Part 10 (1/2)

THE EIGHTEENTH AMENDMENT.

GIUSEPPE MORELLO WALKED OUT OF THE FEDERAL PRISON AT Atlanta on February 1, 1920, paroled ten years from the day he had started his sentence. The world had changed significantly since he had gone away. New York was more crowded than ever; the city had added nearly another million people to its population, more than a hundred thousand of them Italians. Cars, a rarity in 1910, were commonplace in 1920. So too were subway trains. The country had emerged from isolation to fight in the Great War (Vincenzo and Ciro Terranova had both been issued with draft cards, though neither man was actually called up) and ended up richer and more powerful than ever. Crime, meanwhile, had grown steadily more profitable and complex. A hedonistic generation-men desperate to forget the war, women emboldened by flapper fas.h.i.+ons and the vote-was sending the demand for illicit pleasures of all sorts soaring, with a concomitant rise in the compet.i.tion for power and money. Even within the Mafia itself, new bosses had emerged to challenge the old order. Atlanta on February 1, 1920, paroled ten years from the day he had started his sentence. The world had changed significantly since he had gone away. New York was more crowded than ever; the city had added nearly another million people to its population, more than a hundred thousand of them Italians. Cars, a rarity in 1910, were commonplace in 1920. So too were subway trains. The country had emerged from isolation to fight in the Great War (Vincenzo and Ciro Terranova had both been issued with draft cards, though neither man was actually called up) and ended up richer and more powerful than ever. Crime, meanwhile, had grown steadily more profitable and complex. A hedonistic generation-men desperate to forget the war, women emboldened by flapper fas.h.i.+ons and the vote-was sending the demand for illicit pleasures of all sorts soaring, with a concomitant rise in the compet.i.tion for power and money. Even within the Mafia itself, new bosses had emerged to challenge the old order.

But Morello would not slide easily back into his role as boss of bosses, or even boss for that matter. Tot D'Aquila, who had taken on Morello's mantle after the Clutch Hand's conviction, had a stranglehold on the leaders.h.i.+p of the fraternity. The ruthless Palermo man still controlled the most fearsome of New York's criminal families, and, arbitrary though his rule could be, none of the city's Mafiosi were disposed to oppose him. There were by now five families operating within the city limits, among them numbering as many as two thousand men of respect and their a.s.sociates. Many would have been well known to Morello; a number of the bosses whose careers had begun before 1910 were still as active as ever, among them Cola Schiro in the Bronx and Manfredi Mineo in Brooklyn. But there were newer faces among the ranks of New York's Mafiosi, too. Several of them were friends of the Morello-Terranova clan, among them Joe Ma.s.seria, from Marsala in western Sicily, whose criminal record stretched back to 1907. The most influential of the new powers, though, was Umberto Valenti, a fast-rising thug known, according to Nicola Gentile, ”as 'the Ghost' for his cruelty and his way of disappearing after an action.” Valenti made a natural ally for the Morellos; he had based himself in a burgeoning new Italian quarter in Manhattan's East Village. But there were new rivals to be confronted, too, and the entire Italian underworld, whether friend or foe, was ready to fight for its share in the profits to be made in the immigrant districts.

The first family thus faced more compet.i.tion and greater threats to its old dominance than ever before, this at a time when a good number of its old leaders were dead. Grievous losses had been incurred; the Morellos' battles against Gallucci and the Camorra war had stripped the Harlem Mafia of several of its best men and left the surviving Terranova brothers, Ciro and Vincenzo, as heads of the family. Ciro, the younger of the two, was the more active and influential; his artichoke racket continued to produce good profits, and he and Vincenzo had also become heavily involved in some equally lucrative criminal businesses. The murder of the DiMarco brothers had given the Terranovas a firm grip over much, perhaps most, of Italian gambling in Manhattan. But the DiMarcos' deaths also demonstrated the failings of Ciro Terranova's leaders.h.i.+p. Morello had always been able to control his chief lieutenants; New York's Mafiosi may have feared the Clutch Hand, but they had always grudgingly respected him. Nick Terranova, too, had made an effective boss. But Ciro and Vincenzo commanded only a fraction of the regard that had b.u.t.tressed both their predecessors. In the wake of the Camorra war, they had been compelled to retain their tenuous grip on power through violence.

