When they arrived in New York, the two detectives were ushered into a meeting with Commissioner William F. Baker, the new chief of police. Afterwards Baker, who’d been raised from a lowly clerk to the very top of the department for no discernible reason apart from his loyalty to Tammany, gave a public announcement welcoming the two back: “Lieutenants Vachris and Crowley report as a result of their visit to Italy that they have brought back much information in regard to Italian criminals in this country,” he told reporters, “which will be of great benefit.” But in private, the commissioner ordered Vachris and Crowley not to talk to reporters or fellow policemen about their mission. Instead of being allowed to arrest the men named in the penal certificates and begin deportation proceedings, Vachris was told to sit at a desk and translate the documents. Crowley, meanwhile, was demoted from acting lieutenant to the rank of sergeant, relieved of his detective duties, and sent to the Bronx, where he was to walk a beat on St. Nicholas Avenue, nowhere near the Italian colonies. He’d been exiled to “Goatville.”
Vachris spent his days working on the certificates. New ones, along with mug shots of Italian criminals who’d escaped to America, were constantly arriving from Italy, where the authorities were apparently taking the matter more seriously than they had in the past. The number of certificates climbed to over seven hundred. Something very close to the permanent tracking system for Italian criminals that Petrosino had envisioned was now in place. Still, Vachris was concerned. Each of the cases raised by the penal certificates had an expiration date: once the criminal passed his three-year mark in the United States, he could no longer be deported. But days and weeks passed, and nothing happened. No one came to retrieve the certificates, no orders were given to arrest the culprits, and no deportations occurred.
When he’d finished with all the certificates, Vachris placed the originals and their translations in a file cabinet for safekeeping. Then, like Crowley, Vachris was taken off his detective duties and ordered to walk a beat, this time on City Island. It was, in the Byzantine symbology of the NYPD, a ticket to the gulag. His new assignment required a four-hour trip each way from his home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and his shift ran from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. He wasn’t allowed, because of NYPD regulations, to leave until 8 a.m. So he often slept in the precinct house, cooking his own meals and separated from his family for days at a time. Someone had clearly decided that Lieutenant Vachris needed to be punished.
What could the two detectives do? Some profound yet mysterious change had occurred in the department. If they spoke to reporters, they’d be crossing their new commissioner. Arthur Woods, the former Groton instructor who’d come to the NYPD and grown close to Petrosino, now served at the pleasure of Baker and appeared powerless to reverse the decision. The department wanted no part of the investigation into the Black Hand that had cost Petrosino his life. Meanwhile, the bombings and kidnappings continued.
“It is probable,” reported one magazine, “that the Black Hand would have been extirpated before the end of 1910” had Vachris’s files been utilized. It was a distinct possibility. Arresting and deporting seven hundred Society members would have been a major victory that could have led to a waning of the attacks and sent a signal that the price for participating in Society crimes had risen dramatically. “As it was,” the article continued, “the evil grew and thrived.” A special code that Petrosino had established with officials in the Italian government, by which they could inform New York police about criminals who were believed to be headed to New York, was never even used.
But why had this happened? Who had given the orders to quash Vachris’s mission?
All signs pointed toward City Hall. “The certificates were suppressed at police headquarters,” charged New Outlook magazine, “under orders of Mayor McClellan.” The affair seemed to be proof of what Bingham and Petrosino had attested to before the mission to Palermo: that criminals, including Black Hand criminals, were being shielded from prosecution by officials high up in city government. The cover-up “gave these exotic desperadoes assurance of the power of American political leaders to protect them.”
There is, as Salvatore LaGumina has pointed out, one other possible explanation. General Bingham had been at the forefront of the fight against the Black Hand and had green-lighted the Vachris trip. Any success it reaped would be seen as his accomplishment. For McClellan, who had publicly fired Bingham in a power struggle, to then turn around and finish the project that the General had set in motion would have given Bingham a tremendous political boost. It would have brought into question McClellan’s reasons for firing Bingham, and perhaps even given the General a platform from which to seek higher office—including the office of mayor. There were excellent tactical reasons for burying the results of Vachris’s trip, and Petrosino’s, too.
