He strode across the Piazza Marina, but took a different route from the one he would normally have followed to get back to his hotel. Perhaps he was on his way to the meeting he couldn’t miss for any reason. With his umbrella in hand, he disappeared into the gloom.
At around 8:45 p.m., a man was walking down Via Vittorio Emanuele, a street one block from the piazza on its northern side. Suddenly, two shots—powerful ones the man described as “detonations”—sounded in the night. The noise was so loud that the man thought fishermen had exploded a pair of mines in the harbor. In the seconds after the shots, the pedestrian was amazed to see two guards standing in front of the nearby customs house talking with another man, as if nothing had happened. Four more shots rang out.
Men and women rushed toward the sounds, which appeared to have come from a spot about a hundred feet from the local tram station. (At the same time, other people were seen running away from the noises.) A sailor from the ship Calabria, which was docked in the port of Palermo, saw two men fleeing into the park at the heart of the piazza, then heard a carriage speed off in the darkness. The seaman ran along with the others toward the point where the gunfire had erupted. There he saw the body of a thickset man with strong features, well dressed in black clothes, with the appearance of a foreigner, lying on the pavement, an umbrella at his side. A large revolver lay on the ground a few feet from the body, which was “dripping blood.” A black derby hat had been flung to the base of a nearby pedestal.
Bystanders knelt around the body. Suddenly, the gaslights that illuminated the four sides of the square flickered and went out. The piazza was cast into darkness. More locals came running with candles, and the body was lit by flickering flames held by nervous hands.
Detective Joseph Petrosino was dead.
…
It took fifteen minutes for the first policemen to arrive, and when they finally came on the scene, they began going through the dead man’s belongings. They didn’t yet know the victim’s name, but found in his pockets thirty business cards, which identified the man as a detective from New York. Petrosino was wearing a black suit and a charcoal gray overcoat, a brown silk tie, and a gold watch. In his pockets were letters of introduction to various officials such as the mayor of Palermo and the captain of the port, as well as the notebook containing the names of Italian American criminals, seventy lire in banknotes, an NYPD badge (number 285), a scrap of paper with “6824” written on it, various notes on things Petrosino needed to do, plus a postcard of Palermo with Adelina’s address in New York written on it, along with the message “A kiss for you and my little girl, who has spent months far from her daddy.”
Policemen spread out across the square and to the nearby trolley station, interviewing everyone they found. The sailor told them about the two men he’d seen fleeing the scene. One had “a hard hat,” meaning a derby, which to one eyewitness indicated a man who’d recently returned from America, and the other a round one, perhaps a homburg. A ticket collector on the nearby tram told investigators that he’d seen the man who shot Petrosino, and that the detective had ducked to avoid the bullets but had been caught by the fusillade. The conductor of the tram overheard the conversation and quickly told his fellow employee to be quiet. The man provided no further details.
Commissioner Ceola was at the theater that night, the new Teatro Biondo, taking in a play. In the middle of the performance, an aide came up to his seat, leaned over, and whispered the news into his ear. Ceola left at once and rushed to the scene. By the time he arrived, the men and women who’d reported seeing the fleeing men were already retracting their stories. No one, it turned out, had witnessed anything definitive. More remarkably, several people on the scene denied even having heard anything, although a number of loud gunshots from a large-caliber gun (the murder weapon was left lying on the pavement near the umbrella) had torn through a night with almost no ambient noise to disguise the sound.
At 10 a.m. on March 13, a telegram arrived at police headquarters in New York City. It was from William Bishop, the consul who had sympathized with Petrosino over the strange folkways of the Italians. It read: PETROSINO KILLED REVOLVER CENTER CITY TONIGHT. KILLERS UNKNOWN. MARTYR’S DEATH.
