Part 4 (2/2)
GIUSEPPE MORELLO LEFT few clues to his true character beyond the little that can be deduced from his crimes, which were intelligently planned and resolutely executed. He was in many respects conventionally Sicilian: a man who took his duties both as son and as the head of his own family seriously, and was so determined to honor his father's memory that three of his own sons, in succession, were christened ”Calogero.” More than that, though, Morello was a man of dominant personality and steely determination, both attributes that were most likely products of the struggle he was forced to wage to overcome his disability. His exceptional qualities-for a murderer, at least-are evident in his achievements, for though there had been Mafiosi in the United States long before the Clutch Hand arrived there, none was ever regarded with so much awe by his fellow criminals. few clues to his true character beyond the little that can be deduced from his crimes, which were intelligently planned and resolutely executed. He was in many respects conventionally Sicilian: a man who took his duties both as son and as the head of his own family seriously, and was so determined to honor his father's memory that three of his own sons, in succession, were christened ”Calogero.” More than that, though, Morello was a man of dominant personality and steely determination, both attributes that were most likely products of the struggle he was forced to wage to overcome his disability. His exceptional qualities-for a murderer, at least-are evident in his achievements, for though there had been Mafiosi in the United States long before the Clutch Hand arrived there, none was ever regarded with so much awe by his fellow criminals.
There was, even so, little that was attractive in Morello's makeup. True, he was an innovative boss, one who rarely felt bound by other people's rules, and he created, in the first family, a criminal organization of considerable effectiveness. The gang was, moreover, very much his own creation; it bore only a pa.s.sing resemblance to a Sicilian Mafia family, and not the least of the Clutch Hand's talents was an ability to weld together a disparate group of Mafiosi from different towns and backgrounds and make them so formidable that they gained an ascendancy over all the other gangs in New York's Italian district. But Morello was also treacherous and unforgiving, an autocrat who suppressed all dissent and rarely sought advice from even his closest lieutenants. Only Lupo the Wolf, of all his numerous a.s.sociates, seems not to have feared him; the remaining members of the family acted as much from terror as from loyalty. Chief Flynn, who mulled over the puzzle of Morello's personality for years, concluded that the boss was interested chiefly in power, not money, which explained why he lived modestly and why he never made as much as he might have done from his murderous career. For Flynn, the Clutch Hand's actions were really not hard to explain. Morello, he wrote, was simply ”bad-thoroughly, conscientiously and zealously bad. ... There are few men of whom you may truthfully say that they enjoyed being criminals. Old Giuseppe was one of them.”
It was Morello's obsession with power, the Chief was sure, that made him such an implacable enemy, determined to exterminate the weakness within the ranks of his own gang that the barrel case exposed and perfectly willing to kill even his most loyal followers if it suited his purpose. Certainly it did not take a man of the Clutch Hand's cunning to deduce that the Secret Service knew far more about his family's doings than he had realized, and that the gang's brush with the authorities owed much to the incompetence of his own men-not least that of Petto the Ox, whose decision to relieve Madonia of a one-dollar watch could easily have cost the boss and several other men their lives. Morello's own a.n.a.lysis of events soon convinced him that he had at least one traitor in his ranks, and he apparently also grew determined to rid himself of a number of men who knew too much about the Barrel Murder. The thirst for vengeance against all those who he believed had wronged him was one of the Clutch Hand's most p.r.o.nounced traits. In the autumn of 1903, he began to plot against them all.
The first man to die in the aftermath of the Barrel Murder was Salvatore Especiale, a New York Sicilian of some education who was found dead, with two bullets in his chest, on a street corner in Brooklyn that December. According to the local police, Especiale had known Giuseppe Catania and had some peripheral involvement in the Madonia affair as well. More significantly, as Captain Condon of Fulton Street station explained, he was rumored among his a.s.sociates to have been ”used as a 'stool pigeon' by the Secret Service men.” Especiale, it was said, had been responsible for supplying information that led to the arrest of several Italian counterfeiters. There is nothing in William Flynn's files to suggest that this was actually true; what mattered, though, was that his fellow Sicilians believed it was. Especiale certainly knew he was in danger. He had purchased a steams.h.i.+p ticket to Naples a few days before his death, and ”the dread penalty,” so one newspaper observed, was widely understood to have been exacted by the Mafia and ”was now believed to be the tragic sequel to the ghastly barrel murder mystery.” Morello, in other words, had ordered the murder of a man who he believed to have been Flynn's informant inside his counterfeiting ring.
