Part 5 (1/2)

Most work of this sort was done on the direct order of a boss, either to maintain discipline and exert control over the members of his own family, or as part of a war with rival gangs. But organized crime had grown sufficiently sophisticated by the second decade of the century to hire out killers to third parties. The most notorious incident of this sort-notorious because the police eventually broke the case, setting off a lengthy series of trials and appeals-occurred in downtown Manhattan in 1914 when an independent poultry dealer by the name of Barnet Baff began selling his stock at prices well below those set by the Jewish-run cartel that controlled the chicken racket in West Was.h.i.+ngton Market. When dire threats failed to weaken Baff's determination, the poultry dealers turned to the Morellos for help. A Mafia man by the name of Ippolito Greco agreed to hire out four gangsters to ”take care” of Baff who was shot through the head soon afterward. The four murderers, who were each paid a hundred dollars, were tracked down after an investigation that lasted nearly a year; it took four more to establish to the satisfaction of a jury who had hired the gunmen and why.

Murder, of course, remained a last resort, even for Mafiosi, but it was the threat of it that underpinned discipline within the Morello family and ensured that the members of the gang stuck strictly to the Clutch Hand's rules, which were clearly set out and astonis.h.i.+ngly bureaucratic. Morello's Mafia was governed by a set of nine regulations, which apparently were issued to each man upon initiation; one copy, discovered in ”a small black book closely written in the nebulous dialect of Sicily,” turned up among the possessions of a man arrested by Flynn and carefully set out the rights and role of both the boss and his a.s.sociates. Insulting another member of the family or leaving New York without Morello's explicit permission could both be punished with a twenty-dollar fine. Lying or drawing a weapon on an a.s.sociate merited expulsion from the family. Another article shed light on the finances of the gang, explaining that its members were expected to turn over four-fifths of their earnings to the ”society”-meaning, in effect, Morello. Several more dealt with the plainly important topic of gang meetings, which the boss possessed the sole right to call, which had to be announced at least a day in advance, and which members of the family were required to attend on pain of being cut out of ”the next division of funds.”

Morello was not alone in issuing formal sets of rules. A few earlier New York gangsters had done so, and another set of gang regulations would turn up a few years later in Ohio, the work of a Mafia-like Italian group known as the Society of the Banana. Nor was the Clutch Hand's evident ambition remotely unfamiliar to New York's underworld. What was unusual about Morello was the speed with which he was able to expand his influence, first through the city and then beyond its boundaries, at a time when long-distance communication still involved telegrams and letters, and when crossing the United States from top to bottom, side to side, meant journeys lasting several days. Morello had been in the country only since 1893, resumed his counterfeiting career in 1899, and formed his criminal family in 1900. By 1903, though, he was the uncrowned king of Little Italy. And three years after that, he was acclaimed as boss of bosses of the entire American Mafia.

IT WAS NICOLA GENTILE who revealed the Clutch Hand as the most senior, most powerful Mafioso in the country, and probably no one in the Italian underworld was better placed to know the truth. who revealed the Clutch Hand as the most senior, most powerful Mafioso in the country, and probably no one in the Italian underworld was better placed to know the truth.

Gentile, too, was a Sicilian, born in the province of Agrigento in 1885. According to his own account, given decades later when he was in his seventies and no longer had a lot to fear, he emigrated to the United States in 1903, lived and worked in Kansas City, Missouri, and was initiated into what he called the onorata societa onorata societa-the Honored Society, the Mafia-in Philadelphia two years later. Later Gentile moved to Pittsburgh, where he joined another Mafia family, and he spent time in San Francisco and Chicago, too. In his youth, the Agrigento man was arrogant and tough-”the cla.s.sic raw material of the Mafioso”-and he soon built a reputation as a killer, ingratiating himself with his fellow Sicilians in Pittsburgh by violently subduing the local Neapolitans. (”You cannot become a capomafia capomafia without being ferocious,” he explained.) But Gentile was something of a diplomat as well, with contacts among members of the Mafia in many cities, and one of the Mafiosi with whom he was acquainted was Giuseppe Morello. There is no reason to doubt a man of his seniority and experience when he described the Clutch Hand as ”boss of the bosses of the honorable society when I first entered it.” without being ferocious,” he explained.) But Gentile was something of a diplomat as well, with contacts among members of the Mafia in many cities, and one of the Mafiosi with whom he was acquainted was Giuseppe Morello. There is no reason to doubt a man of his seniority and experience when he described the Clutch Hand as ”boss of the bosses of the honorable society when I first entered it.”