16
* * *
Black Horses
On March 13, Teddy Roosevelt had been a private citizen for all of nine days. After completing his second term as president, he’d left Washington, D.C., for New York City. He was already planning a yearlong safari to Africa, both to hunt and to avoid the impression that he was secretly running the country, despite the installation of William Howard Taft in the White House. Roosevelt had traveled to New York to attend a breakfast at his aunt’s house and was walking down the steps of her town house at 110 West 31st Street when he spotted a gaggle of reporters moving toward him along the sidewalk. The ex-president was used to such groups clamoring for his reactions to the day’s political news and he cried out to them good-naturedly, “No, I cannot say anything about anybody or thing.”
“Cannot you say something,” a voice called back, “about the assassination of Lt. Petrosino?”
“What’s that?” Roosevelt said in a shocked voice.
A reporter filled Roosevelt in as he stood silently on the town house steps and listened, his expression somber. “I can’t say anything but to express my deepest regrets,” he replied when he’d heard all the details. “Petrosino was a great man and a good man. I knew him for years and he did not know the name of fear. He was a man worth while. I regret most sincerely the death of such a man as Joe Petrosino.”
The news spread quickly through the city that morning. In Little Italy, crowds stood in front of newspaper offices, waiting for employees to bring out the cables arriving from Italy; when the employees emerged, the crowds would pack around them to hear the latest news on the killing. Those who’d learned English read the stories from the newspapers to little groups of immigrants that formed on the sidewalks and in cafés. Once they’d absorbed the news, people gathered in the doorways of the tenement buildings and the little shops and repeated the same words: “È morto, il povero Petrosino” (He’s dead, poor Petrosino). Newsboys cried out the news on Broadway and up and down Seventh Avenue, yelling, “Huxtry! Huxtry!” (Extra! Extra!), holding up papers emblazoned with headlines about the murder. Members of the Italian Squad, who’d been out on their usual rounds or trailing suspects and interviewing Black Hand victims, broke away from their assignments and spoke among themselves, their voices low. One member wouldn’t hear the news for weeks: Rocco Cavone was onboard a ship bringing a murder suspect back from Buenos Aires and would have to wait another sixteen days to learn that his mentor was dead.
Even those cops who’d once hated Petrosino, called him “wop” and “guinea,” now mourned his passing. “The news . . . was recited at first with scoffing,” noted one reporter out on the street, “then amazement, and then anger. Not only at headquarters, but among the policemen all over the city, the same bitter anger and resentment was shown, for Petrosino was a great favorite among his brothers.” Petrosino still had enemies within the NYPD; there were those who had never accepted Italians on the force. But he’d earned the respect of many of those who’d once despised him.
Not everyone was saddened. When a ship called the Europa carrying four hundred Neapolitans approached the 34th Street pier just after the news reached Manhattan, small boats filled with friends of the passengers went out to greet the newcomers, and the men called up to the passengers that Petrosino was dead in Sicily. “Bravo!” many of the Neapolitans cried in response. “The news that the foremost enemy of the Black Hand had been slain . . . acted like a stimulant on the immigrants.”
Commissioner Bingham read about the assassination while eating his breakfast and perusing the Herald. He locked himself in his room while he considered the ramifications, then emerged to give a very Binghamesque statement to the ranks of cops at 300 Mulberry: “I feel deeply the death of Petrosino,” he told the men. “He died like a sol
dier in action, a grand way for any man to die . . . Let it be an incentive to every man to exert himself to the utmost to the end, that he may do his duty and carry out the orders of his superiors as a courageous man should.” There was no mention of responsibility for his death. But the commissioner swore that the killers would pay. “I’ll avenge him,” he told reporters. The mayor ordered flags at City Hall to be flown at half-mast, where they would remain for four days.
The detective’s widow, Adelina, was at home at 233 Lafayette Street when a reporter from the New York Herald knocked on her door and asked her if she’d heard the news. When she responded in the negative, the journalist explained what had happened. Her sister and brother-in-law, who lived in the apartment above the Petrosinos’, heard her cries and hurried down to comfort Adelina. But the new widow was inconsolable. “He was always . . . gentle and affectionate with us,” Adelina said, “as if the world was populated by angels.” One can easily forgive the falsehood—Petrosino saw enemies everywhere, and rightly so—in a woman who’d lost a second and, by all appearances, beloved husband.