Whichever theory was true, it was a shameful affair. Petrosino had died carrying out his mission, and now its fruits were lying in an index card file at police headquarters. Criminals had been given their freedom. “The acceptance of either theory,” wrote LaGumina, “convicts McClellan of a crime against civilization and makes him more than any other one man responsible for the fearful carnage since wrought by these exotic desperadoes.” The language is overblown, but it’s difficult to argue with the conclusion. In the first sixteen and a half months following Petrosino’s death, one hundred Italians died violently, with many of the murders directly linked to the Black Hand, including the deaths of fifteen victims who perished in fires set by the Society and two kidnapped children who were killed because their parents couldn’t pay the ransom. Many of those deaths could have been prevented. In the same period, the conviction rate for Black Hand crimes plunged to less than 10 percent.
In 1910, a new advocacy group, the Italian-American Civic League, sent a letter to John Purroy Mitchel, the idealistic, aloof politician who was serving as acting mayor after the elected mayor, William Gaynor, was shot during an assassination attempt. The letter recounted the success of the Italian Squad and decried the explosion of violence and the unrelenting terror that had followed Petrosino’s death. “How utterly unjust this state of things is you will certainly appreciate,” the league members wrote. They wished to transform “a great civically inert mass of half a million Italians into an active and organic part of the city’s life,” but first they needed to be freed from the oppression of the Society. The league wanted action.
Mitchel ignored the plea, as did Gaynor after his recovery. On November 17, the Italian Squad was disbanded. Petrosino’s life’s work was fading into obscurity.
Meanwhile, in Italy, Vito Cascio Ferro resumed his rise to become arguably the greatest and most influential Mafia boss of his era. Over the years, Cascio Ferro’s record with law enforcement was enviable: sixty-nine felony arrests, zero convictions. In the black-is-white world of Sicily, being accused of killing Petrosino had made him even more famous and powerful. “As he grew older,” wrote Petrosino’s biographer Arrigo Pettaco, “he assumed an almost royal manner, and he was actually a kind of king.”
…
In 1914 the U.S. Secret service, which had been on the trail of the Lupo-Morello counterfeiting operation, arrested Antonio Comito, who’d overheard the conversation about Petrosino in an upstate New York farmhouse five years earlier. During the long interrogation that followed, an agent got the Italian to talk about what had happened the night Ignazio Lupo came to visit and announced that Petrosino had left for Italy.
Comito recalled that the men had been stunned by the news. The man he knew as Uncle Vincent smiled. “Then he has gone to a good place,” he said, “for he will be killed.”
Another man, Cito, chimed in. “I only hope the plan may be successful.”
This was the first that Comito had heard of a plan to kill Petrosino. He listened closely to what followed. Lupo spoke with bitterness, no doubt remembering his confrontation with the detective four months before.
“He has ruined many,” Lupo said. “You all know that he would have himsel
f locked up in the Tombs as though detained and there listen to conversations and make arrests upon the strength of what he eavesdropped for.”
“Many are the mother’s children he has ruined,” Uncle Vincent said, “and he still has many crying.”
Lupo made a reference to a Calabrian he had sent back to Italy, a man named Michele. Was this a messenger? An assassin? The men didn’t elaborate.
“You have done well,” said one of the counterfeiters, a man named Cecala, who winked at Lupo and picked up his glass to toast the visitor. “Here’s a drink to our success here and a hope of death to him. To hell with that carogna [piece of carrion].”
Lupo raised his glass and drank some wine. “’Tis a pity,” he said, after setting the glass back down. “’Tis a pity it must be done stealthily—that he cannot first be made to suffer as he has made so many others. But he guards his hide so well it will have to be done quickly.”
After the men had eaten, they sat and listened as Lupo sang in Italian, most likely the folksongs they knew from their youth. Lupo was in good voice and sang “like a happy man.” Everything was in readiness.
