Amid threats that the ship carrying the body wouldn’t be allowed to sail, Bishop draped the coffin in an American flag and watched as it was put aboard the steamship Slavonia, which would become famous months later for wrecking in the Azores and sending out the world’s first SOS message. The consul must have breathed a deep sigh of relief when the vessel steamed out of the port without incident.
Bishop would soon follow Petrosino home to America. His life was threatened in a letter sent to his home, while another note was sent to police detailing what a citizen had heard near a chemist’s shop in Via Maqueda. “If the U.S. consul took an interest in Petrosino,” a black-haired man had said within hearing of the letter writer, “I would kill him, and so he would also arrive dead in America.” Bishop remarked bitterly that the chief of police in Palermo had told him confidentially that the circumstances of Petrosino’s murder made little difference: if the detective had been executed at high noon in the city’s main square, with a hundred or a thousand people watching, nobody would have been found to testify as to who killed him. Bishop boarded a steamship for America and followed Petrosino’s coffin across the Atlantic. President Taft had requested that, on his arrival in New York, Bishop take a train to Washington in order to update him on the assassination. The consul readily agreed.
…
After an uneventful voyage, the Slavonia was finally sighted in New York Harbor. The coffin, which had been damaged en route, was unloaded and brought to Pier A on the West Side. On the wooden casket was perched a wreath from the king of Italy, as well as garlands from the Baltimore Police Department and the police of other cities. Thousands of men and women had spontaneously appeared on the streets of Manhattan, their heads uncovered, and they lined the sidewalks as the body passed on its way from the pier to Petrosino’s home, where Adelina was waiting. Accompanied by prominent Italian Americans, the procession arrived at 233 Lafayette and was met by the NYPD police band, which played a funereal piece. “As the last notes of the music died away,” one newspaper reported, “a hush fell over the great crowd before the house and in the silence the shrill sound of women’s wailing voices came from the windows above.” A cart brought the damaged coffin to a garage behind the home, and the body was transferred to a new one.
Adelina was frantic. A physician was called to attend her, but she was inconsolable. She kept asking to see her husband, but the funeral director, Rocco Marasco, gently told her it was impossible. What he didn’t mention was that when his men had opened the coffin, they’d found that the body was deteriorating rapidly. It was later discovered that Professor Giacento Vetere of the University of Naples had been hired by the Italian government to travel to Palermo to prepare the body for shipment. Vetere was an expert in such matters and assured officials that when he was done, the body would be preserved for a hundred years. The professor traveled to Palermo, but there he met one obstacle after another. He wasn’t allowed even to see the body; for four days he implored officials in the city to let him do his job, but because of “insidious influences,” he was prevented from carrying out his work. When the body arrived in New York, it was found that no embalmment had been performed, and that Petrosino’s naked body had traveled across the ocean in the same filthy sheet on which it had lain during the autopsy. It was taken as a final insult to the detective and his family from the Palermo underworld.
The body, in its new casket, was then transported to the headquarters of the Republican League, where it lay in state in a room draped with purple curtains, watched over by an honor guard in white gloves. Candles burned around the casket, and flower tributes were heaped behind it. The next morning, thousands of mourners waited patiently outside for their chance to view the casket, in lines that snaked around the corner and up a nearby street. When the mourners entered the room, some of them stepped out of line and dropped to their knees in prayer. One elderly Italian woman prostrated herself before the coffin, then beat her head on the floor and cried, “He must be avenged!” A group of Catholic attendees chanted the litany for the dead, while two officers of the traffic squad stood at the head and the foot of the bier, “motionless like statues.” Adelina came early in the morning but was unable to stand the sight of the coffin among the low-burning candles and fled, “sobbing passionately.” On the roof of the building, armed detectives scanned the crowds for Black Handers, as Inspector James McCafferty, head of the detective bureau, was worried that someone might dynamite the building. Other armed officers kept watch over the Petrosinos’ apartment.
