Part 8 (1/2)

”This is the way it was done,” he recalled a few months later.

Mrs. Morello and the mother of Morello and the brothers of Morello went to my mother and began to talk to her. They [said] that he had got into very serious trouble. They also said that the only way that he could possibly be saved would be to produce an alibi. I was to say that he was not out at any time he was accused of being out. ... I could then testify that I was treating Morello at the time and he was unable to get out when the charges alleged.

The boss, his relatives decided, would say he had been confined to bed with rheumatism throughout late 1908 and most of 1909. It was by no means an implausible claim; Morello, Romano said, was a hypochondriac, ”always complaining,” and though he was not genuinely ill, he apparently believed that he did suffer from the condition. To convince a jury that the boss could have taken no part in the counterfeiting scheme, however, Romano and Brancatto would have to testify that they had visited their patient regularly at home and had found him entirely immobile. That meant committing perjury in a federal court-something that Romano, for one, felt deeply apprehensive about.

Reluctant though he was to tangle with the Morellos again, the doctor knew he had no choice.

My mother asked them not to call me, that it would be putting me into trouble, and that I would have to abandon the business I started. They told her that it was an absolute necessity that I come down from Rochester to testify. If I did not come, they said, Morello would be sentenced surely. ... So my mother wrote to me. ”This is the last proposition that they are going to give you,” she said. ”I think you cannot avoid coming down.”

Romano agreed immediately. ”I knew the character of the men I had to deal with,” he said. ”I knew that if I refused and Morello got a big sentence they would put the whole thing up to me. I thought of my mother down here [in Italian Harlem] going in and out at night, and I had something to fear.”

Nothing happened for several weeks. Then, sometime in the middle of January, the doctor received an urgent telegram from Manhattan. Nick Terranova had sent it. ”Be in New York tomorrow,” the message said, and Romano obeyed.

”I am very sorry to trouble you,” Terranova said when the two met.

”I know what you are losing. I know that you are doing this for us, but it is absolutely necessary. You are in no danger at all.”He said, ”How many times a week do you want to say that you saw him?” I answered once a week. ”I want to make my testimony as light as possible,” I told him, ”so as not to get into trouble with the Court.” He said that once a week was probably too little; ”Make it twice a week,” he said.

Reluctantly, Romano agreed; in court, later, he would actually go further, testifying that he had called on his patient ”two to three times a week” and diagnosed ”articular rheumatism ... which gave him severe pain and fever” in his legs. To make sure that all the stories were kept straight, Terranova took Romano to the holding cells to reacquaint him with Morello. ”Don't worry,” the Clutch Hand a.s.sured him. ”There is no danger at all. n.o.body saw me out of the house, and I was as pale as a ghost at the time.”

Joe Petrosino had met his death eight months earlier by severely underestimating the power of the Mafia. Now Morello was making an equally serious mistake: By placing his faith in Dr. Romano, he was badly underestimating Flynn. The Clutch Hand plainly had no real idea how strong the government's case was, nor did he realize that Flynn had penetrated most of the protective layers in which he had coc.o.o.ned himself. At trial the Secret Service would be able to call on statements from no fewer than eight operatives to prove that Morello had been out and about in the Italian quarter when he was supposed to be confined to bed. Flynn also had Comito's testimony. Against that weight of evidence, the word of two Sicilian doctors would prove to be of little consequence.

MORELLO'S TRIAL GOT UNDER way on January 26, 1910. It was held in New York, in the federal courthouse on Houston Street, a utilitarian building on a noisy thoroughfare ruled over by Judge George Ray. There were nine defendants. Aside from Lupo and Morello, Cecala and Cina were also standing trial, and Calicchio, the aging printer, too. Fourteen minor members of the gang had been convicted on charges of pus.h.i.+ng counterfeits a few weeks earlier; a dozen others, including Giuseppe Boscarini, were to be prosecuted separately in the spring. way on January 26, 1910. It was held in New York, in the federal courthouse on Houston Street, a utilitarian building on a noisy thoroughfare ruled over by Judge George Ray. There were nine defendants. Aside from Lupo and Morello, Cecala and Cina were also standing trial, and Calicchio, the aging printer, too. Fourteen minor members of the gang had been convicted on charges of pus.h.i.+ng counterfeits a few weeks earlier; a dozen others, including Giuseppe Boscarini, were to be prosecuted separately in the spring.

