The Italian Americans

by Maria Laurino

  The loud and crude Capone, who was born in Brooklyn and had dropped out of school after the sixth grade, pushed violence and mayhem to a new degree. Torrio had started by taking over the production of once-legal breweries; under his guidance, Capone helped expand their enterprise to gambling and prostitution. Capone, lacking the patience and calm of Torrio, did not take lightly to violations of peace arrangements made by warring gangsters divvying up these businesses. When George (“Bugs”) Moran refused to honor one such arrangement, Capone responded by sending four men (two were dressed as police officers) into a garage to murder seven members of Moran’s group.

  Capone arranged the shocking killings known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  With over a thousand bullets fired, the shockingly gruesome murders, known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, appalled the public. This reaction eventually pushed the federal government to act, arresting Capone for tax evasion two years later, in 1931. Capone, spending most of the decade in prison and suffering from the effects of syphilis, never recovered, but the power of his organized crime syndicate carried on.

  Besides Capone, no Italian-American gangster matched the power and viciousness of New York’s criminals competing for the most lucrative illegal liquor market in the country. New York—“Satan’s seat,” in the words of a Protestant minister and temperance leader—was home to over thirty-two thousand speakeasies and nightclubs. The fight for dominance resulted in the murder of over a thousand gangsters in the 1920s. The ugliness of these murders—machine gun firing squads, burlap bags dropped into cement and sea, bodies burned in automobiles—was also unparalleled.

  The most influential mobster of the 1950s, Frank Costello—who owned a lavish Central Park West apartment and appeared on the cover of Time and Newsweek—made his way up the ranks through bootlegging. Born Francesco Castiglia in Calabria, he had come to America as a young boy with his parents, who settled in East Harlem. From the age of seventeen he had been arrested several times for robberies, but the early cases against him had been dismissed. At twenty-four, he was arrested again and spent nearly a year in jail. After his release, Costello married a Jewish woman and worked easily with Irish and Jewish gangsters, enabling him to branch out from the world of solely Italian-American thugs.

  By the 1920s, Costello and future mob head Charlie (“Lucky”) Luciano, the man later credited for creating the organizational structure of the modern American Mafia, were both members of a powerful bootlegging gang. Costello worked as a rumrunner, meeting boats off the coast of Long Island, transferring the liquor to his trucks, and making sure troublesome competition stepped out of the way. Both men came under the influence of Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein (known as “The Brain”), who tutored them in how to make large sums of money in illegal alcohol and expand to other businesses.

  Costello bore a tremendous grudge over the ways in which poor Italians accepted their sorry lot in America. Unlike radical leftists, such as the Galleanisti, who believed that American capitalists deserved letter bombs for their abuse of workers, Costello’s attack on “the system” came through a criminal version of capitalist entrepreneurship. Like the twenty-first-century fictional mobster Tony Soprano, who confessed to his shrink about his demanding mother, Costello complained to his Park Avenue psychiatrist that he hated the humility and meekness of his father, who had settled for poverty and poor treatment. He also deplored his inability to be accepted as a legitimate businessman, despite investing over the decades in legal pursuits.

  Along with fellow New York bootleggers Lucky Luciano and Joe Bonanno, Costello ran speakeasies and nightclubs, mingled with rich New Yorkers, and aspired to at least the appearance of legitimacy—a far cry from street thug, gang, or Black Hand members. By the time Prohibition ended in 1933, these local mob leaders had made partnerships with bootleggers across the country. Seeking new streams of revenue, the gangsters expanded into business and labor racketeering. Unions like the International Longshoremen’s Association and the Teamsters were particularly vulnerable. The gangsters demanded kickbacks for finding jobs and secured payments from businesses that depended on truck deliveries. Rich and unaffected by the Depression, they also returned to their earlier sources of income—gambling, loan-sharking, prostitution, and the expanding market for narcotics.

  Over the next few decades these Italian Americans, along with Jewish gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Ben (“Bugsy”) Siegel, dominated the criminal landscape, leaving the ethnic ghettos they had come from to establish multimillion-dollar illegal empires. Prohibition taught them that crime did pay—if you were shrewd and ruthless enough to get out alive.

  If only the sincere but inept Protestant reformers, trying to shape how immigrants became American, could have stuck to suggesting oatmeal and left their efforts at the breakfast table. By successfully stopping the legal production of alcohol for thirteen years, they spawned a savvy organized crime network that grew rapidly and exponentially in sophistication and reach.

  In East Harlem in the first decades of the twentieth century, there couldn’t have been a greater moral and intellectual divide between tenement coevals, the revered educator Leonard Covello and the wily mobster Frank Costello. Sadly, popular culture, with its attraction to Italian-American criminals, made Costello, not Covello, the more famous of the two. Another man, however—a short, stocky, and pugnacious politician representing East Harlem as a congressman—would also capture the country’s imagination and soon come to symbolize the early extraordinary achievements of Italians in America.

