by Lamothe, Lee
Next off was Francesco Giula, 32, from Siculiana. The men from Siculiana all carried more cash than their Cattolica brethren, in Giula’s case, $75. Like Campisi, Giula had also lived in Detroit in the early 1920s. He said his final destination was the home of his cousin, Sam Pira, in Los Angeles.
Giuseppe Sciortino, also from Siculiana, was the youngest traveler among them, just 19. His father, Salvadore, was listed as his closest relative. With $70 in his pocket, Sciortino, too, was heading to Los Angeles, he said, to the home of his uncle, Giovanni Marino.
At 43, Vincenzo Marino was the oldest of the S.S. Edam group. He also carried the most money: $90. Also from Siculiana, he had married into one of Sicily’s preeminent Mafia clans when he took Giuseppina Caruana as his wife. Marino, too, said he was heading to Los Angeles and the home of Giovanni Marino, whom he described as his cousin.
Of these men, only Francesco Giula would be lost in the mists of time. The other five would each show where their true interests lay in America. Between them, they would find their way into bootlegging, counterfeiting, arson, fraud, perjury and murder.
The Sixth Family had arrived in America.
CHAPTER 2
HARLEM, 1928
The Cotton Club, the most famous of New York’s nightclubs, was offering fabulous floor shows and musical revues exclusively for white patrons in the heart of Black Harlem. On stage were some of America’s greatest black performers: Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Ethel Waters among them. The bustling nightlife at this and similar swanky clubs catered to rich and famous patrons who motored uptown from Manhattan, while most of the people actually living in Harlem’s tenement apartments could not hope to enjoy the shows. Strictly enforced policies ensured that the only blacks inside were on the stage and the white locals were kept at bay by steep prices and a dress code. The action of Harlem’s main strip, packed with speakeasies, taverns, cafés, supper clubs, dancehalls and theaters—often controlled by America’s emerging mobsters—was just a few blocks from where Vito Rizzuto, a young man in his late 20s, settled soon after arriving in America from Sicily.
Contrary to what this Vito Rizzuto—the grandfather of the Vito of today—told immigration officials when he arrived aboard the S.S. Edam, he had no intention of staying in New Orleans. His brother-in-law, Calogero Renda, was well settled in New York by 1927, so it is likely that both men wasted little time in Louisiana before heading north, where the American Mafia was getting properly organized. Rizzuto was living in east Harlem, just across the Harlem River from the Bronx, when, on February 9, 1928, he declared his intention to become a naturalized American citizen, the first step in obtaining citizenship.
His financial fortunes seemed to be improving. Seven months later, he was able to leave the crowded streets of Harlem for a house at 94 Ridgewood Road in Oradell, across the Hudson River in New Jersey. The suburbs did not bring him peace.
At 8:35 p.m. on September 25, 1930, Rizzuto was shot inside his Oradell home. Police arrived quickly and took him to Hackensack Hospital, where he was treated by doctors while detectives questioned him about the attack. With his friend Giovanni “John” Chirichello at his side, Rizzuto told police: “I was shot by my best friend, Jimmy Guidice.” He said little else, other than insisting that he had no wish to pursue charges. Police believed the dispute was the result of a love triangle, with a detective later noting that Rizzuto and Vincenzo “Jimmy” Guidice were involved with the same woman. Officers also noted that Guidice was never again seen in Oradell. Two days after the shooting, despite his injury, Rizzuto filed his petition for American citizenship at the Court of Common Pleas in Hackensack. Calling himself a “contractor,” Rizzuto swore the oath of citizenship and renounced his loyalty to Vittorio Emanuele III, the King of Italy. The event was witnessed by two of his friends, a carpenter and a laborer. This time he came clean with authorities, stating on his application that he was married to Maria Renda and finally revealing the existence of his son, Nicolò, likely the first notation in U.S. government files of a man who would, decades later, cause investigators great concern by bringing the Sixth Family to true prominence. Certificate of Citizenship #3455682 was soon forwarded to Rizzuto by the U.S. Bureau of Naturalization. He was now an American.
