Sicily wasn’t just the place where the real work of the mission would occur; it was also populated by scores of men whom Petrosino had deported from America. One of them, Vito Cascio Ferro, the suspect from the 1903 Barrel Murder case who’d escaped prosecution and vowed vengeance on the American detective, had risen in the Sicilian underworld since his arrival back in his native land. After his exile from America, he’d returned to his home province of Palermo and quickly moved up the ranks of Mafia leaders. Sicily was fertile ground for a sharp mind like Cascio Ferro’s. In the years since his arrival, Cascio Ferro had proved himself, much like Petrosino, to be a brilliant innovator. Switching an innocent man for a killer during the investigation of the Barrel Murder had turned out to be an early glimpse of how he approached his vocation.
Sicily had been a place apart for centuries. In Roman times, the island served as a granary for the empire, with large estates worked by strumenti vocali, or slaves. Even the family names that survived from the era bore the marks of that history: Schiavo (slave), Loschiavo, Nigro, Lo Nigro. In the time of the Normans, the provincial authorities had fought bands of Arab-Berber bandits—practitioners of Islam—and forced them into the central regions of western Sicily, which are now covered by the provinces of Palermo, Trapani, and Agrigento. Those areas formed a kind of sanctuary for the persecuted Muslims, as well as escaped slaves and wanted criminals. “Their importance to the formation of the character of the region which they inhabited should not be underestimated,” wrote historian Henner Hess. “They handed down certain norms and values which stemmed from the fugitive and asylum character of their political existence . . . A strong feature is a strong anarchist dislike of any State system of law or coercion.” The leaders of the Five Families of the American Mafia—Bonanno, Lucchese, Colombo, Genovese, and Gambino—all came from the central part of western Sicily. The murder rate there at the time of Petrosino’s journey was approximately fifty times that of mainland Italy.
As a young man, Cascio Ferro had begun his career as a politician. He was the son of struggling peasants and quite naturally found the concepts of socialism and anarchism to his liking. He preached revolution in the Sicilian countryside, where poor farmers were often victimized by the landowning elite. When he returned from America, Cascio Ferro abandoned his first career for crime, but not the rhetoric; he made speeches during political rallies and was by all accounts a rousing orator who often used the refrain “Property is theft!” to excite the peasant crowd. When Cascio Ferro started a company that delivered mail and packages, he was taken to court for refusing to pay his bills. His defense was that he was an anarchist and didn’t believe in property rights.
Even in the beginning of his criminal career, before the trip to America, Cascio Ferro had the idea of transforming crime into something else. One of his first offenses, which occurred in 1898, was the kidnapping of Baroness Clorinda Peritelli di Valpetroso. Only nineteen, the baroness was being driven in her carriage through Palermo when she was accosted by three men. The bandits, or whoever they were, treated the woman gently, drove her deep into the countryside, and deposited their victim at a house, where an old woman watched over her. Everyone was very kind, especially the handsome, charming leader of the band, who didn’t bother to cover his face. The baroness was released the next day, none the worse for wear. It was assumed that her father paid a handsome sum for her freedom.
The police soon arrested Vito Cascio Ferro and two associates and charged them with kidnapping. But Cascio Ferro had a novel defense. He freely admitted he and the others had taken the baroness, but claimed that this wasn’t a crime committed to earn money. On the contrary: it had been an act of love. One of his fellow suspects, a student named Campisi, was infatuated with the baroness but didn’t believe he had a chance to win her heart. Stealing a few hours of the rich girl’s time had allowed Campisi to lay out his case for marriage. Which had, regrettably, not been accepted.
Remarkably, the Italian police, who were notoriously harsh, at least on Mafia suspects, accepted Cascio Ferro’s explanation. He was convicted of the crime but received only a suspended sentence. Cascio Ferro walked away from the courthouse a free man. To be arrested and then freed was actually a mark of distinction for a budding mafioso like Cascio Ferro. It showed his power and influence. And his stratagem—representing an old crime as something new—was validated.
