Still, it was a moment to savor. An Italian-born detective had prevailed over a red-haired captain named O’Brien in the New York Police Department in 1905. “‘The Dago’ had become a superstar,” wrote one historian of the era. “His bosses, desperately in need of his case-closing skills, did not dare silence him.”
Petrosino had truly arrived.
6
* * *
Explosion
On the afternoon of October 16, 1905, Joseph Petrosino was standing in a doorway, watching the entrance of a small Italian grocery at 13 Stanton Street. The shop was owned by the Gimavalvo brothers. One of the brothers had come alone from Sicily and then worked until he had enough passage money to bring his sibling over. The process had been repeated until the entire family was reunited in Manhattan, all achieved through the proceeds from their little shop.
Then the Black Hand letters started arriving. The Gimavalvos had immediately called Petrosino. Their perch in America was fragile. Could he save their American destinies by sweeping these animals from their doorstep?
A letter from another Black Hand victim to the New York Times echoed the Gimavalvos’ terror. It came from a man who could speak for every casualty of the Black Hand. “My name is Salvatore Spinella,” it began. “My parents were of honest station in Italy. I came here eighteen years ago, and went to work as a painter, like my Father. I married. I raised a family. I am an American citizen fifteen years.”
Spinella had prospered as a house painter and bought two buildings, at 314 and 316 East 11th Street. “My family all are happy,” he wrote. Then a Black Hand letter arrived, demanding $7,000.
I tell them to go to hell. They try to blow up my house. I go to the police and fight them as well as I can. They set off another bomb; two, three, four, five bombs. My business is ruined. My tenants leave, all but six of thirty-six families . . . I am a ruined man. My family live in terror day and night. There is a policeman in front of my house, but what does he do? Only my brother Francisco and myself can watch my wife and children, who dare not go out. How long must this endure?
Spinella and his brother bought shotguns and guarded their houses around the clock. Spinella’s hair turned gray in a few days and he became known around Little Italy as l’Uomo Che Non Dorme, “the Man Who Does Not Sleep.” One of the letters he received, which were addressed to “Piece of Carrion” and “Spy and Traitor,” told him that “the entire Police Department of New York is unable to save you.” The writer was correct. Spinella, after months of torment, lost both houses and was forced to seek work as a manual laborer. There were so many men like him in New York that Petrosino lost count.
Petrosino studied the pedestrians who came down Stanton Street, hoping to recognize a face from the thousands he’d memorized. As he waited, he wondered what his next stop should be: a meeting with the fruit peddler on the Brooklyn Bridge whose life was in mortal danger, or a rendezvous with the Society men “who say they are not afraid of hell because they have chosen to be bad men on earth,” each of whom held an Italian family in terror? Or should he go to the West 3rd Street shop of Carmello de Giacono, who’d recently been visited by a stranger who told him that he and his fellow Black Handers had voted on de Giacono’s fate, and it “was unanimous for murder”? One member had told de Giacono: “They have been wrangling about how you shall go to your death. Some want to stab you, others would shoot you, but most are in favor of blowing you and your shop up with dynamite.”
Petrosino had few resources to dedicate to these desperate people. Little Italy had been chronically underpoliced for years. The editors of the New York Journal, owned by the multimillionaire William Randolph Hearst, confirmed this in an editorial. “The Italians pay their taxes,” the paper argued, “and pay their rent, and do a great deal of hard work. They are entitled to police protection and THEY HAVE NOT HAD IT.” Not only did the police ignore calls for more patrols and prosecutions, but also they actually prohibited many law-abiding Italians from getting guns. “If the police had been paid not to detect,” wrote the journalist Sidney Reid, “they could not have done it more successfully.”
This presented Petrosino with a dilemma: How does one choose whom to save and whom to let die?