The members of Morello's family put on a show of strength on the first day. By order of the Terranova brothers, Ray's courtroom was ”thronged with a rabble of Italians,” and a large crowd of Sicilians who had arrived too late to find s.p.a.ce on the public benches milled about in the corridors outside. Some of the latter broke into the empty U.S. marshal's office, where a razor-sharp stiletto was later found embedded to a depth of several inches in the wall. Further crude attempts at intimidation followed. A second knife turned up the next day on the jury benches as proceedings opened for the morning. It was removed before the jurors saw it, but word of the discovery got out, and the knife and its meaning was one of the chief topics of conversation in the courthouse that day. Efforts were made to silence witnesses as they took the stand as well; according to The New York Times The New York Times, at least one Sicilian spectator made lurid ”death signs” during the first week, ”hissing and sweeping nails across his throat.” Judge Ray, a pinched, humorless man of below-average height who had heard more counterfeiting cases than any other man on the East Coast, would stand for none of this. He had the hissing Sicilian ejected from the building and stationed extra ushers in his court, and there was no more trouble after that.

The trial itself had been scheduled to last a month. Morello and his codefendants faced a huge number of charges-an unheard-of 548 in total, all felonies and all carrying considerable sentences, but the real reason why so much time had been allotted to what appeared a relatively simple case was not made clear until the first full day in court. It was then, with a rustling along corridors and consternation rippling through the defense, that Antonio Comito took the stand and began to tell the jury of his experiences in Highland.

Morello had expected an acquittal until then. There was plenty of evidence, he knew, against his chief lieutenants: Cecala had been caught with Flynn's marked bills, and the Vasi brothers with a large quant.i.ty of counterfeits. But these men were expendable, and there was nothing, or at least so the Clutch Hand thought, to link him conclusively to the counterfeiting scheme.

The printing press lay at the bottom of the New Paltz River, north of Highland, tipped off a bridge by several members of the Cina family. There was no reason to suppose that its resting place would be discovered. The plates, meanwhile, had been retrieved by Salvatore Cina's wife and concealed eight miles to the east, in the hamlet of Ardonia. Mrs. Cina had buried them on a farm owned by another of Morello's a.s.sociates-a Sicilian farmer who went by the Anglicized name of William Oddo. It had been Oddo who concealed Ign.a.z.io Lupo while he was on the run from his creditors in New York.

Word that the plates were hidden at the Oddo farm had been far less welcome to Morello. The farm made a decent hiding place, of course. It was remote and seldom visited, and the Clutch Hand had no reason to suppose that Flynn knew of any connection between Oddo and the Morellos. But quite unknown to Mrs. Cina, the farm was already being used by the first family for other purposes. Morello had long felt a need for some remote spot in which to dispose of the bodies of his victims-men whom he wished to see disappear for good, leaving no trace of their whereabouts and no clues for the police. The Oddo farm met his criteria. Beginning, it seems, in 1908 or 1909, a number of bodies had been buried there, among them the remains of several men who had found out more about counterfeiting in nearby Highland than was good for them. Flynn later would talk of the spot as ”Morello's private burial ground,” and though there is no way of knowing just how many corpses were interred on Oddo's land, one thing is certain: Mrs. Cina unknowingly had deposited her bundle so close to the graves that any search would be more likely to uncover a dead body than reveal the missing plates.

Even the news of Mrs. Cina's error, though, did not anger the Clutch Hand so much as the sight of Comito entering Ray's courtroom. The diminutive Calabrian cut a curious figure in the witness box-he was nothing but a ”thin, nervous youth,” one newspaper reporter thought, and the enormity of his decision to give testimony was plainly terrifying him. But though Comito dared not meet the gaze of the defendants (he delivered his evidence with his eyes fixed firmly on a spot on the opposite wall), he held nothing back. By the end of the first day of his testimony, most of the reporters present thought there was no hope for Morello.

