The Italian Americans

by Maria Laurino

  The immigrants, determined to lessen the abysmal poverty of tenement life, began to re-create elements of the old paese. Already they were settling on streets with Italians who spoke the same dialect and worshipped the same patron saint. Soon they would try to replicate what may have been, next to their families, the ingredient missing most in their lives: the food of their regions. The Italians believed that American salt wasn’t as flavorful as its Mediterranean counterpart, its tomatoes not as sweet, and its bread not as crusty, and they wanted food from the Old World in the New World.

  Selling food, especially to one’s own people, has traditionally been an inroad for new immigrants trying to find work, and soon pushcarts with products like bread, vegetables, and wild greens crammed the dusty, unpaved streets. As Italians saved money and could begin to afford commercial space, they elevated pushcart businesses into fruit and vegetable stores. Eventually they opened bakeries, live poultry markets, cheese shops, and pasta stores.

  The appeal of the immigrants’ first food shops in New York City has endured for over a century: The cheese shop that Basilicata native Savino Di Palo opened in Little Italy in 1910 still produces fresh mozzarella daily. In Greenwich Village, Veniero’s Pastry Shop has been baking confections since 1894, Faicco’s Pork Store selling meats and specialties since 1900, and Raffetto’s pasta shop making ravioli since 1906—the aromatic scents of each shop preserving the flavors of the culture.

  Yet pushcart vendors and store owners were prime targets of an extortion racket led by thugs calling themselves the Black Hand, successors to the violent Irish gangs, with names like the Forty Thieves, the Plug Uglies, and the Roach Guards, that once had controlled a squalid area of the Lower East Side known as Five Points. The organization sent its victims extortion letters signed La Mano Nera (“the Black Hand”)—a name first used by nineteenth-century anarchists in Spain who terrorized the wealthy, claiming to work on behalf of the have-nots.

  Bread sellers on Mulberry Street. Selling food, especially to one’s own people, has traditionally been an inroad for immigrants.

  The immigrants, isolated and unable to speak English, were mostly powerless against the blackmail, forced to either pay up or suffer. The threatening letters targeted wealthy Italians as well; even if the mark agreed to a negotiated amount, the Black Hand often continued its demands until the victim was drained. Gang members even tried to blackmail tenor Enrico Caruso when he came to New York to perform (Caruso went to the police, who caught all the perpetrators).

  As the Black Hand became more embedded in urban life, different theories emerged as to whether these men developed ties to Mafia criminals in southern Italy. While some notorious New York gang leaders most likely did, such as Ignazio Lupo (the redundant “Lupo the Wolf”), others worked alone or in small groups. Merely using the words “Black Hand” was enough to terrorize the population, and it was easy for a few gang members to form their own extortion group and put a letter in the mail.

  While the majority of Black Hand crime took place in New York because of its huge immigrant population, extortionists preyed on every city with an Italian colony. Financial envy could spur a Black Hand letter, as experienced by a fruit stand owner in Baltimore who had purchased his own home and whose son was said to have flaunted the family wealth. After the gang burned down his fruit stand, the man never purchased another piece of property, solely keeping his money in the bank. A letter to a Pittsburgh man instructed him to hand over $2,000 in gold or die by the blade of a steel knife. Dynamite destroyed produce stores and butcher shops in Chicago, where the Daily Tribune reported that one-third of the Italian population paid tribute money to the Black Hand. Hundreds lived in fear of receiving these creepy death threat letters with crude drawings of bones, knives, and nooses.

  The Black Hand employed tactics that terrorists use today: bombing stores and public spaces, killing men, women, and children to make their statement. Random terror reigned in New York’s Little Italy as Black Hand members bombed pushcarts and more than thirty stores in the course of a few years. The thugs detonated dynamite crudely, sometimes intending to target one store but bombing half a block by mistake.

  Thugs calling themselves the Black Hand preyed on immigrants, demanding that they pay up or their stores would be bombed. Police believed the Black Hand members pictured above were tied to a counterfeiting ring.

