But no one had seen or heard from the boy. A fourth letter arrived, demanding the family sell their modest home to raise the ransom. The building was the Labarberas’ only asset in America, something they’d spent their lives saving for. Selling it would doom the parents and their children to grinding poverty, a poverty they’d left the Mezzogiorno to escape. It would snuff out their American dream for at least a generation.
Somehow, the Society had anticipated the family’s reaction. Included in the fourth letter was an incentive, perhaps directed at Mrs. Labarbera. When the paper was unfolded, something fell out and tumbled to the floor. A dark lock of Willie’s hair.
…
The days passed. Nothing. The boy had been atomized.
Then, in the third week, a tip from an nfame. This man had heard a curious story from Kenilworth, New Jersey. A woman had been out strolling in a working-class neighborhood when she passed a man carrying a large bundle. Just as the woman walked past, something inside the bundle had emitted a piercing cry. The man hurried into a nearby house, so crude and ramshackle that it was described as a “hut,” and closed the door. But the woman, startled by what she’d heard, remained outside, watching the door intently. A few minutes later, the same man emerged from the house, still carrying the package—which was silent now—and placed it in a covered wagon. Then he drove away.
On hearing the story, Petrosino immediately hurried to the foot of West 23rd Street and stepped aboard one of the steamship ferries to New Jersey. As he watched the docks of the West Side recede, with the lamps that hung from peddlers’ pushcarts glowing in the dusk like distant campfires, the detective leaned over the railing and listened to the waters of the Hudson whoosh and sigh against the ferry’s prow. His mind was whirring with possibilities, names and faces of suspects, stored in his memory months and years earlier and now called to account. Perhaps he sipped a glass of buttermilk bought from one of the vendors (two cents for the unsterilized version, three cents for the sterilized). The trip would take about a quarter of an hour, so Petrosino had a few minutes to think.
The Black Hand was growing more daring and ruthless with every passing month. The scale of what was happening in New York was difficult to comprehend. In the Italian colonies, as the immigrant neighborhoods were known, the men patrolled in front of their homes with loaded shotguns; children were locked inside barricaded rooms, forbidden to go to school; buildings stood open to the weather, their fronts ripped off by bombs the organization had planted. Certain quarters of New York, one of the most prosperous and cosmopolitan cities in the world, were being bombarded as though the metropolis were under siege from a dreadnought anchored in Upper Bay. “The society of darkness” had killed dozens of men, mutilated and maimed others, and now held tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of citizens under its spell. The panic had grown to such proportions that a family had only to return home and spot a black hand imprinted on their door in coal dust—a sign that the Society had paid a visit—for them to hurriedly pack up their belongings and board the next ship back to Italy.
And it wasn’t happening just in New York. As Petrosino had long predicted, the fear had spread from city to city, blazing across the country like a prairie fire. The Black Hand had materialized in Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco, Newport, Boston, and in hundreds of smaller cities, midsized towns, mining camps, quarries, and company villages in between. It had murdered men and women in many of those places, blown up buildings, triggered lynching parties, and deepened the mistrust of Americans for their Italian neighbors. Countless Americans—not just Italian immigrants—were in the thrall of the Society, and more would soon fall victim: millionaires, judges, governors, mayors, Rockefellers, lawyers, members of the Chicago Cubs, sheriffs, district attorneys, society matrons, gangster kingpins. That January, members of Congress had been threatened by a series of Society letters, and although their story had a unique and rather bizarre ending, several of the representatives from various states had fallen victim to “nervous prostration” as a result.
There were towns in the coal belt of Pennsylvania that had been taken over by the Society as if by armed coup; its leaders held the power of life and death over their citizens. After a shocking Black Hand murder, the residents of Buckingham County would send a message to the Pennsylvania governor that resembled those from settlers in the early West surrounded by Apache: “Conditions here intolerable; a gang of assassins strongly entrenched three miles away; one citizen shot in back, others threatened; county authorities appear powerless.” The petitioners asked for “detectives and bloodhounds.” New laws were being written and passed to slow a wave of terror that seemed incapable of being stopped. The South was in revolt against Italian immigrants, largely because of the Society’s outrages. President Teddy Roosevelt, a friend of Petrosino’s from his days as New York police commissioner, was said to be closely following developments from the White House. Even the diminutive king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, had taken time away from the vast coin collection that obsessed him to write Petrosino about the issue, which was close to his heart, enclosing an expensive gold watch along with the letter. Citizens of nations from India to France and England were enthralled by this contest between the forces of civilization and those of anarchy, and perhaps touched with Schadenfreude at the difficulties the young upstart of a country was having with its dark-eyed immigrants.