It says a great deal for Morello's abilities and reputation that his reappearance in New York-accompanied, from the summer of 1920, by the almost equally influential Lupo-so unsettled Tot D'Aquila that the city's all-powerful boss of bosses was panicked into ordering just such drastic measures against the Clutch Hand and the Wolf. No firsthand evidence has survived of what happened in Manhattan that summer; Flynn, promoted to a post in Was.h.i.+ngton, had been taken off the case, and the Chief's intricate network of informants had fallen into disuse during the First World War. What seems to have occurred, however, was that Morello and Lupo were accorded a rapturous reception in Harlem-welcomed, feted, and restored, at least in part, to their old eminence. Word of their reemergence reached D'Aquila, and D'Aquila just as quickly sensed a threat. The boss of bosses took his time, ensuring that he retained the necessary support. Then, at the next meeting of the Mafia's general a.s.sembly, held sometime between June and September 1921, he saw to it that both his rivals were denounced. The two New Yorkers were labeled dangerous traitors to the established order, tried in their absence, and sentenced to death.

What precisely Lupo and Morello had done to deserve this fate remains unclear. The Clutch Hand had been working to reestablish his position in East Harlem. That much would have been expected, and no doubt tolerated, too. But it had soon become clear that Morello posed a much more direct threat to the new boss's rule. It is not unlikely that the Clutch Hand really had been plotting to usurp Tot D'Aquila's power and so regain his old eminence, and almost certain that he had struck up a dangerous friends.h.i.+p with Umberto Valenti, who was rapidly developing his power base in the East Village. It was this combination of north and south Manhattan, of an old leader noted for his cunning and a new one renowned for his viciousness, that D'Aquila feared. The death sentences pa.s.sed by the Mafia a.s.sembly applied not only to Morello and Lupo but to Valenti and several of his followers as well.

Flynn and Nicola Gentile help to explain what happened next. Thanks, no doubt, to friends in the council, the three condemned leaders heard of their sentences before D'Aquila could put them into effect. Acting hurriedly, they fled the country, leaving by s.h.i.+p from Newport News, a small port in Virginia. It was the first time that Morello had left the United States since 1892, and though it was highly unlikely that the Italian authorities were still seeking him in connection with his counterfeiting conviction, now twenty-six years old, the decision does suggest that he was desperate.

The fleeing Mafiosi were next seen in Sicily, where they arrived around October 1921 in search of sanctuary and a.s.sistance. The men spent the better part of six months hiding around Palermo. It was during that time that Morello, Lupo, and Valenti called on Nicola Gentile in the hope that he could help resolve their problems.

