…
The Alfano affair wasn’t an isolated incident. In the absence of willing witnesses and good prosecutions—of, really, a functioning justice system—this kind of treatment became an unofficial policy of the Italian Squad. Petrosino went after Black Hand men any way he could. “If the courts send these criminals back into the streets,” he told a reporter, “we’ll make life so tough for them that they’ll have to clear out whatever way they can.”
Petrosino had declared his own private, semi-legal war on the Society. And it was to be a dirty war.
Members of the Italian Squad began “bracing” the best-known suspects: accosting them on the street, throwing them up against a wall, threatening them with arrest or worse if they didn’t leave town. They surveilled their apartments. They introduced them to what was known as “the nightstick cure.” They noted their associates and braced them as well. Petrosino even disguised himself as a common criminal and had his fellow cops bring him in handcuffs to the Tombs, where he was locked in a cell with Society suspects. There he would sit, appearing dejected and listless, but in fact listening closely to his fellow prisoners discuss their crimes and organizations. Once Petrosino was “released,” the Italian Squad would begin targeting the Black Handers.
The officers of the Italian Squad were rough on their quarry. They knocked men around; they broke noses, jaws, clavicles. “The gangsters who had dealings with him bore the marks of the ‘interrogation’ for months,” noted one writer. Knowing that most criminals, even the guilty ones, would be given light sentences or released without charges, Petrosino sometimes beat them during his interrogations, or challenged them to mano a mano battles on the streets. If they could outlast him, they would walk free. He often ended the sessions with the words “This way you’ll remember who Petrosino was.”
The practice extended to Italian criminals who weren’t necessarily Black Handers. In one particularly loathsome scheme, criminals would trawl small Italian towns looking for women desperate to leave or to get married; with so many young men gone to America, it was difficult for young women to find husbands. The men would tell these girls about a lonely bachelor in America who was searching for a wife of good morals, who could keep house, to love and marry. If a woman agreed, the men would buy her a steamship ticket and send her off to New York. Waiting in New York was, of course, not a fiancé but a brothel owner and his associates, who forced the woman into a life of degradation and unimaginable horror.
When Petrosino broke up one such prostitution ring, he convicted the entire gang, including its leader, and sent them away to prison, except for one: a twenty-seven-year-old named Paolo Palazzotto, from Palermo. Palazzotto escaped prosecution for unknown reasons; but he was found to have been a convicted criminal in Italy and was scheduled for deportation. Before the suspect left, Petrosino decided to exact some revenge for the women whose lives he had ruined, and to give the white slaver a reminder never to return to Manhattan. He entered the room where Palazzotto was being held, a bunch of keys clutched tightly in his right fist. By the time Petrosino left the room, Palazzotto had lost a significant number of teeth.
The squad’s reputation spread. Police brutality, if one can rightly call it that—the concept hadn’t even entered the public consciousness in 1907—was so prevalent in the NYPD that it was rarely remarked upon, and it enjoyed a healthy dose of public support. “Guns flashed, clubs whacked, and men fell” is one description of a typical encounter between criminals and Manhattan cops. Clubber Williams, Petrosino’s old mentor, once famously said that “there’s more law in the end of a policeman’s stick than in a decision of the Supreme Court,” and many New Yorkers would have agreed with that sentiment. Even Teddy Roosevelt liked a rugged cop. During his reign as police commissioner, one legendary officer came across a gang of wiretappers and instantly “leaped on them, knocked them down and kicked them bodily out of the police station, across the sidewalk and into the street.” Roosevelt’s response was a hearty “Atta boy!”
Petrosino was relentless. The detective, one Brooklyn alderman complained, “knocked out more teeth than a professional dentist.” These were not one-way battles, however, or not always. One journalist recounted that, after years of street battles with Society members, Petrosino “had scars all over his body.” But there was one difference between what he did and the actions of the ordinary cop: Petrosino targeted only those suspects he was convinced were guilty and likely to escape punishment. This was wholly unconstitutional, of course, and it’s possible that Petrosino, even with his excellent sources, assaulted more than one innocent man. But the detective was desperate to blunt the rise of the Society and to save as many Italians as he could.
