The Black Hand Page 4

  …

  There was a specific quality that explained why the detective was respected, even idolized, on Mott Street, at least by those who didn’t loathe him. It was amply demonstrated in the Angelo Carbone affair.

  The young Italian was drinking at a café called the Trinarcia one night in 1897 when he got into an argument with a forty-two-year-old man named Natale Brogno. During the scuffle, Brogno ended up with a knife in his back. Carbone swore he was innocent, but after an eight-hour trial (one of the fastest in New York history up to that time), a Manhattan jury convicted him of murder. The Irish judge, who also happened to be the Grand Sachem of Tammany Hall, sentenced Carbone to death, telling him that the conviction was a warning to all Italians, “who were too prone to commit crimes of that sort.” The bewildered defendant was asked if he had anything to say. “Your honor,” Carbone said, “why should I, who am innocent, be obliged to die as an example to others?” The young man was taken to Sing Sing to await his date with Old Sparky, the wooden electric chair built by a dentist who’d received his inspiration from the account of a drunkard electrocuted after touching a power line.

  Petrosino wasn’t involved in the case, but soon after the conviction he began to hear whispers on Mott Street that Carbone was a hardworking man, respectful, different from the marmaglia, or riffraff, who were usually involved in stabbings. Evidence pointed toward another man. There was no particular reason for Petrosino to care about Angelo Carbone; there had been no outcry in the press, no calls for a retrial, and the NYPD was confident it had the right man. Reopening the case would stir up resentment among his fellow cops. Still, Carbone’s story nagged at the detective throughout the last days of 1897. Finally, he decided to take a look at it.

  The detective took the train upstate to Sing Sing (the notorious prison that got its name from a local Native American tribe, the Sinck Sinck, meaning “stone upon stone”), on the east bank of the Hudson River, thirty miles north of the city. He entered the prison, carved out of native gray marble and watched over by armed sharpshooters who studied the yard from their conical watchtowers. Guards ushered Petrosino to the Death House, where the condemned men were kept, then to Carbone’s damp and freezing three-foot-by-eight-foot cell. There the inmate told the detective the whole story in Italian. “Io non l’ho ucciso,” he said at the end. “I didn’t kill him.” Petrosino agreed to investigate the murder.

  The detective first looked into the life of the victim, Brogno, and found he’d had several known enemies. One in particular stood out: Salvatore Ceramello, sixty-two, who had a record of violence and had been in the café the night Brogno died. One fact Petrosino found especially interesting: Ceramello had disappeared the day after the murder and hadn’t been seen in Little Italy since.

  Petrosino set out to locate Ceramello, chasing leads first to Jersey City and Philadelphia. Finding nothing, he went farther, to the Italian neighborhoods of Montreal, where his search again came up empty. The detective then boarded a ship for Nova Scotia. In his suitcase he carried a variety of disguises that he alternated regularly: laborer, health worker, businessman. The Nova Scotia lead, however, turned out to be yet another dead end. Ceramello was nowhere to be found. Discouraged, Petrosino returned to New York and began pressing his nfami for new intelligence. Carbone’s date with the electric chair, when he would be brought to the death chamber by seven guards and a chaplain at the traditional time of eleven o’clock on a Thursday night, was drawing closer.

  Several days after his return, Petrosino received a tip that Ceramello was living in a house in the Baltimore suburbs. Petrosino immediately boarded a train south and made his way to the street where Ceramello had been spotted. He set up surveillance in the neighborhood, watching the house day and night. He observed men and women entering and leaving the residence, but no one who fit Ceramello’s description.

  Time was running out. Petrosino had to get back to his caseload in Manhattan, and, more pressing still, Carbone’s execution was now only a few days away. The detective couldn’t wait any longer.

  Donning a fake beard, Petrosino knocked on the door of the house. A woman answered and peered at Petrosino, clearly suspicious. “I’m from the Board of Health,” the detective informed her. “I was told there was a case of smallpox here.” The woman took this in. Suddenly, she grabbed the door and tried to slam it in Petrosino’s face. He stepped forward and shoved the door roughly before she could close it. The woman stumbled back, cursing Petrosino as he entered the apartment. The detective turned to study the room he found himself in, and his gaze fell on an old man who was sitting in a chair, holding an axe in his hand. The man had been cutting lengths of firewood so they would fit into the stove. Petrosino asked him his name.