The news shot along telegraph wires from coast to coast, and papers around the country announced it in martial tones: “WAR TO THE DEATH ON THE BLACK HAND,” proclaimed the Atlanta Constitution. “The Black Hand have no more right to live than mad dogs,” declared the New York Sun. “They are enemies of society and should be exterminated at all hazards.” The Washington Post again called for an end to all immigration from southern Italy. In a confidential cable, Consul Bishop in Palermo agreed. “It is time the words of warning were spoken,” he wrote the Department of State. If nothing was done, “it seems but a question of a short time when the U.S. will be submerged by a veritable inundation of alien elements that will render its fine type of civilized development but a mockery and chaos.”
The city was in shock, alternating between bewildered sorrow and signs of “collective hysteria.” The “human butchers” who had killed Petrosino, argued the New York Times, “owe their continued existence to a radical fault in the character of many Italians—their aversion to naming the cutthroats as public enemies.” Gino Speranza, the head of the Society for the Protection of Immigrants, who fought for the rights of Italians, advocated “warfare” on the Black Hand and endorsed the call for a private force to find and kill its members. “Let us not be so sentimentally afraid of a ‘secret police,’ ” he wrote. “The underworld works in the dark and we must fight it in the dark.” To calm the fears that percolated throughout the city, Mayor McClellan and Commissioner Bingham huddled for a conference. When they emerged, they asked the Board of Aldermen to approve a reward for information leading to the capture of Petrosino’s killer. The sum was eventually set at $3,000. The pair requested an additional $50,000 for Bingham’s secret service, to complete the work that Petrosino had begun. The New York World endorsed the idea. “It is not too late,” its editorial board urged, “for the Aldermen to recede from their position as protectors of dangerous criminals.” Bingham and the mayor, ironically, also called on the U.S. Secret Service to help in the investigation of Petrosino’s murder; the agency immediately dispatched agents into the field to find the killers.
Even the Board of Aldermen voiced its anger in a March 17 resolution. Little Tim Sullivan, who had blocked the detective’s work at every turn, expressed along with his peers the desire “that [Petrosino’s] cowardly assassins may be speedily brought to justice.” That same day, the board passed a new ordinance ordering all gun and knife merchants to keep records of the names, addresses, and physical descriptions of people purchasing “guns, revolvers, pistols or other firearms, or dirks, daggers or dangerous knives.” Dealers had to register their business with the city, and each weapon sold had to bear an identifying mark. It was one of the first gun control measures ever adopted in New York City. The state, too, promised action. In Albany, Louis Cuvillier, a Spanish-American War veteran and a member of the New York State Assembly, announced that he was drawing up a bill to make bomb throwing a capital crime, along with other common Black Hand offenses. Under the proposed law, anyone convicted of dynamiting a building or kidnapping a child would go to the electric chair.
In death, Petrosino’s honesty was proven one last time. After twenty-six years on the force, he had almost no savings to leave his family. In a gracious gesture, Little Tim Sullivan introduced a bill to grant Adelina a special widow’s pension of $2,000. As for the $50,000 for the secret service, Sullivan and his allies vetoed the request.
The New York American started a Hero’s Fund to help Adelina pay her bills. William Randolph Hearst pledged $500, and he was joined by justices of the New York State Supreme Court, New York City aldermen, borough presidents, the president of Columbia University, and the Jewish banker and philanthropist Jacob Henry Schiff. Enrico Caruso, Petrosino’s old friend, pledged $100 in honor of Petrosino’s “splendid service, not only for America, but for Italy.”
