The Black Hand

by Stephan Talty

  The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky. The city had the air and movement of hysteria, and the citizens were crying, in every accent of anger and alarm, that the new forces must at any cost be brought under control. Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable, and afraid . . .

  A traveller in the highways of history looked out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come or how it was to act.

  But to others, the changes were an opportunity to make money and secure their hold on power. Tammany Hall, which was reaping millions from the new wealth pouring into Manhattan, took notice of the immigrants who were blasting out the subway tunnels and manning the garment factories. The Irish needed men who could make their way among the Sicilians and Calabrians and bring them to the polls on election day. So when Clubber Williams saw a scow maneuvering gracefully along the waterfront, with a young Italian calling orders in a commanding voice, he paid attention. There was something in Petrosino’s manner—a calmness across his brow—that drew the inspector’s eye.

  Williams called out across the waves, “Why don’t you join the police force?” Petrosino eyed the inspector, steered the vessel to shore, hopped out, and walked over. Williams could immediately see there was a problem. At five feet three inches, the young Italian was too short to qualify as a police recruit; the minimum standard was four inches taller. But the Irish cop had solved far thornier problems than a lack of height, and he began lobbying to get Petrosino on the force. Soon after, on October 19, 1883, the twenty-three-year-old was sworn in as a policeman.

  It was a coup for the former bootblack. Petrosino became one of the first Italian policemen hired by the NYPD, which in 1883 was an overwhelmingly Irish force, filled out with a sprinkling of German and Jewish cops. His hiring was also a milestone for Italian Americans, who’d managed to gain only tiny footholds in the power structure of their new country. But if Petrosino thought his breakthrough would be hailed among his own people, if he thought shield number 285 would earn him the cheers of Neapolitans and Sicilians out on Mulberry Street, he was to be deeply disappointed. On his first day on the job, the new policeman walked out of the building in Little Italy where he rented an apartment, dressed in his woolen blues and a domed felt helmet, a locust-wood nightstick slotted into a leather loop at his side. The new clothes were the outward signs of his reinvention as an American. From his first steps, Italians began calling out to him—not words of congratulation, however, but “insults and obscenities.” Street peddlers, when they saw him coming, yelled, “Fresh parsley for sale!” (in Sicilian dialect, petrosino means “parsley”), warning the neighborhood criminals that a cop was approaching. Not long after, Petrosino received his first death threats in the mail.

  In the sun-withered places that southern Italians came from, as Petrosino surely knew, any man wearing a uniform was considered an enemy. “The government is a huge personified monster,” wrote an official in the Sicilian town of Partinico in 1885, “from the office servant all the way up to that privileged being who calls himself King. It desires everything, steals undisguisedly, disposes over property and person for the benefit of a few because it is supported by henchmen and bayonets.” Even the church despised the people who enforced the law. In the Taxae cancellariae et poenitentiarieae romanae, published between 1477 and 1533, the archbishop of Palermo absolved those who perjured themselves in court, including those who bribed judges or obstructed justice in other ways, provided the defendant went free. In the church’s view, criminals could redeem themselves by paying alms to their local parish; they were even allowed, under this special interpretation of church law, to keep the stolen goods. But the birro, the policeman? He was a rotting piece of carrion.

  In an Irish or a German neighborhood, a newly minted cop was often a cause for celebration, but this wasn’t the case in Little Italy. Petrosino, many believed, had joined the oppressors in the new land. He “was contadino-born,” one Sicilian American said later. To join up with the foreigners and volunteer to police your own kind was “an extreme and deliberate affront” that wasn’t easily forgotten. “Petrosino’s behavior constituted a very offensive immorality, nothing less than an infamia that demanded punishment. As [Sicilians] saw it, Petrosino [had] violated a kind of extended ordine della famiglia by publicly taking the side of strangers against his own kind and thus advancing his own individual position in life.” In the minds of some southern Italians, Petrosino had sold his honor to the whites.

