But now the Black Hand was threatening to murder Sellaro. How could he uplift his people when these killers mocked everything he dreamt of building?
Sellaro and his friend Joseph Petrosino were in the vanguard of a group endeavoring to repair the Italians’ reputation. There were other idealists in New York as well, fellow travelers in the struggle. A young lawyer named Gino Speranza had founded the Society for the Protection of Italian Immigrants in 1901 to help the newcomers but also to counter the backlash against their arrival, a backlash he saw everywhere. “We hear a great deal nowadays of the ‘problem of integration,’” Speranza wrote. “Orators and statesmen, newspapers and magazines, never lose the opportunity of talking of the ‘foreign peril,’ of the danger from an influx of immigrants who do not readily assimilate with the elements and institutions of the Republic.”
Speranza and his volunteers met newcomers at Ellis Island and herded them away from the “runners” who were there to steer them toward overpriced housing and abusive jobs; he ventured down to the labor camps of West Virginia where Italian workers whispered their stories of beatings and whippings. (He always wore a fine suit on these trips, both to gain the respect of the laborers and to ward off the abuse of their overseers.) “I have been in certain labor camps in the South where my countrymen were forced to work under the surveillance of armed guards,” he wrote. “I have spoken to some who had been bound to a mule and whipped back to work like slaves. I have met others who bore the marks of brutal abuses committed by cruel bosses with the consent of their superiors.” And yet these men were the ones accused of being ungrateful for the freedom they found in the new land. “What conception of American liberty,” Speranza wrote, “can these foreigners have?”
Finally, in Brooklyn, a brash young prosecutor named Francis Corrao was working his way into the borough’s Democratic machine. The youngest Italian lawyer ever to practice in the borough, the flamboyant and pugnacious Corrao was a pioneer who craved acceptance and power for his people and himself. But first, he knew, the Black Hand must be defeated. Corrao’s brother “Charly” was a member of the Italian Squad, known for the brilliance of his disguises.
The lawyer lobbied publicly for the Brooklyn district attorney to hire an Italian prosecutor. Who better than a man who spoke the language and knew the culture to prosecute Black Handers? Finally, on April 2, 1907, Corrao himself was awarded the position, with a handsome salary of $5,000 a year. It was another “first” for the Italians, and Francis envisioned himself and his brother, along with the rest of the squad, sending the scum of Sicily away for long terms and freeing his people from this curse. Petrosino and his men would arrest the lawbreakers; Corrao would prosecute them.
Petrosino was the most visible and arguably the most influential of these men, all of whom lived in New York and traveled in the same circles. But the detective knew that even his power was severely constrained. He was arresting hordes of Black Handers, but he couldn’t get the authorities in Manhattan or Washington to engage fully in his war, and he couldn’t get Italians to testify in sufficient numbers. How could the Italian American rise when even a man like Vincenzo Sellaro was held hostage by their oppressors? The detective asked himself this question over and over again.
How does one spark a resistance?
…
In March 1907, the steamship California was churning its way across the Atlantic, headed west. The ship had left the port of Le Havre, France, weeks before and was bound for New York. Aboard were hundreds of immigrants, their cheap suitcases tied with grass rope, stacked in steerage.
A steamship depended on coal for power. Day and night, in the depths of the ship, stokers shoveled anthracite into the four furnaces. Covered in soot, with only their eyes and teeth flashing white in the glow of the fires, the men worked four-hour shifts in extreme temperatures that sometimes reached 160 degrees. In between shovelfuls of coal, a stoker would dash to a metal pipe that rose all the way to the ship’s surface and gulp down the cold Atlantic air that flowed through the tube. It was the work of the stokers that enabled millions of Italians and other immigrants to find their way to Ellis Island on boiling gusts of steam.
If the passengers of the California had been paying close attention to their crew, they would have noticed something peculiar. There was one stoker who never seemed to dirty himself with coal dust and in fact seemed to do no work at all. He was a slight man with olive-tinted skin, “piercing” eyes, and a prominent scar that dipped from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. He was quiet and purposeful, and he exhibited that quality that the Italians called pazienza. This stoker was “a man who meditated much and spoke little until aroused, when his phrases poured forth in a torrent, proving that his ideas had been carefully arranged—a man little given to impulse.” If asked, he gave his name as Giuseppe Balstieri.
