Then there were the stores. By talking to the victims of the Society, Petrosino discerned a pattern: many of the victims had done business with shops owned by particular merchants. Soon one name kept coming up. Giuseppe Morello, Petrosino’s adversary from the Barrel Murder. Morello and his partner Ignazio “the Wolf” Lupo had established a mammoth grocery store on Elizabeth Street, and branches soon opened across the city. A large part of the operation was to extort the businessmen who came into one of their shops. If a merchant ordered a large number of items, he would soon receive a Black Hand letter at his place of business. If he didn’t pay, his own store was bombed and his children threatened.
The two gangsters could hardly have been more different: the troll-like Morello and the stylish, urbane Lupo, who traveled down Mott Street in a buggy pulled by a gleaming white horse, wearing bespoke suits and a hat “tilted rakishly to one side.” Lupo had grown up in a wealthy family in Palermo before murdering a rival over a business dispute and fleeing the country. He was moon-faced, with wide, staring eyes, and he spoke in a high, fluting voice that lent his words a kind of singsong eeriness. In the often brutal, testosterone-rich Italian underworld, Lupo was an oddity. “I give you my word,” said William Flynn, head of the New York office of the Secret Service, “Lupo had only to touch you to give you the feeling that you had been poisoned.”
The two partners preyed on the honest businessmen around Mulberry Street. One such merchant, Salvatore Manzella, imported wine and Italian foods for his store on Elizabeth Street. Lupo arrived at his office and threatened his life, eventually forcing him to pay $10,000 for the right to continue breathing. Manzella was slowly bled of all his money, his once thriving firm driven into bankruptcy. Like so many of the Society’s victims, he came into public view only as his life reached its ruinous end.
The sophistication of the racket—and the scads of money devoted to it—outmatched anything Petrosino and his men could put together. “Theirs is a secret information bureau more complete and accurate than any . . . ever devised,” Petrosino told one journalist about the Society. “The exact status of every member of the various Italian colonies . . . is known to the powers that prey.” The Black Hand was compiling dossiers on every prominent merchant in the city: their net worth, their home addresses, the members of their extended families. The Society that was taking shape before the detective’s eyes resembled less a criminal organization than a shadow government: it taxed its subjects, it surveilled them, and it killed its enemies.
…
As the months passed, Petrosino could tell that the Society was evolving. It seemed to sense the squad’s presence on the street, to anticipate his thinking.
When Petrosino began arresting its bagmen, the Society hired unwitting dupes to pick up the money, many of them straight off the boat from Sicily. When the squad donned disguises, the Society responded with its own. On one occasion, members of the mysterious six were assigned to a stakeout, to keep their eyes on a dummy package that was placed at a designated spot on a Manhattan street. The men tried to behave casually as they watched the streams of pedestrians walking past the bundle. Hours passed. Businessmen, peddlers, housewives, textile workers—no one so much as glanced at the package. As the light softened into dusk, a hunchback turned onto the street. He had a broken nose that was visible even from a distance, and he walked with a peculiar lurching gait. The detectives studied him as he approached the package and were startled when he suddenly dashed over, stooped down, and snatched it up. The hunchback darted ahead with amazing agility and rounded a corner at speed. The detectives broke cover and turned the same corner seconds later. But there was no hunchback in sight: all the men walking along the street were straight-backed, normal. Inspecting the ground, the men found a small piece of putty: the “hunchback’s” crooked nose. The bagman, whoever he was, was walking away, his back straight, the money tucked inside his coat. He was never found.
When Petrosino started marking currency, some gangs insisted that victims pay in gold and silver coins. When he identified certain phrases or bits of handwriting as belonging to one Society band, form letters were introduced, the same note sent to hundreds, perhaps thousands of victims, so that the squad couldn’t identify any particular gang by the expressions it used. When Petrosino tracked one too many bagmen to their tenements, one gang rented a mailbox.
