by Bruno, Joe
“Petrosino was killed!” Saietta said. “It was successful! The way it was done could never have missed in Palermo. It was good he was fool enough to go there.”
Zu Vincenzo opened a bottle of wine and said, “No one will now go to Sicily to search for evidence to use against the Mafia. For in going there they will find death.”
Saietta was somewhat disappointed the Sicilian Mafia would get most of the credit for the Petrosino hit, since the money sent to Palermo to insure the Petrosino hit was raised by the Black Handers in New York City.
Saietta poured himself and Zu Vincenzo a glass of wine.
“Some credit is due to us,” Saietta said. “Though the Palermo crowd will get the most.”
Then the two men toasted the death of their late mortal enemy: New York City Police Lieut. Joseph Petrosino.
However, the Black Handers had an enemy as great as Petrosino, and his name was Deputy Inspector William Flynn, who had taken Petrosino’s place as head of the Secret Service.
Flynn, an expert detective but a little on the talkative side (especially when talking about himself), had been actively investigating Morello and Saietta since the “Barrel Murders” of 1903. Flynn also knew that Morello, Saietta, and their gang were running an extensive counterfeiting operation, but at the present time Flynn could not uncover where the bills were being printed. However, he was fairly sure they were not being printed in New York City.
Employing several undercover policemen, Flynn had what he called a “life surveillance” put on Morello. “Life surveillance” was an over-exaggeration, since, because of the lack of police manpower, Morello was only intermittently observed. Still, Morello was certainly on Flynn’s radar, as was Saietta, until Saietta inexplicably disappeared from New York City and went into hiding in Highland where he oversaw the group’s counterfeit printing operations.
In early 1908, Saietta began a large-scale fraud scheme, using his wholesale network of grocery stores in New York City (he imported olive oil and other Italian delicacies from Italy). Saietta operated out of his Mott Street store, while other grocery stores throughout the city were owned by Saietta’s confederates, active not only in the Black Hand extortions, but also in a nationwide counterfeiting operation.
In November 1908, Saietta filed for bankruptcy concerning his import businesses. As a result, Saietta’s Mott Street store was seized under the orders of the United States court. When the receivers went into the store to examine the books, they found only $1,500 inventory and more than $100,000 in debts. The receivers also discovered that the week before he disappeared, Saietta had made more than $50,000 worth of purchases, but those goods were nowhere to be found. This meant the people who sold Saietta these goods were stiffed of the 50 grand he owned them. (This is called the standard “bust out” scheme, where you buy as much merchandise that you can on credit, sell the merchandise on the black market, pocket the cash, and then file for bankruptcy.)
Saietta’s cohorts in the scheme also filed for bankruptcy around the same time as Saietta. Antonio Passananti, who had been sent to Sicily by Morello and Saietta to do away with New York City Police Lieut. Joseph Petrosino, owned a wholesale wine business in Brooklyn. He too used the ‘bust out” scheme to close his business and claim bankruptcy. When the receivers investigated Passananti’s store, they found records that he had given huge sums of money to Saietta before they had both disappeared. The New York Times reported that a dozen other Italian wholesale dealers had also gone into the wind, resulting in total liabilities of close to $500,000.
In November of 1909, with Petrosino now deceased, Saietta triumphantly returned to New York City. With his lawyer Charles Barbier in tow, Saietta marched into the bankruptcy receiver’s office and told a tall tale of why he had suddenly left New York City. Saietta said he had been sent a Black Hand extortion letter, and fearing for his life, he had fled to Baltimore, and then Buffalo, before spending the final few weeks at his brother’s grocery store in Hoboken.
Saietta hired a phalanx of lawyers to fight his creditors, and he returned to his old haunts in New York City, socializing with Morello and other Black Handers. What Saietta did not know was that Inspector Flynn had his men following Saietta. One day, they followed him to Highland, and now they knew exactly where the counterfeit bills were being printed.
