The Black Hand

by Stephan Talty

  When Petrosino was worried over a particularly difficult case, it was his habit to take refuge in the operas of Verdi, his favorite composer. He’d pick up his violin and bow and play one song in particular, “Di Provenza il mar,” Germont’s aria from La Traviata. In it, a father consoles his son over the loss of his beloved by reminding the young man of his childhood home in Provence, its dazzling sun and sweet memories:

  Oh, rammenta pur nel duol

  ch’ivi gioia a te brillò;

  e che pace colà sol

  su te splendere ancor può.

  (Oh, remember in your pain

  that joy shone on you,

  and that peace only there

  can yet glow upon you.)

  Sitting in his bachelor apartment, Petrosino would play the aria “incessantly,” his powerful hands moving the bow slowly through the lyrical opening notes before progressing into the difficult portions. It’s a lovely piece, but a mournful one; it expresses a longing for things that are past and will probably never return.

  We can imagine that Petrosino’s neighbors heard the aria many times that night.

  1

  * * *

  “This Capital of Half a World”

  On January 3, 1855, a dead man lay on an embankment of the Mississippi River not far from New Orleans as the water just a few feet from his out-flung hand rolled southward toward the Gulf of Mexico. Even from a distance, it would have become clear to any observer that the man’s passing had been a violent one. His shirt was covered in blood and pierced at several points; he’d been stabbed over a dozen times. In addition, his throat was cut from ear to ear, and the blood from the wound was caking thickly in the heat. The man’s name was Fransisco Domingo, and he was the first known victim of the Black Hand in America.

  Joseph Petrosino wouldn’t be born for another five years. The Society had preceded him to the continent by almost two decades.

  Unlike Domingo, unlike the majority of his future enemies, Petrosino wasn’t Sicilian. He came from the province of Salerno in the Campania region, near the front of the ankle in the boot of Italy. Giuseppe Michael Pasquale Petrosino was born in the village of Padula, home to a famous Carthusian monastery, on August 30, 1860. His father, Prospero, was a tailor, his mother, Maria, a housewife. It was a small family by Italian standards; Petrosino had one younger brother and one younger sister in the tailor’s humble house, which was struck by twin tragedies when Giuseppe was young. His mother died during his boyhood—of what was never recorded—and Giuseppe came down with a case of smallpox, an often fatal illness, in the 1860s. He survived but bore the scars on his skin for the rest of his life.

  The first crisis was likely the one that affected the young child most deeply. Petrosino never spoke of his mother—he rarely spoke of personal matters at all—but he would become notorious for his silences, for an inwardness that many would remark upon and give their theories for: his lack of a good education and the difficulties of his job were two popular explanations. “He never smiled” was a stock description in the newspaper profiles that proliferated in the early 1900s as Petrosino rose to national fame. It was untrue. Petrosino was capable of strong emotion, of joy and tenderness as well as great rage; a few intimates even swore he could be persuaded to do impersonations at parties. But certainly the loss of his mother left a deep and mournful mark on his personality.

  His boyhood years were formative ones for Italy. Giuseppe Garibaldi was leading the war to unify the states of the peninsula, including the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papal States, to create the modern nation of Italy. But poverty and misrule persisted, especially in the southern regions, and in 1873, when Petrosino was thirteen years old, his father decided to try his luck in America. Prospero bought tickets for the family on a steam-assisted sailing ship headed for New York City.

  Thirteen is considered an important age in the Mezzogiorno: it marks the time when a boy leaves his childish cares behind and learns the shape of the world and how one is expected to act in it. It’s widely considered to be the age when manhood begins. By that point Petrosino would have absorbed many of the rules of Italian life and honor, the most important being the ordine della famiglia (order of the family), the essential values and customs that dictated all behavior in the towns of southern Italy. One of the most important tenets of the ordine said that you never placed yourself before the family, never allowed your ambitions to overrule your duty. The harsh Mezzogiorno, where life was a battle, demanded obedience to your loved ones.