The Clutch Hand and his followers, a newsman from the Sun Sun observed, were shaken to the core by Comito's unexpected appearance in the witness box. They ”had not heard of his falling into the hands of the Secret Service men, and when he was sworn in as a witness against them ... the glares of the eight men in the prisoners' row were not calculated to lend him encouragement.” As Flynn had planned, though, it was far too late by then to stop the printer from testifying. Desperate measures were certainly attempted-a price of $2,500 was placed on the Calabrian's head only hours after he began his testimony, and Mirabeau Towns, in cross-examination, did his best to portray Comito as a bloodthirsty outlaw, a Calabrian bandit of some infamy now heavily involved in the white slave trade whose sworn testimony could not be trusted. In the absence of a single witness to back up Towns, however, such suggestions had little chance of doing damage. observed, were shaken to the core by Comito's unexpected appearance in the witness box. They ”had not heard of his falling into the hands of the Secret Service men, and when he was sworn in as a witness against them ... the glares of the eight men in the prisoners' row were not calculated to lend him encouragement.” As Flynn had planned, though, it was far too late by then to stop the printer from testifying. Desperate measures were certainly attempted-a price of $2,500 was placed on the Calabrian's head only hours after he began his testimony, and Mirabeau Towns, in cross-examination, did his best to portray Comito as a bloodthirsty outlaw, a Calabrian bandit of some infamy now heavily involved in the white slave trade whose sworn testimony could not be trusted. In the absence of a single witness to back up Towns, however, such suggestions had little chance of doing damage.

There were few bright spots in the case thereafter for the Morello family. The Clutch Hand himself chose not to give evidence, as did Antonio Cecala, and though Lupo did testify in his own defense, nothing he said disproved Comito's allegations. Romano and Brancatto both appeared, and both men gave their evidence as promised, but the ma.s.sed statements of Flynn's operatives reduced the doctors' testimony to tatters. Detailed notes of dates and times, read carefully from notebooks, weighed a good deal more heavily with judge and jury than the vague statements of two Italians, however qualified, and the alibi that Morello and Nick Terranova had constructed with such care was shattered. Both Romano and Brancatto would eventually be charged with perjury.

Well over sixty witnesses were called in all, and though most barely detained the court (Lupo's wife was on the stand for less than a minute), Comito's testimony alone took so long to give that it was not until February 19 that Judge Ray brought the proceedings to a close, formally delivering his charge and sending the jury out to consider its judgment. In complicated cases, as Morello realized, a lengthy sequestration frequently indicated a ”not guilty” verdict, and when the jury filed back in after a mere forty-five minutes' deliberation, both the Clutch Hand and the Wolf wore the haunted look of criminals expecting a conviction. But there was still hope even then. Both men knew that the punishments for counterfeiting were seldom severe. Since Flynn had taken charge in New York, they had generally run to less than a year for a first offense and three to five years for the leaders of a gang. With time allowed for good behavior, even the harshest of those sentences would mean spending little more than three years in jail.

It became clear almost at once, though, that this case was to be quite different. Judge Ray had taken the precaution of having the court cleared of spectators while the jury was at lunch, leaving only officials and reporters present as a long series of guilty verdicts was read. Even so, shocked murmurs rippled through the room as the defendants came forward, one by one, to hear their sentences p.r.o.nounced.

Giuseppe Morello, Ray intoned: twenty-five years' hard labor and a thousand-dollar fine.

Lupo, thirty years and the same fine as Morello.

The remaining sentences were just as harsh. Calicchio, the master printer, got seventeen years in jail, Cina a year more than that. Cecala, Giglio, and Nick Sylvester all received sentences of fifteen years. More than a century and a half of servitude in all, to be served in the forbidding fortress prison of Atlanta.

Flynn would claim, in later years, that Judge Ray had been made well aware of Morello's lengthy record-the arrests as well as the convictions, the murders as well as the nonviolent crimes-and that his judgment took into account the Mafioso's guilt in the matter of the Barrel Murder. Whether that was true or not-the terms imposed were all severe, though only Lupo and Morello had been involved in the Madonia affair-the sentences were by far the longest ever handed down for counterfeiting by a U.S. court. ”The words of the judge,” the American American reported, ”seemed to strike the prisoners down like pistol shots.” reported, ”seemed to strike the prisoners down like pistol shots.”

