Part 7 (2/2)

The plan worked precisely as the Chief hoped. Agents from the New York bureau stationed themselves inside the post office closest to Boscarini's home and identified the Sicilian when he came to collect his mail. Now armed with a detailed description of their suspect, Flynn's men followed him home and then kept watch on the premises until their target emerged the next morning and headed back to the post office. There Boscarini purchased a special delivery envelope, scribbled down Locino's details, added a false return address, and stamped the letter with two one-cent stamps placed upside down. Armed with that precise description, Flynn had no trouble intercepting the package at the Pittston post office the next day. It proved to contain two sample Morello notes: a two and a five. Now the Chief had the evidence he needed to arrest and convict Boscarini.

The investigation had reached a critical point, Flynn told his superiors in Was.h.i.+ngton. To swoop down on Boscarini would expose Locino to the vengeance of the Mafia, and that was something that the Chief was not prepared to do; aside from betraying a man he had promised to protect, the arrest would achieve little but drive the leaders of the gang into hiding. Flynn had a better idea, anyway. Instead of detailing men to pick up Boscarini, he gave Locino thirty-five dollars and sent his informant to Manhattan, an apparently satisfied customer eager to purchase a hundred dollars' worth of counterfeits. Locino located his supplier on a street corner in Little Italy and made the necessary arrangements, handing Boscarini the Secret Service money in exchange for a fresh batch of counterfeits. The exchange pa.s.sed off without a hitch. Neither Sicilian was aware that Flynn had subtly marked each of the genuine bills, placing an extra dot of ink among Abraham Lincoln's s.h.i.+rt studs. By the time Locino had repeated the same procedure weekly for the better part of a month, it was September and the counterfeiters were holding well over one hundred dollars of the Chief's marked bills.

Flynn still needed to establish a connection between Boscarini and his superiors, the real leaders of the counterfeiting gang. It was not an easy one to make; the Corleone man was careful, and days of discreet surveillance produced no useful leads. Still, Boscarini could not run his business indefinitely without obtaining fresh supplies of counterfeits, and one afternoon in the early autumn the Secret Service operative a.s.signed to tail him found himself taking a train up to Harlem, where the suspect hurried down a busy street and ducked into a doorway. The agent noted the address: 233 East 97th Street. It was a spot that Flynn knew well. Boscarini had disappeared into Lupo's old wholesale grocery store-a place now owned and operated by Morello.

The Chief felt certain that this was the spot where the counterfeiters gathered, but putting the store under observation was by no means a simple matter. Morello was certain to be wary, and East Harlem, in 1909, was more exclusively Italian than Little Italy had been six years earlier. Flynn's English-speaking agents could not hope to loiter on the street outside for weeks without being spotted, and arousing the least suspicion would likely ruin the entire operation. The solution was to use their Italian-speaking operative, Peter Rubano, who rented a vacant room across the street. The Secret Service's new base was sufficiently discreet to allow a succession of agents to maintain the watch; comfortably equipped, to enable them to do so constantly; and far enough above street level to s.h.i.+eld the operatives from pa.s.sersby It also offered a first-rate view across the road into the windows of Morello's store.

The ruse worked well, and for several weeks agents noted all the comings and goings at the place. Flynn's men spotted Boscarini several times, then Antonio Cecala, and on one occasion even Lupo-who had not been seen in New York for nearly a year, not since the day he had fled his creditors. Better yet, the Clutch Hand himself paid several visits, and various other members of the Morello family flitted in and out. All this, of course, was merely circ.u.mstantial; there was no clear proof that any of these men were engaged in a conspiracy. The agents' logbooks, though, were certainly instructive. Boscarini and Cecala habitually entered the building separately, the operatives observed. But they were often on the premises together, and, when they were, they met in a third-floor room s.h.i.+elded behind ”great boxes of macaroni and other Italian groceries piled high in the windows.” These meetings were brisk and businesslike-none lasted longer than fifteen minutes. And afterward Boscarini always had fresh supplies of counterfeits.

The discovery that Antonio Cecala was implicated in the counterfeiting scheme was the biggest breakthrough yet in Flynn's expanding investigation. Another team of Secret Service men was drafted in to track the stocky arsonist, and, as their reports came in, the whole thrust of the inquiry changed. It was Cecala, the Chief realized, who was managing the distribution of the forged bills, and Cecala who could lead him to the shadowy Sicilians wholesaling notes from Chicago south to New Orleans. As more and more operatives were pulled from their duties across the country to a.s.sist with the surveillance, Flynn gradually uncovered the most ambitious counterfeiting scheme the Secret Service had encountered in its fifty-year history.