It would be easy to read too much into this t.i.tle. The Mafia of 1906 was a loosely organized collection of families in eight or ten large cities that rarely acted in concert, and there is certainly no proof that Morello tried, or even wanted, to exercise direct control over families in far-flung parts of the United States. What the Clutch Hand did do was act as an adviser and an arbitrator-and arrange matters, on occasion, to benefit New York. Where he governed, he seems to have governed by consensus. But the fact that his authority was recognized at all by men living thousands of miles from Manhattan is testament to the respect in which the Corleone boss was held.

How large and how powerful the American Mafia had become by 1906 cannot be said with any certainty. Only a handful of fragmentary records survive. Taken together, though, these sc.r.a.ps paint a picture of a more complex organization than almost anyone suspected at the time-one in which cosche cosche were springing up in a growing number of towns, wherever there were large Sicilian populations. It was a fraternity that maintained links with its compatriots in Italy and whose bosses in the United States were also in regular communication. And, while still fatally p.r.o.ne to the sort of murderous internecine disputes that soured relations between families in Sicily, the American Mafia was also evolving mechanisms to resolve disputes and so maximize the money it was making-profit, as Flynn once pointedly observed, being ”all these people were concerned with.” were springing up in a growing number of towns, wherever there were large Sicilian populations. It was a fraternity that maintained links with its compatriots in Italy and whose bosses in the United States were also in regular communication. And, while still fatally p.r.o.ne to the sort of murderous internecine disputes that soured relations between families in Sicily, the American Mafia was also evolving mechanisms to resolve disputes and so maximize the money it was making-profit, as Flynn once pointedly observed, being ”all these people were concerned with.”

Nicola Gentile, with his ceaseless wanderings, makes a fine guide to the Mafia as it existed in the first decade of the century. His memoirs describe families in New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, in Pittsburgh and Chicago-where Anthony D'Andrea, a turn-of-the-century counterfeiter, had emerged much as Morello had, and was now the leader of the city's Mafia. (The D'Andrea whom Gentile described-”so savage and so fierce” and ”greatly feared in all the United States”-became an influential politician in Chicago's Italian wards and flourished until his murder there in 1921.) Kansas City and San Francisco were also mentioned; Boston, Baltimore, Detroit, and Wilkes-Barre were not, though there is independent evidence of Mafiosi operating in these districts from the first years of the century. In another decade families would be established in several other large cities-Cleveland, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Buffalo-and some of these groups probably had their roots in the prewar period as well.

There had been hints, dating to the last decade of the nineteenth century, that Mafiosi were in touch with one another across the continent, and that men of respect sometimes traveled from town to town on business. A Sicilian arrested in Philadelphia on a charge of sending Black Hand letters testified ”that he and his companions were members of the Mafia and that they were in communication with similar branches in New York, Baltimore and Pittsburg.” That was in the winter of 1903, and channels of communication apparently existed through the American interior by that date as well. Francesco Di Franchi, said by the police in California to be ”an agent of the murderous la Mafia society,” had been in New Orleans at the time of the Hennessy shooting, was thrown out of Denver a few years later, and was finally shot dead in San Francisco in December 1898. Di Franchi had appeared in the Bay Area only a few days before his death, having arrived there from New Orleans in pursuit of yet another Italian, whom he planned to kill. In Chicago, meanwhile, Carlo Battista-found standing over the body of a dead Sicilian on Grand Avenue in February 1901-had just come to the city from New York; stranger still, a police search of the dead man's pockets turned up evidence that the victim, in turn, had been a witness to a murder in Manhattan. And some years later, on the West Coast, a gunman by the name of Mike Marino (”who according to the police,” the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times reported, ”is one of the head gunmen for the Mafia in this country and abroad”) shot dead at least two more Sicilians with a rifle from a moving car. Marino, the police disclosed, was an experienced killer, already wanted for murder in New York, Chicago, San Diego, and Seattle. reported, ”is one of the head gunmen for the Mafia in this country and abroad”) shot dead at least two more Sicilians with a rifle from a moving car. Marino, the police disclosed, was an experienced killer, already wanted for murder in New York, Chicago, San Diego, and Seattle.