One of the thousands who came to pay tribute to the fallen detective was an elderly African American man. It turned out to be William Farraday, who had been beaten by white thugs twenty years before on the Manhattan piers when Petrosino intervened. “Joe saved my life many years ago,” he told a lieutenant standing guard. “I never forgot him for that. I owe my life to him.” An emotional Farraday approached the coffin and knelt beside an Italian woman whose head was bent in prayer. He was crying when he left the room. A Chinese American man arrived hours later, telling mourners that Petrosino had walked in on a robbery at his shop years before and broken it up. “I’d be a dead man but for Joe,” said the immigrant. “He a fine man.” There were others, including the grown children of Meyer Weisbard, who had been murdered and dismembered in the Mulberry Street tenements years before in the notorious Trunk Murder. Petrosino had spent weeks of his own personal time tracking down the Jewish peddler’s killers. “Petrosino,” declared the American Israelite at the time of the arrests, “has accomplished what forty detectives, the stars of the New York force, failed to do.” The family arrived to pay their respects.
An Italian artist from Naples was commissioned to create a bust of Petrosino to sit atop a pedestal, and Enrico Caruso pledged the money for a bronze wreath to be placed at the monument. George M. Cohan, the Broadway impresario and original Yankee Doodle Boy, organized a concert to raise money for the detective’s family, and many of the top vaudeville stars of the day agreed to perform. Dances, bake sales, and charity auctions were held; eventually, $10,000 would be presented to Adelina. Postcards were printed bearing the detective’s likeness, with the caption “HE WARNED PRESIDENT MCKINLEY. NOW HE IS A MARTYR.” The newspapers attempted to outdo one another in their praise. “It is hard to have a man go out of life as this brave, courageous, heroic Italian went out of life,” lamented the Catholic Times, “leaving little behind him but his good name . . . God give sweet peace to his soul.”
Adelina received visits from wealthy Italian women and dozens of condolence letters. A member of Congress wrote to praise her husband’s “manly gravitas and fearless bravery.” Many of the messages were florid. “Think of how much He must have loved your dear husband to let him die as a martyr,” wrote a Mrs. Jacolucci. “The time is not very distant at which we are to deposit in the same cement our sorrows and suffering bodies and to ascend in essence to an everlasting meeting with our dear ones.” Some of the letters were addressed simply “To the Martyr’s Widow and Orphan.” A reporter who’d covered Petrosino for one of the dailies sent the condolences of Park Row and reminded Adelina of a bitter truth: there were families in Manhattan at that moment living under a Black Hand death sentence, and others who’d hoped Petrosino would recover their stolen children, and they grieved her husband’s death just as deeply as she did. “While you weep for the loss of your loved one,” he wrote, “you must remember that in many another home who once looked to him as a protector, his loss is keenly felt.”
…
On the day of the funeral, April 12, Mayor McClellan declared a public holiday. City offices were closed. A large crowd was expected to send Petrosino to his rest.
The day dawned crisp and clear. Just after 10 a.m., a phalanx of mounted policemen appeared on Grand Street, their horses’ hooves thundering on the cobblestones. They turned onto Lafayette Street and swept back and forth, pressing back the masses of people who had gathered on the sidewalks and clearing a path from Grand Street to Hous
ton, a total of five city blocks. Reporters from every major newspaper and some foreign correspondents were part of the jostling crowds. “Then the scene became most impressive,” wrote one. “In every factory, in every office building, as far as the eye could see up Lafayette Street, windows, balconies of the fire escapes and roofs were filled to overflowing with bare-headed shirt-sleeved workers. There was not a sound except that made by the carriages as they took up their places and the horses of the mounted squad. The girls in the paper-box factories, the cigar-makers, those who manufacture ‘pants’ for so much the dozen pair—all of them could find enough time to spare to pay tribute to this man.”
The lower portion of the city came to a standstill. The Italian flag fluttered from hundreds of buildings in the silence. The police band marched into place and faced 233 Lafayette, the door Petrosino had last walked through to board the Duca di Genova to Italy. The pallbearers—members of Traffic Squad A, all strapping six-footers who looked splendid and rosy-cheeked in their blue wool uniforms—waited, sun glinting off the gold bars on their collars. One after another, men emerged from the house carrying bouquets of flowers sent to Adelina by well-wishers. Carriages pulled up, and the men heaped the flowers inside. After a few minutes, eight victoria coaches had been filled to overflowing.