This conceit was essential to Cascio Ferro’s rise. When he returned from America, he began an extortion racket that was similar to many others in Italy at the time: merchants paid a small fee every week or month, and their shops and businesses went unmolested. But instead of threatening the merchants, as most extortionists did, Cascio Ferro coached his underlings to speak softly and with respect, to make it appear they were good men who wanted to protect the merchants from bad men. It wasn’t extortion; it was a kind of gallantry. His new method was so successful that, after a few months, some of Cascio Ferro’s victims actually sought him out and thanked him for taking their money.
Call it sleight of hand, call it cheek. Cascio Ferro was dressing the Mafia in new clothes.
Cascio Ferro’s second innovation was to make crime into an actual business. Every nefarious activity in his zone of influence was organized, rationalized, and regulated. Beggars, whom no one had thought to bother with before, were given specific spots to work. Robbers who stole from alms boxes were assigned to particular churches and charged a cut of their takings. Cascio Ferro even organized chicken thieves, pickpockets, and blackmailers into a kind of corporation. “Don Vito,” said one writer, using the honorific that Cascio Ferro was now addressed with, “was the first to adopt the Mafia’s archaic and pastoral systems of the 20th century to the complex life of a modern city.” This is perhaps overstating the case. The entity we now call the Mafia had always been a modern organization that exploited the changes in Sicilian political and economic culture of the late 1800s and early 1900s. But Cascio Ferro was thinking hard about how to weave his business so closely into the fabric of Sicilian life that the two could not be picked apart.
As his fortunes rose, Cascio Ferro walked the streets of rural Sicily like an uomo di rispetto, taking the air, dressed in suits made to order in the English style by the famous Bustarino’s of Via Maqueda in Palermo. He smoked a long, elegant pipe and rubbed elbows with politicians and the gentry at the theater and the opera. True, he was still illiterate (even though he’d married a schoolteacher), and when he needed to calculate a sum, he often reached down to a wide leather belt that he wore underneath his vest. The belt had rows cut into it, a crude counting device which helped Cascio Ferro determine what his take in any deal would be. The description of another mafioso given by the Italian author Carlo Levi hews closely to what we know of Cascio Ferro at this point in his life:
His face was impassive and inscrutable, and yet at the same time it was enlivened by grimaces expressing feelings different from those we are accustomed to perceiving, a mixture of cunning, extreme mistrust, mingled confidence and fear, arrogance and violence and even, perhaps, a certain wit: and yet all these elements seemed to be fused in that face in a way that was distant and alien to us, as if the tone of the emotions, and the very appearance of the face, belonged to another era, of which we have nothing more than an archaic, hereditary recollection. I had the distinct impression of being in the presence of a rare representative of a lost race.
Cascio Ferro murdered people, too, ordering a hundred or more killings over his career, according to authorities. “His behavior is bold,” said one police report, “violent and full of outspoken incitements to destruction.” His dossier with the Palermo police included a wide range of crimes: arson, murder, extortion, kidnapping, “outrage,” and racketeering. His ambition was boundless. The other great power in rural Sicily was the Catholic Church. Cascio Ferro was jealous of the priests’ hold over their parishioners, so he persuaded the women of his district to “stop going to Holy Communion and make their confessions to him.” Petrosino�
�s Italian biographer referred to this as “a thing that seems incredible” in the deeply Catholic countryside of Sicily. And indeed it was.
Petrosino, as he walked the decks of the Duca di Genova, had probably not thought of Vito Cascio Ferro for years. He had many other names and faces in his mind, and a bout of mid-journey seasickness forced him to his cabin and his bed, making his life a torment. After his sickness passed, Petrosino seems to have recovered his spirits. Part of this change, ironically for a man on a secret mission, was the result of being recognized by the ship’s purser. “I know who you are,” this individual told the detective. “I’ve seen your picture in the papers. But you can rely on my discretion.” Instead of being horrified by this breach of his anonymity, Petrosino seemed flattered. He fell into conversation with the purser and even revealed he was going to Italy for an important project. The object of which, at least, he kept to himself.