The network so painstakingly unraveled was a pyramidal distribution operation. Cecala, Flynn calculated, ”made frequent trips to various cities, establis.h.i.+ng agencies for the circulation of the bills,” and there were six of these in all, each headed by a man who came from Corleone and was unswervingly loyal to the Morello family. These deputies in turn recruited half a dozen a.s.sistants to distribute forged currency in the various districts of their towns. Here, too, reliability was paramount. ”It was,” Flynn found, ”necessary for these deputies to vouch for any person before Cecala would allow them to have any of the bogus money. ... Thus the notes pa.s.sed through at least three hands before they reached the purchaser, and sometimes the transaction was even more complicated.”

The great virtue of this carefully designed system, from Morello's point of view at least, was that it insulated the Mafia leaders in New York from the distribution of the currency. It was Cecala's a.s.sociates and their deputies who ran the greatest chance of discovery and the risk of arrest, but to arrest them would in no way help to secure Lupo or Morello. Cecala had issued each of his men dire threats regarding the violent consequences they and their families would face if anybody dared to talk, and ”the prisoner, even if he had desired to testify against the counterfeiters, would not know who the leaders were.”

It was all highly frustrating. ”Like malignant spirits,” Chief Flynn mused, Lupo and Morello lurked in the dark and directed the movements of the p.a.w.ns under them in the great counterfeiting scheme that was to make them wealthy and get them out of the difficulties into which the Ignatz Florio a.s.sociation had plunged them. They took no chances-at least they thought they took none-and certainly they were not in the danger to which they exposed their aides.It was they who pulled the strings, and their puppets responded. ... Their system was mysterious, baffling, and almost perfect. But there were flaws in it, and the Secret Service found those flaws.

IT WAS LUPO WHO unwittingly supplied the final piece of evidence that Flynn required to bring his case to a conclusion. unwittingly supplied the final piece of evidence that Flynn required to bring his case to a conclusion.

The Secret Service never fully understood what prompted the Wolf to return to New York that autumn of 1909, with the creditors of his failed grocery business still not satisfied. Lupo told the few who dared to ask that his mind had been disturbed, that he had been working for his brother, a grocer, in Hoboken, and that he had been unable to discharge his debts only because he himself had been a victim of extortion-forced to hand over ten thousand dollars to a Black Hand group that had been threatening his chain of stores. Flynn believed that the more likely explanation was that Lupo had simply grown bored of hiding in the wilds of the surrounding countryside. Whatever the reason, the Wolf was soon a common sight in Little Italy again. He hired lawyers to fight his creditors on his behalf and took up many of his old activities, exuding much of his old self-confidence. Luckily for Flynn and his investigation, he also continued to make trips to Highland to inspect the latest batches of counterfeits.

The Secret Service operatives detailed to follow Lupo had strict orders not to risk discovery, and the first time they trailed the Wolf to Grand Central Terminal they found that he was taking extensive precautions against being spotted. First Lupo purchased a cigar and went into a smoking room, where he sat for some time watching the activity around him. Next he had his shoes polished, while he sat perched in a chair high on the bootblack's stand from which he carefully surveyed the crowd. From there he left the station altogether, walking along West 44th Street until he reached a second entrance to the terminal. At that point he ducked back inside the station and hastened to the ticket office.

Flynn's men had dropped well back in order to avoid detection, and by the time they reached the ticket line Lupo was completing his purchase. The closest agent was too far away to hear the destination, but, as he watched, the Wolf proffered a two-dollar bill and received fifty cents in change. Wherever Lupo was headed, at that fare it had to be a spot no more than sixty miles outside New York.

Later that day, back in his office, Flynn ran through all the possibilities. ”At first I thought it was Poughkeepsie,” the Chief recalled. ”Then I began to put two and two together, and, remembering that Lupo when he fled from New York went to Ardonia, a little town back of Highland, N.Y., I became convinced that the counterfeiting plant must be somewhere along the west bank of the Hudson River, not far from Highland. The country back of the hills that line the river is very wild and very lonesome, an ideal place for the plant of counterfeiters.”

