This odd couple seemed never to have a serious political disagreement. “Their fondness for each other was more than fraternal,” observed the Albany Evening Journal. “It was almost feminine in its tenderness.” They didn’t tolerate traitors, however; it was said that Big Tim perfumed the ballots on election day so that he could make sure his constituents had actually voted by sniffing out the scent on their hands. Over the years, the pair had fought off several waves of bright-eyed reformers, gnawing at their ankles whenever they stepped onto the Sullivans’ downtown turf and sending them howling back to their mansions on Fifth Avenue, crying about “moon-faced Irishmen” and the death of democracy. For the Sullivans, Commissioner Bingham fit a familiar type: a Protestant blueblood eager to take back what the Irish had earned through hard work and honest graft. They weren’t about to let that happen.
The cousins wielded financial power in the city through the Board of Aldermen, which funded a wide range of city agencies, including the NYPD. As soon as Bingham set foot inside 300 Mulberry, the Sullivans and their allies on the board began to attack him in the press as a bumbling outsider, hopelessly out of his depth. “He does not know enough about the city to describe any three of its streets,” said Big Tim. “In my opinion, the Board should not pay any attention to a man so incompetent and arrogant as General Bingham.”
The first showdown between the two came with Bingham’s proposed budget for the NYPD. It was an eye-opener. The General requested two thousand new officers to patrol the streets, one hundred new detectives, and improvements to the precinct stations that would cost, together with the new manpower requests, $1.6 million. With the extra policemen, the department could take on the Black Hand, one of Bingham’s top priorities, with far greater effectiveness. But the Sullivans’ gambling and other illegal interests south of 14th Street would have been negatively impacted, to say the least, by a more robust NYPD. The cousins responded by vetoing the additional cops and, for good measure, actually cutting the General’s budget. If Bingham was to be believed, they also installed men inside 300 Mulberry for the sole purpose of committing espionage. “My headquarters,” the General told reporters, “was . . . full of spies.”
Despite the commissioner’s trials, a new, forceful leader was in place at the NYPD, giving Petrosino reason to be hopeful. He was working practically without rest. He recruited new men to the Italian Squad, as some moved into other bureaus or simply quit, exhausted by the pace he set. Perhaps with this fire-breathing general backing him, and with the fresh alarm about the spread of the Black Hand, the city would finally meet the Society with the kind of force it deserved.
…
Many evenings, after his day was done, Petrosino—who apparently never learned to cook—would find his way to Little Italy and a small restaurant called Saulino’s. It was an unpretentious place where the waiters spoke in dialect and the owner, an Italian war veteran named Vincenzo Saulino, sat with the customers and chatted as the wineglasses clinked and Italian folk music played. Saulino had emigrated from a small town called Agnone, a hundred miles east of Rome, the site of a famous bell foundry. Agnone was surrounded by hills dotted with monasteries and hermitages; hundreds of years before, during the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, it had been a “royal town” and an important trade and craft-making site. But by the time Saulino was a young boy, the place was stagnating, taxes were high, and starving peasants were being thrown in jail for stealing the wheat of the gentry, the galantuomini (literally, the “gallant men”) who ruled the town. With few options, Saulino joined the Italian Legion and fought during the Crimean War at the siege of Sebastopol, in which the two thousand members of the Legion battled the Russians. Saulino had already seen a great deal of blood and sorrow in his short life.
After the Crimean War ended, the soldier returned to Italy and fought in the War of Italian Unification. When hostilities ceased in 1871, Saulino apparently found that even a unified Italy had little to offer him. He left for America with his French-born wife and found his way to a restaurant in Little Italy, where she cooked and he ran the front of the house.
At Saulino’s restaurant, Petrosino found decent food and genial companionship. Saulino’s specialized in the Mediterranean dishes of southern Italy, the food that the detective loved. He often called ahead to order before he arrived, knowing that the more time he spent in such a public place, the more dangerous his life became (plus, he didn’t have time to wait for meals to be cooked). He always chose a table against the wall, so no assassin could take him by surprise from behind. On those occasions when he wasn’t pressed for time, Petrosino would play cards with Saulino, working himself up into such a rage when he lost that he would take the cards in his thick, strong hands and tear them to pieces. This amused Saulino so much that he would ask the detective if he could tear the cards himself. It was an honor, to a certain type of Italian, to have Petrosino eat in his restaurant, to sit at his table.
But there was another reason, known only to Petrosino at first, why he chose Saulino’s for his evening meal. The owner had a daughter, Adelina, who often served Petrosino. She was eleven years younger than the famous detective, handsome rather than pretty, with a strong nose and chin, and eyes that sloped downward at the corners. In pictures, she wears her chestnut hair piled in curls. Her English was rudimentary, so she and Petrosino spoke in Italian as she arranged the cutlery in front of him and set down a bowl of minestrone or a plate of seafood farfalle. “She was an outgoing person,” says her granddaughter. “She liked to read the society column and loved to sing. She loved adventure—she would take the boat back and forth from Boston alone, which in the nineteen hundreds was very unusual for a woman.”
