The Black Hand

by Stephan Talty

  The next morning at seven, Petrosino cut his visit short and boarded the train to Naples. From there he would take the mail boat to Palermo, where most of the criminals who plagued his life had originated. Sicily awaited him.

  His old suspiciousness had returned. When his brother asked him where he was headed, Petrosino equivocated. “Maybe I’ll go to Messina,” he said. “On the way back I’ll stop and see you again.” Clearly, he now felt that no one in Italy—not even his own brother—could be fully trusted.

  Petrosino boarded the train. As his car clicked over the rails as it headed northwest to the seaport of Naples, Petrosino ate the home-cooked meal that Vincenzo’s wife had prepared for him. There was another man in the compartment, one Valentino di Montesano, a captain of the carabinieri. He recognized Petrosino but said nothing.

  15

  * * *

  In Sicily

  Petrosino reached Palermo and checked into the Hotel de France, using yet another fake identity: Simone Valenti di Giudea. His first stop was the office of the American consul, William A. Bishop, where he presented his plans and revealed that he had informers in the city who would be helping him with his secretive work. Petrosino settled in for a long stay, opening a bank account at the Banca Commerciale and depositing two thousand lire for his future use. Any incoming mail would be directed to the bank. He later rented a Remington typewriter, this time under the name Salvatore Basilico. (Basilico is Italian for sweet basil, as petrosino is slang for parsley, so perhaps the detective was amusing himself by switching one herb-inspired name for another.) The intent was clear: he didn’t want to leave any trail in Sicily that could connect one false identity with the next.

  His preparations complete, Petrosino met a local man, most likely one of his old informants from New York who’d returned to Sicily. Together they headed to the courthouse in Palermo and began going through the files of penal certificates. Petrosino spent hours checking the names on the documents against the list of criminals in his notebook. If it occurred to him how odd this mission was—after years of violent combat, he was now endeavoring to defeat the Society through what amounted to paperwork—he never expressed it. Indeed, it was a heady moment. The evidence the New York police needed to stop the Black Hand was laid out before Petrosino’s eyes. His work in Italy had truly begun.

  But something was bothering him mightily. On February 28, he wrote Adelina:

  My dearest wife:

  I have arrived in Palermo. I am completely confused and it seems a thousand years until I come home. I don’t like anything about Italy at all which I’ll explain to you when I come home. God, God, what misery! I was sick for five days. It was influenza and I had to stay in Rome, but now I feel all right . . . Kiss cousin Arturo for me and also my brother-in-law Antonio and his family . . . Greet your sister and her husband, to my dear Baby and to you thousands and thousands of kisses.

  What exactly had disturbed him in Palermo he never spelled out. Had he recognized the face of an old enemy on the street? Had he been threatened?

  Despite his depressed mood, Petrosino was making progress. The next day he sat in his hotel room typing out copies of the penal certificates he’d found in the Palermo courthouse. When he was done, he packaged them up and sent them to Bingham in New York, along with a letter:

  Dear Sir:

  Following my cablegram, I enclose the penal certificates of Gioacchino Candela and others . . . I will explain everything to you in full in my next letter. There is nothing in the penal files dealing with Manatteri, Pericò, and Matranga. Maybe I will find something about them later.

  Faithfully,

  Joseph Petrosino

  With the certificates, Bingham could begin tracking down criminals and deporting them. Everything was going according to plan.

  For the next five days, Petrosino attempted to keep a low profile. He ate his meals at the Café Oreto, met with his informers, visited Bishop daily, and burrowed deep into the criminal archives. He changed his cover names constantly. No one seemed to bother him. On March 5, he told Bishop that he had scheduled a meeting with the police commissioner of Palermo, Baldassare Ceola. He expressed misgivings about the conference. Bishop assured Petrosino that the commissioner wasn’t cut from the same cloth as the rest of the Sicilian police bureaucracy; he was a cultivated man who’d spent ten years working in the northern city of Milan, where he’d led the investigation into the assassination of King Umberto I. Ceola’s task in Palermo was to root out Mafia infiltration. The country’s leaders in Rome obviously trusted Ceola, and Bishop encouraged the detective to do so as well.

