by Peter Watson
She lightly kissed Silvio’s cheek. “No, I’ll go now, while the good memories are close enough to keep themselves warm. If I stayed it would all just run into misery, or blood. I don’t expect we’ll come back from Europe. Good-bye.” Then she turned and went out.
Silvio opened the cigar box. Inside was a letter. The letter was in old Angie’s handwriting.
Dear Sylvano,
By the time you get this, I’ll be gone. First, I want to congratulate you on that last maneuver with Liotta. A very impressive piece of thinking. Real foxy. I was impressed by your great scheme when you first outlined it in the cathedral, that Tuesday when I went to confession. I wasn’t sure you could pull it off, faking the ambush, then making sure the case was dropped, all as a way of setting up a vendetta between Liotta and Martell, and making Liotta the natural suspect for Martell’s death. I knew you had to get rid of Martell, after what he did to you, and that you needed to outthink Liotta, to prove that you were smarter. But I never thought it would pan out just as it did. You were right on the button about Di Passo. He was so ill, so mad with Fazio and Liotta he lied his head off. That last finesse, instructing the judge to send them back to jail, even after they had been acquitted, was beautiful. Life is rarely so sweet. I salute you from beyond the grave. You arrived in this world too late; Garibaldi could have made a great general out of you. Anyway, you will make a great Capo. You should have some years of peace ahead of you, and you will become very rich. Sicily will be proud of you.
I am sorry you never became my son-in-law, but then I am sorry for many things, and it is too late now. You have all the things any man could want.
My only hope is that you find someone.
Angie
Silvio took out a cigar but didn’t light it right away. He was thinking of old Angie saying he would have liked him as a son-in-law. Silvio had never had a father; a father-in-law would have been the next best thing. But that last sentence was the one that hit home. “I hope you find someone.” Yes, indeed. Sono orfano. I am still an orphan.
In the years that followed, Silvio Priola laid the foundation of a criminal empire that exists to this day. It is ironic that Mafia businesses are called families, for this, the first of them, was never a family in the true sense. Just as Silvio was Angelo’s heir but not his natural son, so those who came after Silvio were not his blood relatives either. He died in 1921, just before his sixty-second birthday, trying to fix the Jack Dempsey-Georges Carpentier world heavyweight title fight. A gold ring and an old fishhook were found in his waistcoat pocket. They were buried with him. The bulk of his fortune went to the Esplanade Street Orphanage in New Orleans.
The Birth of the Mafia in North America
This novel is based on a number of actual events that took place in Sicily, North America, and Great Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Those facts are set out below, together with a number of references for further reading.
In 1879 an Englishman, John Forrester Rose, sometimes described as a priest, was kidnapped in the hills behind Palermo by a group of Sicilian mafiosi. Rose owned land in Sicily, on which sulfur mines were a prominent feature. His abductors were a mafioso bandit known as Leone and his deputy, Giuseppe Esposito. Leone sent a ransom note to Rose’s wife, demanding £5,000. With his initial demand he cut off one of Rose’s ears and enclosed it in the envelope. The British government was incensed and demanded that the Italian government do something to resolve the situation. This resulted in another letter to Mrs. Rose, containing her husband’s other ear and part of his nose. The ransom was eventually paid, and Rose released. However, in the interim Leone’s band raided another grandee and held an American artist. He was forced to write the letters in English to Mrs. Rose and made to sketch Esposito to prove that he was an artist. This sketch was mailed to Britain with the second ransom demand written on the back. It was allegedly sent by Esposito out of vanity, the mafioso regarding himself as very good-looking.
After Rose was released, the British demanded that the Italian government move against the brigands, and operating on inside information, a brigata of cavalry, artillery, and infantry raided Leone. He was killed in the shoot-out that ensued, but Esposito, though captured, escaped later on and fled to New Orleans, where he took the name Randazzo. In New Orleans he lived on a fishing boat on the river. He became involved in the importation of fruit through the docks, where his friends included one Giuseppe Provenzano. The Provenzanos were one of two families involved at the time in the importation of fruit into the USA via New Orleans. The others were the Mantrangas, led by one Joseph Machecha. On occasions, and very controversially, on Esposito’s boat, the Italian flag was flown above the Stars and Stripes.
In 1881 the Italian government asked police forces in America to look out for Esposito. The New Orleans detective (and, later, chief of police) David Hennessy arrested Esposito. He was able to identify his man using a copy of the sketch that the American artist had made of Esposito during his capture and which had been sent to London with the ransom demand written on it. Esposito was put on board a ship, the City of New Orleans, bound for New York, where he faced extradition proceedings. Despite a concerted campaign by the Provenzanos (among others) to prove Esposito’s innocence, he was found guilty and extradited to Sicily on an Italian warship. In Italy he was tried on eighteen counts of murder and one hundred counts of kidnapping. He was found guilty of six murders and sentenced to death, though this was commuted to life. He died in prison seven years later, of natural causes.