The turnout exceeded the wildest predictions. Some 250,000 people thronged the streets of New York waiting to honor the detective, more than had gathered for President McKinley’s funeral. Never before in the history of New York or any other American city had such a crowd turned out for a man of the class to which Petrosino belonged, a humble police lieutenant. Eighteen years later, the funeral of Rudolph Valentino, the most famous actor in the world, would attract 100,000 mourners in Manhattan, even though the city had added a million people by then. Many onlookers in 1909 were reminded of the gigantic processions for Ulysses S. Grant and General William Tecumseh Sherman following their deaths. A movie crew aimed its cameras at the faces in the crowd, collecting footage for a documentary film that would play in theaters weeks later.
At the stroke of 10 a.m., the pallbearers entered the house. They soon emerged bearing the coffin, which had been brought back from the Republican League headquarters. As they carried the coffin down and prepared to load it onto the hearse, a flock of pigeons shot from a nearby rooftop and wheeled overhead before flying off. Adelina, on the arm of her brother, followed the coffin, along with members of her family and friends, and stepped into a black coach. When all was in readiness, the hearse began to clatter up the street toward St. Patrick’s, pulled by six coal-black horses draped in white silk netting. When it passed by 243 Lafayette, firefighters from Engine 20 pulled their truck onto the street and rang the bells. There were so many policemen that the sun flashing on their brass buttons “dazzled the eye.”
The procession approached Mott, where Inspector McCafferty waited in front of ranks of bluecoats backed up to the brick buildings that lined the street. As the hearse approached, the policemen presented their batons in salute, the blue tassels swinging with the motion, the white tassels hanging straight down. The weathered brown stone of St. Patrick’s Cathedral was ahead, the mullioned windows of the church sunk deep into the masonry, presenting an air of cloistered solitude. The procession arrived at the front door, and the pallbearers lifted the coffin to their shoulders while a schoolboy choir burst into a rendition of “Raise Me, Jesus, to Thy Bosom from This World of Sinborn Care.” At the sound of the choir, the orphans at the Children’s Aid Society, who lived in a building across the street from the church, abandoned their chores, went to the windows, and pressed their faces against the glass to watch. The coffin bobbled slightly as it approached the door of St. Patrick’s, where cassocked priests and an overflowing crowd were waiting. Flowers covered every available space inside the church, and so many were piled on the coffin that the polished wood was barely visible. On the roof, detectives scanned the streets for provocateurs, while a hundred undercover cops mingled with the crowd, studying the faces of suspicious men, looking for “crack-brained anarchists” or “desperate Black Handers.”
Inside, Italians crowded into the pews on the right side, and policemen took up the seats on the left. Adelina entered, heavily veiled and still leaning on the arm of her brother, and took her place in a pew near the front of the church, sitting next to a young choirboy. She wept hysterically throughout the ceremony, her head bowed. The priests began to chant the Latin mass. The church was deathly quiet except for the voices of the priests and Adelina’s sobs. The priests chanted out the liturgy and were answered by the high voices of the choirboys. Many mourners wept openly.
For his text, the monsignor had chosen the story of Herod’s revenge: how, just after the birth of Jesus, Joseph saw in a dream that he was to take the infant to Egypt to prevent him from being killed by the Romans. But Herod, on hearing that the child had escaped, sent an order to his soldiers to kill every male child in Bethlehem and the surrounding countryside under the age of two. Matthew 2:18 was the focus: “A cry was heard in Ramah—weeping and great mourning. Rachel weeps for her children, refusing to be comforted, for they are dead.” Outside the church, mourners who’d been unable to get a ticket to the funeral mass—seats inside were assigned by lottery, owing to the enormous demand—listened to the liturgy; some knelt on the cobblestone streets, their lips moving in cadence with the priest’s. The monsignor, aware of the intense anger the killing had provoked, moved on to the sermon and spoke passionately of the need to heal the city’s divisions. “I hope and pray that the death of this faithful, true, large-hearted, devoted, and beloved man,” he said, “may be the means of inspiring self-respect among his countrymen, so that no mere handful of criminals shall longer degrade their race. May it teach to the rest of the people the debt and the love that we owe to these strangers on our shores, so that we may not wrongly discriminate. Let us make every one as welcome in our hearts as they are under our flag.”