  They acted with impunity because the immigrants would rarely go to the police. The Italians’ inherent distrust of outsiders affected the decision to remain silent, but they also acted pragmatically, seeing that those who did talk usually suffered a worse fate. A saying among Sicilians summed up their fear and unwillingness to trust anyone outside of the family: “You have eyes you no see; you have nose you no smell; you have tongue you no speak; you have hands you no touch.”

  Giovanna Pontillo, an immigrant from the fishing village of Scilla in Calabria, the famous town of Greek mythology where the sea monster Scylla terrorized sailors, was one of the many unlucky immigrants extorted by the Black Hand. After her husband was killed on a construction site in Brooklyn, she remarried, to a widower named Rocco Siena, a pushcart vendor. When the couple had saved enough money to open a fruit and vegetable store, the Black Hand paid a call asking for a weekly kickback. Siena refused to give up the small amount of profit he was earning and said no. After several warnings to pay up, the gang bombed his store, and Siena was lucky to survive the carnage from the destruction.

  But Giovanna took a rare step. Believing that she didn’t have much else to lose once their store had been destroyed, she went to a police officer named Giuseppe Petrosino, an Italian American trying to rid the neighborhood of this canker. Petrosino headed what was then known as the Italian Squad, a team of five Italian-American police officers who spoke numerous dialects, wore disguises, and tried to gather intelligence about the Black Hand. The department asked Petrosino to go to Sicily to gather information on criminals after an immigration law passed that refused entry to all those who were wanted for or convicted of a crime in their country of origin. Petrosino was hoping to use this intelligence to deport Black Hand members. But the rising star of the police department had become a well-known figure in New York and Italy; he was spotted in Sicily and murdered.

  Lt. Joseph Petrosino (left) headed the “Italian Squad” to root out Black Hand members, pictured here escorting gang member Tomasso Petto (“Petto the Ox”), second from left.

  For Giovanna, the news could not have been bleaker. With dangers surrounding her and nowhere to turn, she found herself in the predicament that defined her Calabrian village: caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Shortly after Petrosino’s death, Giovanna’s daughter Angelina celebrated her fourth birthday. A neighbor told Giovanna that she would take the little girl for a birthday treat—a banana, her favorite fruit. What Giovanna never could have imagined was that her neighbor was a sister of a Black Hand member. Having surmised that Giovanna had gone to the police, the Black Hand kidnapped Angelina, taking her to an isolated area of Brooklyn, where she lived in a lice-infested room, left to sleep on a pile of hay.

  Angelina Siena on her fourth birthday. The next day, the Black Hand kidnapped her.

  Kidnappings, along with bombings, were a common Black Hand practice. They sent ransom notes smeared with blood; they put pieces of Angelina’s hair in the envelope warning, “If you don’t send the money, this is the last thing you’ll ever see of her.” Most kidnapped children were murdered even if ransom had been paid, but Angelina was one of the lucky ones. Four months later, after the family had been drained of its money, Angelina was returned. No longer able to bear these streets filled with vice and vermin, Rocco and Giovanna moved their family across the river to New Jersey as soon as they could afford to, eventually opening an ice cream store there. Leaving large Italian colonies was a smart choice for Black Hand victims because entering more assimilated communities where immigrants were adopting American customs and trusting the police gave them much greater protection.<
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  When Angelina was in her eighties, her granddaughter, Laurie Fabiano, author of the historical novel Elizabeth Street, interviewed her about the kidnapping that had haunted the rest of her life. “She remembered every detail,” says Fabiano. “She remembered the color of the blinds in the room where they had her. It was just so amazing to see how a crime could etch itself upon a person like that, and also realize how this crime had impacted my mother and her siblings and had impacted our family as well.” For Fabiano, even bringing friends over to the house when she was young became a traumatic and mortifying occasion. Her fearful grandmother would tell her, “Get them out of the house. They’re not blood. They’re not family.”