  If Italians had entered America as the last and poorest of the western Europeans, they didn’t lack confidence in or love for their homeland. In many ways, they believed that the culture they carried in their blood was superior to that of the Americans. It was the duty of every Italian to honor it.

  But Petrosino had completed a voyage that many southern Italians found difficult to make: he’d wholeheartedly embraced the promise of his new country. He’d accepted its values as his values. The looks of hatred from his own must have been a shock. To be called an nfame, an informant and a spy, on the streets of Little Italy would forever remain painful to him. “Parsley will make the American police taste better” went one witticism about the new cop, “but indigestible it will always be.”

  There were many Italians who felt differently, who knew that Italian policemen were badly needed in the colony and were proud of Petrosino’s achievement. But others sent him a constant stream of menacing letters, letters that became so alarming Petrosino was forced to look for another place to live. He found a small apartment in an Irish neighborhood and moved his meager possessions there. In Italian American culture, it was almost unthinkable for a single man to leave the colony and live alone among foreign people. It marked Petrosino as a straniero, a foreigner, living among the pale and inscrutable Irish. To be alone without one’s family was to almost cease to exist, to become what the Sicilians called un saccu vacante (an empty sack), un nùddu miscàto cu niènti (a nobody mixed with nothing). But early in his career, Petrosino signaled his willingness to break with the traditions that had ruled life in the Mezzogiorno for centuries. In order to rise, he would leave.

  …

  For his first assignment, Petrosino was sent to the Tenderloin, between 23rd and 42nd streets, from Fifth to Seventh avenues, the most fractious precinct in the city. His first arrest to make the New York Times was of an overzealous actor who’d been so eager to practice his craft that he’d broken the ban on Sunday theatricals. As he gained more experience, he was assigned to other beats as well. One evening he’d ventured as far as the piers at the foot of Canal Street, a festering hellhole filled with sailors’ bars and bordellos. As he strode along at his usual energetic pace, Petrosino heard urgent cries. Ahead of him he spotted a commotion. A group of white men were bent over a figure on the pavement, viciously attacking a black man named William Farraday.

  The reputation of African Americans among the officers of the NYPD wasn’t a favorable one. Many cops were thoroughgoing racists. Even the man who would soon be police commissioner expressed a low opinion of the city’s black citizens. “The Tenderloin Negro,” said William McAdoo, “is an overdressed, bejeweled loafer and in many instances a general criminal.” But, hearing Farraday’s cries, Officer Petrosino didn’t hesitate. He dashed forward, pulling his club from its leather ring as he ran and, on coming up on the scrum, slammed the locust-wood stick into the head of the first white man he encountered. After a few more blows, the attackers ran off. “Four men were trying to kill me,” recalled Farraday. “Joe came along and saved me in the nick of time
.” Farraday would remember the incident for the rest of his life.

  Petrosino proved to be a natural policeman. He was a wizard at languages: he’d mastered not only the regional dialect of his native Campania but also most of the regional tongues spoken by New York’s Italians: Abruzzese, Neapolitan, Sicilian, and Pugliese. He was incorruptible: not once would he even be accused of taking a bribe. And he was exceptionally tough. If he lost a single street fight in his long career, no one ever reported it. But his excellence went mostly unnoticed in the early years of his career. Petrosino had joined an Irish fraternity composed of the same kind of men who had tried to separate his head from his neck in street brawls when he was a schoolboy. There was little hope of advancement for an Italian in the New York City police department. Only the Irish and the Germans seemed to be chosen for the homicide unit or the detective bureau, considered the elites of the department. There wasn’t a single Italian detective sergeant in the entire department in the late 1800s—in the entire country, for that matter. The Irish looked at a spot within the NYPD as their birthright; veteran cops often gave their young sons toy nightsticks as birthday gifts, to tide them over until they were old enough to join the department. Wrote one Irishman: “You couldn’t walk two city blocks without running into a bluecoat named O’Brien, Sullivan, Byrnes, O’Reilly, Murphy, or McDermott . . . Deep down my father’s desire to make me a policeman was ruled by the Irish blood in his veins, even when I lay in my cradle.”

