The Black Hand

by Stephan Talty

  The aldermen and the commissioner jousted for a few minutes before the discussion turned to the secret service. “You must admit,” said one Commissioner Redmond, “that you could turn your secret service not only against the Black Hand, but also in any other direction you thought proper.”

  Bingham ignored the question. He stated that no one could prevent him from creating a squad to do whatever he, as commissioner, saw fit.

  “We can deny you the necessary funds,” Redmond shot back.

  “I can do without your funds.”

  The meeting adjourned. Afterwards, the aldermen called for Bingham’s resignation.

  Bingham was undeterred. Speaking in front of a gathering of five hundred policemen at the Police Lieutenants Association over plates of filet mignon à la Wallace, he proceeded to Bingham the aldermen:

  There are two places within half a mile of where we are now where any crime, from the lowest to the greatest, can be bought for money. And I know it, and many of you men know it . . . I can’t touch [the criminals] under present conditions, and I say that to all New York. That’s one reason I want some secret service money . . . [but] I do not believe [the aldermen] will give it to me.

  The crowd gasped in astonishment, then roared its approval. As to the aldermen’s call for his removal, Bingham laughed. “No Patrick this or Tim that or Tom the other or Charlie so and so is going to get me to quit. I am sorry but I will be with you ’til the end.” Applause and shouts of “Hurrah!” prevented the General from speaking for several minutes.

  Petrosino, swallowing any resentment over Bingham’s criticism of New York detectives, lent his voice to the cause by hinting darkly at the nature of the opposing forces. “It would surprise the public,” he said, “if it knew the names of some of the men in both parties who have come to me to intercede for some Italian criminals.” The subtext was clear: the Sullivans and the aldermen were in league with the New York underworld.

  A few aldermen threw their support behind the commissioner; one even suggested that a bomb would bring down an entire building unless they took the war to the Society, and “men and women will disappear.” But Little Tim savaged Bingham and his warnings. “This Black Hand business is all fake,” he announced at another hearing. “I don’t believe it.”

  “You come up to my office,” the General thundered, “and I’ll show you some Black Hand data that will make your hair stand on end.”

  Bingham had clearly gotten under Little Tim’s skin with his talk of politicians and their criminal friends. In one short meeting, Sullivan accused Bingham of perpetrating “bunko” (a swindle) and called him both a “four-flusher” (a poker player who oversells his hand) and a “bulldozing bluffer.” Publicly Sullivan supported the motion to give the commissioner $25,000 to fund the secret service; in 1908, it paid for a politician to appear tough on crime. But behind the scenes, Sullivan worked furiously to doom the funding measure. The vote was 12 for and 32 against. The motion was defeated.

  The Times roundly mocked the aldermen, charging, “Several of them, indeed, talked in a way to justify a slight suspicion that their real objection to the plan was fear of its possible efficiency.” The paper went so far as to suggest that Bingham might appeal to U.S. Secretary of Labor and Commerce Oscar Straus to dispatch a squad of Secret Service agents to investigate the matter. Such a drastic step was necessary because the Sullivans and their ilk were “subservient to controlling criminal minds.”

  Denied by the aldermen, Bingham took his cause to the public, speaking at banquets and lectures attended by the city’s wealthiest citizens. On January 12, 1909, he gave a talk to the members of the Washington Square Association, made up of the oldest and richest families in the metropolis: the Delanos, the Schermerhorns, the Rhinelanders, the Van Rensselaers. He had new claims to make. “There was an attempt of the Black Handers in this town,” he told the assembled grandees, “to make an alliance with the Anarchists of Paterson, one of them to make bombs, the others to throw them, and both to divide the spoils.” This was most likely nonsense: no such conspiracy had ever been uncovered in Manhattan. But if the aldermen wouldn’t support a secret police force, Bingham believed, he might be able to get the rich merchants of New York to pay for it, and to this wealthy crowd, an alliance between anarchists and Black Handers was lit dynamite.