Morello, too, was an occasional traveler, one whose influence was clearly felt across large swaths of the United States. The earliest indications of the Clutch Hand's growing importance were discovered among the collection of five hundred letters seized from his Chrystie Street attic room at the time of th Barrel Murder. These communications, the Herald Herald reported after a briefing from Flynn, ”were received from Sicily and from nearly every city of importance in this country,” but the most revealing among them had been mailed from New Orleans-still home to the second-largest Italian community in America-and came from one Francesco Genova, whom the Secret Service believed to be the brother of Messina Genova, a member of the Barrel Murder gang. This letter discussed a young killer named Francesco Marchese, who had recently escaped from Sicily after receiving a thirty-year sentence for murder. Marchese had made his way to Louisiana and established contact with Genova, who was now recommending him to Morello, explaining that he was held in high regard in New Orleans and Palermo. Morello did find him a job; Genova's letter was apparently an example of a system, later described by Flynn, that enabled members of various Mafia families who were not personally known to one another to transfer from one city to another with the help of letters of recommendation from their bosses. reported after a briefing from Flynn, ”were received from Sicily and from nearly every city of importance in this country,” but the most revealing among them had been mailed from New Orleans-still home to the second-largest Italian community in America-and came from one Francesco Genova, whom the Secret Service believed to be the brother of Messina Genova, a member of the Barrel Murder gang. This letter discussed a young killer named Francesco Marchese, who had recently escaped from Sicily after receiving a thirty-year sentence for murder. Marchese had made his way to Louisiana and established contact with Genova, who was now recommending him to Morello, explaining that he was held in high regard in New Orleans and Palermo. Morello did find him a job; Genova's letter was apparently an example of a system, later described by Flynn, that enabled members of various Mafia families who were not personally known to one another to transfer from one city to another with the help of letters of recommendation from their bosses.

Morello's influence in New Orleans was not confined merely to matters of administration. A few years later, probably in 1908, several of Flynn's operatives tracked the boss on a visit to Louisiana, this time to deal with an Italian hotelier who had, the Secret Service heard, grown so angry at the Mafia's rapaciousness that he had threatened to reveal everything he knew to the police. Morello arrived in the city, held meetings with some Sicilians there, and after a stay of three or four days was observed by Flynn's men parading through the Italian quarter of the city, ”wearing on his head a red handkerchief knotted at the four corners.” It was a Mafia death sign, the Chief explained, and a visible display of the Clutch Hand's authority in New Orleans. That afternoon, Morello caught a train back to New York; that evening, the offending Italian was found dead in his [hotel] with a score of knife thrusts in his breast very like those received by the victim of the ”barrel murder.” The direct evidence was again lacking on which to convict the dreaded visitor. Yet the Italians of all the country took this stabbing as they had the ”barrel murder,” as a warning not to defy the authority of the big chief.

The New Orleans incident seems to have been unique. Ostentatious a.s.sertions of authority were not generally Morello's style, and though he very likely ordered other murders, for the most part the Clutch Hand advised and governed by letter or, more formally, through a central Mafia ”council” that was established some time before 1909. The creation of a ruling body of this sort-known among Mafiosi as ”the Commission” and said to meet every five years-is known from later testimony, dating to the 1930s and beyond, but its existence some two decades earlier suggests an organization of unexpected sophistication, given the difficulty and expense of travel at the time. Gentile and Morello both discussed the council, though, Gentile explaining that it consisted of no more than a handful of the most powerful bosses from around the country and was responsible for broad strategy. A much larger ”general a.s.sembly,” numbering as many as 150 delegates, also met and had a wider brief, electing capos in cases of dispute and giving its approval to proposals to silence troublesome or recalcitrant Mafiosi. According to another Morello letter seized by Flynn, the two a.s.semblies were separate, and members.h.i.+p in the council did not ent.i.tle even a powerful boss to speak at meetings in the a.s.sembly: ”He can come but only to hear and then has no right to the floor, neither right to an opinion or right to vote,” the Clutch Hand wrote.

