It appeared that the Italian community was at long last going to “open up its batteries on thugdom,” as the Tribune put it. By March 11 of that year, membership had swelled to several thousand. For the first time, the decent Italian Americans of the city had marshaled a significant army to take on the Black Hand. The ordinary Italians of New York had finally answered Petrosino’s call.
12
* * *
Backlash
Before 1907 came to an end, there was one last bit of news—both sad and, in its way, wonderful—that would change the detective’s life. Vincenzo Saulino, his friend and the father of Petrosino’s beloved, passed away just before the New Year. Adelina, the restaurateur’s daughter, never revealed her feelings about his death, but she was a loyal and loving child and must have been deeply distressed. Saulino’s passing, however, carried with it one hopeful prospect. It meant that Adelina was finally free to marry the man she loved.
It’s not clear when Petrosino first made his marriage proposal. Some said it was in November 1906, when he became the first Italian lieutenant in an American police department and went to Saulino’s to celebrate. Others date it much earlier; one newspaper reported that their courtship had lasted a full decade. But all sources agree on the form the proposal took. “You too must be very lonely,” Petrosino told Adelina. “We could get along well together.” Remarkably prosaic words, but Petrosino was forty-seven years old; he was speaking the truth. He and Adelina were both lonely sojourners in the city.
In light of her father’s death, Adelina abandoned the elaborate plans she’d been privately concocting for her wedding day. Instead, she and Petrosino arranged for a small, quiet ceremony at the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street. The detective’s penchant for secrecy still ruled the day; he told almost no one what was happening, but rumors of the match began to leak out. The Italian colony was agog. “MULBERRY STREET ALL IN A FLUTTER,” reported the Evening Sun. “There has been whisperings among the friends of Mr. and Mrs. Petrosino for several weeks past,” the paper noted, “but neither she nor Joe would admit the truth of them.” Then, on Monday, January 6, 1908, Petrosino slipped away from police headquarters and made the short walk to St. Patrick’s. Waiting were the bride, her brother, and her sister-in-law, along with assorted relatives and well-wishers. Monsignor Michael J. Lavelle, who was old enough to remember when the streets around Mott were the province of the Irish, presided over the wedding mass. Commissioner Bingham was there, bald-headed and beaming under his handlebar mustache, as well as all the members of the Italian Squad. The iron-fisted detective had revealed a more tender side to his character, and no one was more surprised and delighted than his fellow cops.
It seemed for so many years that Petrosino had no romantic life, and yet right under their noses he’d been conducting a long-running courtship against formidable odds. The news circulated rapidly at 300 Mulberry, and on Tuesday morning, detectives and bluecoats waited impatiently for the man of the hour to arrive. When a solemn-faced Petrosino walked in, the men stood up and burst into a raucous ovation. “Joe was snowed under with congratulations,” reported the Sun. Deputy Commissioner Woods, inspectors, even rookies clapped him on the back. “[He] was all confusion and blushed like a young boy.”
Petrosino was happy. His friends were happy for him.
The couple took up residence at 233 Lafayette Street, a brisk walk of a little over a mile from his office. Adelina set up housekeeping in the apartment, and her brother and sister-in-law moved in one story above. It was a cozy arrangement. Adelina gradually learned what it meant to be married to “the most famous but also the most hated policeman” in New York. Petrosino gently advised her to keep the shades drawn at all times, to guard against assassins’ spotting her silhouette in the window. When she opened the mail that arrived daily, she found, along with the bills and invitations, death threats marked with daggers and coffins. Petrosino must have pointed out that he’d been receiving them for years and yet nothing had happened. Whatever concerns she may have harbored, Adelina always had Petrosino’s dinner waiting for him when he returned home after an exhausting day.
It had been late in arriving, but Petrosino finally had the home life he’d dreamt of.
…
If the detective’s personal affairs were going swimmingly, his war on the Society was not. The fifth official year of the struggle would turn into an annus horribilis in which the Society would surpass even the worst outrages of previous months. And if 1905 had been notorious for kidnappings, 1908 became the year of the bomb.