Unknown to anyone but himself, Petrosino had fallen hopelessly in love with Adelina. “He was just smitten,” says the granddaughter. Adelina had been married to a man in Massachusetts but had returned home to the restaurant after her husband died. At first, according to her granddaughter, “she lived alone in Boston, but her father said, ‘It doesn’t look right, a woman living alone. Come to New York.’ And she did.” Over many evenings, over the sound of conversation and folk music, the waitress and the detective grew close.
Eventually, Petrosino made his feelings known to Adelina, and then to her father. It was a good match: the detective had a steady job, was known to be honest and hardworking, and was a hero to many in the colony. An Italian widow in her thirties didn’t have a wide range of romantic choices in early-1900s America. But Petrosino was in for a shock: Saulino refused the offer of marriage. The reason? The detective “was in constant danger of assassination,” and, having watched his daughter suffer through the loss of one husband, Saulino apparently wished to spare her the pain of losing another. Perhaps he also worried that the bombs that the Black Hand planted would someday find their way to the detective’s home and kill everyone inside, including Adelina.
Petrosino refused to give up. He was in love and would wait for Adelina as long as it took. Perhaps he thought that Saulino would yield, after a few more dinners and conversations. So Petrosino would enter the restaurant around dusk, hanging his derby on a hook, and sit down at a table with a red-and-white-checked tablecloth. Adelina would come to serve him. The two apparently never saw each other outside the restaurant. The courtship rituals of Mott Street could be as strict and unyielding as in the most conservative Calabrian town.
Year after year, Petrosino returned. But Saulino steadfastly refused his entreaties to consider the marriage.
And so Petrosino would nod to Adelina, sit down to eat his pasta and drink his Chianti. “Waiting made him extremely nervous,” said one biographer of Petrosino’s time in the restaurant. His friends assumed this was because of the danger of being exposed in a public place, but perhaps the detective also found it painful to be near the brown-eyed waitress whom he yearned to call his own. If the anger that filled him when he lost to Vincenzo at cards was tinged with another sort of rage, Petrosino kept it to himself. Hadn’t he himself said
years before that there was too much death in his business, and that “a man hasn’t the right to bring a woman into it”? Now he was being held to that rule.
If Joe and Adelina ever talked about doing something rash, running away together like the Americans did, getting married and setting up house, it was a private conversation that never entered the public domain or even survived as a whisper in Petrosino family legend. The detective apparently never thought of leaving New York; it was where his life’s work resided, and that work was unfinished. And he was in many ways a traditional Italian man with values to match. To run off with Adelina would have been an act of unthinkable disrespect to her father. So he kept silent.
Throughout New York, families were suffering the theft of their children, the slow diminishment of their dreams, bankruptcy, violent death, and loss of faith in America. But Petrosino may have been the only enemy of the Society whose punishment was to be barred from marrying the woman he loved.
A portrait of the twenty-two-year-old Joseph Petrosino
COURTESY OF THE PETROSINO FAMILY ARCHIVE
Sicilian immigrants on board a ship to America, 1908
FONDO PANZINI, PALERMO, FOTOTECA REGIONALE C.R.I.C.D.
An Italian immigrant family looking for lost baggage, 1904. Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine.
MIRIAM AND IRA D. WALLACH DIVISION OF ART, PRINTS, AND PHOTOGRAPHS, PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTIONS (79878)
Adelina Petrosino as a young woman
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LC-USZ62-137645)
Joseph Petrosino as a young policeman, 1883
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
The Italian Squad in their offices. Petrosino is standing at left, in a black derby.
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
The young Theodore Bingham, taken during his days at the White House, circa 1900
WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
Commissioner William McAdoo
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LC-USZ62-54248)
Petrosino, far right, leads a Black Hand suspect to court
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LC-USZ62-137644)
Vito Cascio Ferro
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
The first page of a handwritten death threat sent to Joseph Petrosino’s home
COURTESY OF THE PETROSINO FAMILY ARCHIVE
A pamphlet on Petrosino’s assassination that was printed and sold in Little Italy
COURTESY OF THE PETROSINO FAMILY ARCHIVE
Petrosino’s coffin being placed in a horse-drawn funeral carriage
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LC-DIG-GGBAIN-03254)
The funeral procession
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (LC-DIG-GGBAIN-03255)
New York police and crowds during Petrosino’s funeral march
COURTESY OF THE PETROSINO FAMILY ARCHIVE
Petrosino’s grave in Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York
PHOTO COURTESY OF COREY WASCINSKI
9
* * *
“The Terror of Hurtful People”
A year after the blossoming of his deepest ambition, the thing that would make him a “Supreme Venerable” of the Italian community in America and would raise his people from the palpable disdain that was their lot in America, Dr. Vincenzo Sellaro was afraid. An enormous bomb had gone off in the handsome red brick building at 203 Grand Street in the heart of Little Italy where Sellaro had his apartment and his offices. He’d been asleep upstairs when the explosion shook the building, waking him. His neighbors were already in the hallways, running down the stairs in their nightclothes to the streets, brick dust everywhere. “Men, women, and children appeared on the fire escapes,” read one report of the bombing, “screaming that there was fire and begging for help.” Windows for a hundred yards in every direction were shattered.