Whether or not either the Mafia council or the general a.s.sembly had real influence is not known, but it seems doubtful. The council, as Gentile pointed out, often did little more than rubber-stamp decisions of the boss of bosses, who would settle matters in advance after consulting his advisers. Gentile was still more scornful of the general a.s.sembly, which was, he said, ”made up of men who were almost illiterate. Eloquence was the skill that most impressed the hall. The better someone knew how to talk, the more he was listened to, and the more he was able to drag that ma.s.s of yokels the way he wanted.” If anything, mention of councils, debates, and votes underlines the difficulty of persuading any group of criminals to agree on anything, not least when each boss and each family are engaged in a ceaseless quest to expand their influence, broaden their business, and improve their profits, often at the expense of their fellow Mafiosi. From this perspective, the a.s.semblies described by Gentile and Morello were safety valves as much as anything else-mechanisms for heading off disputes between rival gangs before they could turn into all-out wars. And there certainly was a need for inst.i.tutions of this sort. By the middle of the first decade of the century, the Mafia had begun to make serious money.

THE RAPIDITY WITH WHICH the Morello family grew in strength and in sophistication was startling. The Morellos substantially improved upon the crude methods of the Black Hand, preferring more enduring, far more profitable protection rackets, which meant that rather than extorting enormous one time payments from their victims, the Mafia levied weekly payments from a variety of businesses, from wealthy storekeepers down to the poorest peddlers. Individually, the sums involved were often small, scarcely worth bothering with, but they mounted up over time, and few in Little Italy escaped the gang's attentions. East Harlem was ”pretty rough in those days,” recalled Joe Valachi, the son of an impoverished vegetable seller from Naples who was born in the district in 1904. ”You could hardly walk around without catching a bullet. I remember my father had to pay a dollar a week for 'protection,' or else his pushcart would be wrecked.” the Morello family grew in strength and in sophistication was startling. The Morellos substantially improved upon the crude methods of the Black Hand, preferring more enduring, far more profitable protection rackets, which meant that rather than extorting enormous one time payments from their victims, the Mafia levied weekly payments from a variety of businesses, from wealthy storekeepers down to the poorest peddlers. Individually, the sums involved were often small, scarcely worth bothering with, but they mounted up over time, and few in Little Italy escaped the gang's attentions. East Harlem was ”pretty rough in those days,” recalled Joe Valachi, the son of an impoverished vegetable seller from Naples who was born in the district in 1904. ”You could hardly walk around without catching a bullet. I remember my father had to pay a dollar a week for 'protection,' or else his pushcart would be wrecked.”

”Protection” amounted, in effect, to a form of tax: pay it and be left alone, or refuse to pay and accept the consequences. ”Dipping the beak,” the Mafia called it, and it was already commonplace in Sicily; according to Mafia lore, the idea was introduced to the Italian quarter of New York by Vito Cascio Ferro when he arrived in the city in 1902. As Cascio Ferro explained the technique, it was a matter of expediency, mere common sense. ”You have to skim the cream off the milk without breaking the bottle,” Don Vito once said. ”Offer people your protection, help to make their businesses profitable, and not only will they be happy to pay, they'll kiss your hand in grat.i.tude.”

Whether Cascio Ferro was actually responsible for the idea-and it seems unlikely that no such scheme had existed before-protection did mean something when two or more rival gangs were competing for the same territory, and most Sicilians grudgingly accepted the necessity of paying it. ”With the Mafia ... at least they gave you somethin',” one shopkeeper observed. ”The other gangsters gave you nothin' each time you paid them somethin'.” But the idea that Mafiosi were somehow benefactors, even defenders of the poor, was laughable, though it was something that the gangsters themselves claimed and perhaps believed; so was the notion that their criminal activities, from murder to extortion, were the only way that immigrant Sicilians could secure justice and respect. The truth was that Morello and his henchmen were parasites who terrorized their fellow countrymen, exploited the weak, and dealt in fear. Before 1920, when Prohibition opened up opportunities that earlier generations of racketeers had scarcely dreamed of, Italian criminals preyed only on Italians. There was nothing remotely heroic about the things they did.