Other gaffes followed. Petrosino either forgot his cover name or invented a new one on the fly; in any case, he introduced himself to other passengers as Guglielmo Simone, which was a different name from the one he’d started the voyage with. When a steerage passenger kept sneaking into the second-class passage and annoying people, instead of letting the ship’s crew handle the matter, Petrosino took the man aside and had a few (probably ominous) words with him. The man never repeated the offense, but the intervention could only have served to draw attention to the detective.
Why did Petrosino not guard his identity more closely? Why did he not take more care to preserve the anonymity that protected him? And why hadn’t the NYPD allowed him to bring along another detective to watch his back?
A clue came later in the journey when Petrosino remarked to a fellow passenger that he was headed to Sicily (another slipup: the ship was bound for Genoa). “Be careful not to look at the women,” the man joked. “Otherwise they’ll kill you down there.”
Petrosino’s pride blazed up. “I’m not afraid of anybody!” he cried.
Why was Petrosino so cavalier with his safety? He had for so many years depended on a cloak of invulnerability that seemed draped around his shoulders; to admit fear would be to lose that protection. And besides, he was a proud man. As one young immigrant said after being asked why he spent money on clothes instead of food: “You know the Italian people. You gotta starve but your honor is first.”
…
After a stormy passage, Petrosino stepped off the ganglank in Genoa at 8:20 p.m. on February 21 and made his way to Rome to present his credentials and begin his work. He was still recovering from the voyage and confessed he was feeling ill. Rome was celebrating Carnival, and most of the public offices were closed anyway. With no other business at hand, Petrosino was cut adrift and walked the streets, taking in the old city.
The Italian capital utterly bewitched him. He wrote to Adelina (in Italian) to describe as best he could the glories of Rome:
I’ve seen St. Peter’s, the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s Galleries, which are the wonders of the world. At the sight of St. Peter’s, I was spellbound. It is beyond human imagination. What a huge, magnificent place! The church could easily hold a hundred and fifty thousand people. But how can I give you any idea of it? . . . In spite of everything I am sad, and I must say that when it comes to comfort, I prefer dear old New York . . . In any case, it seems as if it’s a thousand years before I go home . . . Kiss my dear little girl for me and remember me to all our friends and relatives.
A kiss from your affectionate husband.
Petrosino, lonely and frustrated by the delay in his work, was still entranced by the physical signs of Italy’s splendors. Here, under a winter sun, was evidence of the Italy he’d spent two and a half decades defending. Americans called Italians a mongrel race descended from the Asiatic hordes, but everything the detective saw in the old city disproved this. The hours he spent as a tourist must have filled Petrosino with a deep sense of his culture’s worth.
That first day, the detective managed to see the U.S. ambassador to Italy, Lloyd Griscom, a Quaker and career diplomat from New Jersey, who assured Petrosino that he was working on getting him in to see the Italian interior minister and the chief of the national police. Petrosino then returned to his hotel and slept. The next day, he finally began his work. He went to see the chief of the Italian police, Francesco Leonardi, announcing as he walked in, “My name is Petrosino.”
Leonardi smiled. Although he knew Petrosino by reputation, he had the feeling that the detective thought he was far more famous in Italy than he actually was. Petrosino handed Leonardi a letter of introduction from Bingham and sketched out the official reason for his visit. He didn’t reveal Bingham’s plan for seeding Italy with intelligence agents who would report back to the NYPD; that could come later.
Two days later, Petrosino wrote Bingham his first letter (later he would use encrypted telegrams), informing him:
I was able to meet the Minister of the Interior, the Honorable Mr. Peano, with whom I had a discussion on the subject of Italian criminals and their activities in the U.S.A. He was so much interested in this matter that he gave instructions to the Head of Police, His Excellency Francesco Leonardi, to issue definitive orders to the Prefects, Sub-Prefects and Mayors of the entire kingdom not to issue passports to Italian criminals heading for the U.S.A. He also gave me a letter addressed to all the police commissioners in Sicily, Calabria and Naples with instructions to assist me in every way in the performance of my mission . . . Wishing you and Mr. Woods a long and happy life, I remain
Your very devoted,
Joseph Petrosino
It’s questionable whether he really believed that Leonardi’s command would be obeyed. This was, after all, Italy. But it was a beginning.