  When her grandmother began to describe the kidnapping, she asked Fabiano to turn off the tape recorder because she still believed that there are some things in life you don’t tell—that families are kept safe through silence. “I still feel terrible about lying to my grandmother that day when I kept the tape running,” Fabiano said, “but I felt it was more important to have this story as an historical record. There’s much Italian-American history that has been lost because families have refused to speak. And it wasn’t even dramatic things like what happened to my family, but so many families have just lost so much of their history in the not telling.”

  The silence and secrets would have lasting repercussions in the nation’s Little Italies. First-generation Italian Americans remained separate and isolated and had more difficulty assimilating than did other immigrant groups, such as the English-speaking Irish and the Germans, who were more comfortable with the language’s Anglo-Saxon roots. The media also treated Italian crime differently from the murder and mayhem committed by Irish gangs or Russian, Jewish, and Polish criminals, who also blackmailed under the moniker of the Black Hand. Since the late 1800s, Italians in America had been branded by stereotyping with newspapers reporting that where Sicilians gathered, so did the Mafia.

  The victimizing of the vulnerable Italian immigrant population by the Black Hand did not begin to diminish until around 1915. The federal government enforced laws prohibiting the use of mail as a means to defraud, and Black Hand members had to deliver notes personally, making their endeavors trickier to carry out (although professional gangs were skilled in having others—such as, in Angelina’s case, the iceman—leave notes). The number of immigrants also began to drop, decreasing the pool of potential victims. By the 1920s the Black Hand had essentially disappeared, but left in its wake was a terrorized population of urban immigrants, who held serious doubts as to whether leaving southern Italy meant escaping its hopelessness and despair.

  Giuseppe Petrosino

  After Giuseppe Petrosino was murdered in Sicily on what was supposed to be a secret fact-finding mission, he received a tribute in America that gave him the distinction of being perhaps the most celebrated officer in the history of the New York City Police Department. Over two hundred thousand people lined the streets and crowded on balconies to witness the procession from Little Italy to the cemetery in Queens where he was buried.

  “If Petrosino had died a President or an Emperor,” the New York Times reported, “no deeper or truer show of feeling could have been manifested.” The crowds were so great that from Fourteenth to Forty-Second Streets police officers were delayed repeatedly as they attempted to clear the roads.

  Known as Joseph, Giuseppe Petrosino was a diminutive man of five feet three inches, with a square face marked by smallpox scars. In 1873, when he was thirteen, his family emigrated from the town of Padua in the province of Salerno to New York. Petrosino worked a series of odd jobs until he was hired by the sanitation department as a street sweeper. In the late nineteenth century, the police department ran the sanitation department, enabling Petrosino to work his way up and eventually to be hired onto the force—an unusual accomplishment for an Italian American at the time.

  From his early days in the police department, Petrosino was determined to fight the Black Hand, deeply disturbed that a group of thuggish Italians was preying on its own people and preventing the immigrants from lifting themselves out of poverty. His ability to master many dialects and his penchant for wearing disguises enabled him to infiltrate the group. Once Black Hand members discovered that they were being duped by a police officer, they tried to signal to others when Petrosino was present. In several southern Italian dialects the word petrosino means “parsley,” which prompted the peddlers helping Black Hand members to yell messages such as, “Parsley on sale today.”

  The highest echelons of the department noticed Petrosino’s intelligence work on both the Black Hand and anarchist groups, and Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt appointed Petrosino sergeant of detectives, the first Italian American to reach such a high rank. Eight years later, in 1903, the department tapped Petrosino to lead the newly created Italian Squad, later renamed the Bomb Squad. When the department told Petrosino, by then a lieutenant, about a fact-finding mission to Italy in 1909, he was nearly fifty years old and recently married, with a baby girl named Adelina. His new domestic happiness made him deeply reluctant to go, and even his parish priest begged him to stay, fearing he would be killed. The mission was supposed to be top secret, but in a colossal misjudgment, the police commissioner leaked the story to the press, perhaps to score points for an upcoming election by portraying the department’s determination to eradicate violent gangs. Every major newspaper printed the story, which soon spread to Europe.