The more the Chief thought about it, the more certain he became that he was right, and by the end of September a team of Secret Service agents had arrived in Highland and begun to question the locals. Flynn's men soon discovered that Cecala owned a large farm outside the village-the local postmaster recalled receiving packages for him-and that he was often accompanied by Cina. Cina's close relations.h.i.+p with his brother-in-law and neighbor, Vincenzo Giglio, gave the agents another useful clue.

The old stone house in the woods evaded the operatives for a little longer, but in the end they found the Highland farmer who had leased it to Cecala.

The Chief was satisfied he had enough. It was time to move in on the Mafia.

FLYNN HAD ONE REMAINING concern: The size of the counterfeiting operation that was being uncovered was such that it would be difficult to arrest the whole group simultaneously, which meant there was a real risk that some of the gang would realize what was happening and get away. Aside from Morello and Lupo, Cecala and Cina, Boscarini and Nick Terranova, Flynn's list included several other influential Corleonesi: Domenico Milone, a director of the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative a.s.sociation and now nominally the owner of the grocery store on 87th Street; Stefano LaSala, a power in the city's gambling underworld who had risen to become one of Morello's chief lieutenants; and two recent additions to the ranks of the first family, the Vasi brothers, Pasquale and Leoluca. Among them these men occupied twelve different addresses in New York, from Italian Harlem to Long Island City, Queens, and at least three more in Highland. Failure to secure the counterfeiters together was likely to have serious consequences, since any who received sufficient warning would certainly try to get away. concern: The size of the counterfeiting operation that was being uncovered was such that it would be difficult to arrest the whole group simultaneously, which meant there was a real risk that some of the gang would realize what was happening and get away. Aside from Morello and Lupo, Cecala and Cina, Boscarini and Nick Terranova, Flynn's list included several other influential Corleonesi: Domenico Milone, a director of the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative a.s.sociation and now nominally the owner of the grocery store on 87th Street; Stefano LaSala, a power in the city's gambling underworld who had risen to become one of Morello's chief lieutenants; and two recent additions to the ranks of the first family, the Vasi brothers, Pasquale and Leoluca. Among them these men occupied twelve different addresses in New York, from Italian Harlem to Long Island City, Queens, and at least three more in Highland. Failure to secure the counterfeiters together was likely to have serious consequences, since any who received sufficient warning would certainly try to get away.

Flynn's great concern was that Morello himself would manage to escape. The Clutch Hand had always been a dangerously elusive man; weeks of careful surveillance in the Italian quarter had demonstrated that his movements were worryingly unpredictable, and to make matters worse there were a number of ways in and out of the tenement he occupied at 207 East 107th Street, and he appeared to use them all. The whole building, consisting of sixteen apartments, was occupied by members of Morello's family or their tenants, and Flynn could not even be certain which apartment the boss would be in on the day the raid was planned. The only way to be certain of locating Morello and covering every possible exit was to obtain exact, timely intelligence of the internal layout of the tenement. And that meant sending an agent into the building to investigate, with all the risk that that entailed.

Flynn decided to a.s.sign the task to the youngest and most anonymous of the Secret Service team: Thomas Callaghan, a seventeen-year-old so youthful-looking that he had been posing as a shoes.h.i.+ne boy along the street. It was a daunting a.s.signment for an inexperienced agent, more so because the Chief wanted the job done late at night, when the Clutch Hand came home for the evening. Decades later, when he was the storied leader of the agency's Chicago bureau, Callaghan still recalled it as the most terrifying a.s.signment he had ever undertaken.

”It was,” the teenage operative said, a dangerous rookery in which to be trailing a killer. It was a four-story building with long hallways, closed stairways, and bare walls. When I finally saw Morello coming down the street around midnight, I noticed that he had his two brothers, Vincenzo and Ciro, and another man with him. I ducked into the house and sneaked up to the second floor. It was pitch dark because the janitor had turned out all the lights at ten o'clock.I knew Morello and his companions had entered the tenement, so when I heard them coming up the stairs, I tiptoed to the fourth floor. And then I thought, What'll I do if they keep going to the top?Sure enough, they didn't stop at the third, but kept coming up. They were going to find me skulking there with no reason to be hanging around their place. I figured I was a squashed bug no matter what I did. Then suddenly-I don't know why-I decided to walk nonchalantly down the stairs.I met them between the third and fourth floors, my heart thumping like a pile driver. When they heard me and when we came face to face, what do you suppose Morello said? ”Scusa, please.” I stepped aside and they kept going. I'll never know how I got down.