The men of the Italian Squad became amateur handwriting experts and could identify gangs by the letters they sent out. When the squad found a few scrawled words on a scrap of paper wadding that had been part of an exploded bomb, they rounded up every suspected Black Hander in the city—by now, the list had grown to the thousands—and brought them into local precincts and made them sign the register. The writing of one of the suspects matched the note in the wadding, and he was arrested.
The Society switched to typewriters. Or other methods. A note arrived addressed to Captain Cullen at the Liberty Avenue police station in Brooklyn threatening the lives of the leaders of the police department. It was composed of letters cut out of newspapers.
Sometimes the message took a different form altogether. One victim who’d received a number of letters took them to the Italian Squad. Petrosino assured him that his detectives would investigate the case as soon as they had time; his men were already sleeping at their desks, so not every case could be followed up immediately. A few hours later, a bomb went off in front of the man’s shop. He was ruined for having dared approach Petrosino.
The city was on edge. In late September 1905, a hundred-pound boulder smashed through the door of a tobacco store at 230 West 30th Street, nearly flattening a customer before taking out the fanlight and wrecking the interior woodwork. “Screams of ‘Black Hand!’ rent the air,” reported the Times, and rumors quickly circulated in the neighborhood that the Society had acquired a gargantuan catapult that was capable of launching boulders over entire city blocks. The truth was more prosaic: the stone had been blasted out of the ground three blocks north, where crews were excavating for the new Pennsylvania Station, and had rolled all the way down Seventh Avenue before colliding with the tobacco shop. The city counted its blessings. At least the Society hadn’t yet acquired super-weapons.
The tension was occasionally broken with macabre humor. The sheer volume of Society crimes led to the occasional mistake. Adolph Horowitz, the president of the U.S. Framing & Picture Company of Manhattan, had been threatened with death by the Society if he didn’t pay up. One morning he arrived at his shop to find that, overnight, the premises next door had been demolished by a bomb. That day a letter was dropped into his mailbox. “One of our men was sent to carry out our threat, but he made a mistake,” the writer explained, “and blew up the store next door.” The letter was meant to assure Horowitz that the error in no way affected his obligation to pay the Black Hand its money.
Newspaper wags pounced. The Washington Post sent a writer to the verdant suburbs north of New York City, where Society attacks were increasing. “Up in Westchester County is the place to see the people getting shot,” the reporter wrote after returning from his excursion. “If you . . . are looking for a new sensation, just take the train from New York, drop off at Katonah or any other pastoral spot in the tombstone belt and straightaway the Black Hand of excitement will be extended to you in welcome.” The reporter found that a “general rebellion” was under way in the woods which had changed things for the upper class and their servants. A butler at a fancy home “was now expected to be a rough rider, boer, and a wrestler, and clever enough with the family shotgun to shoot the Black Hander out of a family tangle on the lawn without permitting any birdshot to enter the aristocratic persons or the family youngsters.” Children, he reported, were being staked to poles pounded into the front lawns of mansions for their own protection, and “kidnapping alarms” were flying off the shelves of the local stores. (No such devices existed, of course.) He did manage to slip in some real news: fifty deputies from towns all over the region had formed an alliance aga
inst the Society and were patrolling Westchester’s shaded lanes, armed to the teeth. With a ghastly flourish, the writer ended: “Westchester looks fondly toward the time when their troubles will right themselves by the Italians killing all the negroes and the negroes killing all the Italians.”
The satire played on the city’s taut nerves. But unlike citizens of other afflicted cities, Manhattanites could comfort themselves with the thought that they had Petrosino and his five loyal men on their side. And indeed the Italian Squad, though overworked and underfunded, was on a tear, arresting hundreds of the most notorious Black Handers in just its first year. Crimes committed by the Society plummeted by 50 percent. The Times reported “a calmness that is certainly curious and not to be explained.” But the explanation was, in fact, rather clear: Petrosino had fixed a price on Black Hand terror, and fewer criminals were prepared to pay it.