Manhattan now echoed with the sound of explosions on a weekly, often a daily, basis. There were so many explosions in the Italian quarter bordered by 11th Street on the south and 14th Street on the north between Second Avenue and the East River that the Italian Squad gave it a name: “the Bomb Zone.” But in fact, no part of the Italian American quarter was safe. After one explosion at a Brooklyn grocery store, a reporter who ventured into the neighborhood found that “most of the Italians were so frightened they could hardly speak.”
Many buildings around NYPD headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street had been wrecked, and policemen working inside the elegant building regularly felt the walls and floors shake from the latest explosion. Bingham kept an “official roof tree” atop 300 Mulberry. On March 2, the concussion wave from a bombing on nearby Elizabeth Street nearly ripped the tree out of the soil.
The toll mounted month by month:
February 5: A powerful explosive planted at 254 Elizabeth drives a chandelier two stories up through heavy flooring.
February 20: A bomb in Fairview, New Jersey, blows an entire house into the air and propels it into the yard next door. A new lodger on the top floor has the top of his head sliced off and dies at the scene.
March 1: An enormous bomb tears open the offices of a cheese importer in Little Italy, ripping apart the storefront “from the threshold to the ceiling.”
May 23: An “infernal device” explodes in an ash can on Mott Street, killing a young boy and badly injuring five other children.
December 9: A Black Hander climbs to the roof of a four-story tenement at 320 East 63rd Street, opens the skylight, lights the fuse, and drops a bomb down the airshaft. The device explodes halfway down, collapsing walls and badly wounding nine people. The target was a banker, Giovanni Cozussi, whose son had been kidnapped three years before. Cozussi had endured an ordeal since then: Children in tenements he owned were stolen away, men in his houses murdered. His buildings were set on fire, and “firemen reported that the hallways of the houses were smeared with kerosene.”
To counter the wave of explosions, Petrosino created the NYPD Bomb Squad, the first in the nation, which would go on over its long history to battle anarchists, German saboteurs, and Palestinian terrorists. He taught his men how to recognize explosives concealed inside olive oil cans filled with black powder and lit with linen fuses. He traced sticks of dynamite (known as “Italian sausages”) to construction sites, where laborers were sneaking them away and selling them to Black Hand gangs for pennies on the dollar. He discovered the new alarm-clock timers, which allowed the bombers to escape long before the explosion blew apart a deli or tenement house. He unearthed a notebook, a veritable bible of chemical mayhem, detailing how different bombs were made and how they could be safely defused. The department even hired an official “Inspector of Combustibles” and gave him an office on East 67th Street, where the expert analyzed the various devices the squad brought him.
And Petrosino went after the bomb makers. He tracked down the evocatively named Pellegrino Mule, “a big, gaunt Sicilian” who was accused of setting off an explosion that injured twenty children. When Deputy Commissioner Woods sent to Italy to see if his suspect was wanted by the law, he learned that the Mule had received a life sentence for decapitating an informer and nailing his head to a post near the village of Caltabellotta, with a warning to anyone who would interfere in the case. By the time of the trial, he’d fled for New
York.
While searching the Mule’s house, Petrosino found a pad of paper. The top sheet was blank, but when he turned it slantwise to the light, he discovered an impression of handwriting. Technicians put the note under a microscope and were able to read the words: “Dear Friend, This will be our last answer, so be careful . . . You pig of Madonna, you know that this time . . .” It was the tracings from a Black Hand extortion note that had been written on the page above it and then torn off. The handwriting matched a series of letters sent to Manhattan businessmen. Deputy Commissioner Woods cheered the breakthrough. “This is the most important Black Hand arrest since the recent outrages in the Italian colony began,” he announced. The Mule was scheduled for deportation and his gang was broken up.
In July, Petrosino began chasing an even bigger target, the man he believed to be the chief bomb maker of the Manhattan Black Hand, an individual named Pronzola Bonaventura. For days, the detective followed him around Little Italy, trying to catch him in the act of constructing or planting one of his “infernal machines.” Finally, he spotted Bonaventura entering the house of a landlord whose tenements had been targeted by the Black Hand. Petrosino and his detectives rushed into the building and found Bonaventura lighting the fuse of a dynamite bomb. The detectives snuffed out the flame and, after a brutal and bloody fight, dragged the bomb maker to jail.
At times like this, Petrosino could be said to be fighting not just the Black Hand but the unintended consequences of progress itself. It was the industrial revolution that had brought millions of Italians to Manhattan, and it was the construction of modern transportation systems and ever bigger, taller buildings in American cities that supplied the dynamite to the bombers. Newspapers printed on fast modern presses not only helped create the Black Hand but also gave it reams of free advertising. The Society was often seen as a throwback to the violence of the past, a thing out of the Dark Ages, but in reality it was a thoroughly modern invention, owned and operated by criminal entrepreneurs. And it flourished in the modern city, feeding on the solitude of the immigrant who often arrived without friends or family, where he felt like a tiny warm speck amid the cold, rushing millions. All this made the Society a product of its times, and so very difficult to stop.
…
Across the country, the reports of society outrages grew darker. Half the town of Export, Pennsylvania, was destroyed by bombs on February 5, including a home, a store, a boardinghouse, and the rectory of St. Mary’s Church. In Rockland County, New York, a letter was sent to one Arthur Seaman of Piermont, a picturesque village on the banks of the Hudson River known for its hand-cranked drawbridge. By chance, Seaman’s eight-year-old daughter Grace opened the envelope and read the note inside. “Its threats terrified her,” the Tribune wrote, “so that she could not be quieted.” For days, the girl refused to eat and was unable to sleep. Her worried parents moved to the nearby town of Sparkhill, hoping to restore Grace’s health, but she continued to decline. Eight days after reading the letter, Grace passed away.
In Greensburg, Pennsylvania, two Black Handers knocked on the door of a resident and demanded cash. When he said he had nothing to offer, they accepted the answer and presented him with a small package, saying: “Well, if you can’t give us any money, we will give you a gift. Here’s a box of candy for your children.” When they left, the man pulled the string on the box. It exploded, tearing off his right arm and destroying his house.
A surgeon who was part of a West Virginia gang cut off both arms of a suspected informer just below the elbows, and the other members threatened to take his legs. He was intended to be “a living example of the vengeance of the Black Hand on a traitor,” a kind of walking billboard of fleshly horror. The stumps of the man’s arms healed well, but he remained terrified. “The least noise startles him,” wrote one reporter who was brought in to the police station to study the immigrant up close. “He is exceptionally nervous.”
But what of the White Hand societies that had sprung up, the great resistance? They were already foundering. Dr. Carlo Volini, the president of the Chicago organization, received a dark and very Catholic-sounding letter that February. “The supreme council of the Black Hand has voted that you must die,” it began. “Your killing has been assigned and the man waits for you. Prepare yourself for death. We will kill your body but we do not want to kill your soul.” Volini bought a gun and stopped making nighttime visits to his patients.
Contributions to the White Hand slowed. The “1,000 detectives” who were supposed to be hired never materialized; instead, the group hired a single investigator by the name of Godfrey Trivisonno, whom the White Hand brought all the way from Rome with great fanfare. Trivisonno was named “war secretary” of the league, but instead of breaking up gangs and arresting Society leaders, he spent most of his time trooping around Chicago giving lectures on subjects like “How to Detect the Passwords of the Black Hand” and “How to Reveal to the White Hand the Mystery You Have Solved Without at the Same Time Exposing Yourself or Family to Unnecessary Danger of Vengeance.” Various fraternal societies booked him, but there is no record of Trivisonno making a single arrest. The White Hand was effectively silenced. “Never before in the history of Chicago,” asserted the city’s Daily Tribune, “has the Black Hand . . . been such a menace. Nearly every Italian who has acquired a little property lives in constant agony.”