Gasping like a landed fish, Callaghan stumbled back out onto East 107th Street and glanced around. He had not been followed, and he had the information that Flynn needed: the building's layout and its exits, and above all the intelligence that Morello was spending the evening where the Secret Service wanted him, in an apartment on the highest floor.

It was a long night, the agents staking out the building would always recall-long because it was the middle of November, long because they were all so nervous, and long because Morello worked on until dawn. They waited and waited for the lights on the fourth floor to dim and for their man to fall asleep. It was not until nearly eleven the next morning, when Flynn calculated that he had to be in bed at last, that half a dozen agents and several detectives from the Italian Squad crept back into the tenement and up the creaking wooden stairs. The date was November 15, 1909.

Flynn had a key to the Clutch Hand's flat, either a copy requisitioned from the building's janitor or a skeleton key capable of opening a variety of doors. He turned it in the lock so gently that there was no click. The door swung open and the Secret Service men moved softly into the slumbering apartment. The detectives had their weapons drawn, but there was n.o.body about.

The second room that they tried was a bedroom. Morello lay sprawled out on his mattress, deep asleep. His half brother Nick Terranova dozed on a second bed alongside him. ”We had virtually no desire to waken them,” the Chief remarked, ”until we were sitting on them.”

A silent gesture, a flurry of movement, and the two Sicilians were roughly pinioned before they were properly awake. Flynn's caution was justified the moment that his men began to search the room. ”Under Morello's pillow,” he reported, we found four fully loaded revolvers; beneath Terranova's, five. That's bound to impress you. And two of Morello's guns were loaded with cartridges containing buckshot-three or four pellets in each cartridge. One might compare Giuseppe to a one-man war, and I frequently wondered whether he didn't fear himself at times.

The silence of the slumbering apartment had been well and truly shattered by this time, and the m.u.f.fled sounds of the brief struggle roused the remainder of the household. Three or four half-dressed Sicilians emerged, all furious, all disputing the arrests; an Italian-speaking policeman supplied Flynn with a translation. Then Lina Morello herself appeared, an infant daughter in one arm and fury blazing white-hot on her face.

”The furore was spectacular,” said Flynn.

Morello's wife made herself extremely unpopular with us by drawing a wicked knife. It took two of us to get it away from her. Bereft of the knife she subsided into tears. She was to be murdered by the police. Her great, good husband was to be slain. And what was to become of these magnificent children of hers?Fatherless! Motherless! Ah, yes, she knew. They would be thrown into the river at night, like swine. Ah, but there was wickedness in the world when the police should break up this happy Christian home. The dogs of police. She would spit upon them.

The confusion in the packed apartment was indescribable. Morello and Terranova sat together on their beds, each clad only in his underclothes. The other members of the family milled around, shouting and arguing, creating the greatest possible confusion while another of their number took hurried advantage to conceal several pieces of incriminating evidence. A pack of half a dozen letters was thrust into a pocket in Lina's ap.r.o.n, which lay on the table. Lina herself scooped up her daughter Mary, who was only eight months old, ”and it was more or less noticeable,” said Flynn, ”that she was stuffing something in to the child's clothes.” Grasping her infant in one arm, Mrs. Morello made to leave the room, giving vent to another angry volley of Sicilian as she did so. The burden of this outburst, Flynn's detective friend explained, was that ”she would go into the next room and put her beautiful children to sleep and then she would go to the prison and be mutilated by the dogs of police.”

It took two large Secret Service men to part Lina from her daughter, and she resisted them with such determination that the agents ”sustained 40 or 50 minor bruises” in the struggle. Then Operative Thomas Gallagher suggested to Mrs. Morello that there might be something of interest to the government wrapped in the cloth that protected the little Morello, and instantly the mother became very emphatic in her native manner of making us understand that she ”no understand.”Gallagher is a man of Irish extraction from the environs of Boston. In other words, he has a humorous instinct. So he suggested that maybe the poor baby needed a fresh diaper. There was a flash of volcanic fire in the mother's eyes and two strong arms held her secure while Gallagher removed the cloth from the infant's limbs.

Three notes, written by Morello to the heads of Mafia families elsewhere in the country, were found inside the infant's diaper. Lina's ap.r.o.n pocket contained several lurid Black Hand letters. All in all it was, Flynn thought, a first-rate morning's work.

