The First Family Part 2

CHAPTER 3.

LITTLE ITALY.

IT WAS A SPRING DAY, BUT ONLY IN NAME. DARK CLOUDS, PREGNANT with rain, blew in from the north and sagged low over New York harbor. Squalls of wind, damp with the clammy moisture of the North Atlantic, came spinning down around Long Island and darted off across the germy water, whipping up spume and whitecaps as they hurried for the Jersey sh.o.r.e. The skies were gray. The city was gray, a jumble of drab factories and rickety tenements. The sea, green-brown at the mouth of the Hudson River, swirled with the factory filth that oozed across the bottom of the harbor until it turned gray as well. And it was cold: the sort of gooseflesh East Coast chill that the pa.s.sengers cramming the rails of the emigrant s.h.i.+p with rain, blew in from the north and sagged low over New York harbor. Squalls of wind, damp with the clammy moisture of the North Atlantic, came spinning down around Long Island and darted off across the germy water, whipping up spume and whitecaps as they hurried for the Jersey sh.o.r.e. The skies were gray. The city was gray, a jumble of drab factories and rickety tenements. The sea, green-brown at the mouth of the Hudson River, swirled with the factory filth that oozed across the bottom of the harbor until it turned gray as well. And it was cold: the sort of gooseflesh East Coast chill that the pa.s.sengers cramming the rails of the emigrant s.h.i.+p Alsatia Alsatia had never felt in Italy. had never felt in Italy.

The Alsatia Alsatia lay, hove to, in choppy seas just south of Ellis Island. She was thirty days out of Naples and fresh from a rough Atlantic crossing that had left a large part of her human cargo praying for a landfall. That had come on March 8, 1893, a Wednesday. Earlier that day, the s.h.i.+p's first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers, 150 of them, had disembarked at a Manhattan pier. They were presumed to be above the tests and examinations that awaited the eleven hundred more or less impoverished Italians still crammed nervously in steerage. Fourteen months earlier, the U.S. government had opened an enormous immigration center on the island, staffed by hundreds of inspectors and health officials and capable of processing as many as twelve thousand men, women, and children in an hour. There emigrants were questioned as to their employment prospects-men were required to have a job waiting for them-and checked to ensure that they possessed sufficient money to support themselves. They were also tested for a number of diseases. Inspectors carried sticks of chalk and marked people's coats with codes: L for lame, G for goiter, H for a heart condition. The examination for trachoma, an infectious eye disease, was particularly dreaded; it involved having a b.u.t.tonhook thrust behind an eyelid. Anyone seen bearing a chalk mark was taken off for more interrogation, and most of those who were declared unfit to enter the United States were packed off back to their old countries. A few managed to dodge this fate by smartly brus.h.i.+ng off the chalk upon their clothing. lay, hove to, in choppy seas just south of Ellis Island. She was thirty days out of Naples and fresh from a rough Atlantic crossing that had left a large part of her human cargo praying for a landfall. That had come on March 8, 1893, a Wednesday. Earlier that day, the s.h.i.+p's first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers, 150 of them, had disembarked at a Manhattan pier. They were presumed to be above the tests and examinations that awaited the eleven hundred more or less impoverished Italians still crammed nervously in steerage. Fourteen months earlier, the U.S. government had opened an enormous immigration center on the island, staffed by hundreds of inspectors and health officials and capable of processing as many as twelve thousand men, women, and children in an hour. There emigrants were questioned as to their employment prospects-men were required to have a job waiting for them-and checked to ensure that they possessed sufficient money to support themselves. They were also tested for a number of diseases. Inspectors carried sticks of chalk and marked people's coats with codes: L for lame, G for goiter, H for a heart condition. The examination for trachoma, an infectious eye disease, was particularly dreaded; it involved having a b.u.t.tonhook thrust behind an eyelid. Anyone seen bearing a chalk mark was taken off for more interrogation, and most of those who were declared unfit to enter the United States were packed off back to their old countries. A few managed to dodge this fate by smartly brus.h.i.+ng off the chalk upon their clothing.