Police records on this early Vito Rizzuto are complicated by the carelessness of recording foreign names during that time. There were Vitto Rizzuttos, Vito Rizutos, Rissutos and even Riuzzitos turning up in police notes throughout the late 1920s and 1930s in the area, mostly involving bootlegging and violence. Even when the name was spelled correctly in police files, the newspapers of the day were notoriously sloppy, with reporters drawing the names phonetically from policemen who had no interest in the intricacies of Italian pronunciation. As Rizzuto would soon learn, however, not everyone in the local media was so lackadaisical about who he was.
PASSAIC, NEW JERSEY, 1931
Max L. Simon was an aggressive entrepreneur who had started his newspaper career as a streetwise cub reporter known for his exposés of scandalous behavior. Described as having “ability, energy and intelligence,” Max Simon became a powerful and prominent newspaper publisher. A lawyer by education, he was feared by businessmen and politicians for his skill at muckraking, mudslinging and manipulation. It was widely known that he kept secret files on the misdeeds and peccadilloes of powerful people in the community. In fact, he had once suffered a severe beating when one of his blackmailing schemes went awry.
By 1931, he was owner of the moribund Elizabeth Daily Times and deeply in debt. Operating from the Passaic, New Jersey, area, Simon seemed to take too many cues from the gangsters and thugs he had once reported on and to prove that he was himself a crook at heart. Finding himself in increasing debt, Simon turned to the underworld. He called on John Chirichello, Rizzuto’s close friend. The pair were part of one of the dozens of arson rings operating across America, a rare growth industry in those desperate times, as more and more businessmen found themselves suffering from the financial cancer of the Great Depression. As the economy melted, so did well-insured business premises under suspicious circumstances.
Chirichello was invited to Simon’s printing plant for a discreet conversation.
“I’m hooked up to my neck,” Simon told Chirichello, complaining of his financial straits. How much would it take to “make a good job” out of the newspaper’s printing plant, he asked, intimating he wanted it torched to the ground.
“How much is it insured for?” Chirichello asked.
“Between $30,000 and $40,000,” Simon replied. “I must have this place burned down. It’s the only thing that will save my neck.” For some reason Chirichello resisted, perhaps suspicious that Simon was drawing him into a trap. “I told Max I didn’t want to do this job because I had just got out of a scrap, but he pleaded and told me if I got into trouble, he’d help me out,” Chirichello later admitted to authorities. Eventually, Chirichello contacted his gangster buddy.
“I spoke to Vito Rizzuto about the job and I took him down to the plant,” Chirichello recalled. There, Simon offered them 10 percent of the insurance money. “He paid me $300 as an advance payment,” Chirichello said. “This was to buy materials to set the place on fire.” With their front money, Chirichello and Rizzuto bought 100 gallons of liquid celluloid and 200 gallons of turpentine. “We put it into six barrels and moved it in my Chevrolet truck to the plant in Elizabeth,” he said. On the morning of October 17, 1931, the firebugs were ready.
“Rizzuto and myself got tin pails and dipped them into the barrels and threw the stuff over the first and second floors. When we couldn’t dip any more, we rolled the barrels over the floor. We spread about thirty yards of gauze bandage around.” To the gauze wicks he tied a sulfur stick, the type used to purify wine barrels. Chirichello and Rizzuto then pulled a length of electrical cable from the wall; they shut off the main power so Chirichello could safely scrape the cable to bare the two wires inside. He put a nail between the wires and twisted them around it, making what
would become an electrified spike when the power was turned back on.
“I then threw the switch and lit the sulfur stick.” Calmly, the men left the plant and jumped onto a streetcar heading towards Newark. As they rode away they heard sirens and then saw fire engines racing towards the printing plant. Looking back, they could see flames emerging from the building. They knew their job was done.
The operation seemed successful but Max Simon was unimpressed—or, at least, feigned disappointment. “It could have been a better job,” Simon complained when Chirichello and Rizzuto went to his office to collect their money. He then declined to pay them. Rizzuto was enraged.