Flynn had enough evidence to arrest Morello, Saietta, and several other Black Handers who were in on the counterfeiting operation. However, Flynn didn’t want to arrest the minor players first, because he feared Morello would be tipped off and go into hiding. From his surveillance on Morello, Flynn knew Morello lived in a tenement at 207 East 107th Street. However, Flynn did not know in which apartment Morello resided. One of Flynn’s operatives was 17-year-old Thomas Callahan, who had been posing as a shoeshine boy on 107th Street.
On the night of Nov. 15, 1909, Callahan spotted Morello, along with Vincenzo Terranova and another man, heading down the block toward their building. Without an exact plan in place, and wanting to know which apartment the Mafiosos inhabited, Callahan immediately ran into the four-story building. The building was totally dark, since the janitor, as was his custom at night, had turned off the interior lights.
Callahan stopped on the second floor of the tenement. He heard the three men enter the building and begin walking up the steps towards him. Callahan, not knowing exactly what to do, slithered quietly to the top floor. He then realized that the Black Handers, who were always armed, might continue upwards and see him trapped on the 4th floor with no reason for being there.
Here is where Callahan made a bold move that might have saved his life.
Like he had nary a care in the world, Callahan started skipping down the stairs. Between the third and fourth-story landing Callahan came face to face with “The Clutch Hand.”
At first Morello looked puzzled. Then Morello stared Callahan straight in the eye and said, “’Scusa please.”
Callahan moved to one side of the stairs, and without saying another word, the three Mafiosos passed Callahan and continued to the top floor. Expecting a bullet in his back, Callahan sped down the stairs and out of the building; his heart pumping like a runaway train.
As he hurried to where the other agents were waiting, Callahan turned around to see if he had been followed out of the building.
He hadn’t.
Within minutes after Callahan exited 207 East 107th Street, Flynn’s agents had surrounded the building; their eyes on the 4th-floor window where the lights were still on. Every so often, they could see one of the men in the room pass the window, but not once did any of the Mafiosos look out of the window. That was a lucky break for Flynn.
It wasn’t until 11 a.m. the following morning that Flynn decided it was time to make his move.
Flynn, along with six of his best men, including Callahan, quietly entered the building and climbed the steps. Flynn had a skeleton key in his possession, which could open virtually any lock.
When they reached the door of the 4th-floor apartment, Flynn pressed his ear to the door. He heard no movement inside. He quietly inserted the skeleton key, unlocked the door and with their guns pointed in front of them, Flynn and his agents slowly crept into the apartment.
The front door opened into the kitchen, but nobody was there. Flynn opened the door to one of the bedrooms, and there was Morello, deep in dreamland and snoring lightly. On a second bed next to him lay his half-brother, Vincent Terranova, also sawing wood.
“We had no intention of waking them,” Flynn later told the press. “Until we were sitting on them.”
Flynn gave the word to his men to pounce, and in seconds, both Morello and Vincent Terranova were in custody. Under Morello’s pillow, the cops found four loaded revolvers; under Terranova’s pillow – five. Certainly, if they were not sleeping, the two men would have put up a hell of a fight.
The noise Flynn’s men made in snagging the two Mafiosos awakened the rest of the apartment’s inhabitants. In seconds, three half-dressed men exite
d their bedroom, screaming and cursing in Italian. Morello’s wife, Lina, emerged from a third bedroom, her infant daughter in one arm and a huge knife in the other hand. It took two men to subdue Lina and relieve her of her weapon. Still holding her baby tight and incensed the agents had invaded her privacy, Lina spat on them in defiance.
The Italian men tried to create a diversion, so that evidence could be hidden and eventually destroyed. As two Italians started making a fuss, one of Flynn’s men spotted one of the Italians stuffing several letters into Lina Morello’s apron, which lay sprawled on the kitchen table. Thinking no one was watching, Lena grabbed her apron, pulled out several letters, and stuffed them into her infant’s clothing.
Holding the baby, Lina tried to leave the room. Two burly agents pounced on her and a fierce skirmish ensued. With Lina kicking, screaming and cursing, Flynn was able to search the infant’s clothing. There he found three letters and several more in Lena’s apron. They were all Black Hand letters waiting to be sent to their intended targets.