The ledgers that were maintained on Ellis Island record the Terranova family's arrival on the Alsatia Alsatia and give bare details of their circ.u.mstances. There was no sign of Giuseppe Morello, for example-the Clutch Hand had slipped into the United States some six months earlier, in the early autumn of 1892. Bernardo Terranova was aboard, however, with his wife, Angela, and all six of their children: Lucia, the oldest, who was just sixteen; her sister Salvatrice, twelve; and Morello's three half brothers: Vincenzo, seven, Ciro, five, and Nicola-Coco to the family-who was only three years old. There, too, was Morello's wife, Maria Marvelesi, whom he had married soon after the Vella murder. Marvelesi came from Corleone and was the same age as the Clutch Hand. She had with her the couple's child, a two-month-old infant christened Calogero in memory of Morello's father. and give bare details of their circ.u.mstances. There was no sign of Giuseppe Morello, for example-the Clutch Hand had slipped into the United States some six months earlier, in the early autumn of 1892. Bernardo Terranova was aboard, however, with his wife, Angela, and all six of their children: Lucia, the oldest, who was just sixteen; her sister Salvatrice, twelve; and Morello's three half brothers: Vincenzo, seven, Ciro, five, and Nicola-Coco to the family-who was only three years old. There, too, was Morello's wife, Maria Marvelesi, whom he had married soon after the Vella murder. Marvelesi came from Corleone and was the same age as the Clutch Hand. She had with her the couple's child, a two-month-old infant christened Calogero in memory of Morello's father.

It was still unusual for families to emigrate together; more than eight Italian immigrants in every ten were men, and more than half of them eventually returned to Italy. Other than that, though, there was little in the Ellis Island records to suggest the Terranovas were anything extraordinary. Bernardo gave his age as forty-three and said his job was "laborer," which was normal enough; most Italians were unskilled, and several hundred of his fellow pa.s.sengers claimed the same menial occupation. He was the only member of the party who could read or write, and that was common, too. The only clue to Terranova's eminence in Corleone, and to his members.h.i.+p in the Fratuzzi, lies in the notes that the officials made of the Alsatia's Alsatia's baggage. At a time when the average Italian immigrant entered the country with six dollars, carrying a single case, the Terranovas mustered eighteen pieces of luggage among them. No other family on the s.h.i.+p arrived in the United States with so many personal possessions. baggage. At a time when the average Italian immigrant entered the country with six dollars, carrying a single case, the Terranovas mustered eighteen pieces of luggage among them. No other family on the s.h.i.+p arrived in the United States with so many personal possessions.

From Ellis Island, New York was only a short ferry ride away, but for the Alsatia's Alsatia's wondering Italians it was like entering another world. Gotham was an unimaginable metropolis, a hundred times the size of Corleone, and filled with the sort of modern innovations and conveniences that were barely even dreamed of in the Sicilian interior. Buildings were lit by gas or electricity, and heated-downtown, at least-by steam; running water was commonplace and not an unimaginable luxury. Travel, hitherto by horse-drawn omnibus, was increasingly by electric streetcar or elevated railway; the first subways were being planned. Telegraphs and telephones were everywhere, and even saloons had ticker-tape machines, to carry the baseball play-by-plays. There were a thousand theaters and music halls and more than ten thousand bars. The tallest building in the city was a church whose spire ascended to a dizzying 290 feet above street level. And everywhere there were people: more than two million of them in 1893, a third of whom were foreign-born, making New York not merely the most vibrant, fastest-growing city in the country, but by a distance the most cosmopolitan. wondering Italians it was like entering another world. Gotham was an unimaginable metropolis, a hundred times the size of Corleone, and filled with the sort of modern innovations and conveniences that were barely even dreamed of in the Sicilian interior. Buildings were lit by gas or electricity, and heated-downtown, at least-by steam; running water was commonplace and not an unimaginable luxury. Travel, hitherto by horse-drawn omnibus, was increasingly by electric streetcar or elevated railway; the first subways were being planned. Telegraphs and telephones were everywhere, and even saloons had ticker-tape machines, to carry the baseball play-by-plays. There were a thousand theaters and music halls and more than ten thousand bars. The tallest building in the city was a church whose spire ascended to a dizzying 290 feet above street level. And everywhere there were people: more than two million of them in 1893, a third of whom were foreign-born, making New York not merely the most vibrant, fastest-growing city in the country, but by a distance the most cosmopolitan.