The next in the series of killings linked to the Madonia affair did not take place until October 1905, and it occurred far from New York, in the mining town of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania-itself a noted stronghold of the Mafia and the Black Hand. The victim on this occasion was Tommaso Petto, who had fled Manhattan soon after his release from jail in January 1904 and had been living in the town under his real name, Luciano Perrini. Petto had continued his criminal career after leaving New York; he had ama.s.sed several arrests, and the other Sicilians of the district were, a Wilkes-Barre newspaper reported, ”often afraid of him. It is alleged that he was a member of the Black Hand and Mafia clans [and] he was what is known as a boss or king among his countrymen.” Whatever Petto's reputation, though, it was not sufficient to save him from a.s.sa.s.sination. A few days before his murder, the Ox's pretty wife had noticed a stranger hanging around their house, and when she informed her husband, he had taken her sufficiently seriously to begin carrying a large-caliber revolver in his waistband. This gun was discovered lying by the body after Petto was found sprawled dead in the road close to his home on the evening of October 21. He had been ambushed on his return from work and given no chance to return his a.s.sa.s.sins' fire. Five rifle bullets had smashed into his chest from a short range. From the size of several of the wounds-”large enough to admit a teacup,” one local journalist reported after speaking to the town's police-it appeared that the Ox's killers had used explosive bullets to make sure of killing their man.
News of Petto's death reached New York days later, and it was immediately supposed that he had been killed by Giuseppe Di Priemo in revenge for his involvement in the Barrel Murder. The Sun Sun even reported that the imprisoned counterfeiter had been seen by several people in Manhattan, ”on a hunt for 'The Ox,' and that he had gone to Pennsylvania in search of him.” Flynn, though, was adamant that Di Priemo could not have been Petto's killer; in October 1905, the Secret Service man observed, Benedetto Madonia's brother-in-law was still locked up in Sing Sing. The Chief was correct. Di Priemo's surviving prison records show that the earliest date he could have been paroled was April 14, 1906. even reported that the imprisoned counterfeiter had been seen by several people in Manhattan, ”on a hunt for 'The Ox,' and that he had gone to Pennsylvania in search of him.” Flynn, though, was adamant that Di Priemo could not have been Petto's killer; in October 1905, the Secret Service man observed, Benedetto Madonia's brother-in-law was still locked up in Sing Sing. The Chief was correct. Di Priemo's surviving prison records show that the earliest date he could have been paroled was April 14, 1906.
So far as Flynn was concerned, the most likely solution to the Petto murder mystery was that the Ox had been murdered by another of Madonia's relatives. ”To my mind,” he wrote, ”there was no doubt that the slaying was an act of vengeance.” It was not long, though, before the police began to formulate a rival theory. Petto, it was speculated, had been a victim of Morello himself, shot dead as a punishment for the idiocy he had displayed in p.a.w.ning Madonia's watch and because he knew too much about the barrel mystery.
The notion of Morello as the killer, wreaking vengeance on the members of his own gang, and perhaps using his own Mafia connections to have the murder carried out, was an idea that gained greater currency over the next few years as several other members of his family met equally violent deaths, in several cases far from Manhattan. Vito Laduca was the next to die, shot dead in Carini, Sicily, in February 1908; then Messina Genova was murdered in Ohio. A year after that, in the summer of 1909, Giovanni Zacconi-the Stanton Street butcher thought by Petrosino to have driven the covered ”death wagon” that took Madonia's body, in its barrel, to its resting place on East 11th Street-was also killed. Zacconi had abandoned New York for a new life as a fruit farmer in Danbury, Connecticut. On July 28 he was ambushed by a group of seven killers who attacked him with shotguns in a country lane. At least a dozen sh.e.l.ls were fired, and the Mafioso was found by his son lying by a ditch with half his face blown away. ”He was,” one Was.h.i.+ngton newspaper reported, ”arrested in connection with the famous 'barrel murder,' [and] it is believed he incurred the enmity of the organization and was slain for revenge.” The Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune said much the same, adding: ”The police explain the four killings [of Petto, Laduca, Genova, and Zacconi] on the theory that the real murderers of Benedetto have been killing the men who knew the details of the crime.” said much the same, adding: ”The police explain the four killings [of Petto, Laduca, Genova, and Zacconi] on the theory that the real murderers of Benedetto have been killing the men who knew the details of the crime.”