  Even with a mentor like Clubber Williams, Petrosino was an outsider. The police reserve stations where he often slept that first winter, his uniform steaming on a line hung against one wall and a potbellied stove blazing in the center of the room, were cold places for any son of Italy, where Irish cops regarded him with disgust or thinly veiled hatred. Some refused to speak to him or, when they did, addressed him as “guinea” to his face. “Every hand in the department was turned against him,” a journalist wrote about this time in Petrosino’s life. “Silently, and with dignity, he withstood the taunts, slurs, and insults that were heaped upon him by those of different nationalities.” As the rate of Italian immigration increased year by year, and prejudice bubbled up from the streets, silence was expected of any immigrant wishing “to be somebody.” But it wasn’t the full price, as Petrosino would soon learn.

  2

  * * *

  Hunter of Men

  In the early days of 1895, Teddy Roosevelt, at loose ends after his wife forbade him to run for mayor of New York City, was ensconced at his Sagamore Hill estate in Cove Neck, Long Island. He was depressed and tetchy, feeling he’d missed “the one golden chance which never returns.” One afternoon, he opened a book of photographs by the social reformer Jacob Riis. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York exposed the desperation that had sprung up in the shadows of the new Manhattan: poverty, hopelessness, and alcoholism were Riis’s subjects. The new technology of flash photography enabled him to go inside tenements on Mulberry Street and other areas of lower Manhattan and bring back images of barefoot children sleeping on grates and men and women packed into tiny rooms like grimy rabbits.

  The photos shocked Roosevelt, as they did many upper-class New Yorkers, who rarely set foot below 14th Street, the dividing line between modernizing New York and the world of the immigrants. Teddy sprang into action. “No man ever helped as he did,” Riis remembered. “For two years, we were brothers in Mulberry Street.” Roosevelt became head of the New York Board of Police Commissioners and threw himself into reforming the NYPD, which was notorious for its corruption. “Sing, heavenly muse, the sad dejection of our policemen,” crowed the New York World, the flagship of Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper empire. “We have a real police commissioner. His name is Theodore Roosevelt . . . His teeth are very white and almost as big as a colt’s. They seem to say, ‘Tell the truth to your commissioner, or he’ll bite your head off!’” Roosevelt hired cops on the basis of ability instead of party affiliation, installed phones in precinct station houses, ordered yearly physical exams and firearm inspections, and walked from precinct to precinct making sure his men were taking their duties seriously. Detectives were reassigned and even fired. Positions opened up, and Roosevelt, who knew that the immigrant colonies needed to be policed, went looking for an Italian to champion. He found Joseph Petrosino. On July 20, 1895, after only two years on the job, he became the first Italian detective sergeant in the nation.

  Meeting T.R. was like being touched on the shoulder by a prince of the blood. The two men, so similar in their bulldog tenacity, became friends of a sort. “He didn’t know the name of fear,” Roosevelt would later say about Petrosino, in words that could have described his own character. For his part, Petrosino quickly grasped how important a patron like Roosevelt could be to his career. He praised the commissioner to reporters and fellow cops every chance he got.

  In his new role as a detective, Petrosino blossomed; he barely seemed to sleep. He innovated. He used disguises in ways that other detectives scoffed at. It was said that the closet at his bachelor apartment looked like something from the backstage warrens of the Metropolitan Opera. His dizzying array of costumes could transform him into any one of a dozen identities: a dollar-a-day laborer, a gangster, an Orthodox Jew, a blind beggar, a Board of Health bureaucrat, a Catholic priest. Petrosino would walk into the apartment as himself and leave as someone else. He would don torn work clothes, carry a pickaxe, and get a job working the streets, where he looked like every other Sicilian workman. He’d return to headquarters after weeks on these undercover assignments with his hands covered with calluses—Petrosino didn’t portray a laborer, he became one—and his notebook would be full of new leads. He even inhabited the ultimate Italian stereotype: the organ grinder with his monkey.

