a vital witness, and something took place that evening to shatter his informant's fragile confidence. Madonia begged Illich to stay the night with him and double-locked his door. Rising early the next morning, the young man then declared that he would not stay in New York any longer. ”If I remain here they will kill me,” he informed his bodyguard. ”I shall have to go away from Buffalo and hide somewhere where I am not known. Even then I am afraid they will find me. Their vengeance never rests.”
There was nothing that Sergeant Illich or anybody else could say to dissuade the boy, and an hour or two later Madonia was on board a fast train back to Buffalo. With a week to go until the inquest, the police had just lost their most important witness.
WILLIAM FLYNN HAD barely thought about the barrel case for several days. There had been so little time; the demands of his heavy caseload had confined him to the collection of sc.r.a.ps of extra information that he had forwarded to Was.h.i.+ngton. He and his men had played no part in McClusky's laborious and unproductive questioning of the thirteen Sicilians or in the proceedings at Jefferson Market. Nor had Flynn looked in any detail at the exhibits and evidence the police had gathered. barely thought about the barrel case for several days. There had been so little time; the demands of his heavy caseload had confined him to the collection of sc.r.a.ps of extra information that he had forwarded to Was.h.i.+ngton. He and his men had played no part in McClusky's laborious and unproductive questioning of the thirteen Sicilians or in the proceedings at Jefferson Market. Nor had Flynn looked in any detail at the exhibits and evidence the police had gathered.
Barlow's hearing changed all that. The public might feel rea.s.sured that Morello remained in custody, and be taken in by optimistic statements that the barrel mystery was close to a solution; Flynn knew better. The evidence against the counterfeiters was so weak that it seemed likely that the entire gang would escape conviction. Irritated though the Chief still was by McClusky's handling of the case, he felt that he should try to help.
McClusky made no objection when Flynn called at headquarters on April 25 and asked if he could see the evidence; after Barlow's ruling, even the police inspector was willing to admit that he would welcome some a.s.sistance. Flynn was shown into an empty room, and, a few minutes later, several boxes were brought in and piled against a desk for him. Most contained the personal possessions of the thirteen prisoners, seized from their homes or taken from their pockets ten days earlier.
Flynn spent some time going through the containers, finding nothing of special interest until he reached the box that held the items taken from Morello's bodyguard, Petto the Ox. The Secret Service man tipped the contents over the desk and let his eyes wander over the detritus of the Ox's life: a motley a.s.sembly of cigar b.u.t.ts, handkerchiefs, loose change, and junk. Toward the bottom of the pile he noticed a sc.r.a.p of paper. Flynn spread it open on the desk and saw it was a p.a.w.n ticket issued by Fry's Capital Loan Company, a store at 276 Bowery. The ticket was dated April 14, the day after the Barrel Murder. Capital Loan had advanced Petto the sum of one dollar in exchange for a pocket watch.
Flynn thought back to the day of the murder and recalled that Madonia's waistcoat had sported a watch chain but no watch. He called Detective Sergeant Carey. Had the ticket been redeemed? he asked. No, Carey said; Madonia's wife had stated that her husband was carrying a large gold timepiece-an item worth far more than a dollar, even to a p.a.w.nbroker. The police believed the old watch must be Petto's.
Flynn knew nothing of Salvatore Madonia's statement, nothing of the cheap tin watch the boy had loaned his father, but the p.a.w.n ticket intrigued him. Check it, he urged Sergeant Carey. Just to be certain.
IT WAS NOT UNTIL the next day that Carey got around to visiting the Capital Loan Company, and by then the sergeant had read Petrosino's dossier. He asked a clerk to redeem Petto's pledge and waited while the man looked over the ticket, rummaged under the counter, and produced a battered timepiece with the outline of a locomotive punched into its cover. the next day that Carey got around to visiting the Capital Loan Company, and by then the sergeant had read Petrosino's dossier. He asked a clerk to redeem Petto's pledge and waited while the man looked over the ticket, rummaged under the counter, and produced a battered timepiece with the outline of a locomotive punched into its cover.
Carey recognized the watch at once. Its description matched Salvatore Madonia's, right down to a ma.s.s of scratches on the neck where the boy had once tried to pry the casing open. It seemed unlikely that the barrel victim would have given away a watch belonging to his son, and since young Madonia's father had not been short of money, it followed that the timepiece had almost certainly been stolen by his murderer. The sergeant hastened back to Mulberry Street to find McClusky.