The exiled Mafiosi had chosen their man well. Gentile was an established power in both the American and the Sicilian arms of their fraternity, a known conciliator who had helped resolve several similar disputes. But he was also a formidable boss in his own right, with ”strong authority and relations within the Mafia all over the United States,” as he put it himself, and by no means a mere diplomat. ”You cannot be a capomafia capomafia without being ferocious,” Gentile said, and he had first made his name in the society as a man of action rather than words. Arriving in Pittsburgh in 1915, Gentile had been shocked to discover that the local Mafia was cowed by the more powerful Camorra-Pittsburgh's Mafia capo even collected protection money in the Sicilian community on the Neapolitans' behalf. He responded by recruiting his own gang of violent street toughs without being ferocious,” Gentile said, and he had first made his name in the society as a man of action rather than words. Arriving in Pittsburgh in 1915, Gentile had been shocked to discover that the local Mafia was cowed by the more powerful Camorra-Pittsburgh's Mafia capo even collected protection money in the Sicilian community on the Neapolitans' behalf. He responded by recruiting his own gang of violent street toughs (picciotti (picciotti in Mafia slang) and using them to a.s.sa.s.sinate a number of Camorra leaders. The murderous efficiency of Gentile's gang soon brought the Neapolitans to the negotiating table, and there Gentile emphasized his superiority by humiliating his opponents. The Camorrists were threatened ”with all-out war if they so much as offended another Sicilian,” and, when they submitted, Gentile became the most powerful figure in Pittsburgh's Italian underworld. Soon afterward, he regularized arrangements by having the ineffectual capo shot and ”sent back to Sicily in a luxury coffin,” taking over as his city's Mafia boss. in Mafia slang) and using them to a.s.sa.s.sinate a number of Camorra leaders. The murderous efficiency of Gentile's gang soon brought the Neapolitans to the negotiating table, and there Gentile emphasized his superiority by humiliating his opponents. The Camorrists were threatened ”with all-out war if they so much as offended another Sicilian,” and, when they submitted, Gentile became the most powerful figure in Pittsburgh's Italian underworld. Soon afterward, he regularized arrangements by having the ineffectual capo shot and ”sent back to Sicily in a luxury coffin,” taking over as his city's Mafia boss.

It was thus fortunate for Morello and his companions that the Pittsburgh boss was disposed to help. Valenti, whom D'Aquila ”considered the number one enemy and the first to be eliminated,” was a ”dear friend,” the capomafia capomafia wrote, and Morello a respected former boss of bosses. Gentile himself was sufficiently influential in America to have another general a.s.sembly convened, and there, sometime early in 1922, a compromise was reached. Morello, in all likelihood, renounced all claims not only to his old position but also to the leaders.h.i.+p of his own family; he must also have formally acknowledged D'Aquila as boss. At the same time the alliance between the Morellos and Valenti was somehow broken, almost certainly by Tot D'Aquila, who seems to have accepted Valenti back into his organization in exchange for his promise to help tackle the first family. When next glimpsed in the public records, the two were sworn enemies. The death sentences on the men were then revoked, and Morello, Lupo, and Valenti returned from Sicily that spring. wrote, and Morello a respected former boss of bosses. Gentile himself was sufficiently influential in America to have another general a.s.sembly convened, and there, sometime early in 1922, a compromise was reached. Morello, in all likelihood, renounced all claims not only to his old position but also to the leaders.h.i.+p of his own family; he must also have formally acknowledged D'Aquila as boss. At the same time the alliance between the Morellos and Valenti was somehow broken, almost certainly by Tot D'Aquila, who seems to have accepted Valenti back into his organization in exchange for his promise to help tackle the first family. When next glimpsed in the public records, the two were sworn enemies. The death sentences on the men were then revoked, and Morello, Lupo, and Valenti returned from Sicily that spring.

They arrived to find the city changing once again. The fragile peace that had long existed between its four Mafia families was coming to an end. D'Aquila's dominating ways explain part of the rising tension, but there were many other reasons why the gangs of New York might come to blows. There was simply more to fight for in postwar Manhattan than there had ever been before, and the reason why this was so could be summed up in one word: Prohibition Prohibition.

ALCOHOL HAD BEEN outlawed in the United States in 1919 with the pa.s.sage of the Volstead Act. As later codified in the Eighteenth Amendment to the Const.i.tution, the new law outlawed the manufacture, distribution, and sale of any alcoholic drinks. It also created the means to enforce the regulations: a new federal agency named the Prohibition Bureau, spread thinly across the country with a total of fewer than two thousand agents. A quarter of a million, one government official said, was closer to the number that would be needed to properly enforce the law. outlawed in the United States in 1919 with the pa.s.sage of the Volstead Act. As later codified in the Eighteenth Amendment to the Const.i.tution, the new law outlawed the manufacture, distribution, and sale of any alcoholic drinks. It also created the means to enforce the regulations: a new federal agency named the Prohibition Bureau, spread thinly across the country with a total of fewer than two thousand agents. A quarter of a million, one government official said, was closer to the number that would be needed to properly enforce the law.