  As Bingham courted the moguls, rumors flew. After tackling the Black Hand, the Journal reported, Bingham intended to go after Manhattan gambling houses and even investigate corruption in the NYPD. The Sullivans must have blanched at the report. Their initial fears about Bingham were being realized.

  …

  In late January 1909, after a furious campaign, Bingham won his little war. A group of wealthy New Yorkers, “men of means,” agreed to supply enough funds to get his secret service up and running. Bingham wouldn’t name his benefactors, but he’d received a rumored $30,000 for his private police force.

  Later, the New York papers tried to puzzle out the financial angle. The Tribune had heard that the money came from “one man, not an Italian, head of one of the great industries of the country, whose great wealth has made him the target for all sorts of letters.” Two names were bandied about: Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, both of whom had interests in industries—steelmaking, coal, railroads—that the Black Hand had attacked. Still other sources believed it was the Italian merchants of the city and their bankers who’d put up the funds.

  Now that he had his money, the General went looking for his “super-sleuth” to lead the final battle with the Society. Apparently the search was more difficult than he’d foreseen. No Italian-speaking guru appeared at 300 Mulberry; in fact, it’s probable that no such creature existed in the United States, apart from, perhaps, Frank Dimaio of the Pinkerton agency and the NYPD’s Joseph Petrosino. Quietly, Bingham chose the latter to lead his service. It’s possible, in fact, that Bingham had engineered the whole controversy simply to get funds to send Petrosino on a covert mission. Because it soon became clear that the General had a very specific task in mind.

  The project, which was finalized in the early months of 1909, bore Petrosino’s fingerprints in all of its aspects. Bingham wanted the detective to go to Italy in secret and do what the federal government and the king of Italy had failed to: stop the flow of criminals from Italy to America, or as one journalist put it, “dam the noxious human stream.” The mission would have three separate aims:

  To check Italian judicial records for the penal certificates of criminals who’d immigrated to the United States. If it was found that those men had in fact served time in Italy, they could be deported under the 1907 law, provided they’d been in the United States for under three years.

  To collect the names of the most dangerous criminals currently serving time in Italian jails. If these men arrived at Ellis Island after their release, they could be sent back home immediately.

  To set up a spy network of trusted local agents to continue the work after the investigator had returned to the United States. The agents would feed the NYPD the names and criminal histories of any malefactors attempting to enter the country. In theory, immigration authorities would be able to stop every Italian criminal with a penal record from coming into the United States.

  It was a huge and complex effort, “probably the most ambitious intelligence operation that the NYPD had ever undertaken” before 9/11. If it worked, the history of organized crime in the United States would be altered, perhaps profoundly. To give just one example, Giuseppe Profaci was a twenty-three-year-old thief from the province of Palermo who, in 1920, went to prison for a year on theft charges. On his release, he was allowed to immigrate to the United States, where he would go on to found the Colombo crime syndicate, one of the Five Families that dominated organized crime from the 1930s onward. Under Bingham’s plan, Profaci would never have made it to America.

  But most important to the General and Petrosino, the mission would strike a powerful blow against the Black Hand. It would deprive the
Society of its most promising recruits and cut through the ranks of the current membership with a sharp scythe.

  In January 1909, Joseph Petrosino was forty-eight years old. He’d been on the force for twenty-six years. His life had changed from the days when he slept on his desk in the squad office and hustled the streets for sixteen hours a day. He and his wife had a baby girl now, a home life that was by all reports peaceful and loving. It would have been perfectly reasonable to ask if it wasn’t time for Petrosino to make way for a younger man to lead the fight against the Society. But after speaking with Bingham, Petrosino agreed to go to Italy. If he could make the trip a success, if he could really cut away the roots of the Black Hand and strike at its leaders, it would be the culmination of his life’s work. How, in good faith, could he refuse?