  Once in Italy, Petrosino still believed that his identity had been kept secret until he arrived in his home village and his brother showed him the local paper with an article describing his trip to gather intelligence on criminal activity. Still, he didn’t turn back, continuing to Sicily. Lured by the promise of an informant, Petrosino went to the Piazza Marina in Palermo and was circling an enclosed, tree-lined park called the Garibaldi Garden when he was murdered.

  His standing as one of New York City’s most important and renowned crime fighters has mostly been lost in the pages of history, but the 1960 movie Pay or Die made the savvy lieutenant its protagonist, portrayed by Ernest Borgnine, and in 2009 the Lt. Joseph Petrosino Park in New York’s Little Italy was dedicated to him.

  DOCUMENTI

  BLACK HAND EXTORTION

  Translation of extortion letter (from the Italian American Museum): “Dirty bastard. Goddamn pig. We will burn the face of your daughter. Goddamn pig. You will find yourself with a guilty conscience you dog. You must bring the money otherwise we will make you weep bitter tears and you will be responsible for the destruction of your family. Bastard. First you will cry for your daughter and look that we can have her in our hands whenever we want. Before long, we will have her hostage and when your family will see her certainly you will mourn for her. Our vendetta is about to begin.”

  Main Street in San Francisco’s North Beach, where many early Italians settled.

  The Italians in San Francisco shared the plight of all poor immigrants arriving in America: they lived in shoddily built and crowded housing that exposed them to communicable diseases, they faced exploitation as unskilled and semiskilled laborers, and they suffered discrimination because they didn’t speak English. Yet the western experience offered promise and possibilities that seemed merely dreams back east. By the early 1900s, Italians were shaping the economic development of California in agriculture and fishing, as well as in real estate and banking.

  Was it the possibility of the West—the psychological freedom drawing so many to its vast uncharted land—that laid the path for this success? Was it the lack of interest in a class status that preoccupied eastern society? The Italians who first arrived in California had one clear advantage: they were a northern Italian population of peasants, living in an area that in the 1850s had established some of the first passenger ship service from Italy to San Francisco. They were poor certainly, but not as desperately poor as those from southern Italy.

  The northerners also had fewer obstacles to overcome once they reached the New W
orld. Prejudice existed, of course, but it was tempered by the American imagination of northern Italy as the land of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and a promising composer named Giuseppe Verdi—far different from the image promulgated in the South and on the East Coast of a “Sicilian Mafia” infiltrating American life. And it didn’t hurt that the northern Italians were taller than their southern counterparts and had lighter skin and hair color—traits that matched more closely America’s dominant groups.

  Italians from Genoa, Tuscany (mainly from the province of Lucca), Piedmont, and the Veneto came to Sacramento, San Francisco, and the Sierra Nevada foothills as early as 1850, enticed by the great gold rush. Even when the promise of gold had vanished, its legacy of energy, possibility, and optimism remained. Northern California’s verdant hills, sloping valleys, clear waters, and cinnamon and terra-cotta colors remarkably matched the home these immigrants had left behind, and they welcomed the beauty of the land, although, like most Italians entering America, they imagined it as only a temporary layover before returning home.

  When southern Italians, lured by railroad agents who came to their villages with oversized promises of jobs and land, began to arrive in San Francisco in the late nineteenth century, the United States was in an economic downturn. Many fewer jobs were available, and the immigrants packed into an already crowded housing stock. For years, tensions existed between the two Italian communities, and for a while it seemed as if the beloved “Italian Colony” the northerners had created would be dismantled by the forces of poverty and illiteracy. But the northern Italians, in a mix of pragmatism and humanism, followed, for the most part, their better angels and lent a helping hand to their less fortunate brethren.