Petrosino was well aware of this attention, with good reason. He wasn’t just a salaried employee of the New York Police Department; he was famous, perhaps the most famous Italian American in the country. And with fame, at least in Petrosino’s eyes, came responsibility. Along with a small vanguard of his compatriots—a lawyer, a district attorney, the founder of a fraternal society—the detective had set out to spark a movement that would lift Italians out of their precarious situation. They were accused of being a savage people unfit for American citizenship; Petrosino furiously disagreed. “The Italian has a natural love of liberty,” he argued to the New York Times. “He has had to fight bitterly for enlightenment in his own country and what Italy is today has been attained by heroic struggling.” But his struggle, to make Italians into full-fledged Americans, was faltering in the face of the ongoing war against the Society; even the Times had joined the calls for an end to immigration from southern Italy. How could you redeem your race when the “vampires” of the Black Hand were bombing, maiming, and killing their way across the entire country?
As Petrosino had learned, you couldn’t. The struggles were too intimately connected. The writer H. P. Lovecraft would later provide an example of the animosity Americans felt toward the newcomers in a letter to a friend in which he described immigrants from Italy crowded into the Lower East Side as creatures who “could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human.” Instead, “they were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities.”
If Petrosino had been winning the battle against the Black Hand, his crusade would have proceeded more smoothly. But 1906 had gone badly; blood, allies, and territory had been lost. The shadow of the Society now extended over the whole of Petrosino’s adopted homeland, from the stone mansions of Long Island to the craggy inlets of Seattle. Petrosino was filled with foreboding.
But tonight he would put aside his worries. He needed to find Willie Labarbera.
Petrosino reached the far shore and disembarked. He hired a carriage, and the driver hissed at the horses and sped off toward Kenilworth, about twenty miles due west, with the detective aboard. The pier cleared of its passengers, and a horse cart filled with coal trundled aboard the ferry to supply its engine room with fresh fuel, then departed, after which the ferry pulled out for the return trip to Manhattan. The dock grew quiet. A few hours later, a carri
age reappeared at the dock and Petrosino climbed out. He waited for the ferry to arrive, then stepped aboard. The vessel pulled away from the New Jersey pier and slipped across the dark, rippling water toward the gas lamps glittering in the low-slung city across the Hudson. He was alone. The boy had been nowhere to be found.
When Petrosino was worried over a particularly difficult case, it was his habit to take refuge in the operas of Verdi, his favorite composer. He’d pick up his violin and bow and play one song in particular, “Di Provenza il mar,” Germont’s aria from La Traviata. In it, a father consoles his son over the loss of his beloved by reminding the young man of his childhood home in Provence, its dazzling sun and sweet memories:
Oh, rammenta pur nel duol
ch’ivi gioia a te brillò;
e che pace colà sol
su te splendere ancor può.
(Oh, remember in your pain
that joy shone on you,
and that peace only there
can yet glow upon you.)
Sitting in his bachelor apartment, Petrosino would play the aria “incessantly,” his powerful hands moving the bow slowly through the lyrical opening notes before progressing into the difficult portions. It’s a lovely piece, but a mournful one; it expresses a longing for things that are past and will probably never return.
We can imagine that Petrosino’s neighbors heard the aria many times that night.
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About the Author
STEPHAN TALTY is the award-winning author of Agent Garbo, Empire of Blue Water, and other best-selling works of narrative nonfiction. His books have been made into two films, the Oscar-winning Captain Phillips and Only the Brave. He has written for the New York Times Magazine and GQ, among other publications.
Learn more at stephantalty.com
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