When the mass ended, the pallbearers carried the coffin to the hearse for the procession to the graveyard, in Woodside, Queens, which lay seven miles away, across the 59th Street Bridge. Some 3,200 members of the NYPD bowed their heads to the sound of muffled drums as the six horses bore the hearse away from St. Patrick’s. The procession wound its way down Houston, turned onto Mulberry, and went past police headquarters. As the mourners made their way uptown, the police band played Verdi’s Requiem on trumpet, trombone, tuba, clarinet, flute, and drums. Whenever the band crossed an intersection, the music flowed outward and down the side streets, mingling farther into the city with the sounds of streetcars and the calls of pushcart men. Except for the music, the city was unnaturally still, its business postponed. The windows of the office buildings along Fifth Avenue were crowded with faces, the sidewalks jammed with people; no car could make its way forward. Many of the mansions of the rich and the leather goods stores and boutiques of Fifth Avenue wore emblems of mourning: crepe or black cloth, company and family flags flown at half-mast. “If Petrosino had died a President or Emperor,” the Times proclaimed, “no deeper or truer feeling could have been manifested.”
As the hearse made its way slowly, detectives walked alongside. At the intersections, members of the traffic squad snapped to attention. Men and women in the crowd wept, and the men took off their hats in respect. Many mourners knelt in prayer on the sidewalks. The faces in the crowd represented every nationality, “from Chinese to Turk.”
The whole city was mindful of what was happening along Broadway, but the spirit of the newspaper eulogies was paired with more tough-minded thinking in distant boroughs. In a criminal courtroom in Brooklyn, as the cortege headed toward Queens, a Judge Dike was sentencing an Italian named Frank Truglio to a year in the penitentiary for assault. “We are burying a good Italian today,” he said bitterly to the defendant. “You, I am inclined to believe, are a bad Italian. You belong to the class which was not wanted on the other side and which is not wanted here.”
The procession mo
ved north. Children emerged from the crowd and threw flower petals to the cobblestones before the horses clopped past to the sounds of Verdi. Church bells tolled as the casket passed, and the great hotels of midtown, the St. Regis and the Waldorf-Astoria included, lowered their flags out of respect. Sixty Italian societies, including the United Bootblack Protective League—honoring one of its own—and veterans of the Italian War of Independence in their bright red shirts, scarlet jackets, and blue Zouave trousers, accompanied the body. Dr. Sellaro, the activist and Black Hand target, marched with the men of the Sons of Italy. Whether he’d continued to resist the Society or paid up after the bombing at his Grand Street building was known only to him and his persecutors.
The procession crossed the 59th Street Bridge, to the sound of thousands of footfalls treading on the steel grates, then followed along Newtown Creek until it reached the entrance of Calvary Cemetery, which had been carved out of the Alsop family farm in 1845 and which had grown along with the city that lay to its west. The cemetery had been split into four divisions, each of which bore the title of a different Roman catacomb. The procession made its way to the third division, named after Saint Sebastian, the Gaul who’d been accused of betrayal and shot with arrows before becoming the patron of archers and holy Christian death. When the mourners had gathered around the open grave, members of the mounted police presented arms as Adelina stepped from her carriage, nearly collapsing before her brother caught her. “Joe, Joe,” she cried, “my Giuseppe, come back to me! My God, can’t I have my Giuseppe again?”
The mounted horsemen saluted the coffin as it was lowered down. Five and a half hours after the procession set out from St. Patrick’s, “Taps” was played. A captain called out, “Fours right! Trot!” and the mounted officers pulled their steeds away from the grave and toward the cemetery exit. The Patriotic Garibaldi, the Sons of Italy, the police brass, and the political notables turned and followed, and a new procession made its way toward the bridge and the city. It had been a long and tiring day.
The Black Hand Page 24