  Petrosino met with Ceola the next day. The commissioner felt a twitch of class consciousness when first sizing up this legend from America. “I saw at once,” he said, “that Lieutenant Petrosino, to his disadvantage, was not a man of excessive education.” Petrosino was blunt that day. He told Ceola that the U.S. government had sent him to find out whether criminals were entering the country with papers falsely stating they’d never committed any offenses in Italy.

  Ceola protested. No documents issued by his office had been altered or falsified.

  Petrosino had apparently had enough of the protestations of Italian officials. He brushed aside the commissioner’s answer. “Then why is it that many of the criminals I have arrested showed perfectly clean penal certificates even though they had been convicted here?”

  “Perhaps because they had been rehabilitated,” Ceola replied. The commissioner was being rather slippery. There was, in fact, an official process called “rehabilitation” in Italy, but it often involved nothing more than deleting any mention of a man’s crimes just as he set off for Ellis Island. Ceola was defending his department, but he must have known that Petrosino was essentially correct.

  There was another matter the commissioner had to discuss with Petrosino: his safety. Bishop had already told the detective he needed protection in Sicily; the island was just too dangerous for him to travel from neighborhood to neighborhood unguarded. Ceola agreed and volunteered to supply the American with a bodyguard. The last thing he wanted was a prominent American being assaulted or even murdered in his city.

  Petrosino declined. “Thank you, but I don’t want a bodyguard.”

  “But it will be too dangerous for you to wander alone around Palermo!” Ceola protested. “You’re too well known . . . No one knows how many enemies you have in this city.”

  Petrosino’s answer was enigmatic. “I also have friends in Palermo, Commissioner. They will be enough to protect me.”

  An irritated Ceola called in a Lieutenant Poli, the head of the mobile brigade, and introduced him to the American detective. Poli would be his contact in the police bureaucracy. Then Ceola wrapped up the meeting. Petrosino’s lack of trust in the Italian police had obviously grated on the commissioner. The detective had even declined to reveal where he was staying in Palermo. Whatever Petrosino had learned in the past week, hinted at in his letter to Adelina, had destroyed his trust in Ceola and his men. But pride certainly played a part as well in his refusal to accept protection. How would it look if Petrosino had to be escorted around town by a Sicilian cop?

  Even if the American wouldn’t accept a bodyguard or let the Palermo police know what he was doing and whom he was doing it with, Ceola intended to keep close watch over him. Poli and Petrosino met several times in the next few days, with the detective reporting on what records he was looking at and what documents he needed next. Poli, too, had informants who spotted Petrosino around the city, and he reported to Ceola that the detective was visiting “the most dangerous underworld areas,” even at night, taking notes and having secret meetings with informants and high-ranking officials. How the police got this information, whether through tailing Petrosino or through informants, is unknown. But the Palermo police were anything but trusting of Petrosino; one report even tried to paint his natural caution as suspicious. “In every way,” it said, “he adhered to the custom of those among the Sicilians who believe th
at they get the best protection when, instead of turning to the Authorities and the forces of Law and Order, they put their trust in some notorious and dreaded criminal who has authority and influence in the underworld.”

  Petrosino had found a godfather of his own. Such was the implication of the harsh report. In reality, the detective was taking precautions: he was using false names and perhaps even disguises. Certainly, Petrosino’s self-confidence was apparent in his actions, but he wasn’t behaving recklessly. He didn’t, however, trust Ceola, and that clearly stung.

  But it was also clear, at least to Poli, that Petrosino was making significant headway. He “saw at once that his American colleague must indeed have a certain number of informers at his disposal, and that some of these must be persons in high places.” The documents that Petrosino was looking at could have come to him only from “persons who had legitimate access to judicial circles.”

  Did Petrosino have a secret mission in Sicily? Later, reports would surface that, as well as targeting the backgrounds of known criminals, the detective was working on other, even more confidential missions. President Theodore Roosevelt was scheduled to visit Italy later in 1909, and one American journalist subsequently claimed that members of the Black Hand planned to assassinate him on Italian soil. But Petrosino’s mission was kept secret in New York, at least until Bingham’s interview, and it’s unlikely that the Secret Service knew beforehand that he was making the journey. And what motive did they have to assassinate Roosevelt? The vast majority of Black Hand members were convicted in state and city courts; the president had no power over them anyway.

  …

  In the following days, the detective hurried from meeting to meeting. None of the people he spoke with about the Black Hand ever came forward afterward, so we don’t know much about whom he spoke to or what he learned. Even more so than in Little Italy, the detective moved amid rumors and conspiracies, veiled threats, inchoate rage. His name was on a thousand lips, whispered in several dialects. He was confronting a centuries-old culture that he’d once thought he understood but now found inscrutable. It’s hard not to see him in those days as remarkably American: alone by choice and conviction, mission oriented, a bit arrogant, courageous, and naïve.

  Giuseppe Petrosino was truly at the heart of the sprawling thing he’d come to end.

  On March 11, as he strode through the streets of Palermo, Petrosino passed two men standing near the migration office. One of the men watched the detective step into a coach and drive off; he turned to his friend and said, “This man is Petrosino, who came to die in Palermo.” The speaker was later identified as Paolo Palazzotto. This was the same man, arrested in New York for his involvement in a prostitution ring, who had been deported after receiving a beating from Petrosino. Palazzotto had arrived back in Italy on March 2. That night, as the detective ate at the Café Oreto, the young man and a friend named Ernesto Militano (whom the police described as “an incorrigible robber of prostitutes”) watched Petrosino from the bar, where the pair sipped wine and “looked threateningly” at the American. Two more friends joined them, Francesco Nono and Salvatore Seminara. The latter was another one of Petrosino’s many “victims.” He’d been forced to leave the United States after the detective arrested him.

  Down the bar from the four men, who were drinking and laughing, was a man named Volpe, quietly eating his dinner. Volpe was a police informant, and he eavesdropped on the conversation of the four men, who were speaking in a local dialect. What he heard was fascinating:

  NONO (laughing): But you know parsley [petrosino] gives you diarrhea!

  SEMINARA: If I die, they’ll bury me, but if I get over it, I’ll kill him.

  NONO: You haven’t got the guts.

  SEMINARA: You don’t know the Seminaras.

  It sounded ominous, but in reality there were many such bad actors walking the streets of Sicily’s capital. In Via Salvatore Vico lived a man named Angelo Caruso, who nursed a lingering bitterness toward the detective after Petrosino had treated him roughly during his arrest for possession of a sword-cane and an unlicensed pistol. Caruso despised Petrosino so much he’d named his dog after him. Another informant told of seeing a small boy who lived at 9 Via Lungarini following Petrosino for days, tracking him from place to place, without being spotted by the detective. It was said the boy was being paid by a pair of unnamed women.

  Two suspects from the 1903 Barrel Murder case were also circulating in Palermo in early March, including Giovanni Pecoraro, who’d impersonated the killer in court. The two men went to visit a third suspect in the murder—Vito Cascio Ferro—at his home. Afterwards Pecoraro sent a mysterious coded telegram back to New York: “I Lo Baido work Fontana.” The meaning remains unclear.

  The swirling motives for wishing Petrosino harm extended back in time and across an ocean. Petrosino arrested me, Petrosino showed no respect, Petrosino broke my jaw in two places, Petrosino betrayed the Sicilians. They also projected into the future. Whom was Petrosino building cases against? Was he trying to stir up trouble with the Italian police? Or was he, as it was rumored, shutting off forever the escape routes to New York that so many gangsters had utilized when times got tough in Palermo? The ships to Ellis Island had become a vital pressure valve for criminals of all types. To cut it off would be to sentence many of them to poverty or prison. Certainly many criminals looked on Petrosino as the “enemy of the Sicilians” who’d come to Italy to take food out of their families’ mouths.