Prohibition's proponents, chief among them religious leaders, firmly believed that they were saving the nation from itself, and to some extent they had a point. Drunkenness and alcoholism was responsible for several thousand deaths a year by 1919, not to mention a fast-rising tide of failed marriages and many more thefts, a.s.saults, and petty crimes. ”The insidious effects of alcohol are responsible for more misery than the late war,” p.r.o.nounced the bishop of Rochester, a firm supporter of the notion of a ”dry” America, and millions of his countrymen agreed with him. Unfortunately for the authorities, however, tens of millions did not. Laws that lack public support are notoriously impossible to enforce, and the advent of Prohibition had no measurable effect on the demand for beer, wine, and spirits-not least in New York, where it was estimated that the 16,000 saloons that had existed in the city before the pa.s.sage of the Volstead Act were replaced by 32,000 speakeasies. Thus, while it was relatively easy for the government to close down the country's large breweries and distilleries, new sources of supply were quickly found. Ale and liquor were imported from Canada and the Caribbean, smuggled in by boat all along the Atlantic sh.o.r.eline. British exports of alcohol to Canada s.e.xtupled between 1918 and 1922, with virtually all the surplus finding its way south. Liquor was manufactured in the United States as well, in such quant.i.ties that the seizure of neither 173,000 illicit stills in 1925 nor forty million gallons of beer and wine five years later had any noticeable effect on the available supply.

Before 1919, even the best-organized and most efficient of the nation's criminals had controlled rackets worth no more than some thousands of dollars. Now control of a vastly profitable industry had pa.s.sed to the underworld, and it had done so not merely without a struggle but with the active support of practically every drinker in the country. New York juries habitually returned not-guilty verdicts in even the clearest cut of Prohibition cases, and large-scale breweries operated virtually unchecked in busy city centers despite their telltale smells and smoke. Prices, meanwhile, increased so rapidly that a humble beer cost anywhere from twice to ten times what it had before the pa.s.sage of the Prohibition laws.

There was, in short, a huge amount of business to fight for, and the streets of America's great cities soon turned into battlegrounds as rival gangs began to shoot and gouge their way to dominance over their local markets. Prohibition would lead directly to the emergence of a number of the greatest names in crime: Dutch Schultz, Waxey Gordon, and the Italian Frankie Uale in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and, in Chicago, Al Capone-born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents from Naples, at one time a minor member of a Brooklyn street gang, but by the end of the decade the most notorious boss in the United States. Capone built a vast stake in the supply of alcohol throughout the Midwest and made so much money that his influence could be felt in Manhattan.

What all this was worth in monetary terms is difficult to say-figures, for obvious reasons, were not kept. By the early 1930s, one estimate put beer sales in the New York region at $60 million to $100 million a year; another estimate suggested that alcohol sales in Detroit grossed $215 million in 1928. The market in New York, a city bigger than Chicago and Detroit put together, can scarcely have been worth less than $500 million by that time, and if the city's Mafia families, among them, claimed even one-twentieth of that, their profits must have exceeded $5 million a year.

Nothing like it had ever happened before. An entire industry-one of the most important in the country-had been gifted by the government to gangsters.