Calicchio, who was the first man called before Judge Ray, appeared to have aged well beyond his fifty-two years, and he listened in silence as the court interpreter explained his sentence. Then, as the verdict sank in, the old forger began to scream, loudly and unceasingly, drowning out every attempt to quiet him. After a few moments of this unearthly wailing, officials were forced to half lead, half carry the prisoner to the holding cells, his yells echoing back along the corridors as he was dragged away. Calicchio's bubbling wails could still be heard through several doors as Morello was summoned, and the Clutch Hand seemed unnerved by the printer's performance. He slid rather than walked to the bar, and trembled as his sentence was p.r.o.nounced.

Morello's English was good enough for him to understand the judge's words without the aid of an interpreter, and his response was just as dramatic as Calicchio's. As Ray set out his sentence, New York's most feared Mafia boss dropped to the floor in a faint, then, half reviving, went into convulsions. Whether or not his collapse was an act intended to wring sympathy from the court-most of the disgusted newsmen present thought it was-he too had to be helped up and hustled from the room. Lupo, for his part, began sobbing as he stood before the judge and, by the time he had finished pleading for mercy, had ”used up one whole handkerchief with his tears.” The Wolf then stood, seemingly catatonic, while his thirty-year punishment was explained.

The shock of the heavy sentences was just as severely felt in the corridor outside, where word of the record terms, and the sound of groans and sobbing from the courtroom, set off furious mutterings among the friends and relatives of the convicted Mafiosi. U.S. Marshal William Henkel, in charge of security in court, had mustered nearly seventy men-thirty-five of his own officers, a dozen Secret Service agents, fifteen detectives, and six uniformed policemen-and all of them were needed to keep order as the news emerged. Henkel had to order that the corridor be cleared four or five times before things quieted down sufficiently for the prisoners to be manacled and marched away, and the short walk to the holding cells in the Tombs prison on Centre Street was a nervous one. Fully expecting that they might become a target for the remaining members of Morello's family, marshals and Secret Service men alike flinched as the press photographers outside discharged blinding volleys of flashbulbs. A brief panic ensued when a weaving drunk blundered into the column and appeared intent on breaking through to reach the prisoners.

It was pitch dark and freezing by the time the ma.s.sive prison gates were reached. Henkel's marshals stopped the traffic on the street, holding up two streetcars, three women with five babies, and a weeping crowd of relatives while the prisoners were ushered inside. Flynn stepped forward and answered a few questions, glad to reap the praise to which his years of unceasing effort had ent.i.tled him. ”That will help some,” the Chief remarked with a half smile as the gates thudded shut-just the sort of understated comment that the press loved hearing from a Secret Service man. His words made most of the next day's papers.

CHAPTER 11.

MOB.

THE PRISON THAT WAS TO HOUSE MORELLO AND LUPO FOR THE next twenty years or more rose behind imposing walls to the southeast of Atlanta. It was the most important federal prison in America, and suitably enormous-the biggest concrete structure in the world. From outside, it looked more like a medieval castle than a prison, but appearances, in this case, were deceptive. The jail was still more or less brand new-the first group of convicts had arrived only in 1902-and its warden liked to paint it as a model inst.i.tution. It was certainly better appointed than the state prisons the Morello gang had left behind them in New York, and was not designed to grind down its inmates' wills or break their spirits, as Sing Sing had been and in some respects still was. Prisoners were spared the rock breaking that const.i.tuted hard labor in other penitentiaries, being set instead to ”useful tasks.” Morello was a.s.signed to the tailors' shop. Even more remarkably, the men worked ”union hours,” which meant an eight-hour day rather than the back-breaking dawn-to-dusk routine followed on the chain gangs then commonplace elsewhere in Georgia. After work, they returned each night to blocks that held a total of just eight hundred prisoners, mostly one man to a cell-an unheard-of luxury to other jails. next twenty years or more rose behind imposing walls to the southeast of Atlanta. It was the most important federal prison in America, and suitably enormous-the biggest concrete structure in the world. From outside, it looked more like a medieval castle than a prison, but appearances, in this case, were deceptive. The jail was still more or less brand new-the first group of convicts had arrived only in 1902-and its warden liked to paint it as a model inst.i.tution. It was certainly better appointed than the state prisons the Morello gang had left behind them in New York, and was not designed to grind down its inmates' wills or break their spirits, as Sing Sing had been and in some respects still was. Prisoners were spared the rock breaking that const.i.tuted hard labor in other penitentiaries, being set instead to ”useful tasks.” Morello was a.s.signed to the tailors' shop. Even more remarkably, the men worked ”union hours,” which meant an eight-hour day rather than the back-breaking dawn-to-dusk routine followed on the chain gangs then commonplace elsewhere in Georgia. After work, they returned each night to blocks that held a total of just eight hundred prisoners, mostly one man to a cell-an unheard-of luxury to other jails.