SOMEHOW, FEW PEOPLE seemed at all surprised at the collapse of the Barrel Murder investigation. New Yorkers had grown used to seeing Italian crimes going unsolved, almost always for lack of conclusive evidence. But a yearlong Secret Service operation lay in ruins, along with all the lonely, boring, dangerous hours of observation that it had entailed. Worse, Morello and his confederates had been thoroughly alerted to the fact that they were under continuous surveillance. seemed at all surprised at the collapse of the Barrel Murder investigation. New Yorkers had grown used to seeing Italian crimes going unsolved, almost always for lack of conclusive evidence. But a yearlong Secret Service operation lay in ruins, along with all the lonely, boring, dangerous hours of observation that it had entailed. Worse, Morello and his confederates had been thoroughly alerted to the fact that they were under continuous surveillance.
The Clutch Hand had always been a careful man; now, the Secret Servicemen a.s.signed to watch him observed, he had grown almost pathologically cautious. His movements became ever more unpredictable, and when he did emerge from one of his haunts, he walked rapidly, frequently glancing over his shoulder to see if he was being followed, and developed the unnerving habit of turning a corner and vanis.h.i.+ng by darting into a nearby building before the man tailing him could catch up. Arrangements were also made by the Morello family for mail to be delivered covertly to an unknown address, probably a bar or store owned by one of the boss's friends. The Secret Service, which had obtained more firm evidence of wrongdoing by intercepting the gang's correspondence than from any other source, spent months attempting to discover where the missing mail was going, but without success.
Flynn was extremely perturbed by this turn of events. Lupo and Morello were among ”the most dangerous foreign criminals in the country,” he had concluded, and he had warned McClusky that his arrests were premature. ”Too many policemen,” the Chief complained, ”make the mistake of viewing an arrest as their most important function. The most vital task of a policeman is not an arrest-but a conviction conviction. An arrest without the necessary evidence for a jury is not only wasted labor, but in its final a.n.a.lysis a confession of weakness.”
What made the failure to prosecute the gang the more galling in Flynn's eyes was the inability of the police to learn from their mistakes. The NYPD made no real attempt to keep the Morello family under surveillance after May 1903, let alone to investigate the sources of its income or obtain fresh intelligence about its members. Petrosino, who might have played a central role in such an effort, found himself swept off almost immediately to check the rising tide of Black Hand crime; he had little time to spare for longer-term investigations over the next two years. McClusky and his Detective Bureau were relieved to drop the case. That meant that the job of keeping an eye on Morello and his men fell by default to the ordinary patrolmen of the first family's local precinct, the 104th Street station, who were woefully ill equipped to deal with such well-organized criminals. Rather than concentrating, as Flynn urged, on quietly ama.s.sing fragments of intelligence, the police instead indulged themselves in a campaign of petty hara.s.sment. ”The detectives,” Ciro Terranova said, ”used to come around very often and search everybody. Since the time of Morello's arrest, each and every member of my family including my brother, have been searched on average twice a week.”
The Morellos had some reason to resent the attentions of the 104th Street men; on one occasion, several officers seized Ciro and his brother Vincenzo while they were out searching for a doctor to tend Morello's son and, ignoring their protests, dragged them off to the station house for interrogation. But the Sicilians had more reason to be grateful. The crude efforts of the Harlem precinct barely hindered the family's activities, the police felt they were ”doing something,” and their regular hara.s.sment made the Morellos more careful and so more effective. For Flynn, the 104th Street campaign amounted to rank incompetence.
What was really needed, it seemed clear to almost everybody, was a police squad dedicated to Italian crime. There was reason enough to set one up; the number of Black Hand bombings, shootings, and stabbings rose fourfold between 1903 and 1907, by which time The New York Times The New York Times alone was reporting in excess of three hundred incidents a year-a figure that implied that a far greater number of similar offenses were going unremarked. And while at this same time the number of Italian-speaking policemen on the force was gradually rising, Petrosino was the only man devoted to tackling crime in Little Italy. Detective Sergeant Antonio Vachris, a Genoese who was Petrosino's opposite number in Brooklyn, complained that he spent more of his time dealing with saloon license violations than he did with the Black Handers of his own borough, and of course that meant that the officers who were a.s.signed to investigate murder and extortion in Italian Brooklyn had no chance of grasping the intricacies of such cases, nor even of making themselves understood to their witnesses. alone was reporting in excess of three hundred incidents a year-a figure that implied that a far greater number of similar offenses were going unremarked. And while at this same time the number of Italian-speaking policemen on the force was gradually rising, Petrosino was the only man devoted to tackling crime in Little Italy. Detective Sergeant Antonio Vachris, a Genoese who was Petrosino's opposite number in Brooklyn, complained that he spent more of his time dealing with saloon license violations than he did with the Black Handers of his own borough, and of course that meant that the officers who were a.s.signed to investigate murder and extortion in Italian Brooklyn had no chance of grasping the intricacies of such cases, nor even of making themselves understood to their witnesses.
