THE BARREL MURDER - a Detective Joe Petrosino case (based on true events)

by MICHAEL ZAROCOSTAS

  Salvatore stumbled into the witness box. His large knotty hands clutched at the wood railing, and his eyes were full of dread. He looked lost, like a forlorn ghost to Petrosino, but there was nothing he could do to help him. This was the moment of truth.

  Jerome started with simple questions, trying to calm Salvatore. He asked how he came to America and how he was related to Benedetto Madonnia, and he gave the interpreter and Salvatore plenty of time to answer. Throughout the room, a murmur began as those in the back passed on the testimony to dozens in the hallways and then hundreds on the street outside.

  “I know this is difficult, Mr. Sagliabeni, and I apologize.” Jerome approached the witness stand and held up a morgue photograph of Madonnia. “But is this your stepfather, Benedetto Madonnia?”

  “Yes, that’s him.” Salvatore’s eyes watered.

  “Thank you.” Jerome gave him a few seconds to compose himself, then held up a gold hunting case pocket watch for the jury to see. “Is this your stepfather’s watch?”

  Petrosino saw Morello lean over defense counsel’s table. His deformed hand had been hidden inside a loose sleeve, but now it slinked out and rapped loudly against the table to get the boy’s attention.

  Salvatore fixated on Morello’s claw and stammered.

  Jerome followed Salvatore’s gaze and stared angrily at Morello. “Mr. Morello, if you make any gestures to this witness, I’ll seek contempt against you.”

  Le Barbier popped up in his double-breasted frock. “Objection, Your Honor! Mr. Jerome is threatening my client. This is an outrage.”

  “Pipe down, Chas,” Jerome said. “Your client is the one who’s trying to intimidate my witness. Maybe you should counsel him on obstruction of justice. You’re an expert at it.”

  “Look who’s squawking, Jerome. You’ve got more tricks than Saks has suits.”

  The crowd chuckled.

  “Everyone sit down,” Scholer said. “Mr. Morello, if you do that again, you’ll be blindfolded and gagged. Go on, Mr. Jerome.”

  Jerome smiled at Le Barbier, adjusted his pince nez, and said, “Mr. Sagliabeni, I want to remind you that you have nothing to fear. You’re under the protection of this Court and the Central Bureau detectives. Now, once again, is this the watch you loaned your stepfather?”

  “Well . . . it looks just like mine. My father’s watch was out of order and he carried mine from Buffalo on his trip to New York.”

  “What do you mean ‘just like’ yours? It’s yours, is it not?”

  “It l-l-looks like my watch, but . . . there may be many others like it in the world.” A tear started down the fuzzy curve of Salvatore’s cheek. “I can’t say it’s mine for certain.”

  The Ox snorted from beneath his chains, and Petrosino felt as if the whole courtroom were turned upside down and all the blood gravitated to his head. He bit his lip and fought the urge to go over and shake some sense into Salvatore.

  “Wait a moment,” Jerome said. “When you saw this watch in the hands of the police, when you met with Detective Petrosino, didn’t you tell him, ‘That’s papa’s watch’?”

  “I may have. I’m just not sure now.” Salvatore glanced at the Morello gang.

  “Come now, didn’t you say that this was your watch, that you scratched the neck with your thumbnail because of a loose screw? Mr. Sagliabeni, you’re weakening, sir.”

  Salvatore seemed on the verge of a convulsion and couldn’t speak. Petrosino groaned, watching helplessly as the boy unraveled on the stand.

  Jerome smiled uncomfortably at Coroner Scholer. “Your Honor, Mr. Sagliabeni’s prior affidavit positively identifies this watch as his stepfather’s. Given this mafia gang’s transparent efforts to intimidate the witness, the People move to publish said affidavit to the jury.”

  “Granted,” Coroner Scholer said. “The jury should conclude that Mr. Sagliabeni positively identified the watch found by the police as the watch loaned to his stepfazzer. It was described by the witness as a gold hunting case pocket watch engraved with a locomotive.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” Jerome said. “Now, Mr. Sagliabeni, I know this is difficult for you, but I must ask: when did you last see your stepfather alive?”

  “At the Lehigh Valley train depot.” Salvatore paused. “I’ll never see him again, will I?”

  “Thanks to these mafia hoodlums here, I’m afraid not, son.”