Discipline was strict but rarely violent. Corporal punishment did not exist; troublemakers received spells of solitary confinement on a restricted diet. Even the food was good, though there were none of the Italian staples that Morello and his followers pined for-”no spaghetti or garlic,” a sneering journalist informed his readers. Inmates received three square meals a day: perhaps fish cakes, bread, and coffee at breakfast time, beef stew for lunch, and doughnuts or fried potatoes in the evening. Conditions were so marvelous, a reporter from The Was.h.i.+ngton The Was.h.i.+ngton Post Post was told, that one prisoner, recently released, had smashed open a mailbox just to get himself arrested and returned to jail. was told, that one prisoner, recently released, had smashed open a mailbox just to get himself arrested and returned to jail.

It was not the jail itself, in fact, but the sheer length of the sentences confronting them that weighed on the Sicilians' minds. Allowing for time off for good behavior, the earliest date that Morello would be considered for release was December 4, 1926, nearly seventeen years away. For Lupo the Wolf it was more than three years later: April 3, 1930. The sentences, Morello complained in a letter to his wife, were ”enough to drive a man crazy.”

What kept the prisoners sane, for the first year at least, was the hope that their appeal would be allowed. The remaining members of the Morello family worked hard to make that possible, and their prospects of achieving something improved immeasurably when they retained Bourke c.o.c.kran, a celebrated litigator and one of the highest-paid defense attorneys in the country. They raised the money required to pay him through the usual ”appropriations” in East Harlem-where pushcart peddlers, merchants, and petty bankers were terrorized into handing over contributions-and in gifts sent by other Mafia families from as far away as Tunis; at one point the fund raised in this way stood at fifty thousand dollars, a portion of which was set aside to bribe witnesses from the first trial to change their stories. The Terranovas did what they could to bring political pressure to bear at the same time, and their influence in Harlem was such that both Republicans and Democrats seemed ready to help. All those efforts, though, counted for little when the case actually reached the appeals court. Flynn's case was just too watertight. The appeal was heard and dismissed in June 1911, and c.o.c.kran's fees were so enormous that there was no money left afterward to mount another attempt.

Thwarted though they had been in the courts, the remaining members of Morello's gang did not altogether give up hope. John Lupo, the brother of the Wolf, cultivated contacts in the Catholic Church in the hope of obtaining a recommendation for mercy from New York's Cardinal Gibbons. Another scheme that the Terranovas seriously considered was to have Morello accept full responsibility for organizing the counterfeiting operation, in the hope that Lupo might then be freed; the brothers believed, Flynn noted, ”that once Lupo is out, they would have a better chance to get Morello out.” This plan was abandoned almost as soon as it was explained to the Clutch Hand during a family visit to the penitentiary. According to William Moyer, Atlanta's warden, who had stationed guards and an interpreter within earshot, ”it affected him so much that the Deputy Warden was obliged to relieve him from work and a.s.sign him to his cell, because he appeared to be mentally as well as physically in no condition to work, in other words this plan seemed to break Morello.”

Giuseppe Morello, first ”boss of bosses” of the American Mafia, is forced to display the deformed, one-fingered hand that earned him the nickname ”the Clutch Hand” in this 1900 mugshot. According to Secret Service files, Morello personally committed two murders and ordered at least sixty more. Even the influential second-generation Mafia boss Joe Bonanno was terrified of him: ”There was nothing of the buffoon about Morello. He had a parched, gaunt voice, a stone face and a claw.”