If we can believe Comito, and there’s no reason not to (the Secret Service agent certainly did), the plan to kill Petrosino had been set in motion in America. Lupo and Morello were likely the plotters behind it, and their friend Vito Cascio Ferro is the leading suspect as the man who arranged the details in Palermo, even if he didn’t pull the trigger. Comito’s confession is the closest thing we have to a blueprint of what happened to Joseph Petrosino that night in the Piazza Marina.
18
* * *
A Return
In April 1914, “a tall, dark, pleasant man” climbed the stairs of the new NYPD headquarters located at 240 Centre Street, greeting policemen warmly as he headed inside the sturdy, gleaming white Beaux Arts building. It was Arthur Woods, the former Groton teacher who’d joined the New York police years before. A new reform mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, had been swept into office, and he had named Woods his choice for commissioner.
When he arrived that first day, Woods had plans, known only to him, to change the very mission of the NYPD. He wasn’t just another reformer; he bordered on being a wild-eyed radical intent on blowing up the police force from the inside. Woods had new and drastic ideas on how to engage the people his men watched over, and how to turn the NYPD from a head-breaking army of overweight, graft-loving Gaels to something almost cerebral and benevolent. One of his earliest ideas was to require all detectives to take classes in applied psychology at local colleges. Eventually he changed his mind, but it was an indication of Woods’s mindset. He would become perhaps the most progressive head of the NYPD in history.
The new commissioner began his term with a slew of changes. He ordered cops to slim down and undergo military-style physical training. “The fat policeman,” proclaimed one journalist, “shirking behind a political pull has gone forever.” He demanded that precise crime statistics be kept for every neighborhood, a preview of the CompStat program developed in the 1990s. Trained chemists, members of the first forensic teams in the country, now hurried to crime scenes with detectives and analyzed bloodstains and clothing, collecting dust, fabric, hair, wood, metal, and other clue-bearing materials from the scene. Professor L. E. Bisch of Columbia University opened the “Psychopathic Library” inside an NYPD facility, where he and his staff gave criminals tests to measure their reasoning and personality types. Bisch’s work became one of the first large-scale studies of the criminal mind. New York even got its first aquatic police station, an NYPD office that floated on the East River, complete with sleeping quarters, a “desk room,” a wireless, and a lounging cabin. There were regular film classes; detectives sat in a darkened room at police headquarters and studied motion pictures of theater performers acting out various crimes so they could better learn the telltale signs of felonies and misdemeanors.
In August 1914, Woods even ordered his men not to enforce certain kinds of laws, especially city ordinances. Instead, he wanted them to show the violators how to avoid breaking the law. Detectives watching over anarchist rallies, who once would have waded into the crowd with nightsticks flying, were now ordered to smile, “radiate good nature,” and spread an air of calm and peacefulness. The cop, to Woods, was a friend and mentor. “He becomes a teacher of cleanliness, an educator of good habits . . . He plays the part rather of a helpful friend and guide than of avenging, implacable autocrat.” Captains were given tickets that they could hand out to a father or mother in distress; with them, the needy could buy milk or bread, coal for their fire, or a hot meal in a local restaurant. At Christmas, precinct houses were fitted out with balsams and Douglas firs, and poor children found gifts under the trees. Woods suggested that cops should be known as “the People’s Friends.” It was said that Woods had turned the police department into a “branch of Social Service.”
The effects were immediate. Instances of serious crime dropped from 31,759 in the first half of 1915 to 24,267 the next year, with murders dipping from 116 to 94. Woods was invited to Sing Sing to address inmates, then to Harvard. He brought thirty ex-convicts to the prestigious Collegiate Club at Columbia University and sat down to dinner with them.
But one artifact of the past remained. The city on the eve of World War I was infested with violent gangs that were a law unto themselves. There were blocks in the city that were considered off limits to civilians and even policemen. In the neighborhood along the East River from 96th Street upward (known as the Car Barn District), you could find a sign hanging on a black lamppost: “NOTICE: COPS KEEP OUT. No policemen will hereafter be allowed in this block. By order of the Car Barn Gang.” Policemen who ignored the sign and entered the block were regularly attacked and beaten. Gangsters had seemingly lost their fear of the officer in uniform. “Murder can be done cheaper in New York,” according to the World, “than in the wildest parts of Arizona.”