It was not until January 1905 that a new police commissioner solved this conundrum, partially at least. Worried by the rising tide of violence in Little Italy, William McAdoo, a reform-minded New Jersey lawyer, brought together a small group of Italian-born officers to tackle the problem. Petrosino, still a detective sergeant then, was the obvious choice to lead this new Italian Squad, but McAdoo scoured the ranks of the NYPD for other speakers of the language, eventually unearthing eight more men, among the four thousand then on the force, who possessed the necessary linguistic skills. There were so few Italian policemen in New York, in fact, that Petrosino's deputy, Maurice Bonsoil, was half Irish and half French, but Bonsoil had grown up in a Sicilian quarter of the city and spoke the dialect better than he did English. There were other surprises, too: The addition of an Irish-sounding patrolman, Hugh Ca.s.sidy, to the ranks of the squad baffled newspaper reporters until it was discovered that the man had been born Ugo Ca.s.sidi and had Anglicized his name.
Petrosino's nomination to lead the new Italian Squad was well received throughout the city, not least in Little Italy itself, where word of the appointment helped a.s.suage growing concern among the great majority of honest immigrant families that the spate of bombings and kidnappings for ransom was getting out of hand. Early successes, including the solution of an especially b.l.o.o.d.y murder in the Bronx, helped to burnish the detective's reputation further. Petrosino also scored a signal victory in arresting and having deported to Italy an important Neapolitan criminal named Enrico Alfano, who was one of the heads of the Camorra, an extended, organized criminal band that terrorized Naples in much the same way as the Mafia did Sicily. Alfano had fled to the United States after the murder of a rival boss and was widely considered untouchable. His deportation caused a sensation in Italy, where it resulted in an eleven-month trial and, eventually, in thirty convictions-the fiercest blow struck against the Camorra in a generation. Petrosino's exploits also made a deep impression on the Italians of New York, many of whom had viewed Alfano with a superst.i.tious dread. The Neapolitan crime boss had been seen, The New York Times The New York Times reported, ”in the light of a demi-G.o.d; he was thought to be invulnerable to bullets and able at all times to escape his pursuers.” Yet the Italian detective had defeated him. reported, ”in the light of a demi-G.o.d; he was thought to be invulnerable to bullets and able at all times to escape his pursuers.” Yet the Italian detective had defeated him.
By the time the Alfano affair reached its conclusion, Joe Petrosino was unquestionably one of the two or three most famous policemen in the city, and arguably in the entire United States. He was certainly influential enough to browbeat his superiors into increasing the size of the Italian Squad, which grew to number thirty men by 1908, with ten more stationed across the East River in Brooklyn. ”The personality and the mentality of the chief of the Italian squad are striking,” wrote one reporter who returned impressed from interviewing Petrosino.
He is short in stature, but stoutly built. He is clean-shaven and shows a strong but determined jaw. The mouth is firm, the lips are set in a straight line, suggesting purpose rather than severity. The eyes are not the searching eyes of the inquisitive prodder, but the intelligent eyes of a student. There is generally a kindly light in them, a light that makes one feel easy in mind. They invite you to be confidential, and when the straight line of the lips breaks into a smile, you can readily imagine that you are talking to some gentle and thoughtful person who has your interests at heart.Petrosino is suave, but this is never discovered until too late, and the Italian criminal who has been chatting with him over a wicker-jacketed Chianti bottle, finds a strong hand clasping his wrist and the information is given to him that he is under arrest.
But for all this, the same writer warned, the Italian Squad was hard pressed to keep up with the demands placed on it: ”Petrosino and his men seldom know what it is like to get eight hours of sleep in twenty-four.”