  …

  In the early months of 1909, as Petrosino began to prepare for the trip, members of the Italian Squad sought him out and offered what advice they had. It mostly took the form of warning him to be careful once he reached Italy. “Joe, you may be safe and all right up in the North,” Lieutenant Vachris told him, “but look out for yourself as you never did before when you get down in the South. You know who is there.” (He meant the Mafia.) Petrosino was tetchy. “I’m no fool, Tony,” he responded, “and I’ll be ready for anything that happens.” The U.S. ambassador offered similar advice. “Perhaps a thousand criminals know you there,” he said. “They hate you and may stab you.” Petrosino’s response is not recorded.

  Just before his departure, the detective went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he’d been married and his daughter had been baptized, to meet with one of the priests there. “Do not go to Italy,” the cleric begged him, “because I am afraid you will not return alive.” This time, Petrosino’s answer was taken down. “Probably not,” Petrosino replied. “But it is my duty, and I am going.” Clubber Williams, his early mentor, ran across the detective two days before his departure and reported finding him in a less pessimistic mood. “I told him to take care of himself, as he would be in constant danger, but he replied, with a laugh, that he was not afraid.”

  The detective took time out of his preparations to make a trip to his lawyer’s office, where he signed over power of attorney to Adelina. It would allow her, in the event of his death, to collect his remaining salary. But perhaps the most intriguing report of his state of mind during this time came from his niece. One afternoon, she was out walking the Petrosinos’ baby to give her aunt some rest. She pushed the stroller along the sidewalks of Little Italy, avoiding the crowds while she and little Adelina took in the fresh air. At one point she saw the familiar shape of Petrosino approaching in his black coat and black derby hat.

  “Uncle Joe!” she called out to him. “Look, I have the baby.”

  Petrosino, stone-faced, passed her by without a glance. The young woman was confused by the detective’s reaction. She finished the walk, wheeled the stroller back to 233 Lafayette, and carried the baby up to the couple’s rooms. Petrosino was waiting for her, his face flushed with anger.

  “Don’t you ever,” he said in a fury, “recognize me on the street when you have the child.”

  The young woman was taken aback. Later, she realized that Petrosino was terrified that, if his enemies knew the baby was his, they would find a way to harm her. From that point on, she never greeted him on her strolls around Little Italy, but passed him as if he were a stranger.

  …

  The first agent of the New York City Secret Service scheduled to sail for Italy aboard the 475-foot steamship Duca di Genova on February 9, 1909. Extraordinary precautions had been taken for his mission. The first-class ticket was booked under the name Simone Velletri; his cover story was that he was an Italian Jewish merchant traveling to the Continent on business. A few days before his departure, detectives began spreading the news throughout the NYPD that Petrosino had fallen sick and his doctors had advised him to stop working in order to recover fully. It was implied that he’d left town to start his rest cure. Apart from Petrosino’s family, the only people who knew his true whereabouts were Commissioner Bingham and a few trusted police officials.

  Petrosino packed two large yellow leather suitcases and tucked his .38 Smith & Wesson revolver into one of them. He also packed letters of introduction to the minister of the interior in Rome and the head of the Italian police, as well as a notebook filled with the names of one thousand Italian criminals whose true status within the justice system he would investigate. The letters stated that his work was a simple fact-finding mission, but Petrosino knew the truth. “He had the key,” one writer said, “that could have closed the gates . . . to the immigration of Italian criminals virtually in his pocket.”

  But the elaborate secrecy and the promise of high-level cooperation didn’t cheer Petrosino. He knew how perilous the mission was, and even before he left he must have been missing his wife and infant daughter. Lieutenant Vachris, the head of the Brooklyn Italian Squad, came to see him off at the pier; during their farewells, the detective was “in the worst of moods.”

  At four o’clock on the frigid afternoon of February 9, horns sounded and the harbor workers tossed the dock lines to sailors aboard the Duca di Genova. Black smoke poured from its two funnels, while beneath the slate-gray surface of the water its twin screws began to spin. The ship powered out into the middle of the Hudson and slipped through the cold water toward the Upper Bay. The other passengers stood at the railing and waved vigorously at the diminishing figures on the pier, then hurried down to their staterooms. But Petrosino lingered, gazing on the tiny figures. He was one of the last passengers to descend.