“Rizzuto was going to shoot him,” Chirichello said. Rizzuto was not making idle threats. Shortly after the meeting, Simon called a policeman he was friendly with and said Rizzuto was armed and stalking him. The officer tracked Rizzuto down and took away his gun. The disagreement festered. Simon was clearly able to make life in New Jersey uncomfortable for Rizzuto and he soon fled, hidden by Stefano Spinello, a gangland friend from the Bronx, in a shack near the Patterson Stone Quarry in Patterson, New York, about 80 miles northeast of New Jersey. At the quarry, Rizzuto spent his days carrying water from a deep hole that formed a natural pool in a nearby swamp to make cement blocks, working to fill an order of 200 for a local company. Rizzuto was to lie low until the problem with Simon could be settled. It was the perfect place to hide: he could keep busy, Spinello would visit him and Rizzuto could pass his time chatting with a friendly watchman. Best of all, only one man from his gang knew where he was—Spinello—and he was a trusted paisan.
Meanwhile, the vindictive Simon, appalled and frightened by Rizzuto’s threats, decided to settle this problem in the same anti-social way he dealt with his mounting debts. He reached out to his underworld contacts.
Vito Rizzuto was sleeping on his cot when three men slipped into his hideaway shack during the night of August 12, 1933. They wasted little time before bashing his head in with a cement block tamper, a heavy metal device made for compacting uneven concrete. The tamper was brought down again and again, up and down his body. Ropes were then looped around his neck and yanked, an unnecessary precaution as he was already dead. The assassins cloaked his body with cement bags and wrapped it again in the canvas cover of a cement block machine before dragging it into the nearby swamp, to the very spot where Rizzuto had been drawing water for the cement. They pushed him into it and left. He was 32 years old.
When the watchman at the stone quarry realized he had not seen Rizzuto for several weeks, he went to the shack to check on him. He found the door open and no sign of Rizzuto, although his “good” clothes had been left behind. Fearful, the watchman called the local sheriff, who arrived and immediately noticed a trail leading to the swamp; something heavy had been dragged from the shack. The sheriff then “sounded” the water in the swamp by poking down with a long steel bar. When foul-smelling bubbles arose, he dragged the water and soon found Rizzuto’s submerged corpse.
The autopsy report spares little detail: “[The victim’s] mutilated and battered body was found buried in a hole in a swamp near an abandoned stone quarry. Chief cause of death: fracture of skull—comp[ound]. Other causes: rupture of liver; internal hemorrhage; simple fracture of fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth ribs on left side.” Coroner Dr. Robert Cleaver, who conducted the examination, concluded: “Homicide by crushing instrument.”
When the victim was identified as Vito Rizzuto, police were not surprised. The activities of the arson ring had already come under investigation. A month before Rizzuto’s body was found, the New York State Police had received an alert from officers in Passaic County to be on the lookout for him. He was wanted for arson after a small hotel was torched.
The police investigation moved quickly. People who knew plenty were talking too much, particularly John Chirichello, Rizzuto’s friend, whom Simon had first approached with his arson scheme. Chirichello told police the details of the printing plant fire, as well as Simon’s subsequent dispute with Rizzuto over payment. Investigators, meanwhile, had determined that Stefano Spinello was the only person in New Jersey who knew where Rizzuto had been hiding.
Max Simon, Stefano Spinello, and a third man, Rosario Arcuro, another of Rizzuto’s friends, were charged with his murder. The theory of the prosecutor was that Simon had hired the other two to track down Rizzuto and kill him. They had killed Rizzuto either to protect Simon from Rizzuto’s revenge or to shut him up in the face of an investigation into the arson ring. The names of Rizzuto’s killers remain provocative: Spinello is also sometimes spelled Spinella—the last name of Calogero Renda’s mother’s family—and Arcuro has an alternate spelling of Arcuri—the name of a Sixth Family clan from Cattolica Eraclea who would remain close to the Rizzuto family to this day. Could he have been killed by kin? Answers do not come easy.