The largest immigrant communities were still the Germans and the Irish, who between them accounted for more than half a million of the city's population-this at a time when there were fewer than three thousand Chinese in Manhattan, a thousand Spaniards, and three hundred Greeks. They still lived largely in their own communities, the Irish in Five Points and h.e.l.l's Kitchen, and Germans in Williamsburg or "Kleindeutschland," east of the Bowery. Immigration from northern Europe had slowed by 1890, though. For the next two decades, by far the greatest number of new citizens would come from Eastern Europe-mostly Jews, fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire-and Italy. The number of Italians in New York, which was well under 1,000 in 1850 and only 13,000 in 1880, had grown to nearly 150,000 by the turn of the century. By 1910 it had more than doubled again, standing in excess of 340,000. In Italy as a whole, between 1860 and 1914, five million people, one-third of the entire population, left to find work overseas.

The earliest Italian settlers in New York came from the industrial cities of the north. They were skilled workers and middle-cla.s.s professionals, and they received a cordial welcome. It was not until the 1880s that this pattern changed and much poorer, less educated peasants from the southern provinces began to flood into the city. These Neapolitans and Sicilians were escaping harsh conditions in their homeland: high taxation, an endlessly depressed economy, compulsory military service, and an unprecedented slew of natural disasters-droughts, floods, earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions-that followed one upon the other so relentlessly that they were seen as signs from G.o.d.

Unskilled, illiterate, and speaking mostly in impenetrable dialect, the men of the south were despised even in Italy, where a bit of doggerel popular at the time perfectly described their position in society: At the head of everything is G.o.d, Lord of Heaven.

After him comes Prince Torlonia, lord of the earth.

Then come Prince Torlonia's armed guards.

Then come Prince Torlonia's armed guards' dogs.

Then, nothing at all. Then nothing at all.

Then nothing at all.Then come the peasants. And that's all.

In Manhattan, they were still less welcome. Though useful, insofar as they did dirty jobs that earlier immigrants now thought of as beneath them, Italians from the southern provinces were regarded with hostility by many New Yorkers. Their dark complexions, lack of English, and devotion to an alien food were all regarded as distasteful. They were much more volatile than northern Europeans, it was commonly supposed, and p.r.o.ne to deadly knife fights and vendettas. Worse, only a minority embraced American inst.i.tutions with the fervor expected of immigrants. Few Italians mixed with men of other nationalities, and well under half actually applied for U.S. citizens.h.i.+p. For many Sicilians and Neapolitans, the United States was a place to work hard, spend little, and save ferociously; many planned to return home with their savings. These were habits many Americans regarded as ungrateful and insulting.

Opinion hardened further at about the time the Terranova family first came to Manhattan. There was concern at the number of anarchists and socialists pouring into the country to preach revolution. There was concern at the number of criminals. Nineteen Italians in every twenty of those pa.s.sing through Ellis Island were found to be carrying weapons, either knives or revolvers, and there was nothing in American law to stop them from taking this a.r.s.enal into the city. The Sicilian police were said to be issuing pa.s.sports to known murderers in order to get them out of the country-a calumny, it transpired, but there were still real reasons to take such problems seriously. So many Italians were pa.s.sing through Ellis Island every day that it was not possible to check their statements properly. But when the 1,400 pa.s.sengers on board the SS Belgravia Belgravia were subjected to a spot investigation, one in six was found to have given false information. "Statistics prove," the were subjected to a spot investigation, one in six was found to have given false information. "Statistics prove," the Herald Herald trumpeted in one alarmist feature article, "that the sc.u.m of Southern Europe is dumped on the nation's door in rapacious, conscienceless, lawbreaking hordes." trumpeted in one alarmist feature article, "that the sc.u.m of Southern Europe is dumped on the nation's door in rapacious, conscienceless, lawbreaking hordes."