  Fiorello La Guardia (left) wasn’t the first Italian-American mayor of a major city. Angelo J. Rossi, mayor of San Francisco (seen here with La Guardia), was. But as mayor of New York, La Guardia became the nation’s best-known political figure after Franklin Roosevelt.

  When Fiorello La Guardia was sworn into office on January 1, 1934, as mayor of New York City, it was the first wet New Year’s Eve after fourteen interminably dry ones under Prohibition. The inauguration was particularly thrilling for Italian Americans, now numbering over one million in New York City and exuberant that one of their own had reached this pinnacle, ending the control of a corrupt band of Tammany Hall politicians that had drained the city’s coffers. La Guardia wasn’t the first Italian-American mayor of a major city—Angelo J. Rossi of San Francisco beat him by two years—but he was the first Italian American in Congress, and as mayor of New York he became the nation’s best-known political figure after President Franklin Roosevelt. For an ethnic group that had been the target of an increasingly virulent nativist prejudice during the previous decade, La Guardia’s election was monumental.

  Fiorello La Guardia was, in many ways, the perfect representative for a beleaguered Italian people. The indefatigable politician, who reached just over five feet in height, had suffered his own share of indignities and personal tragedies. Unlike the anarchists intent on destroying a system that they believed caused only misery, La Guardia channeled his anger and grief into creating effective and lasting change through government action.

  Born in a four-story building in Greenwich Village, Fiorello (which means “little flower”) spent most of his childhood in Arizona. His parents, Achille La Guardia (a musician born in the town of Foggia in southern Italy) and Irene Luzzatto-Coen came to America after Achille had been offered the opportunity to play and arrange music here. Although a talented cornetist, Achille never found permanent work with an orchestra and eventually joined the army as a bandmaster—a decision that took the family west.

  Fiorello’s mother was a Sephardic Jew born in Trieste when the city was under Austrian rule. As part of a prominent Italian Jewish family, though, she always thought of herself as Italian. With Achille a lapsed Catholic and Irene not particularly religious, they raised their children as Episcopalians, adding to the mixed cultural and religious heritage that shaped La Guardia’s outsider status.

  The family moved around to follow Achille’s military assignments, and while stationed in Florida
during the Spanish-American War, he became ill eating rancid beef, which had been returned from England a year earlier, embalmed with preservatives, and sold to the army for its rations. Thousands of others similarly suffered food poisoning in what became known as the “embalmed” beef scandal, and Achille developed hepatitis, further complicated by malaria. The realization that disreputable contractors out to make a profit had sickened his father, along with thousands of other soldiers, made a profound and lasting impression on the adolescent Fiorello. His father retired from the army a weakened and angry man, and died several years later from a heart attack.

  Before La Guardia’s father died, the family returned to Trieste to live with Fiorello’s maternal grandmother. Fiorello stayed for a few years to help support his mother, but eventually he became anxious to return to America, and he found employment in Ohio. The job didn’t last long. Fiorello longed to live in New York, and his knowledge of several languages secured him a job at Ellis Island working for immigration services as an interpreter and caseworker. La Guardia never finished high school or attended college, but he took courses to acquire a high school diploma and enrolled in night classes at New York University Law School, where he earned a degree. At Ellis Island, La Guardia witnessed the cruel treatment of immigrants and arbitrary permanent separations that took place after family members failed the medical inspection. These incidents stoked his rage. By the time La Guardia arrived in Washington, he was ready to fight for social justice.

  The political career of Fiorello La Guardia—which began with his first election to Congress in 1917—combined tenacity, improbability, and luck. He was a die-hard progressive, sympathetic to immigrants and labor, but he ran on the Republican line because the brazenly corrupt Irish political machine known as Tammany Hall dominated the Democratic ticket. The Republicans, composed mostly of New York’s gentry, considered La Guardia crude and loud. But they also needed the pugnacious and overwhelmingly popular politician because there was little Republican representation in the state.

  La Guardia’s first bill in Congress—a surprising move for a freshman, who is supposed to be seen but not heard—sought penalties for anyone who knowingly sold inferior supplies to the army or navy: a prison term in times of peace and the death penalty during war. The bill never went any further than the Judiciary Committee, the usual fate of legislation for a junior congressman without strong party backing. But it became clear from the beginning of his career that La Guardia meant to be seen and heard.

  La Guardia ran as a Republican because the brazenly corrupt Irish political machine known as Tammany Hall dominated the Democratic ticket.

  La Guardia briefly left Congress to serve as a fighter pilot during World War I. Strongly patriotic at a time when his ideological colleagues remained pacifists, he enthusiastically applied to a training camp. The congressman had learned to fly several years earlier, when he served as the attorney for the airplane company of a man named Giuseppe Bellanca. La Guardia was sent to Italy as the lieutenant of a bombing squadron, and returned to the States a major. While some of his supporters denounced his decision to leave the people of his district to fight in the war, he won reelection, returned to Washington, and spent the remainder of his time there putting forth a progressive agenda that prefigured major themes and ideas of the New Deal.