Morello was allowed to dress and was led away. His half brother Terranova attempted to escape arrest by posing as ”a crazy man ... he just rolled his eyes, stuck out his tongue, and babbled incoherently,” as the Chief recalled. ”Still, he was brought in, and though he quit the crazy routine, he proved to be about as garrulous as a clam.” And, up and down the city at much the same time, other operatives were raiding other addresses. Fourteen Sicilians were detained in all, and careful searches of their homes produced some incriminating finds. A bag containing $3,600 in counterfeit two-dollar bills was found under a bed in the Vasi brothers' flat, and the news from Antonio Cecala's home on East 4th Street was even more rewarding. Agents Burke and Henry seized $221 in genuine currency from the counterfeiter's wallet, and this, when carefully inspected, proved to include two of the subtly marked notes that Flynn had pa.s.sed to Sam Locino. Another link between the counterfeits and their suppliers had been made.

The only member of the Morello gang to elude arrest was Lupo, who was then living incognito in Brooklyn. To Flynn's irritation, his men had lost track of the Wolf some days before, and he continued to evade pursuit for almost two months, only to be trapped when a characteristic piece of opportunism went badly wrong. Detectives from Hoboken had been investigating the theft of an upright piano and succeeded in tracing their suspect to a rented house in fas.h.i.+onable Bath Beach. The man they were after turned out to be Lupo. When the detectives recognized their quarry, they called the Secret Service bureau and invited Flynn to send an agent to a.s.sist in their planned raid. Flynn sent Peter Rubano, and Lupo was picked up without incident on the morning of January 8 as he strolled along the street outside his home. The Wolf was unarmed, and his pockets proved to contain nothing but a nail file and seven dollars in cash.

Lupo joined nine other prominent members of the Morello family in jail. Bail had been set at unheard-of levels: $10,000 for Morello, $7,500 for Cecala and Boscarini, and $5,000 apiece for the other members of the gang. None of the Mafiosi could raise such sums, so Morello and his men stayed in the cells while Flynn began preparing for his day in court.

THERE WAS STILL ONE yawning gap in the Secret Service case: the lack of a confession from a member of the Morello family. Flynn was not optimistic of obtaining it, nor was it strictly necessary; the Secret Service had obtained plenty of convictions in the past without the a.s.sistance of admissions from any of the defendants. A confession, though, would make it vastly easier to guarantee a guilty verdict, and though the Chief was certain none of Morello's men would talk, there was one member of the counterfeiting gang who might. yawning gap in the Secret Service case: the lack of a confession from a member of the Morello family. Flynn was not optimistic of obtaining it, nor was it strictly necessary; the Secret Service had obtained plenty of convictions in the past without the a.s.sistance of admissions from any of the defendants. A confession, though, would make it vastly easier to guarantee a guilty verdict, and though the Chief was certain none of Morello's men would talk, there was one member of the counterfeiting gang who might.

It's not certain when Flynn first heard Comito's name. He had not realized that the printer so much as existed when he raided the Morellos' tenement in mid-November. By the middle of December 1909, Flynn had discovered that two men working together had produced the Clutch Hand's counterfeits, and by Christmas, thanks to an informant, he knew about Calicchio. But as late as the first days of January, as his reports to Was.h.i.+ngton attest, the Chief was still referring to the second of Morello's printers as a mysterious ”Calabrian,” and he had no idea who he was or where he lived.

It was luck, pure chance, that led the Secret Service to Comito only a week or two before the gang was due in court. Charles Mazzei, one of the Italian informants so carefully cultivated by Flynn, knew Calicchio, and it was Mazzei who pa.s.sed Flynn word that the master printer had been working for Morello. Through Calicchio, Mazzei then heard that there had been a second man printing notes at Highland. But though Flynn hung back in the hope of learning more, his new lead yielded little more than that until, one day early in January, Calicchio unexpectedly saw Comito scuttling toward him down a Brooklyn street. The two men exchanged wary greetings; they had not seen each other for six months. When Calicchio spoke critically of Cecala and Cina, though, Comito, suddenly emboldened, supplied his colleague with his new address. That crucial sc.r.a.p of information, pa.s.sed by Calicchio to Mazzei and by Mazzei to Flynn, led almost immediately to a raid.

The Chief, by his own admission, had no inkling that Comito was an unwilling accomplice, and he expected to discover evidence that his new suspect was heavily caught up in the counterfeiting scheme: ”bundles of [forged notes] in his rooms,” perhaps, ”together with letters and other evidence connecting him with Lupo, Morello and the others.” Certainly Flynn antic.i.p.ated trouble; he sent nine men to make the arrest. It was a surprise when they found nothing. A careful search of the Calabrian's apartment revealed ”not a single bogus note, nor any blackmail letters,” and Flynn began to change his mind.