However, Flynn’s men did not fare too well in their battle with “Hellcat Lina,” as was evidenced by the several dozen cuts and bruises all over their battered bodies.
Flynn’s men fanned out and searched the other apartments at 207 East 107th Street. When the dust settled, they had arrested 14 Black Handers and counterfeiters (some men were both). As an added bonus, $3,000 in fake two-dollar bills was found in a paper bag under the bed in the apartment occupied by the Vasi brothers.
It was a fine roundup for Flynn indeed. But one of the big fish was nowhere to be found: Ignazio “Lupo the Wolf” Saietta.
As the search for Saietta continued, other members of Morello’s and Saietta’s crew were arrested throughout the city. Domenico Milone was arrested at a grocery store at East 97th Street; Antonio LoBaido, Frank Columbo, Giuseppe Mercurio, and Luciano Maddi were among the others snagged by the police.
Failure of communication within the New York City police department delayed Saietta’s arrest on the Highland counterfeiting charges. On Nov. 18, 1909, just three days after the arrest of Morello and his gang, Saietta was arrested for extorting a man named Manzella, a Manhattan store owner who claimed Saietta had ruined his business.
On Nov. 22, Manzella, not surprisingly, got cold feet and refused to appear in court for Saietta’s arraignment. The Manzella case was dropped, but Saietta was immediately arrested under a bench warrant dated April 21, which charged him with being in possession of counterfeit money way back in 1902. The bail was set at $5,000, which Saietta immediately posted.
As a result, Saietta walked out of court a free man. When the New York City police department finally got their communication wires uncrossed, they realized they had their man in the clutches, but they had let him escape.
On Nov. 26, the New York City police department issued an internal proclamation saying that any officer who could arrest Saietta in connection with the Highland counterfeiting case would immediately be promoted to first-grade detective. As it turned out, because of an unrelated case of a piano theft, Saietta fell right into Flynn’s hands.
The piano was stolen in Hoboken, N. J. by a man who was described as an “Italian immigrant.” This man was traced to a home at 8804 Bay 16th Street, in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn. When the police arrived at that address, they found Saietta, who had rented the house under the name of Joe LaPresti. Saietta was arrested, along with fellow counterfeiter, Giuseppe Palermo. When the police searched the house, they discovered a loaded revolver, Black Hand letters, phony passports, and three bank books under the names John Lupo, Joseph LaPresti, and Giuseppe LaPresti.
Saietta, realizing he should have used the phony passports while he had a chance to leave the country, offered the arresting officer a $100 bribe as payment for letting Saietta escape arrest. The police officer refused the bribe and received his promotion to first-grade detective instead.
*****
The counterfeiting trial of the Black Handers commenced on Jan. 26, 1910, in a federal courthouse on Houston Street. It turned out to be a raucous carnival show, showcasing crying clowns as the main act.
The judge was the honorable George Ray, and there were eight defendants, including the stars of the show: Joe “The Clutch Hand” Morello and Ignazio “Lupo the Wolf” Saietta. They were represented by attorney Mirabeau Towns, who was born in Alabama and went to law school in Atlanta, Ga. Towns was notable by the fact that he sometimes presented his court addresses in verse, which could not have pleased Judge Ray too much.
There were 60 witnesses in all put forth by the state. The main witness against the counterfeiters was a timid little man named Antonio Comito, who was kidnapped by the Black Handers, and along with his wife, forced to do the actual printing of the counterfeit bills in Highland. Comito told the court he and his wife personally printed $46,000 worth of counterfeit bills.
Comito also said when New York City Police Lieut. Joseph Petrosino was killed, Saietta had commented, “We did a fine job with Petrosino in Sicily.”
The trial came to its conclusion on Feb. 19, 1910, and it took the jury only 1½ hours to come back with eight guilty verdicts.
At the eight mens’ sentencing, the theatrics began.
Giuseppe Morello was the first defendant called before Judge Ray for sentencing.