The strategy did result in some lighter moments. A suspect named Giamio, whom the squad suspected in a kidnapping, was taken to headquarters to be questioned. The detectives brought Giamio to the photographer’s room for his mug shot and placed him in a wooden chair. A bright light buzzed above the Italian’s head, catching the nervous man’s attention. Maybe it was the buzzing or maybe it was Petrosino’s grim expression, but the idea came to Giamio, who no doubt had heard stories of the vast powers of the Italian Squad, that Petrosino had dispensed with a trial and had placed him in the infamous “electric chair.” In Giamio’s mind, the bantering he heard around him was the prelude to his own execution. Unable to contain himself, the suspect jumped up, shouting that he did not wish to die and calling on the saints to help him; then he “flopped to the floor” like an ungainly fish.
Petrosino and the others watched it all happen, laughing themselves sick at this grignono, this greenhorn, making an ass of himself. Then they picked Giamio up off the floor and explained that, in this case at least, the chair was just a chair.
Nevertheless, many disappearances of gangsters and would-be assassins could be traced to a visit from the detective. Ignazio “the Wolf” Lupo, the stylish, high-voiced criminal mastermind who’d teamed with Giuseppe Morello to defraud and terrorize dozens of honest merchants in Little Italy, was by October 1908 a wealthy crime boss, a role he kept hidden behind his position as a Little Italy merchant. Lupo’s magnificent flagship store at 210–14 Mott Street was a seven-story building filled to bursting with Parma hams, long tubes of mozzarella, and exotic spices. It was “easily the most pretentious mercantile establishment in that section of the city,” according to the New York Times, “with a stock of goods over which the neighborhood marveled.”
The smooth-faced criminal, however, had lately found Petrosino impinging on his business. The detective not only pursued him relentlessly for acting as the intelligence network for the Black Hand in New York, but also lost no opportunity to warn Italians not to deal with the Sicilian and his friend Morello, “attacking their credit wherever he could.” This had so enraged Lupo and his associates that he’d sent a lawyer to the detective’s office, who told Petrosino that if he didn’t stop blackening the name of his clients, he was going to file a criminal libel suit against him.
Petrosino, confident in his sources, didn’t let up. He wanted to drive Lupo and his gang out of New York. Finally, the boulevardier struck back. He told friends and associates that if Petrosino didn’t stop his campaign, he, Lupo, would hurt him. The threat was soon out on the street.
One afternoon, the Wolf was in his shop overseeing his business, working, as usual, in one of his tailored suits, when the door opened and Joseph Petrosino walked into the store’s gleaming ground floor. He inspected the stacks of Parma hams and Asiago cheese, then called Lupo over. The Wolf approached him; Petrosino leaned over and said a few words in a low voice. Before Lupo could respond, Petrosino’s right fist shot out and knocked the Wolf to the ground. As Lupo’s employees and customers watched, Petrosino proceeded to administer a severe beating on the floor of the Wolf’s fine establishment.
Within a month, Lupo’s buggy was no longer seen on Mott Street with its owner snapping the whip at his immaculate white horse. Petrosino had driven the Wolf from the c
ity. A year later, the merchant filed for bankruptcy.
Few men who encountered the chief of the Italian Squad ever forgot the experience. One prominent politician from Palermo, Raffaele Palizzolo, announced he was coming to New York to help his compatriots fight the Black Hand. Twenty thousand Sicilians, many of them wearing buttons with Palizzolo’s face on them, met his ship at the pier and cheered him lustily as he descended the gangway. But Petrosino discovered that Palizzolo had an unsavory reputation back in Sicily, where he was known as “the King of the Mafia” and had once been sentenced to prison for murder. His opposition to the Black Hand was a charade. The detective followed Palizzolo from event to event, breaking up his lectures by force and announcing the man’s true history to stunned crowds of immigrants; he even knocked on the politician’s hotel room door one night and “threw some fear” into him.