One day as Petrosino walked through Rome, two newspapermen from New York recognized him on the street. Then, in Palermo, an old family friend named Cianfarra ran into the detective at the post office. They were chatting when Petrosino spotted a man walking by. “I know that face,” he said in a low voice. “I know it.” Cianfarra turned to see a badly dressed stranger who seemed to be glancing at them while trying to avoid being spotted. Petrosino passed his hand in front of his face as if he were attempting to brush away a veil obscuring his memory. His friend protested that Petrosino knew thousands of people, and so it was inevitable that he should run into one or two of them in Palermo. But the detective exhibited signs of “extreme worry and perplexity.”
Petrosino and his friend watched as the man calmly passed them by, then walked into the post office to send a telegram. That night, over dinner, the detective was quiet, but at one point he confided to Cianfarra. “Here I am totally alone,” he told his friend. “I know no one and have no friends. In New York it’s different; I have friends and collaborators on every street corner, and policemen who will help me in an emergency.”
“Italian cities are safer than New York,” Cianfarra protested with a smile. But Petrosino wouldn’t be comforted. He began to speak quietly, as if to himself. “I would pay one thousand dollars to know where he lives.” And then, “But I have to go and whatever happens, happens.” Petrosino felt he was being watched, and there was one individual in particular who was worrying him. Who that was has never been revealed. But Petrosino was full of misgivings. There were dozens if not hundreds of men and a few women in Italy who had a vendetta against the American. Even the Sicilian police commissioner admitted as much. “It was sufficient only to hear Petrosino’s name,” he said later, “to hear oaths of vengeance.”
Petrosino in Italy is a figure that grows less recognizable by the day. In New York, he braved assassins with icy composure; in Italy, he is confused. In New York, his memory was photographic; in Italy, he struggles to remember a familiar face. It’s almost as if our snapshots of him on the streets of Italy are slowly obscured by some shadow that creeps in bit by bit from the margin of the photograph.
…
The next morning, Petrosino cabled his brother Vincenzo in Padula t
o tell him he was taking a train that would arrive there at 1:53 the next afternoon. His bill at the Hotel Inghilterra was thirty lire. He paid it, made his way to the railroad station, and boarded the train.
He hadn’t seen his younger brother in decades. Vincenzo was waiting at the station with their second cousin. Petrosino embraced his brother, glanced at the other man, then asked Vincenzo why he hadn’t come alone.
“But this is our cousin, Vincenzo Arato,” his brother exclaimed, “the son of our sainted mother’s sister!”
“You know my trip is secret,” Petrosino said. “Nobody’s supposed to know.”
Vincenzo had bad news on that very score. He pulled a newspaper out of his pocket, Il Pungolo (The Goad). It contained an article about Petrosino’s supposedly secret mission. There was even a quote from General Bingham, who’d been asked about the detective’s absence from New York. “Why, he may be on his way to Italy, for all I know!” the General had replied.
Petrosino uttered a curse under his breath. The article laid out the details of Petrosino’s trip and even tied it to the mission of defeating the Black Hand. His cover had been blown by his own commissioner.
The day was ruined. Vincenzo’s friends lined up outside the family home to greet the famous detective, but he stayed inside a bedroom, furious. How could Bingham do this? Petrosino had hundreds of enemies in Italy, and here the commissioner had revealed his plans to the entire nation. It was an inconceivable blunder.
Bingham was prone to such gaffes, of course; he’d insulted Jews and Italians in his first days in office and shot off his mouth at the most inconvenient times. It’s impossible to say exactly what the General was trying to achieve when he granted the interview. He was certainly under pressure to reduce Italian outrages: 1909 was another election year, and William Randolph Hearst was again gearing up to attack Tammany on its crime-fighting record. What better evidence could there be of the NYPD’s commitment to fighting the Society than the fact that the world’s greatest Italian detective was at that very moment headed to Sicily to cut off the supply of thugs once and for all? Bingham’s ambitions for higher office might explain the gaffe, but its recklessness is still almost incomprehensible. Would the commissioner have exposed his best Irish detective in such a rash and ham-handed way?
The Black Hand Page 21