The Italian Squad had evolved from “a homeless, drifting little band of outsiders” to a well-oiled unit that had earned Manhattan’s admiration. The “mysterious six” were a new phenomenon in an American city: sworn officers of the law risking their lives to turn back the tide of a looming terror—and they were Italian. To New Yorkers, Petrosino and his men were some of the first immigrants to appear recognizably American. “That little band of zealots,” the Washington Post would later call them, in admiration.
…
The squad had proven itself. Commissioner McAdoo, who’d resisted its creation, even gave permission for Petrosino to take on more detectives. He went looking for recruits. Petrosino had a wide circle of friends in Little Italy: musicians, storekeepers, fathers and mothers whose families he’d helped out when the Society struck. Among them were the Cavones, a family who’d brought their son Rocco with them from Italy when they’d emigrated some years before. Rocco was a bright kid. “He had shown capacity and management and understanding of the human animal,” wrote one reporter, “especially those born with Italian temperament and traditions.” He was also, like the young Petrosino, ambitious. By the age of ten, he’d become an errand boy for a wholesale fruit firm. (Like so many Italian children, Cavone quit school to help his family.) By sixteen, he’d become managing clerk of a store, and soon after that he moved on to become a production manager in a Manhattan factory, a heady perch for an immigrant teenager.
One day, Petrosino paid Rocco a visit at work.
“We need you in the police,” he said. “I need you.”
It wasn’t a request to be considered casually. Cavone was on his way to high places in the business world, a rarity for someone so young, especially when one’s name ended in a vowel. Yes, the Italian Squad was alluring—they were the idols of much of the colony. But joining would earn Cavone the hatred of many of his countrymen; his life would be in constant danger.
Yet simply to receive a visit from Joseph Petrosino was a high honor. And the pay of a policeman, though low, was still better than what the factory owner was paying Cavone; Italians, even production managers, often earned less than their peers. He accepted the offer.
Cavone quit his job and became a regular patrolman in the department. Ten days later, he suddenly and quite mysteriously disappeared from the ranks. No one knew what had happened—had he quit? lost heart?—but a day or two later a youth dressed in ragged clothes began hanging around the taverns of Little Italy. He resembled Cavone, but the name the young man gave was different. This newly arrived Italian soon joined in all of the vices that were on full display in the colony. “He was a hanger-on in low basement dives,” according to the Evening World, “a gambler, a frightened, doubtful pupil of blackmailers and kidnappers.” Rocco Cavone was under what would later be called deep cover.
He stopped sleeping in the family home and laid his head on filthy, flea-infested pillows in one of the Mulberry Bend flophouses. These establishments resembled seedy army barracks, where laborers exhausted after a day blasting subway tunnels lay down next to criminals hoping to make their fortune in the Society. Cavone made friends with bartenders, with enforcers and killers. He traded in his business lingo for the special argot of the underworld. He was heard to say things like “Take a slide off Broadway and stay off.”
After a few months of this life, Cavone began feeding Petrosino clues about emerging Black Hand gangs: who was leading them, whom they were targeting. Petrosino didn’t make any cases with the information. He wanted to know the full range of the outfits’ activities before making a move. For months, Rocco Cavone immersed himself in the low life of the Italian colony.
Then, his files filled with Cavone’s notes, Petrosino struck. Scores of the criminals the undercover cop had befriended were arrested. Others hurriedly left town. “The few that remained,” the Evening World reported, “declared war on ‘Petrosino’s boys.’ ”
With men like Cavone, directed by Petrosino, the Italian Squad appeared able to take on the Society and win. In the first flush of battle, it seemed that the forces of order might actually prevail.