FOR MOST ORDINARY CRIMINALS, the most striking thing about the liquor business was not so much the money that it generated but the way in which it eroded existing boundaries within the underworld itself. Crime, before 1919, had been largely a neighborhood affair. Gangs struggled for control over small areas of large cities, as the Morellos had done in Harlem and Little Italy, and the gangs themselves were almost always tightly knit. Jewish syndicates fought over the Jewish districts of the Lower East Side; Sicilians and Neapolitans disputed the Italian quarter of Manhattan. Prohibition broke down many of those barriers. The vastly influential, Jewish-run Reinfeld Syndicate included several leaders who had American backgrounds; Waxey Gordon and Dutch Schultz, two of the best-known bootleggers of the 1920s, came from Jewish and German families respectively, and Schultz (whose criminal empire was rumored to turn over $20 million a year) had many allies in the Italian community, including Ciro Terranova, with whom he split the Harlem lottery racket. Some Mafia families even began to admit Neapolitans, a development made considerably more palatable by the demise of the Camorra in New York. Vito Genovese, who became one of the most feared Mafiosi in the city, was the first Naples man to rise to real power in this way. Genovese certainly had Camorra links-according to Sing Sing prison records, he was one of the last men to visit Tony ”the Shoemaker” Paretti before his execution for the murder of Nick Terranova. But he was also an ally of Charlie Luciano, who came from Lercara Friddi in Sicily and whose star was rising swiftly in the Mafia.

An influx of new, younger blood certainly helped Sicilian criminals to profit from the opportunities on offer. ”Prohibition,” said Joe Bonanno, whose own successful Mafia career owed a good deal to the ban on alcohol, ”was too good to be true. I didn't consider it wrong. It seemed fairly safe in that the police did not bother you. There was plenty of business for everyone, [and] the profits were tremendous.” But, to begin with, little changed. In the early 1920s the bootlegging of alcohol was as much of a neighborhood business as the racketeering that preceded it, and the bootleggers themselves were very often the same gangsters who had infested their local communities for years. North of Central Park, the remnants of the old Morello family seized gratefully on these new opportunities. They were led on this occasion by Vincenzo Terranova, who proved to be so fearsome a compet.i.tor that he now acquired the nickname of the Harlem Tiger. He and his brother-in-law Vincenzo Salemi formed a partners.h.i.+p with another bootlegger by the name of Diamond Joe Viserti-a flashy Neapolitan involved in several of the killings at the Murder Stable. Viserti was renowned for his gaudy taste in jewelry and flashed a ten-thousand-dollar stickpin. His links with the Morello family went at least as far back as 1913.

Terranova, Salemi, and Viserti were strong enough to control most of the liquor trade in Harlem, but their influence seems to have run no further south than 106th Street. Further downtown, rival gangs fought over the enclave of Little Italy and the new Italian colonies on the East Side. One was led by the Morellos' old friend and new enemy, Umberto Valenti. Another, even more important, was controlled by yet another influential Mafioso. He was a small, combative, and frighteningly ambitious man who had come to New York from the town of Marsala, on the west coast of Sicily, and had a criminal record that stretched back nearly twenty years. In time, he would prove to be the most important Mafia figure of the Prohibition era. His name was Giuseppe Ma.s.seria, but he was better known as Joe the Boss.

Ma.s.seria had got his start in crime before the war. His police rap sheet noted arrests on suspicion of kidnapping, sending Black Hand letters, and theft from numerous premises around the Bowery. He and a companion named Lima were convicted of burglary in 1907 (Marie Morello, the Clutch Hand's sister, had married a man called Gioacchino Lima, which hints at one possible connection between Ma.s.seria and the Morello family). Then, a few years later, Ma.s.seria was caught again, this time breaking into a p.a.w.nshop with the a.s.sistance of a barman from the Lomonte brothers' Harlem bar. He served four and a half years for this second offense, enough to keep him in prison until late in 1917.

This was scarcely the record of an important Mafioso, and the future boss was still barely more than a petty crook, living in a single room above a bar, when Prohibition came in and changed everything. Without the ban on alcohol, Ma.s.seria might never have been heard of. As it was, however, he benefited more than most from the new laws. His territory on Kenmare Street in Little Italy chanced to include an important stretch of sidewalk known as the Curb Exchange-a place where liquor dealers from across New York met informally to buy and sell. Control of the Curb Exchange meant a small slice of a large portion of the city's liquor sales, and within a few months Ma.s.seria had reinvented himself as the boss of an influential syndicate. By 1921, allied by now with several other Italian gangs from Brooklyn and Manhattan, he was second in influence only to Tot D'Aquila. His lieutenants included several men destined to be the leaders of a coming generation, among them Joe Adonis, Frank Costello, and Charles ”Lucky” Luciano.