As he watched the front of the Gimavalvos’ store that afternoon, with customers entering empty-handed and leaving with paper bags stuffed with eggplants and lemons, Petrosino made his decision: the fruit peddler’s case was the most pressing. Everyone else would have to wait. When his appointment drew near, he spotted one Sergeant Funston, whose precinct included 13 Stanton Street, and called him over. He told the officer that the store needed to be guarded continuously until he could return. Funston wrote a note to one Captain Murtha, an Irish officer, with Petrosino’s instructions that he put at least one guard on the store, then assured the detective that the store would be watched around the clock.
Satisfied, Petrosino began walking toward the Brooklyn Bridge. There he met the fruit peddler and pretended to be the man’s assistant as they set up the humble cart in the middle of the span. Once the fruit was displayed in its boxes, the two rested, watching the crowd and waiting for the extortionists to appear.
Almost immediately there was a snag. A policeman stopped by the cart and told Petrosino and the peddler to move on. Petrosino explained who he was—as a detective he actually outranked the cop—but the cop made such a public commotion that the chances of a rendezvous were ruined. Petrosino was furious. Clearly, the officer saw only two wops making a nuisance of themselves. Petrosino gave up, spoke with the fruit seller, and made his way home to bed.
That night, at 3 a.m., a “terrific explosion” ripped through the Gimavalvos’ apartment building, smashing through brick walls and tearing the oak front door off its hinges. The family members were knocked out of their beds and covered in flying glass and splinters of wood. Windows were shattered up and down the block. When the cops arrived, Italians throughout the tenement were on their knees, praying for protection. “A thirteen inch shell could not have done more damage,” reported the Times. A passing pedestrian had his face badly cut by flying glass. Miraculously, no one was killed.
Petrosino heard about the bombing and couldn’t understand what had happened. Where was Murtha’s man? Where was the NYPD? He stormed off to Murtha’s precinct and there learned the truth. When the bomb throwers had arrived on Stanton Street in the middle of the night, there wasn’t a cop to be seen. Captain Murtha had lied about protecting the Gimavalvos.
At this, Petrosino’s famous pazienza finally gave way. The accumulated rage that had been building for months, if not years, the memory of insults, slights, and aspersions against his race and family, finally broke through. Petrosino erupted. He found a Times reporter and told him to take down what he said. “When I . . . learned of the explosion in Stanton Street,” he told the man, “I hit myself on either side of the head with my two hands. And then I said to myself things about Captain Murtha for which I am sorry.” Clearly, though, he wasn’t sorry. The Italian Squad had resolutely protected the family, but the moment the assignment was handed to an Irish cop, the Gimavalvos had been attacked. Petrosino could not contain his fury or his feelings of helplessness. “We have worked so hard and faithfully to suppress this brigandage. We have gone without sleep and food, and subjected ourselves to indignities.” Petrosino rarely, if ever, spoke publicly with such naked emotion. But he was no longer willing to stand up for the NYPD while it allowed Italians to be bombed.
What the detective was trying to get across to the Times and its readers was that each and every battle in the war on the Society mattered. The attack, Petrosino knew, would become a recruitment tool for the Black Hand. At that very moment, reports of the successful bombing were most likely being repeated all over Little Italy “to the eager ears of Sicilian boys.” Brave Italians would be silenced and cowed. The murderers would “gloat over our defeat.” And they would seek new victims.
The NYPD was losing the trust of the city’s Italian Ameri
cans. “There is very little hope, to my mind, of ever breaking up these secret bands,” admitted one police captain. Every time an Italian was victimized and no one was punished, it made Petrosino look like an nfami, a spia—an informer in the pay of the oppressors.
Never before had the detective publicly expressed his anger with the NYPD and its Irish leaders. But now he’d had enough. And he wanted New Yorkers—all Americans, in fact—to realize that they could be next. “They are getting bolder,” he told reporters about the Society’s minions. “In time they may find a way to prey on the general public. They are clever enough, I believe, to find that way.” Petrosino had been saying this for months, but now he added a new twist: “Their society is governed by an Executive Committee, with headquarters in various cities of the United States. The committeemen are called chiefs, and are obeyed absolutely.”