In response to the charges against him, Max Simon pulled every string he could wrap his crooked fingers around. After being convicted of the arson, he had a soft landing, editing a newspaper and writing columns from his jail cell and, able to acquire steaks and a stove to cook them on, maintained his rich diet. He only served nine months of his three-year sentence and was released after a special session of the New Jersey Court of Pardons. The murder charge was then dropped.
Stefano Spinello was not as lucky. He had originally pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, but after a few days of hearing the damning testimony of Chirichello in court, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He was sent to Sing Sing prison for a 7-to-20 year sentence. Rosario Arcuro was never captured by police or brought to trial. He did, however, get a taste of what he had meted out to Rizzuto: he was murdered in the Bronx in August 1934.
Vito Rizzuto, one of the Sixth Family’s first North American pioneers, who would give his name and a criminal culture to a grandson he did not live long enough to see, died as a fugitive arsonist at the hands of his friends. American police could find no family who needed to be notified of his death and he ended up in a grave at the Methodist cemetery in Brewster, New York.
The American government, however, was far from closing its file on Vito Rizzuto.
WASHINGTON, D.C., 1932
Even before his murder, Vito Rizzuto had earned unwanted attention from the U.S. federal government. On Halloween, 1932, a memo marked “CONFIDENTIAL” was sent from Washington, D.C. to the New York director of the U.S. Bureau of Naturalization, asking that Rizzuto’s immigration file be pulled and forwarded. Someone had questions about the visa that had allowed Rizzuto entry into the United States.
On November 7, 1932, the quota visa that Rizzuto had presented when he disembarked in New Orleans in 1925 was found in the archives and sent to Washington. An official also dusted off the 10-year-old pages of the passenger manifest for the S.S. Edam that recorded his arrival in America.
To everyone’s eye, even now, Rizzuto’s visa looks perfect. Apparently issued by the American Consular Service in Palermo, Italy, certificate #2226 shows it was duly processed, approved, signed and stamped on November 19, 1924. The nine dollars’ worth of fee stamps were affixed and appropriately canceled to acknowledge payment for the visa, which bears the signature of Robert E. Leary, the diplomatic post’s vice consul.
The visa, issued under the American government’s recently imposed quota system that tightly controlled the number of Italians that could immigrate, carries the photograph and name of Vito Rizzuto, allowing him a coveted way into America. His paperwork to obtain the visa also seemed in order.
He had a Certificato Di Identita Personale, his personal identity certificate. Issued by the Italian government, featuring his photograph and signature and bearing the stamp of the commander of the Carabinieri station in Cattolica Eraclea, it acted as a passport.
He had a medical certificate: “I, the undersigned physician and surgeon, hereby certify that Rizzuto, Vito, son of Nicolò, of Cattolica Eraclea, has no contagious disease and has a sound mind and perfect physical constitution,” reads
the letter, dated November 13, 1924, and signed by Dr. Mario Bellina, of Cattolica Eraclea. The letter was witnessed and notarized as authentic by P.A. Margiotta, the mayor of Cattolica Eraclea, and stamped with the seal of the town’s municipal office.
Finally, he had a Certificato di Penalita—a penal certificate testifying that he had never served a term in prison—signed by the vice chancellor of the court in Agrigento, the provincial capital. Everything appeared authentic, but U.S. officials were suspicious.
In October, 1934, more than a year after Rizzuto’s murder, all of Rizzuto’s documents were gathered together by the Department of State in Washington, D.C. and sent in a diplomatic package to its consulate in Palermo, in what was being classified as “the fraudulent visa case of one Rizzuto, Vito.” The government was trying to “ascertain the circumstances and facts in the case,” the accompanying letter says. The inquiry, however, did not stem from Rizzuto’s messy murder. The diplomatic note ends: “The Department also wishes to learn whether or not Vito Rizzuto is in Italy at present or still resides in the United States.” A joint investigation by U.S. and Italian authorities was launched into the visa, which found that a good portion of the documents Rizzuto used were brilliant forgeries or corruptly obtained versions of the real thing.