Whatever it was that drew men of such undoubted ability to flock around the rising boss, it had little to do with his habits or appearance. Ma.s.seria was a glutton who ate far too much. Standing not much more than five feet five, he was squat and chubby, and though (like the great majority of bootleggers) he dressed well, in silk s.h.i.+rts and tailored suits, he lacked the poise to impress even his fellow criminals. Joe Bonanno, a fastidious dresser, found him sloppy in his personal appearance: ”His belly protruded from under his half-opened vest,” Bonanno wrote after one meeting. ”His collar was unb.u.t.toned and his tie loosened. One of his s.h.i.+rt sleeves was b.u.t.toned on the wrong holes.” Another enemy nicknamed him ”the Chinese,” because, he said, of his ”bloated cheeks, which made his eyes seem like narrow oriental slits.” Ma.s.seria was neither eloquent nor intelligent. He spoke both English and Sicilian poorly. And, notoriously, he was a messy eater. ”He attacked a plate of spaghetti as if he were a drooling mastiff. He had the table manners of a Hun,” recorded Bonanno, who professed himself to be repulsed by the mere sight of the new boss at the table. ”[He] was vulgar, and puffy ... the nervous type of eater, an incomplete man inside-the glutton in him compelled him to feed his belly as the bully in him was compelled to feed his ego.”

What Ma.s.seria did have, though, was something more important than appearance: a reputation for ruthlessness and a long run of good fortune. Chancing to control the territory around the Curb Exchange was only one example of his luck. The fat Sicilian was also famous in the New York underworld for his preternatural ability to dodge trouble and even bullets, and on at least two occasions in the early 1920s, rival gangsters cornered Ma.s.seria in ambushes from which the boss emerged miraculously unscathed. These encounters entered underworld legend and leant l.u.s.ter to the gangster's reputation.

From the Morello family's perspective, Joe the Boss had suddenly become a man worth courting. He was, by now, the only Mafioso in Manhattan strong enough to face down Tot D'Aquila, and it was this strength, almost certainly, that attracted Morello himself into Ma.s.seria's...o...b..t. Spared, however grudgingly, from his Mafia death sentence, the Clutch Hand still had every reason to fear that the implacable D'Aquila would come after him again. In 1921 he abruptly reemerged as Joe the Boss's right hand man.

It was an alliance that made every kind of sense. The Clutch Hand traded independence for protection, while Ma.s.seria benefited hugely from Morello's contacts and his long years of experience. The Terranova brothers also entered the equation. By aligning his fast-rising new syndicate with the remnants of the old Morello family, Joe the Boss expanded his influence to Harlem and gained an important outlet for his alcohol. He also added to his strength in the event of any power struggle.

D'Aquila wasted little time in fighting back against the new alliance. The Ma.s.seria-Morello pact was far from welcome to the boss of bosses, and in the fall of 1921 he struck back hard at what remained of the Morello gang. Diamond Joe Viserti was the first to go, shot twice in the back in Little Italy on October 13, but his death was followed a few months later by none other than that of the Harlem Tiger. Vincenzo Terranova fell on May 8, 1922, ambushed as he was walking past an ice cream parlor on East 116th Street, in the heart of the Morello territory. The end was swift; a touring car with its top down sidled up behind the eldest of the Terranovas and pulled up to the curb; two men armed with sawed-off shotguns leaned out and fired buckshot charges, hitting their man repeatedly in the shoulder, back, and lungs. Vincenzo collapsed to the ground, where he had just sufficient strength to raise himself on one arm, draw a revolver from inside his coat, and discharge several hopeless rounds after the disappearing car. Then he fell back to the ground and died, the third member of his family to lose his life to a gang war. He was only thirty-six.