Carey, as he most likely knew, was only just in time. No one had imagined, until now, that Petto was a man of any importance in Morello's gang, or guessed that the Ox might have played more than a minor part in the Barrel Murder. Indeed, the police had thought so little of him that Petto was still being held on a bail of just five hundred dollars, a figure so low that he had by now found a bail bondsman willing to supply it. The police had uncovered the one piece of evidence tying the Morellos to Madonia's murder on the very morning Petto was due to be released.
McClusky recognized the importance of Carey's find at once and wasted no time in placing a phone call to the House of Detention. Then, having instructed the warden not to release Petto under any circ.u.mstances, the inspector hurried over to the Criminal Courts building on Centre Street to speak to the district attorney. The upshot of all this activity was the best news the police had had in weeks: Petto's bondsman was turned away from the House of Detention, and, shortly afterward, the Ox was arraigned and charged with murder.
Word of these developments did much to restore morale at police headquarters, where McClusky made several more bullish statements to the press. Sergeants Carey and Petrosino resumed the questioning of Morello's men with extra vigor-as promised, several of the prisoners were subjected to the physical interrogation methods of the third degree-and the two detectives began to think for the first time that they were making progress. Pietro Inzerillo and Joseph Fanaro both showed signs of talking, Carey said, and when Fanaro, who had been seen in the murdered man's company more often than any other member of the gang, spent several hours closeted with a.s.sistant District Attorney Garvan, word spread that the Sicilian was prepared to testify. To Carey, even Morello seemed to be weakening; I thought that he might talk. It had not been unusual to find that gang leaders like him would talk, for the tradition prevails among this type of criminal organization that the king can do no wrong, and Morello was a king.
So far as Petrosino was concerned, however, this was wishful thinking. Morello was too stubborn and too well aware of the weaknesses of the police case to break as easily as that, and Fanaro and Inzerillo were both too frightened of their leader to risk turning against him. If the NYPD wanted more arraignments and convictions, it would have to prove its case against a stone wall of Sicilian obstruction, starting with a strong performance at the coming inquest. The effort would be worthwhile; the right verdict would open the way for charges to be brought against the other members of the gang.
A week remained before the inquest opened, long enough for Petrosino to make the necessary arrangements. First Salvatore Madonia and his mother were ordered back to Manhattan to give evidence. Then Giuseppe Di Priemo was brought down from Sing Sing to be examined as to his part in the Madonia affair. The witnesses were plainly reluctant, Salvatore perhaps most of all. Among them, however, or so Petrosino hoped, the three could do much to explain Madonia's death and illuminate his relations with Morello.
Before any of that could happen, though, the Manhattan coroner would need to find a dozen men willing to serve as a jury.
FOR GEORGE LEBRUN, the Barrel Murder inquest was turning rapidly into a nightmare.
LeBrun was Manhattan's a.s.sistant coroner, and one of his innumerable duties at Coroner Gustav Scholer's court was to empanel inquest juries. He had years of experience of this, and never had he found a routine task so difficult to organize. Newspaper coverage of the ”Mafia murder case” had left the readers of the New York press in little doubt as to the ruthlessness and brutality of the killers, and the majority of the jurors summoned would not sit, citing various excuses. ”Even with the formal arrests,” LeBrun confessed, ”I had difficulty getting enough men to serve,” and the a.s.sistant coroner was left in no doubt why. Several potential jurors, the man from the Herald Herald wrote, ”made no secret of the fact that if it could be avoided they would be most loath to sit on a jury and have to bring in a verdict of guilty against a member of the Mafia, even if the weight of evidence was conclusive, and it was evident that in the minds of several of them the prospect of Mafia vengeance in such an event was extremely vivid.” When, after a delay of almost a day, a jury was finally a.s.sembled and the jurors' names were read, not one among the dozen was Italian. Most were stolid men with German names who lived far from Little Italy. wrote, ”made no secret of the fact that if it could be avoided they would be most loath to sit on a jury and have to bring in a verdict of guilty against a member of the Mafia, even if the weight of evidence was conclusive, and it was evident that in the minds of several of them the prospect of Mafia vengeance in such an event was extremely vivid.” When, after a delay of almost a day, a jury was finally a.s.sembled and the jurors' names were read, not one among the dozen was Italian. Most were stolid men with German names who lived far from Little Italy.