According to published reports, “Morello was cringing before the judge. He held out his left hand, deformed from birth, for the inspection of Judge Ray. This was the hand that Morello was averse to showing to the jury that had tried him. He was the father of a family, he said (through an interpreter), and if the dear court would only suspend his sentence, he would go to Italy at once.
“But Judge Ray told Morello that he might serve 15 years and pay a fine of $500 on the first count against him, and serve 10 years and pay another $500 on the second count against him. Morello didn’t wait for the interpreter to tell him the bad news. He dropped into a faint, and he had to be picked up and carried to the pen by the deputies.”
Big, bad “Lupo the Wolf” was next in line for sentencing.
Newspaper reports said, “Was Lupo the brave and nervy criminal that he had been supposed? Not for a moment. He began to weep before he reached the bar, and by the time Judge Ray had finished asking him what he had to say, he had used up one whole handkerchief with his tears. His thick, fat body shook with emotion as he told the court how the murder charge against him (in Italy) was all wrong, and he had been hounded by the police in two countries.
“Judge Ray, getting in words between Lupo’s sobs, told Lupo that he had passed sentence on himself as to the old murder case when he fled from Italy instead of standing trial.”
Judge Ray then told Saietta, “I believe you and Morello were at the head of this undertaking. You have been convicted. I sentence you to 15 years and a fine of $500 on the first count and 15 years and a similar fine on the second count.”
Still crying like a baby, Lupo was led back to his cell to finish his blubbering in private.
Judge Ray then passed sentence on the remaining six men; giving the eight convicted criminals a total 150 years in prison.
The incarceration of Saietta and Morello effectively ended the Black Hand extortion letter scheme in America, but it did not end their lives of crime.
*****
With Morello and Saietta both behind bars for the foreseeable future, Nick Terranova took control of their old gang. With counterfeiting out of the question and the Black Hand letters a thing of the past, Nick, with the help of his brother, Ciro, branched out into other criminal endeavors, including loansharking and the very profitable numbers rackets. Ciro also expanded the family’s importing business and soon became known as the “Artichoke King,” because he got a piece of the sale of every artichoke that was imported into the United States.
And Italians love their artichokes.
Of course, a murder or two was always in the cards, especially if a dupe was reluctant to pay his debt, or if an enterprising gangster
decided to move in on their territory. This, in fact, happened in 1915, when trouble came in the form of Neapolitan Cammora gangster Don Pelligrino Morano, the boss of the rackets in Brooklyn.
Morano, not satisfied with controlling only Brooklyn, started moving in on the Terranova territory in Greenwich Village and in East Harlem. To thwart the competition, the Terranova gang wiped out Cammora gang member Nick Del Guido. Morano responded when he whacked Goise Gallucci, a Harlem politician, who was also a made member of the Mafia and very close to the Terranovas.
After a peace summit was offered by Nick Terranova but spurned by Morano, bodies began piling up in both the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Suddenly, Morano had a change of heart and he said, sure, he’d meet Nick Terranova to discuss their differences. Morano told Nick Terranova he’d guarantee his safety if Nick agreed to meet him at Vollero’s Café on Navy Street in downtown Brooklyn, not far from the Brooklyn Bridge.
Nick Terranova arrived at Vollero’s Café with his bodyguard, Charles Ubriaco. After they exited their car, Morano’s men filled them with lead, rendering them quite dead.
Unfortunately for Morano, there was a turncoat in his crew, who ratted him and his cohorts to the cops. As a result, Morano and seven of his men were convicted of the murders of Nick Terranova and Charles Ubriaco and sentenced to life in prison. This “life sentence” lasted only three years, when Morano, pulling strings in two continents, was deported back to Italy (in those days, no matter what crime you committed, there was always a politician to be bought for the right price).
As for Ciro Terranova, he was not such a tough guy after all and certainly not qualified to run a gang. In the early 1920’s, Terranova hooked up with up the new Italian sheriff in town: Joe “The Boss” Masseria, who had taken over all the Italian rackets in New York City. In 1931, Masseria’s second-in-command, Lucky Luciano, decided to take out his boss and side with Salvatore Maranzano in what was called the Castellammarese War.