  Even though his education had ended in the sixth grade, the young detective was hungry for knowledge. “It was one of his chief pleasures to discuss aesthetic subjects with intellectual men,” wrote one journalist. “He was sensitive and emotional. He loved friendships, too, and social pleasures.” He could look stupid, but only because it served his work. He’d learned to imitate the stock grignono, or greenhorn, who’d just arrived on a steamship from Genoa. It was something Petrosino actually practiced. “He is a master in the art of feigning a timid naiveté,” said one Italian writer. “But more than one robber and killer have learned to their cost how quick is his mind and how nimble is his arm.” It was, in a way, a commentary on the low esteem in which most Americans held Italians: What better way to become invisible than to slip behind the mask of the dumb guinea? More than one Irish cop passed by the detective in disguise and never even noticed.

  In his new position, Petrosino’s brilliance shone. Instead of using files, as was customary among detectives, he carried his cases “in his hat”; that is, he memorized every detail, along with the names of thousands of Italian criminals, their faces, vital statistics, regional background, habits, and the crimes they were charged with. One evening he was climbing the stairs to see some friends who lived on the top floor of a building at 2428 First Avenue. As Petrosino ascended, he glanced to his right into the open doorway of an apartment where a man sat at a kitchen table. Petrosino climbed a few more stairs, stopped, stood still for a moment, then reversed course. He turned at the open door and walked toward the man, telling him to stand up, then informed him that his name was Sineni, that he’d been accused of killing Oscar Quarnstrom with a razor four years before in Chicago, and that he was wanted by the police for capital murder. Forty-eight months before, Petrosino had glanced briefly at a circular sent by the Chicago police, and something in this man’s face—seen for a split second—had chimed with that memory. Sineni confessed and was sent to Chicago to be prosecuted.

  Petrosino was soon outpacing his peers. He tracked and broke up the “resurrection insurance” ring, whose members were buying policies, getting themselves pronounced dead, and then living off the proceeds. He uncovered a scheme in which innocent Italians we
re being murdered by gangsters who pretended to have known them in the old country, then took out insurance policies in their victims’ names before administering a lethal dose of poison. In one year Petrosino won seventeen murder convictions, an NYPD record; by the end of his career, he would send one hundred killers to the electric chair or to long terms at Sing Sing.

  Manhattanites, not just Italians, began to talk about this new whirling dervish of a detective. Petrosino became so famous that criminals arriving from southern Italy asked to be taken to see him. They would gather across the street from 300 Mulberry, watching in silence as bluecoats and detectives in overcoats emerged and congregated on the steps or headed off to their assignment. The criminals would sometimes wait hours, until a friend leaned over and said, “It’s him.” There was Petrosino, bull-necked, dark-eyed, dressed all in black, with his distinctive derby hat. They would memorize the lines of his face, his height (he sometimes wore lifts to alter how tall he looked), his striding gait. There was a practical reason for this inspection: the men wanted to know what Petrosino looked like so they could avoid him during their criminal activities. But they were also, surely, a bit starstruck. An Italian by birth who knows Teddy Roosevelt! They were thieves and killers, yes, but they were immigrants, too. “Petrosino seemed to epitomize the American success story,” wrote crime historian Humbert Nelli, “for many within and outside the Italian colony.”

  Some of these men would become the early members of the Society of the Black Hand, which was, in the last days of the century, beginning to spread like typhus in the tenement hallways of Mulberry Street.

  It’s telling that the most famous Italian American in the country in the late 1800s was the one deputized by the powerful to track down and imprison his fellow countrymen. There were artists and intellectuals among the migrants from the Old World—classics professors, writers, opera singers, stonemasons who created great civic artworks—but the country largely ignored them. It was Petrosino, the “hunter of men,” who fascinated the old American stock of Knickerbockers and WASPs, and they embraced him like no other Italian American of his time. It was as if the nation’s idea of the Italian was so narrow and constricted that it could take in only two figures among the thousands entering through the gates of Ellis Island: the killer, who terrified Americans, and his opposite. The lawman. The savior.