If any of the passengers were from Naples, and had crossed the man’s path before, they most likely avoided him for the duration of the trip. For he wasn’t a stoker or a run-of-the-mill stowaway, and his name wasn’t Giuseppe Balstieri. His real name was Enrico (also known as Erricone) Alfano, and he was the king of the Neapolitan Camorra.
Alfano was a figure of terrifying reputation in Italy, with a string of murder accusations in his past, a requirement for any mafioso. “The populace considered Alfano the light of a demi-god,” said the New York Tribune of the people he’d left behind. “He was thought to be invulnerable to bullets and able at all times to escape his pursuers.” Alfano was allegedly powerful enough to get men elected to Italy’s parliament; he even charged the Naples power company a monthly fee for not stealing their electrical wires.
It would be a mistake to believe that figures like Alfano and the other great mafiosi generated nothing but fear in their countrymen. It was a deeper, richer, far more complicated gaze that the average Sicilian would have cast on a figure like him. He was a uomo di rispetto, a man of respect, who had defied the fate laid out for him as a boy, the life of miseria, of endless physical labor and suffering, by becoming a bandit. And yet more than a bandit. “The Northern Italian of any class . . . is perpetually busy accumulating wealth,” wrote the historian Henner Hess. “The Southern Italian . . . above all wants to be obeyed, admired, respected, feared, and envied.”
Over the door of one Sicilian village church is etched a tribute to one of the most famous uomini di rispetto of the region, a man who surmounted his humble origins to become a powerful mafioso. “With the ability of a genius,” the inscription reads,
he raised the fortunes of the noble family. Clear-eyed, dynamic, untiring, he gave farm laborers and sulphur workers prosperity, constantly worked for the good, and made his name highly respected, in Italy and beyond. Great in his enterprises, much greater still in misfortune, he always kept smiling, and today in the peace of Christ, reunited with death’s majesty, he receives from all his friends and even from his enemies, the finest testimonial: he was a galuntuomo.
That is, a gentleman. Alfano, too, saw himself as a galantuomo, a man who had overcome his beginning. A complete man in the Sicilian mold.
Alfano had taken passage on the California because he’d found it necessary, like so many men in his position before him, to flee to America. He’d been accused of masterminding a pair of sensational murders that had originated in the Piazza San Ferdinando, in the aristocratic quarter of Naples. It was a neighborhood full of palaces, “still occupied by families who were prominent under the viceroys of Spain” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But not every resident of San Ferdinando had such illustrious forebears. A few, in fact, had much darker pasts. But they could pay the rent.
At seven o’clock on the morning of June 6, 1906, a servant girl rang the bell of the fifth-floor apartment at number 95 Via Nardones, where one such couple lived. When she received no answer, the girl alerted the owner of the building, who—knowing a bit about the two people occupying the flat—ran across the street to the police station for the San Ferdinando district. There
he explained his dilemma to one Agent Simonetti, who agreed to return with him and investigate the strange occurrence. Simonetti asked for and received a master key to the apartment, then the two men walked across the street and ascended the stairs to the fifth floor. Once the door was unlocked and opened, Simonetti found himself inside an apartment decorated with expensive furniture and luxurious drapes, still and calm in the morning light, and apparently unoccupied. Entering the dining room, he saw that the meal from the night before, including some half-eaten tarts from a nearby pastry shop, hadn’t yet been cleared. From the dining room, Simonetti entered the first bedroom, an elegant space with new walnut furniture upholstered in red, but now strewn with clothes and the contents of jewelry boxes. The shutters were closed against the strong Italian sun, and the night lamp still glowed. In its light, Simonetti could make out a figure on the bed. It was a woman, her dark hair splayed above her white silk nightgown. Lifting the gown, Simonetti saw that the woman’s torso had been punctured with thirteen dagger wounds that reached up to her neck. “Blood,” he remembered later, “was everywhere.”