SO FAR AS THE members of the Morello-Terranova family were concerned, though, New York was a welcome haven. They were safe there from the Italian authorities. Cooperation between Sicily and the United States was all but nonexistent at the time; certainly the police in Palermo and Corleone made no effort to discover if any of their wanted men were hiding in the United States. And only when an Italian became so notorious that the American government wanted to expel him would the New York police trouble to discover if the man had a criminal record in Italy. Any immigrant who had been in the United States for three years or more became, in any case, immune from deportation. All Giuseppe Morello and his stepfather had to do was steer clear of trouble for that long. Then they could put their difficulties in Sicily behind them. members of the Morello-Terranova family were concerned, though, New York was a welcome haven. They were safe there from the Italian authorities. Cooperation between Sicily and the United States was all but nonexistent at the time; certainly the police in Palermo and Corleone made no effort to discover if any of their wanted men were hiding in the United States. And only when an Italian became so notorious that the American government wanted to expel him would the New York police trouble to discover if the man had a criminal record in Italy. Any immigrant who had been in the United States for three years or more became, in any case, immune from deportation. All Giuseppe Morello and his stepfather had to do was steer clear of trouble for that long. Then they could put their difficulties in Sicily behind them.

Where Terranova and his family went when they disembarked from the Ellis Island ferry remains unknown; nor do we know exactly when they were reunited with Morello. In all likelihood, however, the clan took lodgings in the main Italian quarter of Manhattan. Speaking no English and already pining, like most immigrants, for the familiar staples of the old country, they would have made straight for Little Italy.

The Italian district of New York, centered around Mulberry Street, was still in its infancy in 1893. It had been predominantly Irish as late as 1890, when Mulberry Bend, a kink in the road a few blocks north of City Hall, was the most reviled slum in the city: rife with disease, thick with litter, and home to communities of the desperate and dest.i.tute with names such as Bandit's Roost and Bottle Alley. "There is not a foot of ground in the Bend that has not witnessed some deed of violence," wrote the reformer Jacob Riis, whose after-hours visits to the rotting lodging houses and drinking dens of Mulberry Street produced some of the most memorable images of old New York. Among the horrors Riis described were homes so caked in filth they would not burn when set afire and "stale beer dives" in windowless, earth-floored cellars, where patrons desperate for oblivion sank rotgut whiskey and the flat dregs of empty beer barrels discarded by saloons.

It was largely thanks to Riis's eloquent campaigning that the worst excesses of Mulberry Street were swept away in 1890, leaving the district to the next great wave of immigrants from southern Europe. Three years later there were already tens of thousands of men, women, and children crammed into the seething streets around the Bend, a population larger than that of most Italian towns.

Conditions in the tenements of Little Italy were grim, though certainly no worse than they had been at home. Most of these dilapidated premises had been built before new zoning laws improved the standards of New York housing. They typically sprawled over almost the entire lot, so there was little light and no room for recreation; in the absence of gardens and public parks, children played on rooftops or in the streets. Almost every building was cold and damp in winter, when walls became so saturated with damp that they steamed whenever fires were lit. In summer the same apartments baked, so much so that even Sicilians, well used to infernal heat, preferred to sleep out on the rooftops or the fire escapes.

Privacy was nonexistent in the district. Bedrooms doubled as parlors and kitchens as bedrooms; every toilet, down the hall, was shared by fifty or sixty people. There were no bathing facilities; was.h.i.+ng meant a visit to the public bath. There was no central heating; the only source of warmth in some apartments was the kitchen stove. Those lucky enough to have fireplaces in their rooms stockpiled coal on the floor, in corners, under beds, making it impossible to keep things clean. Every tenement, in any case, was infested with c.o.c.kroaches and bedbugs. All had rats.