Morello himself certainly felt no compunction in extorting from other Sicilians. The Clutch Hand understood instinctively how to go about obtaining cash, masking the threat of violence behind a veneer of bonhomie and adding refinements of his own. William Flynn noted a telling vignette of the boss on his rounds, which, judging from the circ.u.mstances, must date to 1902: ”Good morning, Carlo Pelestrina,” Morello would say, entering a countryman's shop on the East Side. ”Your wife is well? And the children-ah the children-they are well? It gladdens me to behold you so happy, so prosperous, so successful. People fight to enter your excellent shop, Carlo Pelestrina.” ”Good morning, padrone padrone Morello,” would be the reply of the uncomfortable Carlo, for the sight of Morello in one's shop had the effect of denaturing any existing cheerfulness. ”Thank you, I am well, and my wife and children too. ... But is there anything I can do for the good Morello,” would be the reply of the uncomfortable Carlo, for the sight of Morello in one's shop had the effect of denaturing any existing cheerfulness. ”Thank you, I am well, and my wife and children too. ... But is there anything I can do for the good padrone?” padrone?” ”A mere trifle. I desire silver for this small bill.” And Giuseppe would lay down the worst imitation of a $2 or $5 bill poor Carlo ever beheld. Did Carlo protest? He did not. He produced the silver and expressed his vast gratification at being able to offer so insignificant a service to ”A mere trifle. I desire silver for this small bill.” And Giuseppe would lay down the worst imitation of a $2 or $5 bill poor Carlo ever beheld. Did Carlo protest? He did not. He produced the silver and expressed his vast gratification at being able to offer so insignificant a service to padrone padrone Morello. Morello.

Subtly varied techniques of extortion followed in due course. By 1903 the Clutch Hand was using bogus Black Hand letters to obtain expensive services for free, as a young Sicilian doctor named Salvatore Romano would testify. According to Romano, Morello's scheme was cunning in its simplicity. He began by mailing threatening letters to Romano's family, then offered his own services as an intermediary to deal with the ”Black Hand gang” responsible. Carefully retrieving the notes he had sent-supposedly in order to examine their handwriting, but in reality to dispose of any evidence-the boss reported a few days later that the ”threat” had been dealt with and that he had settled with the blackmailers by paying them one hundred dollars, a sum that he would easily recover when the Black Handers ”found out who he was.” Romano and his family were effusive in their thanks, as Morello had antic.i.p.ated-so much so that when the son qualified and opened his own practice in East Harlem, he gladly accepted the Clutch Hand as a patient free of charge.

Matters ran swiftly out of control, as many of those who encountered Morello discovered to their cost. ”He began to call on me,” Romano said.

And then the brothers-in-law, and then the cousin called. ... I treated all their relatives, and all free of charge. ... The whole number of relatives, babies and patients amounted to about sixty. They would call me; I would examine them, prescribe them, but I got no pay, on account of the obligations, also the familiarity. Right from the start I thought I was doing a wise thing not to ask money for my services.

Again, a few small sums soon multiplied. After a year, Dr. Romano was treating so many members of the Morello family that the remainder of his practice was suffering. Eventually he was forced to relocate to Rochester, 250 miles upstate, simply to make a living.

THE MANHATTAN IN WHICH Morello flourished after his discharge from prison late in June 1903 was growing faster than it had ever done before. The number of immigrants pouring through Ellis Island grew larger every year, reaching three thousand a day-more than a million a year-in the spring of 1906. One in five of this vast ma.s.s of naive, eager, sometimes friendless future citizens remained in the city and became New Yorkers, and there were months when very nearly half of that great total was Italian. Little Italy burst its bounds. East Harlem, too, grew rapidly, north and south, until New York threatened to overtake Naples as the largest Italian city on earth. And though most of these immigrants were poor and some were dest.i.tute, the Italian quarter as a whole grew rapidly in wealth. The number of Italian businesses more than doubled. Incomes increased sharply, too; remittances sent home to Italy rose by more than a third between 1900 and 1906. More disposable income meant more people with jobs, more people with savings, and more people worth terrorizing. For Morello and his criminal family, this was a happy time-years in which the Mafia's revenues increased rapidly in tandem with its influence. Morello flourished after his discharge from prison late in June 1903 was growing faster than it had ever done before. The number of immigrants pouring through Ellis Island grew larger every year, reaching three thousand a day-more than a million a year-in the spring of 1906. One in five of this vast ma.s.s of naive, eager, sometimes friendless future citizens remained in the city and became New Yorkers, and there were months when very nearly half of that great total was Italian. Little Italy burst its bounds. East Harlem, too, grew rapidly, north and south, until New York threatened to overtake Naples as the largest Italian city on earth. And though most of these immigrants were poor and some were dest.i.tute, the Italian quarter as a whole grew rapidly in wealth. The number of Italian businesses more than doubled. Incomes increased sharply, too; remittances sent home to Italy rose by more than a third between 1900 and 1906. More disposable income meant more people with jobs, more people with savings, and more people worth terrorizing. For Morello and his criminal family, this was a happy time-years in which the Mafia's revenues increased rapidly in tandem with its influence.