The man responsible for Terranova's death was Umberto Valenti. The Ghost-so it was widely thought-had proved his loyalty to D'Aquila by bringing down an enemy, and that afternoon he struck again, downtown this time, at Ma.s.seria. No fewer than five Sicilians were involved in this battle-Joe the Boss and two of his men on one side and two Valenti gunmen on the other. Neither side, it seems, shot straight; five minutes of intermittent gunfire wounded half a dozen pa.s.sing garment workers, but Ma.s.seria escaped unscathed. Valenti tried again a few months later, sending four more men to Joe the Boss's house early in August. This time Ma.s.seria spotted them as he came down his front steps; he fled into a nearby shop, dodging one bullet that came cras.h.i.+ng through a gla.s.s window and two more, fired at close range, that came within inches of killing him. Joe's famous luck was with him once again that day-two bullets had torn holes in his straw hat-but his enemy the Ghost's had finally deserted him. Three days later, on August 11, Valenti was ambushed entering a restaurant at Twelfth Street and Second Avenue. He made a run for a nearby taxi, but a small group of Ma.s.seria's men shot him as he leapt onto the running boards.

Valenti died in hospital an hour later, and though his boss, D'Aquila, did not call a truce for several months, his attempt to curb Ma.s.seria's power was thenceforth all but over. There was one further important casualty on the Morellos' side-Lina Morello's brother, Vincenzo Salemi, died on East 108th Street early in 1923, hit four times in the back by bullets fired from a pa.s.sing car-but the shooting petered out that spring. With his closest ally gone, D'Aquila was forced to admit that Joe the Boss had come to stay. In turn, the balance of power in the Sicilian districts altered irrevocably.

Ma.s.seria took the credit, but he owed a great deal to another man. Without Giuseppe Morello, Joe the Boss had lacked the brains to rival Tot D'Aquila, much less to best the boss of bosses so decisively. With Morello as adviser and chief strategist-as counselor, or consigliere consigliere in the language of the Mafia-he was a better leader. Together, the two men would dominate Manhattan for the next half-decade. in the language of the Mafia-he was a better leader. Together, the two men would dominate Manhattan for the next half-decade.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT is known only in broad outline; the war of 1922 was the last the New York public heard of the Mafia for half a dozen years. Conflict and murder were bad for business, and either D'Aquila or Ma.s.seria, or both, decreed that business should again be the priority. is known only in broad outline; the war of 1922 was the last the New York public heard of the Mafia for half a dozen years. Conflict and murder were bad for business, and either D'Aquila or Ma.s.seria, or both, decreed that business should again be the priority.

The remainder of the Roaring Twenties pa.s.sed in a blur of illicit bootleg deals punctuated by occasional murders. The killings, as always, made the press, while the day-to-day rivalries of the various gangs that preyed on the city did not. The FBI, which would eventually claim jurisdiction over many aspects of organized crime, was still a decade away from full effectiveness-not until the mid-1930s did the organization acquire real competence in such investigations-and in the absence of some figure of the stature of Flynn or Petrosino, the New York Police Department lacked both the will and the ability to secure evidence against the powerful, elusive leaders responsible for most Italian American crime. Far less is known of the Mafia's operations in the 1920s and 1930s than was ever discovered about the activities of the Morello family.