"More than anything I remember the smells of the old neighborhood," said one old Corleone Mafioso of the Little Italy of his youth.

You can't believe how many people lived together in those old houses. There were six or seven tenements on Elizabeth Street where we lived and in those buildings, which were maybe five or six stories high, there must have been fifteen or sixteen hundred people living. And everybody took in boarders, too. A lot of the guys who came over from Sicily were not married or had left their families in Italy. They were only there at night since they were out working all day, and at night there must have been another seven or eight hundred guys sleeping in the building. We had it pretty good because there were only four of us in three rooms, but in some other apartments you had seven or eight adults and maybe ten kids living in an apartment the same size.Some of the smells were good. I can remember, for example, that early in the morning, say five o'clock, you could smell peppers and eggs frying when the women got lunches ready for their sons and husbands. But more than anything else I remember the smells of human bodies and the garbage. There was no such thing as garbage collection in those days and everybody just threw it out in the street or put it out in the hallways. Christ, how it stank!

Poverty was an everyday reality for most of the families of Elizabeth Street, just as it had been at home in Italy. Higher incomes in New York, where it was possible for even an unskilled laborer to earn $1.50 a day-a sum thirty times the five-cent wage typical in Sicily-were offset by the higher cost of living, and many families willingly endured privation in order to remit larger sums to relatives at home. Pasta and vegetables formed the staple diet, purchased from the innumerable street cart peddlers who thronged the streets of Little Italy, and meat remained a luxury for most. Delivery vehicles inched along the pulsing thoroughfares pursued by a procession of small children who scavenged for anything that fell-or could be made to fall-from them. Few people owned more than the clothes on their backs and perhaps a single item of Sunday best. Even sheets and blankets were scarce commodities. Joe Valachi, born to Italian parents in New York a few years after the Terranova family arrived from Sicily, remembered that "for sheets my mother used old cement bags that she sewed together, so you can imagine how rough they were."

Simply finding accommodation in the overcrowded tenements of Little Italy was hard enough. Work, good work with decent conditions and some prospects, proved a good deal more elusive. Many emigrants, hundreds of thousands of them, had been lured across the Atlantic by tales of the immense wealth of the United States and so arrived in New York filled with the hope that they, too, would acc.u.mulate an easy fortune. The reality proved very different. The only jobs available to unskilled Italians were the filthy, menial ones that Americans thought were beneath them. Rag picking-sorting through heaps of stinking rubbish in search of bottles, bones, and cloth that could be resold for a cent or two-was one source of casual employment for the men. Others labored on sewer repairs, did construction work on the new subway, or manned the city's garbage scows. Women worked in dimly lit sweatshops, ruining their eyes by staring at the fast-moving needle of a sewing machine for nine hours at a stretch, or labored stripping feathers for mattresses and pillows in workshops that brought on lung disease.

This sort of casual work was monotonous and poorly paid. It was also frighteningly insecure. Men were hired by the day to labor on contracts that might last for a week or two, rarely longer. Women did piecework, perhaps gluing envelopes at the rate of three cents for every thousand, and lived with the threat that any dip in productivity would result in dismissal. The endless stream of immigrants pouring through Ellis Island meant that there was compet.i.tion for even the basest work, and for many Italians of Bernardo Terranova's generation the solution was to go to work for a padrone padrone, an overseer who spoke some English and who contracted to supply cheap labor to a variety of businesses. The more fortunate-those with some wealth, some skill, or some connections-got help from friends and relatives who had already settled in the United States. This is almost certainly what Terranova and Morello did. Small colonies of Corleonesi already existed in the New York of 1893, one in Little Italy and another in East Harlem, where a second Italian quarter was taking root in the blocks around East 107th Street. Terranova had some skill as an ornamental plasterer, and he and his stepson most likely got at least a little temporary employment in this way.