Opportunities to make money were to all intents and purposes limitless, which was just as well, since the gang had to make up for the loss of income from its counterfeiting business while also warding off potential rivals, and there seems to have been little that Morello would not sanction in his relentless drive for profit. The Clutch Hand's gang stole horses and wagons and resold them-an important criminal trade at a time when automobiles were rare and expensive, and one so common in New York that more animals were reported stolen in the city every year than in the largest western states. Experienced horse thieves could change an animal's appearance so completely it was rendered unrecognizable; manes were trimmed, hooves clipped, tails docked, and wagons repainted before the stolen rigs were resold through crooked livery stables. Kidnapping, too, enjoyed a vogue in the Italian quarter in the first decade of the century, and according to the NYPD the Morello gang was involved in a number of important cases. The Clutch Hand's police record notes that he was arrested in connection with several incidents, among them, almost certainly, the 1906 kidnapping of Antonio Bozzuffi. Bozzuffi was the fourteen-year-old son of one of the wealthiest private bankers in Little Italy, a man Morello certainly knew since he had helped to charter a front corporation for the Mafia a few years earlier. The boy was held captive for three days while a ransom said by the newspapers to amount to twenty thousand dollars was negotiated. After his release, young Antonio described being tied to a bed and tortured with stilettos by a group of masked Sicilians.

The Morellos operated many other rackets, too, and it appears that these subsidiary businesses were controlled by individual members of the family, who were given free rein to run them much as they wished so long as the appropriate t.i.thes were paid. A good deal was little more than petty crime-one junior member of the gang described the theft of fifteen watches as a good evening's work-but much was not. One favorite way of making money was to lodge fraudulent insurance claims. Members of the gang encouraged frightened shopkeepers to purchase expensive fire insurance policies; then, when the insurance was in place, Morello's men would set the property ablaze and collect a substantial portion of the settlement.

Insurance fraud was the province of Antonio Cecala, a relative of Lupo's, who came from Corleone and claimed to be a barber but in reality made his living as the head of a ”band of incendiaries” whose members specialized in burning down heavily insured properties. According to Cecala-a burly, balding, thuggish man in his mid-thirties-the business was actually one of the least lucrative that the Morellos were involved with (”I am poor because I did not soon enough learn the way to profit in the society,” he said), but it still required a fair degree of expertise and daring.

”How do you do that?” the incendiary was once asked by a novice member of the gang.

”For instance,” he replied, you own a store of some kind. You have insured it against fire. You have paid your insurance from time to time and do not wish to pay any more. Now to realize on the money paid you must burn. You do not wish to do it yourself as it is too risky. So you send for me. I in my own way will plan and start a fire that will never be questioned. When the insurance company pays you, you pay me a percentage.

Cecala claimed to be an expert in this line of work. ”I use glycerine,” he explained, ”mixed with other matters. It does not smell at all and leaves no traces of its own burning. It takes three or four men. I direct them and they bring the material. I pay them five dollars each a night for the time they work.” He was dismissive of the efforts of amateurs who had little understanding of how to set a fire without leaving telltale traces for an investigator to discover. Accused of starting a blaze in a dry goods store on Mulberry Street in which several innocent people had died, Cecala waxed indignant: That is not my line. I do not set fires to cover murders. That fire was started by a Neapolitan band that were in with the proprietor of the dry goods store. ... They made a mess of it because they did not start the fire right. They started it in the side of the store and afterwards put explosives on the stairs so that traces of how it started would be lost. After setting fire to it they ran away over the roofs. If I had had that job, it would have been different. All traces would have been lost from the store door and there would not have been so many accidents to the families above. They could have run out in the yard.