A street scene in Corleone. The Sicilian town-notorious even in the nineteenth century as one of the Mafia's great strongholds-was home to Morello and his brothers. The body lying facedown on the right with eleven bullets in it is that of Bernardino Verro, Corleone's mayor. Verro, who-to his lasting shame-was initiated into the Mafia by Morello's stepfather, paid the ultimate price for denouncing the society.

Don Vito Cascio Ferro, Morello's ally in New York, became the greatest leader that the Sicilian Mafia ever produced. ”Every mayor, dressed in his best clothes, awaited him at the entrance to his village, kissed his hands, and paid homage as if he were the king.”

Calogero Maggiore. A mere twenty years old, and a ”s.h.i.+rt ironer” by trade, the young Sicilian was persuaded by Giuseppe Morello to front an early counterfeiting scheme. When the ring was broken up by the Secret Service in June 1900, Maggiore went to prison for six years; Morello walked free.

More Morello dupes: three of the Irish petty criminals picked up by the NYPD in the summer of 1900 for ”queer pus.h.i.+ng.” They are (left to right) (left to right) Chas Brown (alias Steve Sullivan), John ”Red” Duffy, and Edward R. Kelly. Chas Brown (alias Steve Sullivan), John ”Red” Duffy, and Edward R. Kelly.

Bustling Little Italy in the early days of the century. The first Italian crime boss to gain control of the immigrant quarter was Giuseppe D'Agostino (inset) (inset) who used a chain of grocery stores as a front for a vast extortion ring. D'Agostino was forcibly ”retired” by the Morello family in 1902 as the Mafia established itself and the Sicilians promptly took control of his grocery rackets. who used a chain of grocery stores as a front for a vast extortion ring. D'Agostino was forcibly ”retired” by the Morello family in 1902 as the Mafia established itself and the Sicilians promptly took control of his grocery rackets.

Giuseppe Catania. A giant of a man who worked with Morello as a counterfeiter, he talked when drunk-and was found nude, hacked to death, his head attached to his body by a single tendon, and trussed up in a potato sack on the Brooklyn riverfront.

Tommaso Petto, aka Petto the Ox. A Mafia strongman suspected of partic.i.p.ation in the Barrel Murder, Petto died two years later in Pennsylvania, riddled with explosive bullets that had torn wounds ”as big as teacups” in his body.

Benedetto Madonia (above) (above) and Giuseppe Di Priemo and Giuseppe Di Priemo (inset) (inset) both fell foul of the Mafia. Madonia, a senior member of Morello's gang, was the victim of the brutal Barrel Murder. His brother-in-law Di Priemo vowed vengeance but met his own death, violently, a few years later-another of Morello's victims, the police believed. both fell foul of the Mafia. Madonia, a senior member of Morello's gang, was the victim of the brutal Barrel Murder. His brother-in-law Di Priemo vowed vengeance but met his own death, violently, a few years later-another of Morello's victims, the police believed.

A reconstruction, from the Evening Journal Evening Journal, showing how Madonia's body was found stuffed in its barrel, the throat cut, the torso drained, and blood still oozing between the staves. The police were certain that the murder was intended as a warning-but for whom?

Benedetto Madonia in death. This morgue scene, hastily s.n.a.t.c.hed by a photographer from William Randolph Hearst's sensational Evening Journal Evening Journal, shows Madonia after he had been stabbed more than a dozen times by members of the Morello gang, then all but decapitated with a single sweeping slash from a stiletto. The discovery of his body, stuffed into a barrel and abandoned on a lonely street, alerted New Yorkers to the existence of the Mafia.

Four pieces of evidence from the Barrel Murder case. Above right: Above right: the p.a.w.n ticket discovered by Flynn in a police evidence box that led the authorities to Madonia's tin watch, stamped with the image of a train. the p.a.w.n ticket discovered by Flynn in a police evidence box that led the authorities to Madonia's tin watch, stamped with the image of a train. Above and right: Above and right: four scrawled pages from Joe Petrosino's police notebook for April 1903. On the first spread four scrawled pages from Joe Petrosino's police notebook for April 1903. On the first spread (above) (above), Pietro Inzerillo admits to selling empty barrels from his store, but says he ”does not know what the Maffia is.” On the second (right) (right), Morello admits that ”they say I am the chief of the Mafia” but denies any involvement in Madonia's killing.