  “My name is Fioni.”

  Petrosino shook his head. “You mean your name is Ceramello.”

  The old man stared at this stranger and asked who he was.

  The detective replied, “My name is Petrosino.”

  Ceramello was armed. But at the sound of the detective’s name, the life seemed to go out of him. He gave up without a fight. Petrosino led the man out of the house, and the two headed to the nearest telegraph office. Minutes later, a dispatch arrived at 300 Mulberry: “BALTIMORE—ALLESANDRO CIAROMELLO ARRESTED. GOT FULL CONFESSION. HAVE THE KNIFE WITH WHICH HE KILLED NATTALI BROGNO. COMING TODAY. PETROSINO.”

  That evening, Angelo Carbone was sitting in his cell at Sing Sing when a guard approached and slipped a piece of paper through the bars. The prisoner unfolded it. A telegram. Carbone looked at it blankly; the message was in English, which he couldn’t read. A translator was called in, and he told Carbone that the telegram was from his brother Nicolo. “Be at ease,” the interpreter read. “Ciaramello has been arrested.” Carbone stood in stunned silence, then broke into tears and cried out, “I’m saved!”

  Less than a week before his scheduled execution, Angelo Carbone walked out of Sing Sing a free man and into the arms of his family. Ceramello took his place on Death Row and was eventually executed.

  Carbone never fully enjoyed his miraculous freedom. In the months after his release, he began to behave erratically and showed signs of extreme nervousness. Exactly what he did or said was never recorded, but it was disturbing enough for his family to take him to be examined by a series of doctors, who eventually came up with a diagnosis of insanity. Carbone had become obsessed with the idea that he would be taken back to Sing Sing and die in the electric chair. The thought had unbalanced his mind.

  Many Italians sympathized with Carbone’s fear. Uncounted Italian men languished in New York prisons, convicted because they’d happened to be near the scene of a crime or because they were considered violent by their very nature. “In every crime, of whatever kind,” wrote Arthur Train, who worked in the New York D.A.’s office, the public judged Italians “capable of nothing but acts of brigandage.”

  To be Italian in America was to be half-guilty.

  This was the secret reason why Petrosino was beloved in the colony. In the absence of Italian elected officials, he was a brother, a shield. If he believed you to be guilty, he would pursue you to the very ends of the earth. If he thought you were innocent, he wouldn’t rest until you were free.

  …

  The detective began to make friends among the powerful: prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, and journalists. These men found that underneath Petrosino’s stern exterior lay a vein of sociability, like a spring bubbling beneath a hard limestone landscape. “Petrosino was no nervous temperamental Latin,” wrote a journalist for the Evening World. “He was a sympathetic friend, a gay entertainer with songs, stories and imitations.” One Harvard-educated blueblood invited Petrosino over to talk about a case he was going to prosecute the next day, a murder in the Bronx’s Van Cortland Park that Petrosino had solved in brilliant fashion. It was a business invitation of sorts, but it turned into something else entirely: “the most thrilling evening of my life,” recalled the prosecutor. Petrosino sat bolt upright i
n an armchair, “his great, ugly moon-face expressionless save for an occasional flash from his black eyes,” the prosecutor and his wife listening next to a crackling fire as Petrosino unspooled his narrative. “So vivid was Petrosino’s account of his labors,” said the prosecutor, “that in opening the case next day to the jury I had but to repeat the story I heard the night before.” The murderer was promptly convicted.

  Journalists sought him out, feeling he held a key to the mystical core of the Italians. They found him a surprisingly charming dinner companion. “A big, strapping man with flashing coal black eyes and a melodious voice” was how one newsman remembered him, “quick-witted and resourceful.” When Petrosino walked through Little Italy, children followed him as he made his rounds, “his dark restless eyes studying the faces of everyone he passed.” Often, when he went to arrest a man in one of the city’s cellar taverns, he wouldn’t even present a badge or pull out his service weapon, a .38 Smith & Wesson. He would simply say, “My name is Petrosino,” and the criminal would, almost always, stand up and come along. It was as if that one word—“Petrosino”—outweighed the prestige of the entire ten-thousand-man New York Police Department.