  Twenty-five days later, the Petrosinos arrived in New York, part of an early wave of Italian migration made up mostly of skilled workers and the educated. They settled in Manhattan and Petrosino enrolled in public school, where he began to learn English. (As an Italian speaker, he would have been held back from his natural grade.) The age of mass Italian immigration to America hadn’t yet begun. There were only 25,000 immigrants from the old country by 1875, and they’d assimilated into the fabric of cities like New York and Chicago with relative ease. It wasn’t until the 1880s that huge numbers of desperately poor migrants from Italy would begin to pour into the Eastern Seaboard. This often caused simmering tensions with the native population. In 1888 a series of cartoons in a New Orleans newspaper ran under the title “Regarding the Italian Population.” One panel depicted a cage crowded with Italians being lowered into a river. The caption read, “The Way to Dispose of Them.” But even in 1873, the young Joseph met hatred in the streets of lower Manhattan.

  Italians were moving into neighborhoods that had belonged to the Irish for at least two generations. The new arrivals, with the strange, flowing music of their language, their riotous festivals, their olive skin and bewildering foods, were outnumbered and bitterly despised. When an Italian family moved into a tenement, the Irish often moved out. At one flashpoint, policemen lined the streets every day as the last bell rang at the local school. When the Italian kids emerged from the front door, a howl rose up from the nearby tenements, echoing off the cobblestones as one Irish mother after another pulled up the sashes on their windows, leaned out, and shouted at their sons below to “kill the dagos!” The fair-skinned boys heard them, picked up rocks, and sent them spinning at the heads of the Italian boys and girls, who fled the school in packs. Small gangs charged at the dark-haired children and attempted to cut off the stragglers. If they cornered one, they beat him until his blood flowed. “It used to be simply bedlam,” recalled one man who had endured the daily ritual when he was a boy.

  Fearing shattered teeth and cracked bones, one group of Italian students turned to a newcomer who seemed to radiate strength. Young Joe Petrosino never avoided a battle with the Irish; in fact, he seemed to relish them. When the dismissal bell rang, Joe would lead his fellow immigrants out into the streets, his eyes alert for enemies. If an Irish kid managed to slip by a cop and aim a rock at one of the Italian children huddled behind him, Joe would turn and charge. He would begin by raining haymakers on the assailant’s head and then attempt to crack the Irish boy’s skull on the cobblestones. Petrosino often returned home with his shirt covered in blood. Over time, a small legend began to grow up around his name.

  Despite his often brutal initiation into Manhattan life, Petrosino showed signs of being a typical American immigrant: he began looking for a way up. He and another Italian boy, Anthony Marria, opened a newspaper business and shoeshine stand directly in front of 300 Mulberry Street in what would soon be known as Little Italy. The building happened to be the headquarters of the New York Police Department, and while Petrosino hawked copies of the World and the Herald, he polished the shoes of the beat cops in their dark blue wool uniforms with shining gold buttons. Some of the officers treated the boys with kindness, but others called them “dago,” “wop” (short for “without papers”), or “guinea,” a particularly hated slur that linked the Italians directly to slavery, as the term originally referred to the people stolen from Guinea, on the west coast of Africa.

  The abuse didn’
t deter the young teenager. “Petrosino was a big, strapping boy,” his friend Anthony remembered, “and he was very ambitious.” Most Italian kids abandoned their schooling early on and went to work in the garment sweatshops that sprang up all over Little Italy, or they picked rags or were apprenticed to junk dealers or pushcart men. Joe held on longer at school than most other immigrant boys while holding down what amounted to a full-time job shining shoes. But his education eventually lost out to his need for money. Petrosino quit his classes at Public School 24 at the corner of Bayard and Mulberry after the sixth grade.

  With his school days over, Joe joined the thousands of other Italian boys, some of them barefoot even in the freezing New York winters, who swarmed the streets as bootblacks, crying out “Shine your shoes?” Once hired, Petrosino would throw down an old piece of carpet to cushion his knees and take a brush from his box, knocking away the muck from workingmen’s brogans and the ankle-high lace-ups of the lawyers and journalists who clustered around police headquarters, before bringing the leather to a high shine with his cloth.