  “Objection!” Le Barbier said. “He can’t say that, Your Honor!”

  “No further questions,” Jerome said.

  A bailiff helped Salvatore off the witness stand, and the gang’s unblinking eyes stabbed at the boy as he left the courtroom.

  Jerome stood before the jury box and lifted up his finger in silence, drawing everyone’s attention before he announced: “We call Giuseppe De Priemo as our next witness.”

  Petrosino watched The Ox shift tensely in his chair, and Bimbo put his hands on the gangster’s enormous shoulders, bracing for another outburst.

  Petrosino squeezed the leather sap in his pocket and prayed that Giuseppe De Priemo would fare better than Salvatore. If there were saints in heaven, he thought, they should help De Priemo. He took out a handkerchief to wipe his brow. The room had become stifling with De Priemo’s entrance. The bailiffs threw open windows, but the stagnant air was infected with malevolence. Babies cried out in frustration, and police guards grew irritated and stood closer to the sweating gangsters.

  De Priemo was the only person shivering in the room. His prison stripes quivered as he stared down at his own lap.

  “How, if at all,” Jerome said, “do you know the suspects in this case, Mr. De Priemo?”

  “We made plenty of bad coin together, printed false notes. Things like that.”

  A hissing sound like an angry teakettle came from the back of the room. Petrosino turned, but couldn’t see who was making the noise.

  “Who was in this band?”

  “The men you have in chains there.” De Priemo pointed without looking.

  “And you reside in Sing Sing now for passing counterfeit?”

  “Yes, sir.” De Priemo glanced at the gang. “They let me go up the river and never gave me my share of the spoils. Before my trial, they said they’d get me a lawyer. But I guess they double-crossed me. They were happy to let me rot in Sing Sing.”

  “I see.” Jerome nodded with satisfaction, then held up a large photograph for the jurors.

  Petrosino could see that it was one of the more grotesque Morgue pictures of Madonnia. His head was lopsided in the photograph, and tendons fell out of his neck like red strands of pasta. For the first time, the laconic German jurors made noise. They mumbled and groaned at the picture, and the crowd whispered at the reaction.

  “Please take a look at this photograph.” Jerome handed the photo to De Priemo. “Do you know the poor dead soul in this picture?”

  “My God, yes, I know him.” De Priemo’s whole body cringed. “It’s my brother-in-law, Benedetto Madonnia.”

  “Did Benedetto know the other men in the gang, this counterfeiting gang here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did he know them? Strike that. Do you know if he ever spoke to them on your behalf? About getting your share of the counterfeiting loot and getting you a lawyer?”

  “Yes, he did. He went to that man there, Giuseppe Morello, and asked for my share of the loot. And they all laughed at him.”

  “Did your brother-in-law threaten to expose the gang if they didn’t pay you what you were owed? Did he threaten to squeal?”

  “I . . . I don’t know about that?”

  “Come now, sir, didn’t you tell me that before? Didn’t Benedetto say that they’d pay one way or another or he’d expose them?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “Well, why do you think your brother-in-law ended up this way?” Jerome took the photograph and held it up again, this time for the audience. The crowd gasped in disgust. “Why do you think they stabbed him to death, cut his t
hroat, and shoved his manhood in his mouth?”

  “Objection, Your Honor!” Le Barbier boomed. “This is vaudeville at best. And Mr. De Priemo’s opinion as a layman is utterly irrelevant! There’s no foundation, he’s no expert-”

  “Overruled,” Scholer said. “The witness will answer.”

  De Priemo paused before directing his words at Petto, “I think Benedetto was killed to shut him up and keep him from going to the police.”

  Petrosino nodded and thought, Keep going, De Priemo, don’t crack.

  “The man you’re looking at right now,” Jerome said, “do you know this Tomasso Petto?”

  “I knew him once.” De Priemo’s cloudy eyes strained at Petto. “But not by that name.”

  “You know Tomasso Petto by a different name?”

  Chair legs screeched on the floor as some of the Morello gang moved in their seats, but the police guards held the suspects still.

  “Mr. De Priemo, answer the question. You knew him by another name? What was it?”

  De Priemo’s shriveled lips mumbled, “I knew him as ‘Luciano’ . . . Luciano Petto from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.”