This was nonsense, and Petrosino knew it. His investigations had uncovered no national network of Society members, no “executive committee” or headquarters or any such thing. But now he claimed that he had. Perhaps he believed that only by playing to the nation’s fears, by confirming its worst nightmares about a vast conspiracy of Black Handers embedded in the heartland, could he reach Americans and shake them out of their apathy.
Even in the midst of his outburst, Petrosino had an objective. The Italian Squad was outmanned. They needed powerful allies to defeat the Society, and Petrosino had one in mind. “We may be able to run them down in time,” he said, “but there is only one way to get rid of the terror, and that is through the Federal Government.”
What was Petrosino asking for, specifically? Three things: For the federal government to demand that Italy fine any official who granted a passport to a known criminal. For Congress to pass laws that would allow for the deportation of anyone with a criminal record back to Italy. (Almost every Black Hander arrested in New York was found to have committed crimes back home.) And, finally, for the Secret Service to join the war against the Black Hand.
No one had ever suggested that the U.S. government enter the war against the Society. But Petrosino clearly felt that without it, the effort was doomed. The request also came with a personal significance for Petrosino. He had a painful, even tragic history with the Secret Service that reflected on the present crisis. To illuminate that shared history, we must look back five years.
…
In the summer of 1900, a thin, mustachioed silk weaver named Gaetano Bresci left his factory job in Paterson, New Jersey, and the anarchist newspaper he’d founded and sailed for the port of Le Havre, France. Once he landed, he made his way to Paris and spent hours walking through the grounds of the Paris Exposition; he bought a silk handkerchief for his wife, with his name embroidered in crimson in the corner. He appeared to be just another tourist taking in the sights of the magnificent fair. Bresci then boarded a train and traveled to the town of Castel San Pietro, Italy, not far from Bologna, where he roomed with a relative. Bresci purchased a five-shot .32 revolver and practiced shooting at targets in the yard. He was training for the mission he’d come to believe was his life’s work: to assassinate King Umberto I, in revenge for a cold-blooded massacre of ninety Italian radicals during riots in Milan two years earlier. On July 29, as the young and dashing king was leaving Monza after awarding medals to a group of athletes, Bresci ran toward the royal carriage and fired four shots into the monarch, killing him.
The Italian government believed that Bresci hadn’t acted alone, and that the keys to the true motives for Umberto’s death lay in Paterson, which was acknowledged by just about everyone to be a nest of anarchists. “This country,” remarked a writer for New Outlook magazine, “is without doubt the center and headquarters of the Italian latter-day Anarchy, which is far more dangerous than any of the forms which have preceded.” The Italian government asked President McKinley to order an investigation of Bresci and his associates, but the Secret Service conducted only the most casual inquiry before giving up on the case. The reason was somewhat embarrassing. “Panic reigned in Washington for a time,” reported the Post, “when it was discovered there wasn’t a man among the operatives well enough qualified to go and live among the anarchists in this country and wring from them the inner secrets of their clan.” In fact, the Secret Service had not one Italian-speaking agent on its staff. Rome continued to press McKinley for answers. Finally the president mentioned the matter to his vice president, Teddy Roosevelt, whose mind immediately flashed back to his rambunctious days as police commissioner of New York City. “I have just the man for this job,” Roosevelt told McKinley. “His name is Joe Petrosino, and he’s one of the best detectives in New York.” A call was placed to 300 Mulberry, and Petrosino immediately agreed to go to Paterson, infiltrate the anarchist clique that Bresci had been a part of, and learn as much as he could about the group and its intentions. He would carry out the mission in total secrecy and report his findings directly to the president.
It was a moment Petrosino could only have dreamt of. Here was a chance to prove his patriotism, his skills as a detective, and his friendship with Roosevelt in one fell swoop.