  Bootblacks, who might make twenty-five cents a day, dwelled at the bottom of the economic ladder in 1870s Manhattan. The job introduced the young Italian to the raw side of New York capitalism—that is, to Tammany Hall. Under the Irish politicians who ruled the city, Italian bootblacks were forced to pay cash for the privilege of working a certain corner, and were even required to shine policemen’s shoes for free, as a bonus. Any boy who rebelled invited a visit from a head-cracking son of Galway.

  There was an urgency to Petrosino’s drive; his father’s tailoring business had failed, and the only other male in the family, Joe’s younger brother, Vincenzo, had proved himself to be a complete no-account. “He was irresponsible,” says their grandnephew Vincent Petrosino. “One profession after another. He never found his feet in America.” In fact, Joe’s entire family lacked his burning ambition; they were, according to grandnephew Vincent, “a bunch of bums” who soon began to depend on the teenager’s earnings just to survive. Joe’s father, Prospero, dreamt only of returning to Italy, buying a plot of land, and living out his last years amid the citrus groves of Campania. But Joseph was different. “He was bent, bound, and determined to make it in New York,” remembered his friend Anthony Marria.

  Along with determination and brute strength, Joe as a teenager began to display signs of what the Italians call pazienza. The literal translation is “patience,” but the term had a special meaning in southern Italian culture. It meant to keep one’s innermost feelings close, awaiting the proper time for their release. It was part of the masculine code of life in the Mezzogiorno, a defense against oppression and miseria. “Pazienza does not involve a repression of the forces of life,” writes Richard Gambino. “The code of reserve, of patience, of waiting for the moment, of planning for the event, and then of decisive impassioned action, serves life . . . Impetuous, ill-controlled behavior meant disaster.” One way to show pazienza was to remain cool, almost detached, until the need for action arose. Then, nothing less than violent passion was called for.

  One day Anthony and Joseph were shining shoes in front of a saloon at the corner of Broome and Crosby streets. Petrosino knelt on his old carpet, buffed the leather boots of a customer, then stood up to collect his pennies. Part of his earnings would go toward paying his family’s rent, another for their food, coal, and clothing. This left little, if anything, for himself and his dreams of breaking out of the Italian colony.

  That afternoon, something in Petrosino rebelled. As Anthony watched in astonishment, Joseph picked his heavy shoeshine box off the pavement, hoisted it over his head, his thick arms bulging with the effort, then brought the box down and smashed it onto the sidewalk. The box cracked apart and split into pieces. Anthony stared up at his partner as passersby stepped around the shards of wood and walked on. “Tony,” Petrosino told him calmly, “I won’t shine shoes anymore. I’m going to be somebody.”

  The story is so iconic in its Americanness that one suspects Anthony lifted it from a Horatio Alger novel, which often featured starry-eyed bootblacks. But Anthony swore it really happened. Young Joe had drunk deeply of the American ideal. With his box broken beyond repair, Petrosino had to find another way to make a living. He never shined another shoe, in New York or elsewhere, again.

  His outburst told Anthony something. Behind his friend’s quiet exterior, strong emotions churned.

  …

  Petrosino went looking for a better job, roaming all over Manhattan inquiring in stores and shops. He tried a succession of tasks: butcher’s assistant, railroad crew timekeeper, hat store associate, stockbrokerage runner. He even toured the country as an itinerant musician, playing his violin as far away as the Deep South before returning to Manhattan. But none of the assignments offered Petrosino a way up and out of the humiliating poverty he saw all around him.

  Finally, when he was seventeen or eighteen, Petrosino landed a position as a “white winger,” or street cleaner, for the City of New York. It didn’t sound like much of an advancement, but at the time, the city’s sanitation department was run by the New York Police Department. For the right kind of immigrant, it could be a stepping-stone to greater things.