Crimes of such magnitude inevitably attracted the attentions of the police, but problems, the Sicilian added, could generally be smoothed over in the United States. A large part of the secret of the Clutch Hand's apparent invulnerability, so Cecala patiently explained, could be attributed to the Mafia's carefully maintained relations.h.i.+p with the local police precinct: Morello knows how much money he has given to detectives, when and where it was given, and the names of those who have taken it. He has always gotten out of everything in which he was implicated. Only recently in the ”barrel murder” he got out. They watch him all the time. Even now he is being watched. They do not like to because he knows he has paid them money. But they are ordered to and have to. When the order is given to the police to arrest Morello, policemen whom he has fed always will warn him and he will hide. When they go to his house to arrest him they can never find him. Simple, isn't it?

The notion that the police protected criminals was hardly news in turn-of-the-century New York, where endemic corruption was a fact of life. Several exhaustive judicial inquiries had shown that the police were tools of the city's ruling politicians, who kept firm control over all appointments to the NYPD. Novice patrolmen paid as much as three hundred dollars for a position on the force, a substantial sum that could be recovered only by their agreeing to help channel bribes paid by Manhattan's brothels and illegal gambling houses upward to the city's ruling cla.s.s. Vice was thus tolerated, licensed, and controlled, creating a hugely profitable, wholly illicit criminal economy that turned over an estimated $3 million a year by 1900. Revelation of the existence of ”the System” made the entire city cynical; in Cecala's opinion, laws prohibiting various crimes existed not to protect citizens, or even because the authorities were puritan, but to provide politicians with opportunities to make vast, almost entirely risk-free profits. ”In this country, money counts and nothing else,” the Sicilian explained. ”Sooner or later it all goes into the one pocket. Give money to the police and the detectives and they will leave you in peace. Kill someone and if you have money you will get out of it. The American newspapers prove that every day. But if you are poor and cannot buy your way out, they will kill you for it.”

The ease with which the police could be bribed and the political authorities corrupted made possible far larger and more profitable rackets than Cecala's insurance frauds. Prices in virtually all of New York's major industries were set artificially high as a result of gangsters extorting large sums in ”protection,” and the most profitable of these illicit businesses were those involving goods that all consumers simply had to buy. The coal racket, the ice racket, and the ”wet wash”-that is, laundry-racket all brought in substantial sums, and, most important of all, there were also numerous food rackets involving milk, fruit, vegetables, fish, and meat. Run efficiently, with all the major wholesalers fixing prices and paying a percentage to the racketeers, the latter could be astoundingly lucrative. The chicken racket in West Was.h.i.+ngton Market, which cost Barnet Baff his life, was estimated to be worth at least one hundred thousand dollars a year, and a few years later the artichoke racket-a major source of income for Italian gangs, since artichokes were an indispensable ingredient of minestrone-was estimated to be worth twice that, the Morellos levying a.s.sessments of up to fifty dollars per truck of vegetables entering the city. Enforcement was vicious and uncompromising, as Baff discovered to his cost. Anyone trying to evade the cartel that controlled the markets was liable to find his transport damaged or his stock adulterated, and as usual it was all but impossible for the police to trace such acts of terrorism to their source. In time, the Morello family and their rivals refined their operations further by moving into labor racketeering, infiltrating and increasingly controlling the powerful trade unions in the markets. With the workforce doing the gangsters' bidding, it was a relatively simple matter to inflict intense pressure on recalcitrant dealers by calling strikes or ordering persistent minor acts of sabotage.

The scale of all these operations was substantial. The Manhattan wet-wash racket was controlled by three large corporations, which agreed among themselves to charge no less than $1.50 a bundle for laundry. Investigation of the Baff murder revealed that the Was.h.i.+ngton Market ”poultry trust”-a cartel of more than twenty wholesalers-collected ten dollars from every dealer in the market for each railroad carload of birds to reach New York. The trust protected its position by doing business solely with unionized s.h.i.+ppers and butchers, and its enforcers meted out blackjackings and beatings to those who refused to cooperate. Dealers who resisted or complained were further punished by being made to pay a 6 percent surcharge on their purchases, and that for poultry of an inferior standard.