A backlash against Italians quickly gathered force. The men of the Italian Squad swept into action and did themselves no credit. They marched downtown and raided businesses in the Italian quarter, including a tavern on Monroe Street and a billiard room at 164 Watt Street, arresting twenty-seven Italians and charging them with disorderly conduct, even though the men had simply been socializing. The arrests continued night after night: a dance hall on Thompson Street, a barbershop on First Avenue. “The raids,” reported the Sun, “were said to be a part of a plan to discourage the meeting of large numbers of Italians.” The arrested men were released in court, and no viable information as to Petrosino’s killer was gathered. In reality, the squad was simply lashing out. A similar raid in Brooklyn on March 15 resulted in the arrest of everyone in one establishment; the men were accused of “knowledge of the recent assassination of a detective of world-wide repute.” These charges, too, were later dropped.
It wasn’t just New York. Petrosino’s death was “calamitous for Italian-Americans,” spurring “a plague of vilification and persecution,” wrote the historian Richard Gambino. The police in major cities conducted sweeps of Italians with no justification, netting 194 people in just one such raid in Chicago. Italians grew tired of the constant harassment. In May, two Irish policemen hurried to the scene of an accident in an Italian section of Hoboken, New Jersey. The sight of the bluecoats after a spring of persecution enraged the residents. Men leaned out of windows in the tenements, firing guns at arriving cops. A full-scale riot broke out, and the cops narrowly avoided being killed in the streets.
…
The story flashed across the headlines in London, Manchester, Berlin, even Bombay. In Berlin, the chief of the Criminal Investigations Department told reporters: “I wish to pay tribute to the ability and extraordinary courage of Petrosino . . . I have often wished we had a man of such fearlessness and striking talent.” In Italy, there was shame and mortification. Americans had donated $4 million for the victims of a devastating earthquake in Sicily and Calabria that struck on December 28, 1908, which took the lives of up to 200,000 people, and now the nation was sending back one of America’s most famous sons in a coffin. “SICILY RISES AGAINST MAFIA,” reported the New York Globe, telling its readers of mass meetings planned to help find the killers. Italians donated $2,000 to a fund for the capture of the assassins; the Italian government advertised a separate reward of $3,000 (“a large sum here,” noted the Post); and officials floated the idea of opening foreign bureaus to watch over emigrants in foreign lands.
King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy met with J. Pierpont Morgan, the American financier, and laid out a new plan for defeating the scourge of Italian crime: a chain of night schools. “The king believes that ignorance is the principal cause of criminality among Italian emigrants,” reported the Washington Post. The monarch reportedly wrote letters to John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, as well as the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Goulds, seeking funds to start his classes. The scheme went nowhere. And though he acknowledged that criminals were making it to Ame
rica, even at this late date the king refused to admit that such a thing as the Society existed. “The Black Hand, whatever that may be,” he said, rejecting the very notion, “is an atmosphere, an intangible and an indefinable something.” This from the leader of the country where Petrosino had been executed.
…
In Palermo, the American consul, William Bishop, undertook the mournful duty of arranging for the return of Petrosino’s remains. He reached an agreement with a steamship company to ship the body on one of its vessels. But with the sailing date approaching, the consul received a call from the company’s agent. His life had been threatened because he’d involved himself in the Petrosino affair; he was breaking the contract. The consul scrambled for a replacement and finally found another ship leaving for America that would take Petrosino home. The body was placed in a walnut coffin lined with zinc and guarded, rather ironically, by eighty Italian policemen on its journey to the pier. The coffin was then brought to the Palermo city center for a farewell, followed by a long train of notables and local politicians as spectators crowded on balconies to get a look. “I had the impression,” said one onlooker, “the armed police accompanied the corpse, being afraid that, if Petrosino was resurrected, he would cry the guilt of having left him to be murdered.”
The procession was eerily silent. No one called out a blessing; no women were heard to cry over the coffin. As the hearse passed, many men refused to take off their hats, the sign of respect for the dead.
The Black Hand Page 23