After weeks of these confrontations, the politician cut his visit short and boarded a ship for Europe. At the pier, he made his way to the side of the vessel and looked down mournfully at the relatives and well-wishers waving up at the departing passengers. As his eyes scanned the skyline and then the crowd, Palizzolo was stunned to make out a familiar figure amid the jostling crowds below: Joseph Petrosino, standing among the throngs as if the politician were his favorite nephew leaving on a trip back to the old country. Palizzolo stared at the detective with mounting rage. Before the ship slipped into the ocean currents, he raised his fist and shook it at Petrosino, crying out to the receding figure below, “If you ever come to Palermo, God help you!”
10
* * *
Once to Be Born, Once to Die
In interviews, street battles, and confrontations with the Society, Petrosino set a tone for dealing with the Black Hand, and it was one of defiance. He insisted that his countrymen stand up to the killers, no matter the cost. Those who paid up he regarded with an almost violent disdain. There were times, said an Italian journalist, when the detective was “more furious against the victims than the criminals.” It’s not that Petrosino lacked sympathy; he understood very well the terror that entered a person’s life the moment he or she opened a Black Hand letter. He’d experienced it himself. But regarding his own death as almost certain, as in fact long overdue, he didn’t understand people who sought to save themselves while behaving, as he saw it, atrociously. Perhaps it was because he had no children. But it honestly perplexed him.
Not everyone surrendered. Whether inspired by the detective or simply acting on their own sense of moral outrage, a number of Italians in Manhattan and across the country followed Petrosino’s example and said no to the Society. One such man was John Bozzuffi. His story is one among hundreds.
Bozzuffi was a self-made man, a prominent banker in the small Italian colony on the Upper East Side. One day, three men came to see him. The first, Mr. Christina, was a cobbler with a thriving shop who’d earned enough in America to hire three assistants. He’d received a letter in red ink saying the Black Hand would drink his blood if he didn’t come up with a certain sum of cash. The second, Mr. Campisi, who owned a grocery shop near Mr. Christina, had been warned that he would be cut into small pieces and packed into a barrel if he didn’t leave the city. Not too far from his store was the First Avenue barbershop of Mr. Fascietta, which had been partially demolished with a bomb not long before. All of them were friends of Bozzuffi’s, and they had come to his bank on Seventh Avenue to ask for help. The three were thinking of paying or fleeing the city. No other choice seemed possible. “Virgin Mother,” swore Mr. Campisi, “I will get out before they kill me or kidnap one of my children!”
Bozzuffi understood their fear. He, too, had a business that catered to Italian customers. He also had seven children—the eldest, Antonio, named after his grandfather, who had brought the family to America, “and who slaved as a laborer in the trenches of the streets of New York in 1872 to give his own eldest son a chance at a public school education.” John Bozzuffi had started as a ticket taker on the elevated subway and worked his way up while earning extra money as a notary public on the side. He bought a little grocery store, then moved on to insurance and banking. It had been difficult all the way up, but Bozzuffi was respected, and he was honest. He was proud of the family’s rise, an Italian patriot as well as an all-American booster. “I’m not ashamed of my people, family or nation,” he said. “But I’m an American by the sweat of my father’s brow.”
Bozzuffi had received his own letters from the Society. But to give in to them was, for him, unthinkable. If he capitulated, the Bozzuffis would surely be pushed back down the economic ladder into the stinking tenements, which were so ridden with disease that one journalist of the time wrote that they “might well earn for New York the title The City of Living Death.” His children would have to reenact the fate of their grandfather. But it was more than that: it would be an insult to his race. “For the sake of decent, honest, hard-working Italian citizens,” the banker said, “I will sacrifice everything I have.” And so, when the three men came to see him, Bozzuffi had a simple message for them: Resist. “Stick it out!” he said. “Not for your own sake, but for the sake of the decent Italians who are making their way in the world, and will be easy victims of the banditi if you or I give tribute to such cattle.”