And then there was the Black Hand.
The Society continued to kill, maim, bomb, and extort its victims in New York, and indeed across America. After Petrosino, other cops had been attacked. Detective Gabriele Longobardi, “the Petrosino of Chicago,” was nearly killed only months after his namesake’s execution; and an attempt was made on the life of John D’Antonio, head of the Italian detectives in New Orleans. Three years before, in Kansas City, a cop named Joseph Raimo was sitting in a saloon when a man talking to a group of Italians at a table named the killer of Paulina Pizano, a grocery store owner slain by the Black Hand with a shotgun blast in December 1910. As the gunman’s name was mentioned, one of the gang looked up and saw Raimo listening. The cop was shaken. “I know who killed Paulina Pizano,” he told a friend. “And they know I know it. Some day they will get me.” Weeks later, Raimo was walking home after a card game at a neighborhood bar when a man stepped in front of him with a shotgun. There were two loud reports and Raimo fell to the ground, dead. At his funeral, his wife, the mother of their four children, fell on the coffin, crying, “Mio compagno! Mio carissimo compagno!” (My life’s companion! My dearest companion!). She was later sent to a mental institution, her grief having unbalanced her mind.
The Society had even effected a kind of institutional change within criminal culture. Many Manhattan gangs, even ones run by Jewish or Irish bosses, had adopted the methods of the Society. Extortion was rife among the small businesses of the city, which were regularly threatened by “bandmen,” or gang members. The business owner “was their favorite prey, because they could so terrorize him that he would not even appeal to the police,” reported the Herald. “The bandmen would go to him and demand that he pay so much toward their upkeep weekly or else they would kill his horses, beat his drivers, or in some cases . . . murder would be threatened.” Dopey Benny’s gang ran the Lower East Side; the Hudson Dusters managed the West Side and the piers. The Italian sections below 14th Street were ruled by the Jack Sirocco gang and the “Chick Triggers.” Some of these gangs were descendants of the notoriou
s Five Points outfits. But others followed a model that had been pioneered by the Society.
And what might be called the classic Black Hand was still terrorizing the city. Five kidnapped children were murdered between 1909 and 1914. Bombs still went off with regularity in lower Manhattan, and kidnappings continued unabated. But other stories and themes now captured the attention of the public. “[The Society] had perpetrated so many sanguinary outrages in New York and the country,” wrote Frank Marshall White, still on the case, “that the narration of their crimes in the newspapers had almost ceased to interest, much less to horrify, the average citizen.” As some officials had feared, the Black Hand had become a permanent feature of life in a number of major cities, including New York. Arthur Woods arrived in a city that had largely capitulated to the Society.
When it came to most crimes, Woods preached a gospel of compassion. When it came to the Black Hand, he read from a different prayer book, one heavily influenced by Joseph Petrosino. The case that came to exemplify Woods’s approach to the Society began on Wednesday, May 13, 1915.
That afternoon, in her home above the family bakery on Bleecker Street, near Washington Square, a Mrs. Longo waited for her son Francesco to come home from Public School 3, as she did every weekday. Her “bright and pretty” child, six years old, had left that morning with a nickel in his pocket to buy a sandwich for lunch. At 3:00 p.m., when he usually came sauntering through the front door, there was no sign of the boy, nor at 4:00 p.m. or 5:00. Mrs. Longo began to feel anxious. Her husband, a “big and brawny man,” told her not to worry, that the boy was out playing and would be home soon. The father, a baker also named Francesco, was combative by nature. One writer said that the motto of Scotland—Nemo me impune lacessit, or “No one provokes me with impunity”—could have been tattooed across his brow, so imposing was his expression. The Black Hand had never threatened him.
The Black Hand Page 26