Comito, Mazzei had already told him, was an even-tempered little man derisively known to the Morellos as ”the Sheep.” That name, the Chief decided, appeared well deserved; his prisoner was simply too timorous to be a full-fledged member of the Mafia. Comito, he admitted, ”had [not] profited at all by the counterfeiting scheme” and ”was not at heart a criminal.” This discovery was a surprise but also an opportunity. If the Sheep had been coerced into working for Morello, there was a chance that he might talk.

Flynn, who had conducted hundreds of interrogations, realized instinctively that his prisoner would not respond to bullying or threats.

Instead of placing him under arrest I sat down and had a long talk with him. ... I soon learned that if I could get him to talk I would have a witness who could fasten guilt upon almost every man of the band.This strange character was influenced to a remarkable extent by kindness. There were tears in his eyes when I told him that neither he nor Katrina would be arrested. ... The girl was spirited away and put under the protection of the government and Comito himself was under my own supervision. For days he was in the Custom House in New York, never leaving the building except disguised and with me.For days I worked over him, always treating him with the greatest kindness and striving to overcome the fear which at times got the better of him. ... Each night I went with Comito to some Italian restaurant and dined on spaghetti with tomato sauce and onion soup, until I felt inside like a Sicilian and added inches to my girth. At first, Comito glanced fearfully about him and only played with his food. He knew the men with whom he had to deal, and he knew their methods, but gradually he came to look on me as [someone who] would protect him even against the secret vengeance of the men from Corleone.

Bolstered by Flynn's repeated rea.s.surances, Comito's weak resistance crumbled. His apartment had been raided on the fourth of January. Within a week he had reached an agreement with his captors: testimony against the Morello family and, in return, protection, immunity from prosecution, and the money to make a fresh start somewhere other than New York.

With that the whole story came pouring out. Comito, Flynn discovered, had vivid, almost perfect recall. He remembered absolutely everything, it seemed: his visits to the Sons of Italy, the introduction to Cecala, the offer of a job in Philadelphia, the river voyage to Highland, and the remote house in the distant woods. More than that, Comito unpicked the mechanics of the counterfeiting operation, providing information sufficient to incriminate nearly a dozen members of the gang, and offered evidence against the gang's princ.i.p.als, Lupo and Morello, who would normally have been almost impossible to convict. He described the Wolf's visits to Highland, toting guns and giving frowning approval to a succession of proofs, and his fateful encounter with Morello, clearly the leader of the gang, a man who behaved as though the enormous deference that the others showed him were simply his due.

Taken down in shorthand and typed up, Comito's testimony ran for well over a hundred pages, or nearly fifty thousand words. It was the most complete and most incriminating body of testimony that the service had obtained for years, and Flynn thought that it would be sufficient to convict every member of Morello's family. For the time being, though, it was plainly best to keep that knowledge to himself. The less that the Clutch Hand knew about Comito and his evidence, the better.

LUPO AND MORELLO, meanwhile, were not idle. There were the usual stiff compulsory levies among Italian businessmen in Little Italy, to pay the costs of a defense led by Mirabeau Towns, one of New York's best-known but most expensive trial lawyers. Orders went out for the destruction of the Highland printing press, and the remaining stock of counterfeits was burned or buried. There were also attempts to construct alibis for the prisoners; Cecala, for example, made arrangements for two witnesses to claim that he had been ill in bed with pneumonia on several crucial dates.

To n.o.body's surprise, the most elaborate of these efforts were made on Morello's behalf. Marshaled by Nick Terranova, who had been reluctantly released by Flynn when no firm evidence could be found to prove his involvement in counterfeiting, the members of the Clutch Hand's family designed an elaborate alibi. Morello, they decided, should claim to have been ill for the preceding year. Unlike Cecala, though, whose witnesses were a daughter and a friend, the boss would call on solid, independent testimony to sh.o.r.e up his alibi: A pair of doctors, Salvatore Romano and Salvatore Brancatto, would swear on oath that he had been incapacitated.

Romano, of course, had helped the Morellos before. In January 1910 he was still practicing in Rochester, the town to which he had been obliged to flee in order to avoid the attentions of the Clutch Hand's family, and he knew nothing of Flynn's arrests until early in January 1910, when he unexpectedly received a letter from his mother in New York.

<script>