Petrosino was promoted to lieutenant in 1907, and most of the press coverage that he generated in abundance was positive; his name was so well known and well regarded by this time that he even became the unwitting star of a whole series of dime novels, published in Italy, which portrayed him as a sort of New York Sherlock Holmes. But the larger question of whether any detective was truly up to such a task was seldom asked. Certainly it was expecting too much of even forty officers to suppress crime in a community that by now numbered well over two hundred thousand people, and it did not help that the men of the Italian Squad were provided with the bare minimum of resources. The squad was given a little office of its own on Elm Street, a short distance from police headquarters, and had its own Rogues' Gallery and files, but no effort was made to integrate this intelligence with the main NYPD files, let alone to share information with Flynn's Secret Service, and the squad remained almost entirely reactive, attempting to solve crimes that had already been committed rather than mounting the sort of long-term surveillance Flynn advocated in the hope of preventing those that were still being planned. To make matters worse, Petrosino still kept much of his own invaluable experience in his head-he boasted to one newsman of being able to identify three thousand Italian criminals by sight-and while this made him a formidable adversary in person, it was a dangerous habit, and one that worried his superiors, who realized how much would be lost if the lieutenant decided to retire or was actually killed.
For his handful of critics, indeed, Joe Petrosino was a good deal less effective than his press coverage suggested-a Victorian policeman who kept the peace in Little Italy in a Victorian way. Having joined the NYPD as long ago as 1883, and having served more than half a dozen years as a beat patrolman before rising to the rank of plainclothesman, Petrosino had always relied as much upon his muscles as his brains-a Brooklyn alderman had once accused him of punching ”more teeth than a dentist” from the mouths of criminals. Nor would anyone who knew both men have said that he was in Flynn's cla.s.s as a detective. Petrosino was more of a plodder, a stolid, careful, conscientious man who got results by sheer hard work, solid experience, and the occasional distraction of a modest disguise.
”As a story book detective,” a critical reporter from the New York Sun Sun once observed, once observed, Petrosino would have been a lamentable failure. His devices were simple. But his commonplace appearance and the fact that he had to deal with a cla.s.s of criminals not particularly intelligent obviated the necessity for unusual cleverness in his methods. ... He impressed most people as a short fat man, rather dull than otherwise, certainly not to be feared by a malefactor with a mind above a pig's, [and] he looked as unlike a detective as you could imagine. He loafed about the wine shops of the lower East Side, the West Side and Harlem; he worked for a day or two sometimes in trenches with laborers; he pa.s.sed himself off as an immigration official or as an employee of the Board of Health. A big cap, the brilliant red bandana, boots or a long overcoat were about all the properties he needed.
It was true, another newsman added, that Petrosino's men did get a few of their results with the help of clever tricks and innovations such as fingerprinting. But, like their boss, they often seemed more comfortable practicing old-fas.h.i.+oned police work of a sort poorly suited to tackling newfangled crimes. The nightstick, the third degree, the stool pigeon, and the telephone tip-off to a friendly journalist when a newsworthy arrest was about to be made: These were the tools of the Italian Squad.
- ON WALL STREET a mile from Petrosino's Elm Street office, William Flynn was also calculating how best to keep watch over the first family. a mile from Petrosino's Elm Street office, William Flynn was also calculating how best to keep watch over the first family.
Had Flynn worked for the Police Department, he might have left Morello alone. The Chief's sole duty was to catch counterfeiters, and the Barrel Murder case had brought the gang's efforts to distribute bogus notes to a hurried stop. The family had burned ten thousand dollars of counterfeit bills on the boss's orders immediately after his arrest, and the realization that the operation had been exposed by the Secret Service was sufficient to persuade Morello's Sicilians to seek less risky ways of making money. The men of the New York bureau found no evidence that the gang was involved in counterfeiting in the months that followed the Clutch Hand's release from jail in the summer of 1903.
Flynn's instinct, though, was that Morello was still dangerous. The Mafia had already turned to counterfeiting twice; it struck him that there was every prospect that it would do so again. And there were still the loose ends of the Yonkers counterfeiting case to be followed through, investigations that led to the uncovering of the Canadian end of the Morellos' distribution operation and with it traces of a more extensive mail fraud-the gang had been sending small quant.i.ties of notes by mail to agents in Italian communities all over the country. Then, that October, three other Morello agents went on trial, with the upshot that each received a sentence of six years. All in all, Flynn felt certain that his surveillance of the Clutch Hand ought to be resumed. If there were any signs that the Sicilians were making preparations to resume their counterfeiting schemes, the Chief wanted to hear about them long before they were a serious concern.