  Jerome nodded and leaned on an elbow against the jury box railing. “Did you know that Luciano Petto stabbed a miner in Scranton?”

  “Objection, hearsay, Your Honor. It’s irrelevant and prejudicial-”

  “Overruled. You may answer.”

  “Yes,” De Priemo said, “I heard that he stabbed a man in Scranton.”

  “Did you also hear that the police found a pawn ticket for Benedetto’s watch on Petto when he was arrested, after Benedetto was also found stabbed? Like the fellow in Scranton?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you have any reason to believe that your brother-in-law would have voluntarily given that watch to the likes of this Petto?”

  “No, sir, he wouldn’t have done that. Never.”

  “So then, do you believe Petto murdered your brother-in-law in cold blood, stabbing him with a knife as he’d done before and then stealing the watch from his still-warm body?”

  “Objection! This is ridiculous, he’s leading his own witness-”

  “Overruled,” Scholer said. “Answer the question.”

  De Priemo looked away from Petto’s black stare. “Petto was a friend of mine once, and I didn’t want to believe he killed my brother-in-law. But now I think… yes, I think he did it.”

  Petrosino exhaled his anxiety and mopped a handkerchief across his face.

  “Does Giuseppe ‘The Clutch Hand’ Morello tell Petto what to do?” Jerome asked. “Is he the ‘head’ or capo of this gang? Is he the one who ordered Petto to kill?”

  The Clutch Hand shifted in his chair, and De Priemo looked over at his former capo. Morello eyed De Priemo, lifted his deformed hand to his own lips, and mouthed the word, Shhh.

  A man in the crowd shouted in Sicilian, “Say good-bye to your family, De Priemo!”

  De Priemo’s eyelids draped shut, and he collapsed into a heap of jelly.

  The bailiffs tried to gather him up, saying to Coroner Scholer, “He’s out cold, sir!”

  Another voice in the crowd yelled, “They gave him the death sign!”

  Coroner Scholer banged his gavel and shouted, “CLEAR THE COURTROOM!”

  The guards clubbed the Morello gang’s heads, shoving them out the prisoners’ entrance, and spectators scrambled for the courtroom door. Petrosino jostled through bodies, looking for the culprits and muttering, “When I find out who’s behind this, there won’t be ambulances enough for you.” Then he saw them. One had dark curly-hair, handsome but in a menacing way. The other looked like an unshaven drunk. Paul and Peter from the soda fountain.

  The two men looked back at him tensely, then shoved their way outside. Petrosino caught Bimbo’s arm at the courthouse entrance, pointed, and shouted, “STOP THOSE MEN!” But the crowd moved like an irresistible tide, pouring onto White Street, then spreading north where Walker Street converged with Canal. By the time it thinned out, Petrosino and Bimbo were in Harry Howard Square still in sight of Paul and Peter. They dodged two carriages and a trolley car and kept running, the air burning Petrosino’s lungs like a cheap cigar.

  When the sidewalk cleared out and they had a bead on the two crooks, Bimbo pulled a baseball out of his bluecoat and held it up as if to ask Petrosino’s permission. Petrosino shouted, “Do it!” Bimbo twisted into his wind-up and whipped his arm forward with all his strength. The brown leather sphere whistled through the street like it was on a clothesline and cracked the back of Paul’s head, sending him tumbling forward into a pile of straw and manure.

  Petrosino and Bimbo caught up just as Peter managed to hoist Paul back to his feet.

  “If it isn’t the soda jerks,” Petrosino said over his cocked .38. “I told you if I ever saw your faces again, I’d squash you like turnips. Guess what? It’s squashing time, boys.”

  Chapter 33

  “I’m gonna teach you what a ‘sweatbox’ is, boys,” Petrosino said in Italian. “Show you the true Third Degree.” He shoveled more coal into the old-fashioned stove in the cell at Eldridge Street Precinct. The black iron stove rattled like an elevated train as the flame grew in its belly. “You won’t catch a cold that’s for sure. Maybe a fever, but not a cold.”

  Peter and Paul sat in the brick cell, chained to the plank bench against the back wall. Sneering. The room was the smallest of any precinct, less than six feet high, maybe a few feet bigger than a Sing Sing coffin cell. A bulb the size of a lemon flickered in the ceiling and bluish-orange light bubbled from the coal’s embers. Smoke spiraled through the cracks in the stovepipe and climbed the air like a black serpent. Peter and Paul’s expressions didn’t change. They sat in their wool suits and iron bracelets, stoic as wooden Indians in a pipe shop.