Other groups disbanded. In December, James Tassarelli, vice president of the St. Joseph’s Italian Society for the Suppression of the Black Hand in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was cornered and “literally cut to pieces” by unknown attackers; it was assumed to be a Society attack. He suffered twenty-one stab wounds to his body, with a single gaping wound to his chest the cause of death. Little was heard from the Scranton league after that.
Even the New York branch of the White Hand fell apart. In fact, if one had listened closely to the speakers on the night the league was formed, it was clear its leaders weren’t exactly itching to bring the killers to justice. No, the group being formed that night swore only to protect Italians “from the ‘general obloquy’” resulting from the Black Hand’s crimes. That is, the league never pledged to do battle with the Society at all but rather intended to combat something far more ephemeral: prejudice. The assembly had been a grand and thoroughgoing sham.
A month after the group was formed, the New York Tribune weighed in with an editorial titled “Where Is the White Hand?” Through weeks of bombings and kidnappings, “all anxious citizens have whispered, ‘Where oh where is the great Italian Protective League which set out a month ago to battle with Sicilian cutthroats?’” The editors pointed out that not a single extortionist had been exposed since the group was formed; no funds had been collected; no reports filed. “Such a collapse of fair promises,” the paper charged, “would prove conclusively one of two things: either that the Italians have not the moral courage to attack an evil menacing their lives and property or else that they have no capacity for organization and leadership.”
The New York police had thrown their hands up. The Secret Service was interested only in protecting the wealthy and powerful. Now Italian leaders, some braver than others, were abandoning the fight to . . . whom?
…
Fearful and enraged, Americans began to lash out. In mid-January 1908, extortionists attacked six lumbermen in tiny Ellamore, West Virginia, killing two of them. The other workers immediately put down their tools, armed themselves with rifles and revolvers, and went looking for the murderers. “If the posse succeeds in capturing the fugitive blackmailers,” an observer wrote, “lynching is almost certain.” When a Black Hand member kidnapped a nine-year-old girl in Philadelphia, he was chased by a “howling mob” of Italians, a unit of mounted policemen, and a squad of marines all the way to the banks of the Delaware River, where he leapt into the water. As the pursuers studied the water’s surface from the banks, the girl was found alive, bound and gagged beneath a heap of rubbish. But the Black Hander, knowing what probably awaited him should
he surrender, stopped swimming and sank beneath the surface.
Ten days later, in Reeds Station, Kentucky, locals became so furious over crimes committed by the Society that they began attacking local immigrants. “Italians are being terrorized,” the Washington Post reported. “Several of their houses have been burned and a number of them have been given orders to leave the place on penalty of death.” The governor of the state opened an investigation—into the Black Hand, not the targeting of Italians. Another attack against dark-skinned immigrants occurred in Illinois, in the city of Clinton, the place where Abraham Lincoln allegedly uttered the words “You can fool all of the people some of the time . . .” In mid-April, thirty Italians who worked for the Illinois Central Railroad were “driven from the town by a mob who intimidated them with a fusillade of shots from guns and revolvers.” The throng rampaged through the city in the middle of the night, firing bullets through the windows of the immigrants’ homes while “police stood by and refused to act.” The United Press dispatch from the scene went out under the headline “RACE WAR: WHITES ATTACK ITALIAN LABORERS IN EAST.”
John D. Rockefeller, cofounder of Standard Oil and one of the richest men in the world, voiced the nation’s exasperation when he arrived in Manhattan in April 1908 with fifteen detectives in tow. His granddaughter had been threatened in Chicago, and his daughter Edith, Mrs. Harold McCormick, was said to be “verging on a nervous breakdown” because of it. A change of scenery was required. But Rockefeller was made of sterner stuff than his daughter. “I am not afraid of Black Handers, dynamiters, anarchists, kidnappers, or anyone who lives,” he told the gaggle of reporters who strode alongside the millionaire down Fifth Avenue on a walk with his grandchildren, as detectives watched every well-wisher who came up to shake the mogul’s hand.
The Black Hand Page 18