  AROUND THIS TIME, IN THE SMALL TOWN OF HIGHLAND, NEW YORK, a team of counterfeiters was working in a farmhouse on a run of Canadian currency. Every day they inked the plates of fake Canadian $2 and $5 bills and ran the paper through the press, then stacked the phony currency against a wall. It would sit there until someone arrived to pick up a bundle and transport it to New York City and beyond.

  One of the men was Antonio Comito, a printer from Calabria who’d come to New York in June 1907. At a meeting of the Order of the Sons of Italy, he’d met a printer from Philadelphia and had been hired—not, as it turned out, to work in the man’s Pennsylvania shop, but to travel to the small upstate town to become a counterfeiter. The young Comito, practically penniless, had little choice and accepted the offer. He was given the name “Comito the Sheep”—he was, apparently, a passive type—and was given the job of operating the presses.

  One night, Comito and the other men were upstairs in their beds sleeping after a long day’s work. Around 2 a.m., he heard a sound from downstairs: someone was knocking on the farmhouse door. One of the other counterfeiters, Giuseppe “Uncle Vincent” Palermo, got up and took a rifle in his hands. “He turned deadly pale,” Comito recalled. The farmhouse was isolated, and none of the townspeople knew what the Italians were doing. A visit from anyone in the middle of the night was an unwelcome and worrying event.

  Two of the other counterfeiters grabbed their revolvers. They told Comito to go downstairs and answer the door. Comito resisted, but the men spoke forcefully. The young Italian felt his way down the stairway to the front door—he didn’t stop to light a candle—and stood before it in the darkness.

  “Who is there?” he asked.

  “We,” came the answer. The voice was high and sounded almost feminine.

  “Who are you?”

  “Open, Professor.”

  As Comito was debating what to do, Uncle Vincent came down the stairs and passed him, saying only, “Ignazio has come.”

  When the door was opened, a group of men walked in, led by a smooth-featured young man dressed in an expensive fur coat. It was Ignazio “the Wolf” Lupo, the urbane gang leader whom Petrosino had run out of New York with a beating after Lupo had publicly threatened him. The men greeted each other with kisses on both cheeks, in the Italian fashion. Comito realized that he was “about to meet the brains of the whole sch
eme,” the men who’d planned and financed the counterfeiting operation, which was producing thousands of fake Canadian dollars every week. Lupo, especially, seemed cut from a different cloth, “a man of polished manners and much etiquette.”

  The men had brought Italian delicacies from New York—packages of sausage and other meat—and they woke the cook to prepare a feast. They’d also brought two larger packages; opened up, they were found to contain military machine guns and a few pistols, along with ammunition. Lupo passed the guns around and showed the men how to work them; the bullets, whose noses were hatched with a cross, “would spread and tear nasty holes instead of neatly boring in or through.” Satisfied with the new weapons, the men sat down for their meal, with Comito waiting on them.

  “What news do you bring, Ignazio?” Uncle Vincent asked after the Italians had seated themselves around the table.

  Lupo turned to the older man.

  “You know all that I know,” he said, “except perhaps that Petrosino has gone to Italy.”

  14

  * * *

  The Gentleman

  The Duca di Genova steamed eastward at sixteen knots, its twin funnels sending spouts of black smoke high into the crisp Atlantic air. Each day brought Petrosino closer to Italy and his eventual destination, the island of Sicily. After the detective left the Atlantic seaboard behind and fell into the rhythms of life aboard the ship, his mood had improved and he was proving quite sociable. “We spent so many sympathetic hours together,” wrote one passenger to Petrosino’s wife, Adelina, “that it seemed as if we had known each other a long time . . . Your husband constantly talked of America and hoped his mission to Europe would be brief. I was tremendously impressed with his love for the United States.”