…
There was one place where the detective wasn’t lionized, despite his growing fame and his success with the squad: the NYPD. His fellow cops constantly sabotaged Petrosino’s unit. “Every possible handicap was thrown in his way,” according to the Washington Post, “and at no time could he count on the cooperation of his superiors or inferiors in rank. All bore themselves in the same contemptuous manner toward the Italian Squad, and when the chance came they would stop at nothing to retard [its] work.” Soon after the squad was formed, Petrosino became convinced that members of his own department were spying on him. “There were certain politicians in the city,” reported the Post, “who were bitterly opposed to the formation of the Italian Squad, and those men had sufficient influence over the members of the uniformed force to compel them to report direct to them.” Petrosino was so concerned about informers that, at the beginning of an investigation, he used telegrams to let his detectives know where to meet him. He didn’t want his men followed from 300 Mulberry Street to the squad’s offices, and he didn’t trust telephones.
One of the essential tools of a homicide detective in a city like New York, where tens of thousands of new immigrants were crowding the streets every year, was the mug shot. Suspects were brought to 300 Mulberry Street and “mugged,” or photographed, and their pictures entered into the department’s vast collection. But when Petrosino brought his suspects to headquarters, the officers in charge refused to shoot the pictures. The detective was forced to have one of the squad members strike up a conversation with a suspect on the street while Petrosino pointed a camera at the criminal, hoping to get a decent likeness. The pictures were often useless; Petrosino was a terrible photographer. The trick also exposed his men to the suspects they were supposed to be following secretly.
At their headquarters on Waverly Place, the behavior of the Italian men in broad-brimmed hats began to attract attention. Who were these dark-haired strangers, tramping in and out of the rooms at all times of the night? A “young and ambitious” roundsman patrolling the block studied the swarthy strangers, who seemed to act “in what he regarded as a suspicious manner.” After observing the Italians for a while, the cop ran back to headquarters and reported that a gang of potential Black Handers had moved into 175 Waverly Place.
Captain John “Ginger Jack” O’Brien was given the assignment; ironically, Petrosino had worked under O’Brien earlier in his career. The captain collected a squad of men and they hurried over to Waverly, where they found the door of the “real estate” office locked. O’Brien ordered one of his men to break into the apartment. The man threw his weight against the door and it shuddered open. The cops slowly walked through the rooms, taking note of the assorted weapons spread out on one table and the photos of menacing-looking Italian men tacked to the walls. O’Brien’s men proceeded to tear the rooms apart looking for fake currency or other evidence. (As well as kidnapping and murder, the Society was believed to have its hand in the counterfeiting racket.) They pulled out the desk
drawers and dumped the contents on the floor and tore up the carpet to study the floorboards.
At that moment, an unsuspecting Petrosino, still in disguise as an Italian laborer, returned to the building after chasing down a lead on a developing case. His panicked landlady met him at the front door, “begging him to fly at once, as the police were after him.” As the detective tried to calm her, a cop spotted him and informed Ginger Jack that the leader of the gang had arrived. O’Brien rushed down to the foyer and, failing to recognize Petrosino, tried to wrestle him to the ground. But the detective was much too strong for that. He gave the captain “a hip-lock back heel” that sent O’Brien spinning into a wall and then collapsing to the floor. O’Brien staggered to his feet, pulled out his service weapon, and slowly walked forward, bringing the gun to within inches of Petrosino’s face. “Would you like to go to the station,” he asked, “with or without the trouble of sending for a hearse?”
Petrosino froze. He knew too many Italians who’d been killed by cops for resisting. He reached slowly for the lapel of his jacket, and pulled it back inch by inch. There, pinned to his shirt, was his detective’s shield.
O’Brien let the gun drop away.
The story made the papers the next day, and Captain O’Brien quickly disappeared from his precinct. It was later reported he was “rusticating in Greenpoint”—that is, he’d been demoted to a beat patrol in the far reaches of Brooklyn. But Petrosino bore no grudges toward the other officers. He even recommended the roundsman who’d spotted his “gang” for a promotion to detective sergeant. Petrosino loved an intelligent cop.
The Black Hand Page 8