  An attractive Italian dress designer whom La Guardia had courted before the war, Thea Almerigotti, from his mother’s hometown of Trieste, finally agreed to marry him. The next year Thea gave birth to a baby girl, Fioretta. The sheer happiness of this time was extremely short-lived; both wife and daughter developed tuberculosis, a disease commonly acquired from living in tenements, as the couple did. Two years later, Fiorello’s daughter died of tuberculous meningitis, and his twenty-six-year-old wife, of pulmonary tuberculosis.

  Within two years after La Guardia married Thea Almerigotti, both she and their baby girl, Fioretta, would die from diseases commonly acquired from tenement living.

  When a newspaper reporter asked La Guardia shortly after his wife’s death how he would spend $1 million a day—the daily sum of New York City’s annual budget—La Guardia responded with the fury and passion that would define his tenure in Congress and as mayor. “First I would tear out about five square miles of filthy tenements, so that fewer would be infected with tuberculosis like that beautiful girl of mine, my wife, who died—and my baby . . . Then I would establish ‘lungs’ in crowded neighborhoods—a breathing park here, another there, based on the density of population . . . Milk stations next. One wherever needed, where pure, cheap milk can be bought for babies and mothers learn how to take care of them. After that the schools! I would keep every child in school, to the eighth grade at least, well-fed and in health. Then we could provide widows pensions and support enough schools for every child in New York on what we saved from reformatories and penal institutions . . . I would provide more music and beauty for the people, more parks and more light and air and all the things the framers of the Constitution meant.”

  A significant and popular Progressive Party existed in America in the 1920s that vigorously challenged the status quo and culminated in the effort to elect Robert La Follette as president. La Guardia was a member of this movement, which he described as “the arousing of a united protest against conditions which have become intolerable”—conditions such as the high cost of food and rent, vast economic inequality, a tax system that significantly favored the rich, and the exploitation of workers.

  Although the Progressive movement made fighting for economic equality a keystone of its agenda, most of its members came from the Midwest, which meant that one of La Guardia’s most salient issues—immigration—was barely on their radar screen. Having grown up in the West and watched how Italian organ-grinders were mocked (kids would cry out, “A dago with a monkey!”), and having spent his career in the East combating the stereotype of the “crude wop,” La Guardia championed immigration reform. He wanted to remedy the abusive treatment of families at Ellis Island and change the restrictive quotas placed on southern and eastern Europeans. Learning that an Italian girl diagnosed with trachoma had been denied the right to a delayed deportation, which would have allowed her to return to Italy with her mother rather than alone, La Guardia sent a telegram to the secretary of labor, condemning the department’s action as “cruel, inhuman, narrow-minded, prejudiced.”

  When, in 1924, nativists in Congress supporting the Johnson-Reed Act declared that “we have too many aliens in this country . . . we want more of the American stock,” La Guardia responded, “Is not this country made up of immigrants no matter what period of history you take?” By setting quotas based on immigration rates from 1890, the legislation ensured the drastic reduction of Italians and Jews. La Guardia fought to have quotas pegged to 1920 immigration levels, but the bill overwhelmingly passed by a vote of 323 to 71.

  La Guardia detested the stereotype of the Italian organ-grinder. Growing up in the West, he had heard kids cry out, “A dago with a monkey!”

  Fearless of special interests, La Guardia refused to cater to them. He supported a rent control bill despite the urgings of the powerful Real Estate Board of New York to vote against this “radical” act. The undeterred congressman wrote back, “I have read the arguments contained in your memorandum and it is the same old whining, cringing pleas presented by the New York landlords who have thrived on the housing situation . . . Nothing better in support of the bill could have reached the memberships of Congress than a protest from the landlords of New York City. Please keep up your good work.”

  Many Italian-American women were talented seamstresses, and the ethnic group dominated the garment industry in the 1920s and ’30s. The black velvet dress and prom dress pictured here were designed and sewn by Nina Piscopo, a daughter of immigrants who had the good fortune of attending an art and design college in the 1930s.

  Throughout the decade, La Guardia warned of the nation’s excessive inequality and sought to ameliorate rural and urban pov
erty. He introduced legislation to establish unemployment insurance. He advocated government ownership of power, railroads, coal, water, and oil to protect the public good over private profit. He was called a socialist and a radical, although his Old World values belied the second label. La Guardia could also be culturally conservative, especially toward the arts: he was suspicious of free-form jazz and modern art and dance, and preferred classical music and other more traditional art forms. While supportive of women’s rights, he had old-fashioned expectations of women as wives and mothers.

  Such traditionalism was a luxury, however, for the majority of urban Italian-American women. In the 1920s, Italian Americans represented the largest group of women working in the manufacturing sector, and this number continued to grow in the following two decades, a time in which they dominated the garment industry. Seamstresses in factories, hat plume and piece workers at home—Italian-American women took needle to thread to help their impoverished families survive. As a congressman, La Guardia backed organized labor and joined workers on the picket line during the 1926 garment strike in New York.

  La Guardia made fun of Prohibition, mixing two legal substances, drinking his homemade concoction, and waiting for the cops to arrest him.