He managed to calm the men and sent them back to their businesses. But more letters arrived at the trio’s shops, and they returned to see Bozzuffi once again weeks later. “Don’t pay blackmail,” he insisted. “Die first.” One chink in the armor of the three friends would mean the Black Hand would never let them go.
Every weekday, Mr. Fascietta opened the shutters of his shop. Customers filed in, and he cut their hair and shaved them. He knew his tormentors were possibly among the crowd, but he persevered. Meanwhile, the cobbler, Mr. Christina, had a method for steeling his nerves. Every time the Black Hand was mentioned, every time he received a letter, he would whisper a word to himself. “Petrosino!” The detective’s name was for him a kind of talisman.
This went on for months. Then one day, Mr. Bozzuffi’s eldest son, Antonio, was leaving Dilmer’s drugstore near his home. Antonio was fourteen and a good student; the banker “hoped to see [him] distinguish himself in Harvard or Yale some day.” On this afternoon, a man Antonio didn’t know walked up to the teenager. “Hello, Tony,” he said. “Will you do me a favor? We have some letters from the old country at my house and we want you to translate them.”
Antonio agreed. The pair walked down Second Avenue to 59th Street. The man gestured toward a door leading to a second-floor apartment, and Antonio, unsuspecting, opened it and walked up the stairs. When he stepped into the apartment, he found himself facing three men in black masks. The man who’d brought Antonio to the apartment closed the door behind him. Antonio heard the lock slide into place.
One of the men pulled out a revolver and pointed it at the teenager’s face. “Tony,” he said, “if you don’t holler and do what we tell you, we will do you no harm. But if you yell and don’t do what we tell you, we’ll kill you.” Another man pulled out an axe; it hung in his hand, bright, newly store-bought.
They seated Antonio at a table and told him to write a letter. One of the men recited the words: Bozzuffi the banker would pay $20,000 or Antonio would be returned to him as a corpse. When Antonio heard this—the amount was an absolute fortune—he broke down. He was shaking so hard he was unable to write.
The men began to shout at him and curse his family. Antonio couldn’t regain his composure. He felt something cold against his temple: the barrel of the revolver.
Slowly, the teenager pulled himself together. His hand stopped shaking and he finished the letter. If the police or Petrosino himself was contacted, the men instructed him to write, his death would follow.
The kidnappers bound Antonio’s arms and legs with ropes and stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth. He was terrified. He tried to think, to gather clues. From the noises that came through the thin panes of glass, Antonio suspected he was above a
saloon. Meanwhile, on 62nd Street, Bozzuffi received his first ransom letter. From the start, he held out little hope. “He considered his son dead,” reported the New York Times. “He had been kidnapped by the same class of Sicilians that had promised to drink the blood of the cobbler, to pickle the grocer, and had ruined the beautiful barber’s pole of Fascietta.”
Bozzuffi ignored the letter’s instructions and contacted Petrosino. The detective arrived at the Bozzuffi home and began to chase down leads, with the father “on his heels.” First, Petrosino called all the hospitals in the area to make sure Antonio hadn’t been wounded and brought in for treatment. Nothing. Then he started making inquiries in the neighborhood.
The contents of the letter quickly became known in the tight-knit Italian colony. Bozzuffi was a favorite banker among the small businessmen on the East Side, and rumors quite naturally began to spread: Bozzuffi is going to take his depositors’ money and pay the Black Hand. Wouldn’t you do the same? Depositors crowded into his bank, holding their books with the modest balances written in ink. Many withdrew everything. Bozzuffi watched from his office as a run on his bank began.
By Tuesday, $7,000 had been withdrawn from his vault, and the panic wasn’t over yet. Another letter arrived: the Black Hand now set out the details of his surrender. If he was ready to settle on March 7, he should hang a sign in his bank window reading “SEVEN MEN WANTED.” If he chose March 8, “EIGHT MEN WANTED.” On the specified day, the captors or their associates would arrive to collect their money.
The Black Hand Page 15