The woman’s name was Maria Cutinelli. In life, she’d been a notorious beauty “who had led a most adventurous life among the most intelligent and aristocratic elements of the mala vita”—that is, the Neapolitan underworld. At thirty-nine, she’d married Gennaro Cuocola, the son of a respectable leather merchant who had fallen into “evil companionships” in the Vicolo di Santa Lucia quarter of Naples, known for its crime and high living. Cuocola was a member of the Camorra, specifically a basista, a crime strategist. His wife had been an adescatrice, a stool pigeon for the police. Both were dangerous occupations, but Maria’s, in corrupt and gossip-ridden Naples, was slightly more so.
Simonetti reported what he’d found to his superiors, and one of them wrote out a report identifying Maria’s death as a classic “uxoricide,” the murder of a wife by her husband. This official was on the verge of signing the report and ordering the arrest of Gennaro Cuocola when an officer rushed into his office with news: a carter walking the Cupa Calastro, on the shore of the Bay of Naples, a beautiful stretch of land known as a place where lovers met and strolled on summer evenings, had come across another corpse. The body had been violated even more thoroughly than Maria’s; it displayed forty-seven knife wounds, whose triangular shape matched the gashes on the body of the victim at 95 Via Nardones. The man was identified as Gennaro Cuocola. The police official quietly put his report away.
The murders of the beautiful Maria and her raffish husband became a sensation in the Italian newspapers. Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy, who’d been looking for an opportunity to clean up the cesspool that was Naples, ordered the minister of war to investigate the crime, using the carabinieri reali, the military police known for their discipline and efficiency, to take on the case, fearing that the local police were too corrupt to complete the job. The carabinieri combed the haunts of the Camorra and pressed their informants for tips; there they learned that Enrico Alfano, the super-capo of the Camorra, had suspected that the couple was giving information to the police about his group’s activities. He was promptly arrested.
Alfano’s many friends and benefactors went to work to free him. (How much work was needed is debatable, however; Alfano’s star sat high in the Italian firmament.) His godfather, an influential priest, was eventually able to get the suspect released from prison, but the charges still stood. Alfano saw the storm building and left Naples, moving “from village to village under various disguises in his efforts to escape capture.” Police in the town of San Leucio learned that the suspect was staying in a local house and quickly surrounded it, but Alfano managed to escape and took a train to Rome. There he decided America was his only hope. He had a false passport made by one of his associates and booked passage aboard the California. New York, the lifeline for so many criminals of the south, beckoned. The very thing that Petrosino had decried for years, the easy transit of killers from Italy to America, now had its most famous example. The powerful and universally feared Enrico Alfano, head of “the most monstrous criminal organization the world has ever seen,” was headed for Manhattan as perhaps the world’s number one fugitive.
…
Petrosino knew about Alfano’s arrival almost from the moment he stepped off the boat. The detective’s informers told him that Alfano had passed through immigration on March 21, that he was traveling under the name Giuseppe Balstieri, and that he was said to be carrying seventy thousand francs in French currency. It was also rumored that the members of the Neapolitan Camorra who had settled in Manhattan, some of whom were involved in the Society, intended to hide their capo dei capi in order to prevent his extradition. But Petrosino’s informers could tell him no more. Once Alfano stepped off the pier, he’d disappeared.
Petrosino put out the word to his sources and his nfami: Find Alfano. Quickly.
For nearly a month, nothing. Alfano was hiding somewhere in the Italian colonies, most likely in the area around Mulberry Street, but no one had seen him. Then, on April 17, two members of the Italian Squad, Detectives Carhipolo and Bonanno, found themselves sitting in an Italian restaurant in the subbasement of a house at 108 Mott Street, near the corner of Hester. How they had come to be at this particular spot at this particular hour remains a mystery. Did they receive a tip that something unusual was happening? Did they follow a suspect down the steps into the dark tavern? Or did they happen to be having lunch when the situation presented itself? Whatever the case, they were witnesses to a gathering that did not seem possible: a dozen feet from where the two detectives sat, six men were holding a lively banquet for a man who resembled—this was all they could say—Enrico Alfano.