  The detective spent his days with policemen, journalists, and judges; he lived in a largely male world. Unlike many of his colleagues, he had no girlfriend or wife, and he claimed that this was by design. “The police department is the only wife I have a right to have,” he once said. “There’s so much sudden death in this business. A man hasn’t the right to bring a woman into it.” But he did have friends all across the city, and these relationships were often built around his first love: opera. “If he talked music to you,” wrote a journalist from the New York Sun, “he would tell you that ‘Lucia’ was his favorite, that ‘Rigoletto’ held second place and that he thought well of ‘Ernani’ and ‘Aida.’ Wagner, he would admit, wasn’t so pleasing to his ear, although he liked ‘Tannhauser’ very much.” Michael Fiaschetti remembered the detective coming over to his family’s apartment on Sundays to chat and to listen while Fiaschetti’s father played their favorite pieces on the piano. Even then Fiaschetti knew who Petrosino was. “His reputation was all over the city,” Fiaschetti recalled. “Walking in on him was like taking a bow before a king.” Between arias, the young man would ask the detective about this or that arrest, and Petrosino would humor him with an account of his latest adventures. The eighteen-year-old was thrilled to be in the presence of this demigod, but surprised to find Petrosino different from what he’d imagined: “middle-aged and quiet of manner . . . You would scarcely have taken him for the hero whose risky ventures and hand-to-hand encounters . . . were a legend.” Fiaschetti, a muscular youth with gleaming black hair, measured himself against Petrosino and found, to his surprise, that “I looked more like a tough detective than he did.” But when Fiaschetti spoke with Petrosino on those long Sunday afternoons, and heard of his pursuit of men who had killed ten or fifteen times in Italy, and how he’d arrested this or that gangster without backup, his impression began to alter. “There was something about his quiet and rather deadly manner,” he recalled, “that kept a man from talking too loud.”

  As Petrosino’s fame spread, a myth began to grow up around him. The precise source of the story is untraceable, but it remains part of his legend today. It was said that, as a young boy, Petrosino had emigrated ahead of the rest of his family to live with his grandfather in Manhattan. In this version of the story, the grandfather was killed in a streetcar accident and Petrosino and his young cousin Antonio were left on their own. Eventually they ended up in Orphans Court. A kindly Irish judge took pity on the two boys and, instead of sending them to an orphanage, brought the pair home and cared for them until members of Petrosino’s family arrived in America. “In consequence,” the legend recounts, “Joseph Petrosino and his cousin Anthony Puppolo lived with a ‘politically connected’ Irish household for some time, and this opened up educational and employment avenues not always available to more recent immigrants, especially Italian immigrants.”

  The story is a fiction. There was no grandfather in America, no streetcar accident, no Irish judge. Petrosino was raised in an Italian household and learned everything he knew about integrity from his fellow immigrants. He was entirely a product of his own culture and his rough education in American life.

  The tale was an insult to poor Italians, who were judged incapable of producing a Joseph Petrosino. It was another, subtler taste of the prejudice that awaited the detective in his career, a prejudice that most Italians faced at the turn of the century and that would shadow every step of the war Petrosino was soon to begin.

  …

  Petrosino had already been dubbed “the Italian Sherlock Holmes,” but he hadn’t yet met anyone approximating his Moriarty. That would change with the events that began on the morning of April 14, 1903.

  Soon after daybreak, Frances Connors, a cleaning woman, was walking down 11th Street as it approached Avenue D when she came across a barrel sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, an overcoat draped over the top. Curious, she lifted the wool coat and looked inside. And then she screamed. For what the cleaning woman had seen inside was the face of a dead man, his head shoved down between his knees. The corpse was completely naked, and his head had been nearly severed by a savage knife thrust across the throat. When the victim turned out to be a Sicilian, the lead investigator called for help. “Send for the dago,” he told his men. He meant Petrosino.