  “Joe, is this on the square?” Bimbo asked. His broad silhouette was only ten feet down the basement corridor. “They said in training we can’t do sweat boxes or shower baths anymore, because shysters are making a stink about the Third Degree and the Constitution.”

  “You’re right, kid. But the law isn’t black and white. It’s full of grey areas.” Then Petrosino spoke loudly to the two prisoners. “Lots of holes in the law. Isn’t that right, Peter and Paul? Nobody’s used this sweat box in a while, at least since that one prisoner died. He was a tough bastard, skin thicker than a rhino’s hide. I wasn’t surprised when they couldn’t get a word out of him. They said when the ambulance took him away, he weighed thirty pounds less than when they first pinched him. It was all the water he lost.”

  Bimbo’s face twitched, and he looked back at the stair door at the end of the corridor.

  “Don’t worry, kid. These men are rougher than that fellow. Aren’t you, Peter and Paul?” Petrosino lifted the rusted shovel from the bin and added more coal to the stove. He stoked it until the flames were white hot. Then he took off his cap, his suit jacket, his tie, and unfastened the top three buttons of his shirt. “I’m not so tough myself. I’m gonna wait out here.”

  Petrosino went into the corridor, closed the cell door and and sat on a stool. He kept the coals burning and watched through the iron bars of the door as Peter and Paul went through the stages. First, they laughed at him until their faces turned shiny and wet like bronze. As the minutes passed, their cheeks ballooned, and their bodies pulled at their chains. They cursed at him, trying to wriggle out of their suits. Their hands had only so much slack in the chains, so barely a button was loosened. They used their mouths to try to undress, teeth gnawing at the fabric, but their bodies began to slump lethargically. Sweat fell from their noses as they bickered, trying to move the plank bench away from the stove, scuttling to the corner of the cell.

  Petrosino said, “What are your real names?”

  They shook sweat from their eyelids and glared at him, saying nothing but curses.

  Petrosino reached between the door’s iron bars and shoveled more coal in the stove until it felt like the inside of a baker’
s oven. He flapped his suit jacket at the acrid black smoke, forcing it to envelop the two thugs.

  “Who are you? Mafia? Is that why you were threatening witnesses at the Inquest?”

  They ducked their heads between their knees, coughing for air. Paul choked out, “Fuck you, Parsley. Give us a lawyer.”

  Bimbo shuffled closer and stared at the two men melting away in the brick cell. He whispered timidly, “Joe, please, this ain’t good. We’re supposed to give them-”

  “These men have been threatening me, kid, and I think the witnesses at the Inquest, too. They’re mixed up with the Morello gang. So to hell with them.” Petrosino stared at them. “The fellow that died in here, it wasn’t all sweat. It was vomit and piss, too. Even the snot in his nose and the water in his eyes. I guess at some point, he lost his mind. The doc said his brain got cooked like a hardboiled egg. So he lost control of all his functions.”

  Peter looked up, his hounddog eyes crossed with dizziness. “No more… stop.”

  “Tell me who you are, and I’ll shut the stove off. And I’ll pour this on you, too.” Petrosino reached for a bucket behind him and showed them the water. He cupped his hand and took a slurp of it, exaggerating the taste, smacking his lips. “Nice and cold.” He flicked cold drops at them. “Who are you? Is your boss The Fox?”

  The door at the end of the corridor swung open, and one of Schmittberger’s best plainclothes men, Moses Weiss, catapulted down the corridor. The young Jewish sleuth grabbed Bimbo by the shoulder and hissed, “We got company!”

  Petrosino quickly opened the cell door and closed the stove. “Stall ‘em.”

  Weiss disappeared back through the corridor door, and Bimbo looked back at Petrosino with a pleading look. It was obvious he wanted to follow Weiss out.

  “Get the hell out of here, kid. I’ll handle it.”

  Bimbo left as Petrosino put his suit jacket and his tie back on. He wiped the sweat from his face with his cap and tossed it into the shadows behind him. Then he threw the bucket of water on Peter and Paul. They gasped with relief and baptized themselves in the salve of wet clothes. The ugly one even sucked moisture from his sleeve.