Aside from all that, there was also Morello, who Flynn knew had gotten away with murder, and for whom the Secret Service man had begun to feel considerable loathing. ”He has become enveloped in mystery,” Flynn once observed in notes about his enemy, [and] ultimately he will be looked upon as a big bad man, but he wasn't and isn't. He was a little bad man. He was vicious and vindictive and dangerous generally ... treacherous but yellow. His mob was, like all mobs, a fluctuating quality. He enlarged it or decreased it to suit his own immediate purposes, [but] his staff was composed of as sinister an aggregation of cut-throats as I have ever surveyed, arrested and sent to prison.
There was more to Flynn's determination to put a stop to the Clutch Hand's activities than mere dislike, of course. By 1906, the Mafia was evidently a significant threat to law and order in New York.
As the Chief pointed out, convicting Morello would put one of the most murderous men in the city behind bars. ”I'm of the opinion that 50 murders could be traced to the Morello-Lupo outfit,” he wrote.
Actually putting this decision into action was more easily said than done, of course. More so even than the Italian Squad, Flynn's Secret Service bureau-indeed, the agency as a whole-was desperately short of men. Between the years 1890 and 1910, the number of Secret Service agents a.s.signed to offices across the United States was never more than forty; the average was only twenty-seven men. Nine of those, plus Flynn, were a.s.signed to the New York bureau, which made the Wall Street office the only one of any size outside Was.h.i.+ngton. But the city was home to so many forgers and counterfeit bills that every agent in the city was kept busy. In most years, more than a fifth of all the counterfeiting cases in the country meant work for the Manhattan office.
Both Flynn and his predecessor, William Hazen, had been aware for years they had a problem. As early as the summer of 1900, Hazen had written pleadingly to Was.h.i.+ngton, informing headquarters that the New York bureau required, at a minimum, a stenographer, a typist, and more agents. Little had changed by 1903, when, during the Barrel Murder investigation, Flynn's men had worked sixteen-hour s.h.i.+fts, slept four hours on a sofa in their office, and then gone back out on the streets again. Now, that same autumn, the Chief was able to spare no more than one or two men to watch over Lupo's grocery store and Inzerillo's cafe, and that merely on an intermittent basis. As the months pa.s.sed without any sign of a resumption of counterfeiting activity, even that watch was wound down and discontinued.
All this did not mean, however, that Flynn abandoned all attempts to monitor the New York Mafia. Informants recruited in Little Italy kept his office supplied with fragments of intelligence, and, unlike the minor street thugs favored as stool pigeons by the Italian Squad, the Chief's recruits were generally former forgers with a good knowledge of serious crime. Tony Brancatto, Flynn's top man in the Italian Quarter, was a Sicilian tailor who had once run a large-scale counterfeiting ring. Since his release from prison shortly before the Barrel Murder, Brancatto had-so Flynn believed-reformed, and the Sicilian now supplied the Secret Service with a stream of useful information, much of it gleaned from criminals' gossip in Italian bars.
Italian-speaking agents supplemented such informants on the streets. In 1903 the New York bureau employed one such man, Larry Richey (born Ricci), a Philadelphian who had joined the Secret Service at sixteen as a result of a dime novel adventure-he had chased a ball down into a bas.e.m.e.nt that turned out to be the lair of a counterfeiting gang. A few years later, Flynn added a second Italian speaker to his staff. Peter Rubano, an older and more experienced operative, became the Secret Service's chief undercover man in the Italian quarter, a.s.similating so well into the life of the district that eventually, so Flynn recorded, he wormed his way into the outer circles of the Morello family itself. Over the years, both Richey and Rubano succeeded in producing large quant.i.ties of useful information.
The task of recruiting able agents of such auspicious quality was made easier by the fact that the Secret Service was regarded as a glamorous employer. The name, the lure of exciting detective work, and the relatively handsome pay of four to seven dollars a day (half as much again as a policeman's) combined to encourage large numbers of well-qualified potential agents to apply for the handful of posts available. There were seldom fewer than three thousand men on Director Wilkie's waiting list, and this meant that it was possible to select honest operatives of high attainment who possessed specific qualities; even Flynn had had to wait a decade for his chance. ”In the Secret Service,” the Chief once explained to a curious journalist, ”are specialists in dealing with certain callings. There are, for instance, the 'lawyer,' and 'doctor,' and the 'engineer.' They can pa.s.s themselves off as doctors, lawyers or mechanics as the case requires.” At Flynn's instigation, the bureau even brought in female agents on occasion, a remarkable and forward-looking policy never dreamed of by New York's Police Department. Nor was there ever any problem with corrupt, dishonest agents-this at a time when the Police Department was entirely awash with graft and almost every officer on the force took bribes.