Whatever the men of the family tried, though, it soon became apparent that it was not enough. The American economy was stalling. Fewer and fewer were able to find even temporary jobs; by summer there was almost no work to be had anywhere in New York. The American economy, foundering since 1890, was sliding into full-blown depression. It was the worst economic crisis yet experienced by the United States. The great crash of 1893 was under way.

THE CRASH OF 1893 was a slump as bad in almost all respects to the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was a run on gold; the value of stocks and shares plummeted; thousands of companies went bankrupt; and at least five hundred banks failed. It was no time to be an impoverished immigrant in a frightened New York. By December, fully a quarter of the working population had no job. was a slump as bad in almost all respects to the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was a run on gold; the value of stocks and shares plummeted; thousands of companies went bankrupt; and at least five hundred banks failed. It was no time to be an impoverished immigrant in a frightened New York. By December, fully a quarter of the working population had no job.

Morello and the Terranova family spent that terrible year living in Manhattan. How they survived there is unknown, but their position must have been precarious. Even with the help of fellow Corleonesi, Terranova and Morello had two wives and seven children to support; none of the family spoke English; and only one of their offspring was old enough to earn-Lucia, Terranova's eldest daughter, turned seventeen that year. Their savings and even the sale of their personal possessions would have stretched only so far. When it became clear that the economy would not recover quickly, the only realistic solution was to search for work outside New York.

Ciro Terranova, the second youngest of Bernardo's sons, was the only member of the family who ever spoke about these early years. Five years old in 1893, just old enough to grasp something of the problems that his parents faced, he recalled his half brother Giuseppe leaving New York to hunt for work soon after their arrival. Morello traveled south, to Louisiana, a well-worn route for Italian migrants in those days. Severe labor shortages in the Deep South, where the cotton fields and sugar plantations had never recovered from the emanc.i.p.ation of their slaves a quarter of a century earlier, made the landowners of the state eternally anxious to hire immigrants. Sicilian laborers were particularly highly valued; they worked hard, were inured to backbreaking toil, and were often skilled farmers, too-plantation managers never ceased to be amazed at the variety and quant.i.ty of food that their Italians conjured from the little kitchen gardens they were allowed to tend. Italians, Southern gentlemen discovered, worked willingly at even the dirtiest jobs, and unlike Chinese laborers, who were readily tempted by offers of better jobs, they generally fulfilled their contracts.

According to Ciro Terranova, Morello worked at first as a fruit peddler, "selling lemons with a bag on his back." In two months he acc.u.mulated sufficient money to send for the rest of the family, and, when they arrived, he and his stepfather went to work on a plantation. It must have been early in 1894 by then, at the time that the seed cane was planted, and there was plenty of work in the fields. Afterward, in spring, laborers were needed to pull weeds and clear drainage channels. In August and September, the growing cane was thinned, and in the autumn it was harvested.

October marked the beginning of the zuccarata zuccarata-the grinding season-in the sugar parishes of Louisiana. Gangs of Sicilian laborers spread out through the fields armed with machetes with which to hack down the giant canes, then hauled them to nearby wagons and transported them to mills where they were washed, cut into pieces, ground, and clarified. Sugar crystals, mixed in with mola.s.ses, went from the mill to enormous centrifuges, where they were separated; from there the sugar was loaded into wagons and s.h.i.+pped to a refinery.

It was hard, physical, unrelenting work, a test for any able-bodied man, much less one as crippled as Morello. Work began at sunrise and went on until dusk, sometimes considerably later. In that time, a good man could harvest three or four tons of cane, but, in order to maximize production, plantation owners would hire entire families and give work not only to women but to children as young as five. Probably all of the Terranova children cut and stacked cane together from October until the harvest season ended in January 1895.

The work did not pay badly by the standards of the time. Men could expect to receive sixty-five cents a day outside the grinding season and as much as $1.50 for working an eighteen-hour day during the zuccarata zuccarata itself. Women and children got less, perhaps $1 and ten cents respectively. But rough accommodation was provided free, and even if only by stinting themselves, eating nothing but bread and the vegetables they grew themselves, a thrifty family could save as much as $2.50 a day for the duration of the season. This must have seemed a fortune to men and women used to the sort of wages paid in Sicily, and it even compared favorably to the $200 a year that unskilled workers earned in New York at this time, from which the costs of rent and food would have to be deducted. itself. Women and children got less, perhaps $1 and ten cents respectively. But rough accommodation was provided free, and even if only by stinting themselves, eating nothing but bread and the vegetables they grew themselves, a thrifty family could save as much as $2.50 a day for the duration of the season. This must have seemed a fortune to men and women used to the sort of wages paid in Sicily, and it even compared favorably to the $200 a year that unskilled workers earned in New York at this time, from which the costs of rent and food would have to be deducted.

Louisiana had other attractions for Italian immigrants. Temperatures during the winter months were close to what Sicilians were used to and were far more comfortable than chilly New York. And for the duration of the harvest season, anyway, a large Italian community flourished in the sugar fields. More than two thousand Sicilians came to Louisiana in 1893-some direct from their homeland, in boats that sailed between Palermo and New Orleans, depositing the workers that they carried directly into the fields-and others from distant parts of the United States.

It is legitimate to wonder whether Terranova and Morello took advantage of this fact to extort from and to terrorize their fellow workers, as the Mafia had done in Corleone, and whether either found his way to New Orleans, where there was a fast-growing community of Sicilian criminals. A decade or so later, certainly, Morello would travel frequently to the Crescent City, where a cousin lived and he apparently had numerous acquaintances. There is no evidence, however, that any member of the family took part in such activities when they were working in the sugar parishes, and when Morello and the Terranovas left Louisiana after a year, it was to go not to New Orleans or New York but to an agricultural community in Texas where the Mafia held no sway.

The family went, Ciro recalled, to Bryan in Brazos County, a farming community south of Dallas, tempted by the offer of a house, the loan of a team of horses, access to a doctor, and the guarantee of work in the Texas cotton fields. Almost certainly they settled on the east bank of the Brazos River at a spot where another group of men from Corleone had erected a shanty towns.h.i.+p in the 1870s. On the far bank, opposite, was another crude Italian settlement, this one consisting of people from the Sicilian town of Poggioreale. The two communities spoke different dialects, were rivals, and looked upon each other with mutual distrust.

Morello and the Terranova family spent two years farming outside Bryan. According to Ciro's recollections, his father and half brother worked as sharecroppers, renting a parcel of land-available in those days at the rate of five dollars an acre-on which they planted and harvested their own cotton. The family was free to sell its crop, paying a portion of the proceeds to the landlord, and conditions seem to have been better than they had been in the sugar parishes; according to Ciro, only his father and Morello had to work full-time.

Life in Brazos had a Sicilian simplicity. The menfolk labored in the fields. The Italian women of the colony, including Angela Terranova and Maria Marvelesi, cooked for their families, rolling pasta by hand and leaving it in the sun to dry, baking bread in outdoor ovens, and sending their children off into the fields with their husbands' dinners. They sewed their families' s.h.i.+rts, trousers, and dresses, made their own soap from lye and grease, and washed their clothes by hand in iron pots over a fire. Their children weeded the crops, chopped wood, and "helped around."

For all this, wresting a living from the Texan soil was difficult, even for Italians with experience of farming. The land baked in the summer and the soil was poor. Crops had to be watered by hand during the dry season, from buckets heaved up from the river, but when it rained the only way for men and mules to cross the fields was by strapping broad planks of wood to their feet. Few pesticides were sold in the Bryan district; instead Italian farmers planted garlic, sunflowers, and marigolds to ward off insects, put up birdhouses and drinking basins to attract birds, and embedded stones in shady corners to encourage toads. "Farming wasn't that good in those days," the grandson of one of the pioneer Sicilians remembered decades later. "They made just enough to eat and sleep and buy a few clothes."