As a result of the Esposito affair, David Hennessy became a celebrity in America and eventually chief of police in New Orleans. He was a rumbustious character, himself accused of murdering a rival detective, though acquitted.
In May 1890 a group of New Orleans roustabouts belonging to the Mantranga family were ambushed at the corner of Esplanade and North Claiborne streets. As a result of the attack several members of the rival Provenzano family were arrested. The attack was the culmination of a war between the Provenzanos and the Mantrangas during the course of which, in one year, eighty-nine waterfront murders took place.
At the time David Hennessy and the Provenzanos were joint owners of a whorehouse known as the Red Lantern located near Hennessy’s home. Before their trial could take place, David Hennessy was killed in circumstances that are still controversial. He was walking home on Girod Street, having had supper at Dominick Virgut’s oyster saloon, when he was shot by a group of men from across the street. Before he died, he is alleged to have said, “The dagos did it.”
At the subsequent trial of nineteen men from the Mantranga family, the word Mafia was first used in an American context. The head of the Mantranga family was still alleged to be Joseph Machecha, a fruit importer. Part of the prosecution’s case concerned a certain Frank di Maio, an employee of Pinkerton’s agency, who infiltrated into the Parish Prison to snoop on the defendants. He posed as a counterfeiter who had been arrested in Amite, upstate Louisiana, and he shared a cell with a highly disturbed defendant, Emmanuele Polizzi. By persuading Polizzi that he was being poisoned by the others, di Maio managed to acquire circumstantial evidence against the Mantrangas. However, he caught dysentery and eventually did not give evidence. (Later in his career he was indeed one of those responsible for the apprehension of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) The rest of the evidence in the trial of those accused of the murder of David Hennessy was grossly contradictory and in fact either the great majority of defendants were found not guilty or no verdict was reached. Despite this, the judge in the case, Mr. Joshua G. Baker, refused to release the defendants, who, following their acquittal, were returned to the Parish Prison. The next day, a mob, led by several “concerned citizens,” surrounded the prison, broke in, and lynched those defendants. They were either shot or hanged at the Parish Prison or just outside, in full view of a mob. One was hanged from a lamppost.
Later a grand jury investigated the actions of this mob but refused to hand down further indictments.
The affair caused a rift-between the American and Italian governments and, for a while, there were even rumors of war. These were soon quashed, but aggression and even lynching against Italians in other American states and cities continued for some time.
There is controversy to this day as to whether the Provenzanos or the Mantrangas were responsible for David Henessy’s death and to what extent it was a revenge killing for his arrest of Giuseppe Esposito some years earlier. What cannot be doubted is that both the Provenzanos and the Mantrangas were recognized families in both New Orleans and Sicily as late as the 1990s. In January 1995 one Giuseppe Provenzano was sentenced to life imprisonment in Palermo for a Mafia murder. And the importation of fruit, before the age of refrigeration, helped to account for the highly organized nature of Sicilian gangs in New Orleans, ahead of anywhere else.
Further reading
All these references tell much the same story except for the book by Richard Gambino.
Adams, Margaret, Mafia Riots in New Orleans, Tulane University thesis, 1924.
Coxe, John E., “The New Orleans Mafia Incident,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly, 20, 4, 1937, pp. 1067–1110.
Gambino, Richard, Vendetta: a true story of the worst lynching in America, the mass-murder of Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891, the vicious motivations behind it, and the tragic repercussions that linger to this day, New York, Doubleday, 1977. (The author, who is Brooklyn-born, of Sicilian parentage, makes the case that there was no Mafia involvement in the Hennessy murder, but that instead the Sicilians in New Orleans were “set up” by traditional American business interests. Otherwise, a good and full account.)
Harper’s, “The Mafia and What Led to the Lynching,” Harper’s Weekly, 35, March 28, 1891, pp. 225–7.
Horam, J.D., The Pinkertons, London, 1970, Robert Hale & Co. See especially chapter 34, “Operative Dimaio: “The Raven’.”
Kendall, John Smith, “Who Killa de Chief?,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly, 22, 2, 1939, pp. 492–530.
Marr, Albert H., “The New Orleans Mafia Case,” American Law Review, 25, 1891.
Author’s Note
This novel is loosely based on actual events which took place in Sicily and New Orleans between 1879 and 1891, events that show how the Mafia left Sicily and became established in North America.
The chronology of certain events has been changed, to suit the convenience of fiction.
I am grateful to the New Orleans Public Library and the Historic New Orleans Collection for help with research.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1995, 1998 by Peter Watson
Cover design by Drew Padrutt
ISBN 978-1-5040-2048-0
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