Sellaro knew that the bomb was a warning. To him.
Letters signed “THE CHAMPIONS OF THE BLACK HAND” had been arriving at his apartment for months, demanding $5,000. The Society warned him to send them the money, in a sealed envelope, or his house on Grand Street would be blown to smithereens. There was one further instruction: he was to send the money “in perfect silence . . . without any knowledge of Petrosino . . . he will do you a great deal of danger.” Such warnings were not uncommon. Black Handers often instructed their victims not to contact the detective and even designed their schemes to evade him. “It became,” according to the Baltimore Sun, “one of the features of plot-making to find a way to throw Petrosino off the scent.”
Sellaro had refused to pay the ransom. How could he, of all people, bow to these murderers who were dragging the Italian name through the muck and the grime? For a year before, Sellaro had taken a step that he hoped would redeem his people from the taint of degradation epitomized by the Black Hand and would alter the course of Italian American history forever.
On a brilliantly sunny June day in the summer of 1905, the doctor had waited in his beautifully appointed apartment for his visitors to arrive. The occasion was the culmination of many years of dreaming and planning for Sellaro, and he was dressed, as was customary for him, in a good-quality dark suit, which played up the luster of his brown eyes. He wasn’t a conventionally handsome man; the line of his dark hair crested over a large forehead, and his eyes were hooded and brooding. There was something of the basset hound in the good doctor’s appearance, but the mildness of his expression belied a granite will.
Sellaro was a Sicilian, born in Palermo, who’d received his medical degree from the University of Naples. In 1897, he took the boat for America and enrolled at Cornell Medical School. By 1904, he’d saved enough money to open his own practice out of his offices at 203 Grand Street, on the corner of Mott. His practice thrived. Many of his patients came to him after nearly losing their lives in New York hospitals where the doctors and nurses didn’t speak Italian and an interpreter often couldn’t be found. How could a woman suffering from tuberculosis or a pulmonary embolism explain her symptoms in sign language? Later, Sellaro would be among the founders of the Columbus Italian Hospital, where doctors were required to speak both Italian and English.
By 1905, Sellaro had grown prosperous and well respected, but his ambitions ran further: he wished “to emancipate Italians from every prejudice.” (He would later join the Masons, not because he particularly wanted to, but simply to prove that a Sicilian could.) So on this summer’s day he’d called some of the prominent individuals in the New York colony to his gracious apartment on Grand to found an order that would begin the ascent of the Italian American into the highest reaches of American life.
The men arrived one by one: The pharmacist Ludovico Ferrari was from Piedmont. The attorney Antonio Marzullo was from Campania, home to the much-maligned city of Naples. The prominent sculptor Giuseppe Carlino came from the central region of Lazio. And the two unnamed barbers—often men of high standing in the colonies—hailed, like Sellaro, from Sicily. Though the theme of the evening was pride and unity, the men gathered that night were mostly from the south, the sun-stricken and often despised regions that had supplied 90 percent of the mass immigration to America. The men here knew, painfully, the reputation of their compatrioti. And they were here to redeem it.
Sellaro greeted the men, and we can imagine that he pressed glasses of wine into their hands. It was a hot day, and this was a celebration as well as a meeting. Sellaro stood and addressed his friends. “The Almighty has brought us all together for a purpose,” he announced. The aim of the gathering, he said, was to found a new society, Figli d’Italia, the Sons of Italy. Sellaro acknowledged to his compatriots that evening that the Italians were the poorest and the least educated of the Europeans; in their old lives, they’d been common laborers, tenant farmers, field workers, shepherds, gardeners, and fishermen. Four hundred years after Columbus had sailed from the Spanish port of Palos, the Italians had finally followed him, “the last to come to America.” But they had come of their own free will, to work and prosper, to
free themselves of the corruption of Rome. “It is because of this that today I have a dream,” Sellaro said to the five men, “and hope that someday, even if it takes a hundred more years before we are fully accepted, our children and our children’s children . . . will be able and proud to continue our traditions, our culture and our language . . . I want to believe that someday we will become a very important part of American history.” The men raised their glasses and toasted Sellaro and this new beginning.
After that summer’s day, the Order of the Sons of Italy had thrived: it was well on its way to becoming the largest and most powerful of the Italian fraternal societies in America. There were already eight lodges in the city, and many others were planned throughout the country. Sellaro, who’d been named “Supreme Venerable” of the society, was planning to open schools to teach English to immigrants from Naples and Palermo and Milan, as well as centers where they would learn how to become American citizens. There would be orphanages and homes for the elderly. He dreamt of other things, such as mortuary funds for those unfortunate souls who died carving out the subway tunnels. (Just a few years before, nine workers, mostly Italian, had been caught under 195th Street in a dynamite explosion and perished, their names and families unknown, forcing the city to load them onto the “dead boat” and bury them in unmarked graves on Hart Island.) Credit unions, welfare societies, scholarship funds, all were being planned.
The Black Hand Page 13