But was it him? The two detectives couldn’t be sure; there were no photographs to go by. And why would the head of the Camorra flaunt his presence in Little Italy in such a public place? The pair took one last look at the man, then exited the restaurant and went in search of their leader. A reporter from the Evening World revealed what happened next.
According to the reporter, he met Petrosino on Mulberry Street that afternoon. They were walking along the crowded street when Petrosino stopped in front of a restaurant: 108 Mott. “I’m going to lunch here, come,” the detective said, and the two descended the stairs into one of the basement eateries that dotted the neighborhood. Petrosino sat at a table near the door and studied the menu nonchalantly while stealing glances at six “villainous-looking men” who were gathered around a table halfway down the bar that ran along one wall of the restaurant. Some were standing, others sitting, and all were engrossed in an “almost worshipful attention to a spare, bold-eyed Italian” who had a deep scar running from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. The men were speaking Italian, flattering their guest of honor, and he was basking in their praise.
The reporter was oblivious to what was taking place. He was hungry and studied the menu while making small talk with Petrosino. After scanning the offerings, Petrosino laid an arm softly on his, as one would to a friend engrossed in the playbill when the theater curtain rose. The reporter looked up. The detective was standing now, looking toward the table of talking men. All of a sudden he called out “Alfano!” in a booming voice, “as one might call a cringing dog.” The room went silent.
The capo dei capi, who wasn’t used to being addressed in such a disrespectful tone, stood up from the table and whirled around to face Petrosino. The other Camorrists, who must have recognized Petrosino immediately, stayed where they were.
As the reporter gaped, Petrosino strode across the room straight toward Alfano and “fetched him a mighty slap” across his cheek. Alfano staggered back and toppled against the wall, where he sat propped like a marionette, his back to the bricks. Moving quickly, Petrosino brushed past the Camorra men and approached Alfano, leaning over and slapping him briskly across the face, then again. Then he reached behind the killer, grabbed his collar, and, as the reporter watched in stunned silence, dragged the capo across the res
taurant floor “with his toes face down.” When one of the Camorrists took a step toward him, Petrosino said, “Get out of my way, lest I take you to jail with this cowardly dog”—this although, the reporter later learned, all of the men were armed (Alfano had a knife secreted in his waistband), and “every one of them was a murderer, either in fact or in prospect.”
News of the arrest ran in papers from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles to the small town of Paducah, Kentucky (“STRANGE ROMANCE OF BANDIT CHIEF WHO CAME TO AMERICA AS A STOKER”). Days later, Petrosino put his captive on a ship back to Le Havre, where he was arrested and brought to Naples. The proceedings that eventually resulted, though it took five years for them just to begin, expanded to embrace the entire Camorra leadership: forty-seven defendants, including twenty-seven Camorra bosses, went before a judge on charges of murder, corruption, assault, and other grave offenses. Italy was transfixed. “Not since the case of Dreyfus,” reported one journalist, “has a criminal trial so stirred a nation.” After seventeen months of testimony that was collected in sixty-three volumes of transcripts, the defendants were convicted and sentenced to 354 years of imprisonment. The arrest of Alfano broke the Camorra in Naples. The trial was a major landmark in Mafia prosecutions, the predecessor of the “maxi-trials” that emerged in Italy during the 1980s. And it had all begun with Petrosino’s slap.
Still, the detective’s performance—for it was a performance, as precisely thought out and choreographed as anything in his beloved Traviata—remains curious. Why risk being shot to catch Alfano himself when he could have brought a dozen armed cops to take him down? Petrosino hadn’t even bothered to draw his gun. Why become, as the Times called him, “the terror of hurtful people” on a public stage?
Why? For the same reason that the Black Hand sometimes chose to mutilate its victims, and once arranged for a rendezvous to take place in a cemetery in front of a freshly dug grave: it was excellent advertising. Petrosino wished to show Italian Americans that they should fear no one, not even the head of the dread Camorra. He wanted to stiffen their backbone, while deflating the myth of the all-powerful Italian criminal. The detective also knew that publicity was a force multiplier. He and his men were outnumbered a thousand to one; the arrest of a capo like Alfano made the Italian Squad appear more powerful than it really was.
The Black Hand Page 14