The importance of rackets to the Morellos increased considerably over time. The first family's earliest involvement in such schemes probably dated to about 1905, and for perhaps half a dozen years they made up only a part of the family's business, though an increasingly lucrative one. So important were the rackets to the Morellos that the Terranova brothers became increasingly involved. Vincenzo, the eldest of the three, became an iceman, with his own company, Morello & Barbero. In the years before the advent of refrigeration, ice was among the most vital of commodities and the only way of preserving both foodstuffs and medicines. Ciro, meanwhile, became gradually more powerful in the vegetable rackets while still supposedly employed by Bernardo Terranova's plastering business. Only Nick, the youngest brother but also the most natural leader among the three, played no recorded part in this side of the family's activities. He certainly was involved in the theft and resale of horses and wagons, but his real role in the Morello gang made him far more influential than that. Increasingly, as the years went by, the youngest Terranova began to oversee the whole of the family's businesses. While he did that, his stepbrother, Morello, was devoting more and more of his attention to the problem of how to handle all the cash his family was making.

HOW MUCH GIUSEPPE MORELLO earned over the years from extortion, counterfeiting, and his numerous rackets cannot be known with any certainty, but it was plainly a great deal of money. William Flynn, who knew more about the first family's businesses than most, believed that Lupo and Morello between them turned over somewhere in excess of two hundred thousand dollars ”in a few years,” a figure that apparently did not include the profits of several legitimate businesses acquired with funds generated by their criminal empire. Morello began making investments of this sort at an early date-by 1903, his a.s.sets already included the spaghetti restaurant on Prince Street where Madonia was murdered, a barbershop and a cobbler's on Tenth Avenue, and two houses that were leased to tenants-and this portfolio was regularly augmented. ”As fast as Morello got money,” Flynn explained, ”he would farm it out by acquiring a barber shop or set up a man in a shoe repairing shop,” and at much the same time, Lupo the Wolf was developing his grocery business into the envy of Little Italy. At a time when a family could live in New York on three hundred dollars a year, the Clutch Hand and his brother-in-law were wealthy. The truth, so far as anyone can gauge it, is that Morello was probably worth some thousands of dollars in 1903, some tens of thousands four years later. earned over the years from extortion, counterfeiting, and his numerous rackets cannot be known with any certainty, but it was plainly a great deal of money. William Flynn, who knew more about the first family's businesses than most, believed that Lupo and Morello between them turned over somewhere in excess of two hundred thousand dollars ”in a few years,” a figure that apparently did not include the profits of several legitimate businesses acquired with funds generated by their criminal empire. Morello began making investments of this sort at an early date-by 1903, his a.s.sets already included the spaghetti restaurant on Prince Street where Madonia was murdered, a barbershop and a cobbler's on Tenth Avenue, and two houses that were leased to tenants-and this portfolio was regularly augmented. ”As fast as Morello got money,” Flynn explained, ”he would farm it out by acquiring a barber shop or set up a man in a shoe repairing shop,” and at much the same time, Lupo the Wolf was developing his grocery business into the envy of Little Italy. At a time when a family could live in New York on three hundred dollars a year, the Clutch Hand and his brother-in-law were wealthy. The truth, so far as anyone can gauge it, is that Morello was probably worth some thousands of dollars in 1903, some tens of thousands four years later.

It was Lupo, so Flynn explained, who came up with the idea of capitalizing on the booming construction market in a city struggling to accommodate a million new immigrants each year. A six-story tenement block, the most common and most profitable variety of housing in New York, could be put up for about $25,000 and when completed contained twenty-four small apartments, each of which could be rented at a rate of about $130 a year. Developers could thus recover their investment over an eight-year period, while retaining a highly salable a.s.set in the tenement itself.

Since not even the Morello family's illegal enterprises generated the sort of funds required to pay for the construction of entire tenement blocks, Lupo arranged to sell shares in a newly incorporated construction company and then obtain mortgages on suitable lots. The upshot was the formation of the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative a.s.sociation Among Corleonesi, a company chartered on December 31, 1902, and named in honor of the most prominent Sicilian businessman of the day. The real Ignatz Florio, a s.h.i.+pping magnate from Palermo, was one of the wealthiest patricians in Italy and came from a family known for doing business with the Mafia. In all likelihood, however, Florio remained entirely ignorant of the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative and never discovered that the Morellos were trading on his good name on the far side of the Atlantic.