  The detective, along with agents of the Secret Service, who believed the murder was connected to a counterfeiting ring, chased down the suspected killers: a gang led by Giuseppe Morello, a Sicilian from the town of Corleone known around Little Italy as “Clutch Hand” or “the Old Fox.” The first nickname was the result of his deformed right hand, which resembled a lobster claw, and which he supported with a white string tied around his neck. Black-eyed and cunning, Morello carried a .45-caliber pistol in his waistband and a knife tied to his left leg, the tip plunged into a small cork to avoid stabbing him when he walked. He was arrested along with a towering brute named Tomasso “the Ox” Petto, “an oval-faced hulk of muscle and menace” who was known for both his great strength and his paltry intellect. Petrosino suspected it was Petto who’d cut the throat of the man in the barrel. Each member of the Morello gang was rounded up and brought into court for his arraignment—all except one: a tall, piercing-eyed Sicilian named Vito Cascio Ferro, who apparently had better sources of information than his compatriots and had fled town before the cops swept down.

  In court, the judge was proceeding with the case when the man booked as Tomasso Petto angrily called out from the dock. Something in Italian. The judge tried to move on, but the suspect refused to quiet down. Finally, an interpreter spelled out what he was saying to the judge: “I am not Tomasso Petto.”

  Onlookers began to whisper and laugh. The man looked exactly like Petto. What game was he playing?

  “Then who are you?” asked the judge.

  “My name is Giovanni Pecoraro,” the suspect called out. “I can prove it.”

  With that, the man produced several pieces of identification, all with the same name: Giovanni Pecoraro. The district attorney had no choice but to drop the charges against Pecoraro. It was a disaster for the prosecution and a public embarrassment for the police. How had this happened? The suspect, especially to non-Italian eyes, looked exactly like the Ox.

  It turned out that the missing suspect, Vito Cascio Ferro, had come up with an ingenious plan to beat the charges: have the real killer disappear and put a double in his place. The scheme worked to perfection. The prosecutors, unable to find the murderer, were forced to release all the suspects. Pecoraro and the others walked free, much to the delight of Little Italy’s underworld, and the killers of the man in the barrel were never prosecuted.

  Petrosino had outwitted the Italian underworld for years, but here for the first time was evidence of a man who thought at his level. The substitution of a look-alike was wonderf
ully neat—not to mention brazen. “Something was changing in the world of American crime,” wrote one author.

  In 1903, Petrosino had no idea of Vito Cascio Ferro’s importance. The Sicilian was a kind of organizational genius, soon to be a super-boss of the Palermo Mafia, the man who some believed had reinvented crime for the urban age. He was a master strategist held “in unlimited esteem” by more ordinary criminals, even gang bosses such as Morello. But after his spectacular trick in the Manhattan courtroom, the American adventure of Vito Cascio Ferro was over. The suspect fled to Italy via New Orleans, and Petrosino, swamped with other cases and criminals, filed Cascio Ferro’s name away in his memory and moved on. The Sicilian, however, didn’t return the favor.

  When he got back to Italy, Cascio Ferro began reshaping the Mafia from small groups of bandits and extortionists into something far more visionary and profitable. He had vast ambitions and a keen mind with which to work. It was said that it was he who had invented the “protection” schemes that would soon spread from Little Italy across the country. But his great years were all in the future. For now, he was a poor man returning unwillingly to the country of his birth, nursing a deep and lasting animus toward Joseph Petrosino. In the port of New Orleans, Cascio Ferro walked up the gangplank to the steamship bound for Italy, carrying a suitcase with his clothes and meager belongings inside. To his mind, he’d been turned back by the man in the derby hat, that straniero, that infamous person. In his pocket Cascio Ferro carried a picture of Petrosino, which he would keep with him always. It was said that, back in Italy, he would take out the picture and study it, remarking to his friends, “I who have never been tainted by a crime, I swear that I will kill this man with my own hands.” The story may have been an underworld legend invented after Cascio Ferro’s death, but there’s little doubt that he maintained an unhealthy fixation on the detective.