Petrosino walked back to his apartment and went straight to his famous closet. For the Paterson mission, he chose an outdated suit typical of the grignoni, men who always arrived in America wearing unstylish clothes that marked them irrefutably as greenhorns. He placed some laborers’ shirts and trousers, along with underwear, in a suitcase. Taking on the guise of Pietro Moretti, an unlettered middle-aged laborer who’d recently arrived from Italy, a type that would blend in easily with the textile workers and blue-collar idealists who populated Bresci’s circle, Petrosino left his apartment and boarded a train for Paterson.
On his arrival, the detective checked into Bertoldi’s Hotel, which was known to host meetings of the local anarchist societies. Bresci, the assassin, had stayed at the hotel and had even met his wife there. True to his usual style, Petrosino set about looking for work and eventually landed a job on a construction site. He spent his days laboring in the sun and his nights pretending to be a budding revolutionary.
The detective remained in Paterson for weeks, talking, eating, and arguing with the anarchists who worked in the textile factories. He listened to their wild monologues about world capitalism, read along with them articles from La Questione Sociale, an anarchist journal published right there in New Jersey, which decried the greed of the ruling class and its puppets in the palaces and parliament buildings across Europe and the Americas. When he returned to his room, Petrosino made careful notes about what he’d heard, then collapsed onto the threadbare blanket and slept. After three months, he felt he’d learned all he could, and one night Pietro Moretti suddenly disappeared from Paterson, never to be seen again. Hours later, Joseph Petrosino, dressed in his derby hat and black suit, reappeared in New York and quickly made an appointment to see Roosevelt and McKinley at the White House.
When he sat down with the president and vice president, Petrosino eagerly poured out his findings. What he’d learned in New Jersey was shocking: the group that Bresci had emerged from was made up of dedicated revolutionaries who had drawn names from a drum to determine who would kill Umberto. But there was still more worrying news: the group’s work, Petrosino said, wasn’t finished. More assassinations of world leaders were planned. And at the top of the anarchists’ target list was President McKinley himself.
Petrosino probably expected that his news would produce alarm, at the very least, in the two formidable men who sat before him. But McKinley only smiled gently and said nothing. The president, possessed of a genial and trusting nature, believed he didn’t have an enemy in the world. To him, talk of an assassination was nothing but rash gossip. Roosevelt, too, seemed unimpressed. He made an offhand comment about not wanting an anarchist to make him president, and then the two men thanked Petrosino for his hard work and sent him on his way.
The detective took the train back to New York filled with bitter disappointment. He’d spent three months on a high
ly dangerous mission in which he’d uncovered a plot to kill the American president, among others. But McKinley and Petrosino’s friend T.R. had treated him like an excitable amateur, a man completely out of his depth. It was clear that McKinley and the Secret Service agents whose job it was to protect him weren’t going to take his report seriously. Perhaps they simply wanted to be able to tell their counterparts in Rome that a thorough investigation had been conducted and nothing urgent had been found.
Months later, on September 6, 1901, President McKinley was shaking hands inside the Temple of Music on the sprawling grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, when a man with mad-looking eyes and a heavily bandaged right arm approached and fired two shots into the president’s abdomen at point-blank range. Eight days later, McKinley was dead of gangrene. His assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was an anarchist.
Moments after those shots rang out, the phones on Park Row in lower Manhattan—Newspaper Row—began to ring. The editors learned of the assassination and immediately called their reporters at 301 Mulberry, opposite police headquarters. The reporters rushed across the street to get the NYPD’s reaction. When a few of the journalists came across Petrosino, they told him the news. The detective listened to their reports in stunned silence. Then, to the reporters’ astonishment, he began to sob. He wept “as copiously and hysterically as a woman,” one reporter wrote; his public display of grief “came as a revelation to his comrades” and to the gathered journalists as well. The newspapermen found it hard to believe that the legendary hunter of men could show such deep emotion. Perhaps a few were even shocked to find that a member of a despised minority would feel so strongly about the killing of an American president.
The Black Hand Page 9