The back office staff responsible for maintaining the Secret Service records in Was.h.i.+ngton were of the same high quality, and their files, a well-maintained and well-indexed collection, together formed an invaluable resource. The bureau's headquarters in Was.h.i.+ngton boasted a Rogues' Gallery, in Room 35 of the U.S. Treasury Building, that featured displays of 250 active counterfeiters and photographs and records of ten thousand more. Files bulged with samples of counterfeits, and clerks labored over ledgers containing the criminal records and exact physical descriptions of every forger and queer-pusher ever arrested by the bureau. The volume of fresh intelligence processed each morning was considerable. Each Secret Service agent was required to submit a daily report summarizing his activities in minute detail, and the names and the information these reports contained were carefully indexed and cross-referenced, providing Flynn and his colleagues in other bureaus with access to a formidable quant.i.ty of information on counterfeiting and counterfeiters throughout the country.
All these resources, all this information, gave Flynn a large advantage when it came to watching the Morellos. When the Chief discovered that the gang had begun to meet in a room at Lupo's wholesale store, he rented a room across the street. He also arranged to have mail dropped into a local box recovered, opened, and read. His agents followed Morello and his men when they left New York, sometimes trailing their targets as far as New Orleans. And long months of dogged detective work-hours standing on street corners observing, weeks spent piecing together the details of the gang's movements, actions, and acquaintances-ensured that Flynn generally had a shrewd idea of where Morello was and what he was doing.
When the Mafia moved, he would be ready.
CHAPTER 7.
FAMILY BUSINESS.
THE BODY LYING IN THE BROOKLYN MORGUE HAD BEEN REDUCED to little more than packages of meat. Its arms and legs lay piled on one side of the slab, sawn clean through at the shoulders and thighs and still clad in the fragments of a suit. The torso and the head lay on the other, the throat cut and the trunk expertly drained of blood-”almost complete sanguination,” in the grim phrase of the medical examiner. The face had been so hacked up with a straight razor that it no longer appeared human. Even Antonio Vachris, who had fifteen years of service with New York's police, had never seen such awful mutilations. to little more than packages of meat. Its arms and legs lay piled on one side of the slab, sawn clean through at the shoulders and thighs and still clad in the fragments of a suit. The torso and the head lay on the other, the throat cut and the trunk expertly drained of blood-”almost complete sanguination,” in the grim phrase of the medical examiner. The face had been so hacked up with a straight razor that it no longer appeared human. Even Antonio Vachris, who had fifteen years of service with New York's police, had never seen such awful mutilations.
The injuries themselves, though, were familiar enough. The dead man's nose, lips, and tongue had all been roughly cut away, and all were missing-punishments typically inflicted by Sicilians on traitors. The remainder of the mutilations-the slashed throat and the dismemberment-were warnings to anyone who might think of doing likewise. That explained why the body had been dumped where it was likely to be found: wrapped in two oilcloth bundles and thrown onto a stinking dump in Pigtown, a dilapidated Brooklyn neighborhood populated largely by Italians.
The victim had been young and strong, of middling height, though poorly dressed and showing little sign of wealth. Putting a name to the remains would usually have been a lengthy task, but when Vachris slid his fingers into a jacket pocket, they closed around an envelope that held a folded square of paper. It was a letter postmarked Carini, Sicily, a few weeks earlier, and addressed by one Antonio Marchiani to his son Salvatore in New York. Unfolding the paper, Vachris read an urgent scribble in Sicilian: ”I hear from a number of people who have returned from America that you are constantly in company of a lot of bad Palermo people,” the elder Marchiani had written. ”It is the express wish of your father and mother that you cut loose from them, as you cannot come to any good end with them. If you have not the money to return, we will send it to you. Never mind how poor you are: Come home.”
Vachris replaced the letter in its envelope. The butchered remains lying in front of him now had a name. But clearly Salvatore Marchiani had had no time to heed his father's warning. His expertly dismembered body was the plainest evidence imaginable that someone powerful and vengeful had wanted hi
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