  The fear reached across the Atlantic. Police in Chicago later reported that secret societies in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York were plotting a coordinated strike on their enemies in law enforcement. Assassins in each of those cities would target the three leading opponents of the Black Hand. The second name on the list was Detective Gabriele Longobardi, known as “the Petrosino of Chicago.” The third name was John D’Antonio of New Orleans. The first was Petrosino.

  And what of Vito Cascio Ferro, the peasant genius who carried around the photo of Petrosino in his wallet? By March 10, he was staying in the small town of Burgio, about thirty-five miles south of Palermo. He was the guest of a prominent politician, Domenico De Michele Ferrantelli, who later claimed Cascio Ferro was helping with a political campaign Ferrantelli was mounting. But it was difficult to get information on Cascio Ferro’s whereabouts, the police commander in Burgio admitted, because of “the absolute silence . . . the fear of Vito Cascio Ferro inspires.” He believed Cascio Ferro had slipped away from Burgio on March 11, even though Ferrantelli swore publicly that Cascio Ferro never left his house.

  On the evening of March 11, Petrosino made a hasty notation on his list of criminals: “Vito Ferro . . . dreaded criminal.” The list contained suspects in America who might have entered the country illegally. But Cascio Ferro had lived in Italy since 1903. Why did Petrosino suddenly write his name, six years after he’d encountered him? Did he see him on the street that day, watching him? Or was Cascio Ferro one of the informants Petrosino had scheduled to meet? The handwritten note sits there in Petrosino’s notebook, without context.

  …

  On the morning of March 12, Petrosino journeyed to the small Sicilian town of Caltanissetta to check more penal certificates. He spent a great deal of time that day speaking with the chief court chancellor, then met with Leonardi, the chief of police in Palermo, whom he told about two appointments he had that afternoon in the city. While in Caltanissetta, the detective confided to an unnamed person that he also had a meeting that evening “which he could not miss [for] any reason.”

  That afternoon, a Palermo street vendor would later testify, he sold some postcards to a slim, handsome gentleman who bore a startling resemblance to Vito Cascio Ferro. Another individual spotted the capo that same day in Piazza Marina, the old city square, near the waterfront. According to this witness, Cascio Ferro was speaking with a man named Pasquale Enea, a well-known crime figure in the city. Enea had spent years in New York, where he owned a grocery store that had doubled as a me
eting spot for criminals. Commissioner Bingham would later reveal that Enea had been known to the department as a “person of confidence.” In other words, an informant.

  After he’d finished his work in Caltanissetta, the detective returned to his hotel on the east side of the Piazza Marina. The square was a small park bordered by a spiked wrought-iron fence set in the heart of the historic district in Palermo, not far from the sea. Around the fence were wide sidewalks where locals liked to stroll. In medieval times, when the piazza was nothing more than vacant wasteland, it was here that heretics were brought from their prisons and executed by agents of the Inquisition.

  The detective went up to his room, where he remained through the late afternoon. Dusk fell around 6 p.m., and a storm front moved over the city. Lightning flashed and thunder sounded; rain pounded down on the piazza and ran in small rivulets toward the gutter, leaving puddles in its wake. The showers had stopped by 7:30 p.m., when Petrosino emerged from the hotel carrying an umbrella and walked along one side of the square toward the Café Oreto for dinner.

  The piazza’s gaslights glowed steadily as the sky grew dark. Arriving at the near-empty restaurant, Petrosino sat at his usual corner table, his back to the wall. He studied the menu and ordered pasta with marinara sauce, fish, fried potatoes, cheese, peppers, and fruit. To wash the meal down, he chose a half liter of local wine. The waiters recalled that Petrosino wasn’t alone as he dined that night, but spent the evening talking to two men they were unable to identify who sat with the detective at his table. After dinner, Petrosino paid his bill, stood up, said farewell to the men, and left the restaurant alone.