  Petrosino had the good fortune to come under the protection of the tough and fabulously corrupt inspector Aleck “Clubber” Williams, known as the “Tsar of the Tenderloin.” Williams was Irish to the marrow, gregarious and physically intimidating, a figure instantly recognizable to New Yorkers as he strode down Seventh Avenue, patrolling his precinct. (And it was very much his precinct: no saloon could operate, and no criminal could long survive, without Williams’s permission.) “I am so well known here in New York,” he once boasted, “that car horses nod to me mornings.” One day, wanting to impress some newspapermen who’d come to interview him, he hung his watch and chain on a lamppost at 35th Street and Third Avenue, in the heart of the wild, crime-ridden Gas House district, then took a leisurely stroll around the block with the reporters. When the group returned to the lamppost, Williams’s watch was still hanging where he’d left it. None of the hundreds of gangsters who populated the neighborhood had dared to touch his valuables.

  Williams’s talent for corruption was another envy of the department. He owned a sprawling seventeen-room mansion in Cos Cob, Connecticut, and a fifty-three-foot yacht, all ostensibly on the modest salary of an NYPD inspector. When asked how he’d come by his fortune, he had a splendidly nonsensical answer: “Japanese real estate.”

  In his new position, Petrosino worked hard. New York was infamous for its grime; the city was far dirtier than London or Paris. It was Petrosino’s job to push his three-wheeled cart through the streets and sweep the cobblestones clean of the incredible array of filth that had collected there overnight. Horse manure was a particular challenge. The 150,000 horses living and working in New York and Brooklyn (an independent city until 1898) produced 3 to 4 million pounds of manure each and every day, and the animals themselves lasted only an average of two and a half years before dropping dead from overwork. The carcasses weighed over a thousand pounds, too heavy for the white wingers to lift, so they had to wait until the corpses had partially decomposed before they could hoist the various body parts onto their carts. Petrosino spent his days sweeping up heaping piles of ash, fruit rinds, newspapers, and broken furniture, as well as dead pigs, goats, and horses.

  He advanced. Petrosino was soon commanding the scow that towed the city’s garbage far out into the Atlantic, where he would dump the malodorous stuff among the breakers. Every day, Petrosino would steer the scow into the waves, the water smacking the front of the vessel and sending bursts of salt spray back over the pilothouse. If he looked to his left or right, he might have caught a glimpse of the trim runabouts commanded by rich Madison Avenue swells as they swept by him. Perhaps he was even passed by the robber baron Jay Gould as he commuted from his home in Tarrytown in his magnificent 230-foot yacht, the Atalanta, the “most magnificent private craft afloat,�
� whose interiors were decorated as sumptuously as any rajah’s palace. A man less secure in himself might have felt a bit ridiculous in the company of these glamorous ships, commanding a vessel filled to the gunwales with rotting horse heads and banana peels. A sparkling dream ship for the son of Campania! But Petrosino was undeterred. He never lacked for confidence.

  As the young Italian advanced, the city around him was growing higher, brighter, and faster. The first elevated subway had opened along Ninth Avenue in 1868. Electric light began to replace the old gas lanterns in 1880; steam heat pulsed out from underground mains beginning in 1882; the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, stretched its gorgeous and improbable frame across the East River. The country was hungry for new labor; its industries were growing at a rapid clip, and they needed strong backs to mine, quarry, forge, build, and dig. New York was at the center of this transformation. Eighty of the nation’s one hundred largest companies had their headquarters in Manhattan. “Wall Street supplied the country with capital,” wrote the historian Mike Dash. “Ellis Island channeled its labor. Fifth Avenue set its social trends. Broadway (along with Times Square and Coney Island) entertained it.” Every four years, the city added to its numbers the equivalent of the population of Boston; it was already the largest Jewish city and the largest Italian city in the world. (One writer fondly called Manhattan “this capital of half a world.”) And many of its new citizens were newcomers from southern Italy, contadini, poor peasants of the Mezzogiorno. The number of Italians living in the city swelled from 833 individuals in 1850 to half a million by 1910.

  For many Americans, the swarming mobs, the dark faces and unfamiliar languages, were a sign not of progress but of anarchy. Henry Adams was one: