Elizabeth Street

by Laurie Fabiano

  Petrosino walked to the other side of Rocco’s bed and looked him straight in the face. “That is all I know, although I can guess much more. I imagine they came to you for money; they might have even called it ‘protection money.’ That is their new tactic. Being an honest man, you probably refused to give it to them. Or,” he said, “you didn’t give them enough.” Petrosino put his derby back on.

  “Signore, you just lost your hard-earned store. I don’t pretend that I can make everything right, but we can put these criminals behind bars by working together. You get better, signore, and we’ll talk again.” He turned and tipped his hat to Giovanna. “Good day, signora.”

  For days, Giovanna did not go out. She did not want to run into Petrosino. Avoiding her neighbor Pietro Inzerillo was more difficult. Sure enough, her first time out of the house, she had to listen to him express his condolences and say, “If only I was allowed to be of service to you.”

  They sold the horse and cart so that Rocco could set himself up as a street vendor once again. If passing the boarded-up store was not reminder enough of the tragedy, the back-breaking work of pushing the cart didn’t allow him to forget.

  Rocco and Giovanna argued long and loud after Lieutenant Petrosino’s second “chance encounter” with them on the street. Giovanna’s feeling was that they had nothing to lose, so why not cooperate in hopes of seeing justice served. But Rocco’s mistrust of the police led him to believe that something even worse could happen if the police were involved. Giovanna was beginning to like Petrosino and trust him, and in spite of Rocco’s suspicions—and vows to kill the Blackhanders himself—she could tell that he, too, liked the little lieutenant.

  A month later, Giovanna announced, “Rocco, I will work with Petrosino. You never have to be seen with him. If they are watching at all, they’ll be watching you.”

  After more than four years of marriage to this man, she was learning the signs. He didn’t say yes, but there was no tirade, which meant that Giovanna could proceed as she wanted without Rocco having to bruise his pride by acquiescing.

  TWENTY-TWO

  In just one meeting, Lieutenant Petrosino realized that he would not be the only one asking the questions. If Giovanna was going to help, she made it known that she was going to have to understand the situation, and on that first morning, Giovanna’s education into the ways of the Black Hand began.

  Petrosino admitted to himself that Giovanna intimidated him. She towered over him, and when she asked questions, her blue eyes were so penetrating that it seemed she would instantly know if he was hedging or not telling the truth. Ruthless crooks were easier to deal with, yet despite his discomfort, he had grown to like this big woman who now sat at an oak table in his cramped precinct office.

  Giovanna was poring through stacks and stacks of identification cards. On the front of each card were two photos—a profile and a full-face shot. On the back were words and numbers that were gibberish to Giovanna, and not only because she didn’t speak English.

  After more than two hours of scrutinizing each photo, Giovanna walked over to Petrosino’s desk. “Lieutenant, I have found an important similarity about these Blackhanders.”

  Lieutenant Petrosino responded to her solemn expression. “Yes, signora, please tell me.”

  “They are all ugly.” Giovanna slapped her face in an expression of ugliness. “Brutti, tutti sono brutti.”

  It was the first time Giovanna heard the lieutenant laugh, and it escaped like something that had been in hiding.

  “Sit, sit, signora,” Petrosino said, still chuckling and motioning to a chair in front of his desk.

  “What does all this say?” Giovanna asked, pointing to the card’s back.

  “It’s the Bertillon measurements; it’s how we identify the criminals. Although now there’s a new method. You put black ink on fingers and make prints. Each one is unique—like a little map.”

  Giovanna remembered the black-ink handprint on one of the letters and silently cursed Rocco for destroying them. Pointing at the titles on the card, she asked, “But here, what do these words say?”

  “Height, weight, head length, outer arms, trunk, forearm…”

  “Are you arresting them or making them new suits?”

  Once again, the lieutenant chuckled.

  “Who’s that ugly one?” asked Giovanna, pointing to a photo pinned to Petrosino’s wall.

  “That is ‘Il Lupo.’ In English, ‘The Wolf.’”

  “He looks more like that kind of dog without a snout. What is that?”

  “A bulldog! Yes, you’re right! We’ve arrested Lupo many times but have never been able to keep him in jail.”

  “I think my stepson saw him in the Star of Italy.”

  “I’m sure he did. It’s one of his haunts. My affair with Lupo began in 1902. He murdered a man, but we didn’t get the evidence we needed. Then in 1903, I had proof he was involved in the barrel murder I told you about, but he was mysteriously cleared by the jury. Later that year, he was arrested for kidnapping, and again they let him go.”

  “How does this happen?”

  “Influence and fear. He pays people in high places, and if the case makes it to a jury, he frightens them. They think he will have them killed or curse their entire family with the evil eye. He’s worked hard on creating a reputation as someone with powers. His newest trick is he is pretending to be a respectable businessman with a grocery store on Mott Street. Not unlike your neighbor Pietro Inzerillo.”

  “Do this Lupo and Inzerillo work together?”

  “Sì. Inzerillo was arrested for the barrel murder with Lupo, and they’re often together. Now that you’ve seen his picture, I wouldn’t be surprised if you notice Lupo in Inzerillo’s cafe.”

  Giovanna gagged on the thought that she had come close to engaging a murderer to protect her store, but she forged on. “So why do you think that Lupo wasn’t involved in the blackmail of my store?”

  “I didn’t say that exactly. I doubted Lupo was involved, based on the sloppy explosion. But even if he was, I have nothing to go after Lupo with. You didn’t exchange money with Inzerillo, and he presented his offer with no threats. I could never prove blackmail.”

  “So the only thing to do is find the moled man and fat bug?”

  “Yes, signora, many crimes lead to Lupo. But hundreds more do not. There are thousands of Italian criminals in New York. There are so many of them that shopkeepers are being blackhanded by three different crooks or gangs at the same time.”

  “But why so many?”

  “When criminals get out of jail in Italy, the police make their life miserable, so they bribe their way onto ships. Usually they arrive in New York with the name of another criminal in their pocket. That thief gives him food and shelter in exchange for swindling shopkeepers since no one will know the newcomer’s face. When the job is done, if we are investigating, they just go to another city.”

  “And the Americans can’t stop them getting in?”

  “We’re trying, signora. The American laws are loose, and only now is the Italian government starting to cooperate with us.”

  A noticeable change took place in the lieutenant’s demeanor. He had been speaking forcefully, and with this last question he looked defeated, so Giovanna changed the topic.

  “Ah, there is a pretty face!” exclaimed Giovanna, pointing to a picture of a woman on his desk.

  Giovanna swore she saw Petrosino blush. “This is my wife.” He turned the picture toward Giovanna. “My Adelina.”

  Giovanna could tell he had more to say. “Any children?”

  “In November we will have our first,” he said with both embarrassment and pride.

  “Bravo!” Spying a gold-embellished certificate from Italy on the wall, Giovanna asked, “What’s that, Lieutenant?”

  “After King Umberto was assassinated, I tracked down the anarchist in Paterson who pulled the trigger.”

  “You are a hero, Lieutenant!” exclaimed Giovanna, sincerely impressed.
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  “Unfortunately,” said Petrosino puffing up, “the second part of the story does not go so well. You see, at the same time I was doing my undercover work to get this killer, I discovered a plot by the anarchists to kill the American president. I went to my old friend Vice President Roosevelt. He was the police commissioner when I started on the force, and I warned him, but they didn’t take the threat seriously.”

  Giovanna stared blankly at the lieutenant, and he realized she didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “The American president, McKinley, was assassinated in 1901, signora.”

  “Oh, I was still in Italy, Lieutenant.”

  Petrosino saw that Giovanna was embarrassed and went back to the issue at hand. “So, beyond ugly faces, there were none that looked like your two Blackhanders?”

  “Not completely. If I take the eyes of one and put them on the cheeks of another…”

  “Signora, see here on the card, it says, ‘remarks.’ This card says, ‘tattoos on both arms.’ Look for the word ‘mole’ in English. It’s written like this.” Petrosino wrote the letters in lead pencil. “You might not see the moles so well in the photograph, but it could be in the notes.”

  “M-o-l-e. Va bene. Lieutenant, you said that when the crime is done, sometimes the swindlers leave town. So, if I find the names of these crooks and they’ve left, can you still get them in another city?”

  “It’s complicated, signora. In America you can change your name every day with no penalty.”

  “So it is hopeless.”

  “No, signora, not at all. Difficult, yes. Hopeless, no. So,” sighed Petrosino, taking the stack of photographs from her and handing her another, “I’m afraid you must look at more ugly faces.”

  Lucrezia read and translated into Italian as dramatically as the text was written. “‘The skull and crossbones flag of piracy is gone from the seas. But in our cities flourishes the Black Hand, a symbol every bit as significant of greed and cruelty—even more an emblem of cowardice and treachery. The scoundrels who lurk behind the terror of the Black Hand wax fat and daily grow more arrogant in their contempt for American law and order.’”

  “What are you reading from?” Giovanna asked Lucrezia.

  “It’s Everybody’s Magazine. I got it from my husband and thought you’d be interested. You haven’t told me much about your dealings with Petrosino.”

  “There’s not much to tell. Read more.”

  Lucrezia leafed through the article. “Here’s the part about the name that I was telling you about. ‘Back in the Inquisition days in Spain, there was La Mano Nera, a secret society that fought the government and the church. It passed, and the secret societies of southern Italy were its heirs. Twenty years ago, a false report was raised in Spain that La Mano Nera had been revived. The story lingered in the brain of a New York Herald reporter and one fine day he attempted to rejuvenate waning interest in a puzzling Italian murder case by speculating as to the coming to life of the Black Hand among immigrants in America. The other newspapers seized on the idea eagerly and kept it going.’”

  “Petrosino said there is no organization, that it is a bunch of thugs.”

  “Well, apparently this writer agrees with him. ‘The terror of the Black Hand now is tremendously increased by its mystery. The mystery will never be revealed, because there is nothing tangible to reveal. The police have not been battling with a complicated and secretly united murdering graft machine, but with individual produces of the opportunities for criminal education afforded by southern Italy for hundreds of years.’”

  “Let me see that,” said Giovanna, taking the article from Lucrezia. A copy of a Black Hand letter was reproduced on the page and, because it was written in Italian, she read it herself.

  “These people got a much longer letter than we did! Listen, ‘This is the second time that I have warned you. Sunday at ten o’clock in the morning, at the corner of Second Street and Third Avenue, bring three hundred dollars without fail. Otherwise we will set fire to you and blow you up with a bomb. Consider this matter well, for this is the last warning I will give you. I sign the Black Hand.’ This is definitely not from the same scoundrels. Even the drawing is different.”

  “Yes, detective,” smirked Lucrezia.

  Giovanna ignored her. “You know, Lieutenant Petrosino told me two Russian Jews used the name Black Hand to scare money out of a real estate dealer.”

  Lucrezia recognized Giovanna’s intellectual interest in all this and asked, “Giovanna, tell me, what do you hope will come of all this?”

  “I don’t know, Lucrezia. I’m beginning to realize that they might not find the brutti lowlifes who did it. But it doesn’t matter. How can I sit back and do nothing?”

  “I suppose I’ll continue to have no help in the next few months delivering babies?”

  “If you need me, you get me.”

  Lucrezia muttered, “I’ll take that as a no.”

  Giovanna and Lucrezia squeezed into a courtroom bench. The chambers were packed with expectant onlookers and reporters. Lieutenant Petrosino had told Giovanna about the case of Signore Spinella, a tailor who confessed to his priest that he was receiving Black Hand letters. The priest, against Spinella’s wishes, went to the police. The detectives watched Spinella’s store and, soon enough, they saw a man enter who they were sure was a crook. When the man left, they questioned the frightened tailor, who finally admitted that indeed this man was blackmailing him.

  Now the blackmailer was on trial, and Giovanna, after persuading Lucrezia to accompany her, came to see American justice at work.

  The tailor was a slight man, and his nervousness on the witness stand was evident. The poor man had to be prodded again and again by the prosecutor to tell his story. Finally, the prosecutor asked, “Is the man who threatened you in this room?”

  The tailor was silent and anxiously glanced around the courtroom.

  The prosecutor posed the question again even more dramatically. “Is this the man who threatened you?” he shouted, pointing to the defendant.

  But the tailor wasn’t looking at the defendant. Instead he saw a man leaning against the wall slowly draw his finger across his throat.

  “No, I don’t see him here,” blurted the tailor.

  Gasps filled the courtroom.

  “Isn’t this the man who threatened you?” shouted the prosecutor, now thumping on the defendant’s shoulder.

  “No, that’s not him,” mumbled the tailor.

  The man leaning against the wall quickly left while the judge gaveled the room silent. In desperation, the frustrated prosecutor asked again and again, until the judge pronounced the case dismissed.

  Giovanna was stunned. She looked at the tailor disdainfully, but when she saw him rejoined by his weeping wife and children, she sighed knowingly. She could see the disgust on Lucrezia’s face but couldn’t read it. At times like this, Giovanna suspected that Lucrezia’s contempt for the uneducated, poor immigrants surfaced. Or was she frustrated with a system that couldn’t protect them? Giovanna herself could not answer the question.

  Petrosino’s cough rattled his chest and the office walls.

  Giovanna wiped the perspiration from her own forehead with a handkerchief she had woven and embroidered with the initials G.C., because if she used either of her married names she felt like she was betraying someone. The heat in the room was oppressive.

  “You must see a doctor, Lieutenant,” counseled Giovanna. “Sometimes summer brings the worst lung illnesses.”

  “My wife agrees,” answered Petrosino, drinking water.

  Following her experience in court, Giovanna lost some of her enthusiasm for finding the blackmailers, but she still met regularly with Petrosino, from whom she continued to learn more about this secret society that was in actuality neither secret nor a society. She now knew that the role of Sicily’s Mafia or the Camorra of Naples was limited to aiding and abetting the criminals in their travels between the countries. She agreed with Petrosino that L
upo’s gang hadn’t been involved in the blackmail of their store. All the signs pointed to one of the small gangs of blackmailers that came and went in Little Italy. She decided that if Rocco had killed their Blackhanders, that might have been the end of it. At least until the next one came along.

  “Keep your eyes on Inzerillo’s cafe, signora. The Wolf has disappeared,” said Petrosino between coughs.

  “What? Lupo is gone? What of his store?”

  “He claimed bankruptcy. He took what money he had and left his creditors behind.”

  “So, Lieutenant, this is good news, yes? At least he is gone.”

  “No, signora. It only means I don’t know where he is.” Petrosino punctuated his sentence with his wracking cough, which would not stop.

  “Lieutenant, there is no need to wait. You should see the doctor,” said Giovanna, standing. She handed him his derby.

  Petrosino, not having the energy to fight, took his hat and left.

  Two weeks later, when word reached Giovanna that Petrosino was home with pneumonia, Giovanna asked Lucrezia to go with her to visit him. Carrying homemade chicken soup and a variety of herbal remedies in the July heat, they walked to his apartment at the corner of Lafayette and Sullivan. Fiaschetti, the young barrel-chested detective who had accompanied Petrosino to the hospital after the bombing, stood guard outside the door to his apartment.

  “Signora! What are you doing here?”

  “I brought soup.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Lucrezia gave Giovanna a look that said, “What did you get me into?” She wasn’t accustomed to being left waiting in hallways.

  “Signora Petrosino said to come in,” announced Fiaschetti upon returning.

  A pregnant Adelina Petrosino greeted them at the door. “How kind of you to come.”