Interest in the case was great; every public seat was filled, and a line stretched down the corridor outside. Most of those who did gain entry to the courtroom were Sicilian, and though these spectators sat impa.s.sively through most of the proceedings, there were ominous stirrings on the public benches whenever critical pieces of evidence were heard. Scholer, unlike Peter Barlow, never ordered that his court be cleared.
a.s.sistant District Attorney Garvan again took charge of questioning the witnesses. The most dramatic moment of the morning came when Petto the Ox was on the stand. The prisoner, who had sat sullenly through Garvan's interrogation and refused to look at the array of stilettos and other ”gruesome objects” brandished by the ADA, was stonewalling more questions when a photograph of the murdered man showing him as he appeared after death, was suddenly thrust by Detective Sergeant Petrosino beneath the eyes of Petto, who is directly charged with the murder. The man gave a start of surprise, his eyes rolled, and he clasped his hands convulsively, but it was only a moment ... he recovered his self control and, shrugging his shoulders, refused to look again at the photograph, although it remained in front of him for fifteen minutes.
Mostly, though, Garvan and Petrosino struggled to make an impression on their witnesses. Newspaper reporters made much of the admissions of Nicola Testa, who was the butcher's boy at Vito Laduca's Stanton Street store and who startled the press bench by agreeing that he was the nephew of the murdered Brooklyn grocer Giuseppe Catania-but that was merely circ.u.mstantial evidence. Giovanni Zacconi, a Sicilian with a stake in the same store, was named in court as the owner of the wagon that had carried Madonia's corpse away, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. But Joseph Fanaro, of whom much had been expected, had plainly reconsidered his position since his meeting with the district attorney. Placed on the witness stand, he remained determinedly mute, denying absolutely that he knew Madonia even though he had made a lengthy statement on the subject only two days earlier. It was ”a remarkable exhibition of an apparent loss of memory,” the Herald Herald caustically remarked. caustically remarked.
Fanaro's mulishness was the first clear sign that Garvan and Petrosino's case was not going according to plan, but the remainder of Garvan's witnesses fared even worse under the defendants' steely gaze. Lucy and Salvatore Madonia had both given statements identifying the tin watch that Carey had retrieved from Capital Loan, but, once on the witness stand, Salvatore began to speak with ”evident misgivings,” terror etched on his face. Carey was there to see the youth give evidence. ”The watch,” he said, was handed to the lad. He looked at it and was about to speak when there was a shuffling of feet and a hissing in the courtroom, which was filled with swarthy-faced men. One of these jumped up and put his fingers to his lips. Young Madonia was now not so sure it was his father's watch.
”It looks like mine,” the boy stammered at last in answer to Garvan's question, ”but there may be many watches like it in the world, and I cannot say it is.”
Lucy Madonia, the dead man's wife, was just as equivocal. She, too, was handed the timepiece, and she, too, started as the same stirring of bodies and rustling of feet swept through the courtroom. The same dark-skinned man half rose for a second time, and ”Mrs. Madonia,” Carey said, ”positive the day before that the watch was her husband's, now suffered a lapse of memory.” The Madonias' useless testimony was a huge blow to the police, shattering the one firm link between Petto the Ox and the Barrel Murder, and what was left of the police case crumbled when Pietro Inzerillo took the stand. The confectioner, ”who had been prepared, among other things, to admit the presence of the sugar barrels in the rear room of his shop,” blanched at the same sinister shuffling of feet and refused to talk.
The final witness called to the stand on that first afternoon was Giuseppe Di Priemo, Madonia's imprisoned brother-in-law. The squat Sicilian was the last of the witnesses whose evidence might have indicted the Morello gang. Knowing that Di Priemo had every reason to loathe the Clutch Hand, Petrosino had done what he could to persuade the queer-pusher to give evidence, promising full protection from Morello's family. Apparently rea.s.sured by that guarantee, Di Priemo had spent nearly two hours two days earlier giving a statement to Francis Garvan, but once in court, he took the oath and promptly withdrew every word. The counterfeiter ”laughed on the stand,” a bitter Sergeant Carey would recall, ”and said that Petto was his very good friend and surely would not have killed his brother-in-law. Yet we knew he hated the bull-necked man.” This once, Carey thought, his witness was not particularly intimidated by the ma.s.sed ranks of Sicilians in the courtroom. So far as the detective sergeant was concerned, Di Priemo had an altogether different motive for his silence: He planned to exact his own revenge for the murder of his sister's husband.
The inquest ran for seven more days after that, but the verdict had been decided long before it staggered to a close. Madonia, the jury ruled, had certainly been murdered-but by ”a person or persons unknown.” There would be no more indictments; even Petto was eventually released from his damp cell in the Tombs. Morello was never heard to utter another word upon the subject. But it was not long before events elsewhere brought the Barrel Murder back to the attention of New York's papers. When they did, the city and the city's police got a longer, deeper, cooler look at the dangers of angering the Mafia.