A glimpse of the one surviving Terranova brother's place in this criminal firmament comes from the memoirs, unremittingly hostile to the Morello family, of a low-level Mafioso by the name of Joe Valachi. Valachi was no more than a street thug: almost illiterate, and a mere burglar with five arrests and a short spell in Sing Sing to his name when he first encountered Ciro, then ”the big man on 116th Street,” sometime in 1925. On that occasion, the Artichoke King brokered a truce between the members of Valachi's former gang of burglars-who happened to be Italian-and a group of Irish thieves with whom he had gone to work on his release from prison. Keeping the peace was an important part of a boss's job, and the fact that Terranova ruled in favor of a predominantly Irish gang over the angry protests of Italians suggests that he was forward-looking for the day. The next time that Valachi encountered him, however, Ciro appeared in a very different light. The burglar was back in Sing Sing, serving a nearly four-year sentence, when he heard from another prisoner that a friend, a fellow housebreaker by the name of Frank LaPluma, had been killed. ”They shot him sitting on a stoop one morning,” Valachi said. ”The way I made it out, it didn't make no sense. Well, all I could do is wonder what was going on.”

It took a prisoner who understood East Harlem to explain the situation to Valachi. Ciro Terranova, the burglar was shocked to hear, had sentenced him to death.

”They sold you out,” he said. I said I didn't know what he was talking about. ”I mean they made peace,” he said, ”on condition that you and Frank must die. Ciro Terranova fixed the whole thing.” Then [he] told me to watch myself. He said that if they got one, they'll get the other-meaning me.

Valachi thought that he was safe in Sing Sing, but he soon discovered that the influence of the Morello-Terranova clan stretched much further in the 1920s than it had a quarter of a century earlier, when a similar prison sentence had kept Giuseppe Di Priemo safe from Morello's wrath.

Right after this I was mopping up one day in the dormitory ... another guy who was helping to clean up, his name was Angelo, was in the toilet. Just then there was a knock at the door, and a kid by the name of Pete LaTempa said he wanted to get something from under his bed. I didn't think anything about it. I knew this LaTempa but I never had much to do with him, so I let him in and went about my business with a mop.All of a sudden I felt a sort of sting-that's the best I can describe it-under my left arm. I looked behind me, and I saw this LaTempa with a knife in his hand. By now Angelo had come out of the toilet and was standing there, looking at me with his eyes bugging out. ... I put my hand down under my arm where he was pointing, and I kind of felt it go right inside me. Then I saw all the blood. Believe me, it was all over the place. So naturally I went after LaTempa, and he started to yell how bad I was cut, hoping I would forget him and worry about myself. But I just kept going, and when I caught him, I let him have a couple of good raps on the mouth. He was smaller than me, and I would have killed him with my bare hands, but by this time my knees were getting weak.What saved me was that the hospital was only one flight above the dormitory. ... When they finished sewing me up, I had thirty-eight st.i.tches running from right under my heart and around to my back. I still got the scar.

Terranova left Valachi alone after that, and his inability to have Valachi killed came as little surprise to many members of the Sicilian underworld. Ciro was feared-his family history, his profitable rackets, and his position as an ally of Ma.s.seria all meant that he enjoyed both power and prestige. But the Artichoke King was never held in anything like the same regard as his dead brothers, and for a few irreverent Mafiosi he actually became a figure of fun, a man whose best efforts seemed destined to descend to bitter farce.

The lowest point in Ciro's criminal career came on December 8, 1929, when he attended a formal dinner in the Bronx in honor of Albert Vitale, a noted magistrate with friends on both sides of the criminal divide. Also in the restaurant that night were a number of eminent New York politicians, several other gangsters, and at least one policeman.

Midway through a raucous evening, the festivities were interrupted by a number of gunmen who burst into the room and held up the a.s.sembled dignitaries. The politicians lost their wallets, and-more important, as it transpired-the one policeman was relieved of his revolver. That theft had to be reported, and when it was the whole story of the evening made the press. Vitale was pilloried for his underworld a.s.sociations, the unfortunate policeman for not putting up a fight. In Mafia circles, though, the Artichoke King was generally believed to have been the most embarra.s.sed guest of all. By allowing himself to get caught up in the Vitale scandal, Terranova had drawn a great deal of unwelcome attention to himself. He had given the newspapers an excuse to dredge up old stories about Italian crime in general and the artichoke racket in particular. However inadvertently, he had interfered with business.