This harsh life can hardly have appealed to a man like Giuseppe Morello. Farming in Brazos County was a grinding business for ordinary Sicilians. For criminals, for Mafiosi who had grown used to much easier lives, it must have appeared doubly frustrating. By the beginning of the Terranova family's second year in the cotton fields, it had already become clear that there was no quick fortune to be made from cotton: The dry soil of the Brazos River watershed required considerable improvement if it was to yield a decent crop. Morello was not willing to make this effort. In any case, there was no real incentive for tenant farmers to invest such Herculean efforts in someone else's land.

The decision to return north was taken in the autumn of 1896. The family's time in the South had already been tinged with tragedy; soon after the Terranovas' departure from New York, Morello's one-year-old baby, Calogero, died. A second boy, born probably in the Louisiana sugar fields, was given the same name, but by the end of Morello's second year in Texas he and every other member of the family were sick with malaria, a disease then rife along the Brazos River, an area that had been ignored by earlier waves of German and Czech settlers because it was so p.r.o.ne to frequent flooding. Illness made the decision to abandon sharecropping an easy one to take, and so did the reports filtering down from the north of a New York that was at last recovering from the crash of 1893. By the first months of 1897, two years after the family had arrived in Texas and three after they had left Manhattan, Morello and the Terranovas were back on the raucous streets of Little Italy. This time they were there to stay.

NEW YORK'S ITALIAN neighborhoods had changed considerably in the brief time that Morello and his family had been away. The number of Italians in the city tripled between 1890 and 1900, and the Little Italy centered on Elizabeth and Mulberry streets had grown so considerably that it now ran well over half a mile along the Bowery. Sister colonies in Greenwich Village and East Harlem had also multiplied many times in size, and overcrowding had become an even greater problem; there were so many people in so many apartments in some districts that the population density was worse than in Bombay. On the other hand, the economy of the Italian quarter was flouris.h.i.+ng again. Demand for familiar staples ensured that there was a growing trade in imports of lemons, olive oil, and wine. Artichokes, an ingredient of minestrone, were s.h.i.+pped into the city by rail all the way from California. There were Italian grocers, cobblers, bootblacks, and bankers, Italian newspapers and clothes. In 1897, according to one estimate, the inhabitants of Little Italy were making so much money that $30 million a year was being wired or carried back to friends and relatives at home. A much larger sum, this news implied, was being earned and spent on the streets of New York. neighborhoods had changed considerably in the brief time that Morello and his family had been away. The number of Italians in the city tripled between 1890 and 1900, and the Little Italy centered on Elizabeth and Mulberry streets had grown so considerably that it now ran well over half a mile along the Bowery. Sister colonies in Greenwich Village and East Harlem had also multiplied many times in size, and overcrowding had become an even greater problem; there were so many people in so many apartments in some districts that the population density was worse than in Bombay. On the other hand, the economy of the Italian quarter was flouris.h.i.+ng again. Demand for familiar staples ensured that there was a growing trade in imports of lemons, olive oil, and wine. Artichokes, an ingredient of minestrone, were s.h.i.+pped into the city by rail all the way from California. There were Italian grocers, cobblers, bootblacks, and bankers, Italian newspapers and clothes. In 1897, according to one estimate, the inhabitants of Little Italy were making so much money that $30 million a year was being wired or carried back to friends and relatives at home. A much larger sum, this news implied, was being earned and spent on the streets of New York.

With money came the prospect of a better life. An honest laborer might secure a permanent position; a petty businessman a handcart or a shoes.h.i.+ne stand to call his own. But for the criminals of the Italian districts, the burgeoning wealth of many immigrants meant more and better opportunities to prey on their fellow men. In the course of the 1890s, the sort of incidents that had characterized Little Italy in earlier years-mugging, petty theft, and knife fights-began to give way to new and more sophisticated forms of crime. The first protection rackets had begun to flourish on the streets of the Italian quarter by the last years of the decade. Then came determined attempts to target the wealthiest of the district's immigrants: extortion, backed by threats of violence, and the seizure and ransoming of children. As early as 1899, there was a "kidnapping craze" among the Italians of Brooklyn.

Crime was certainly no less prevalent in Little Italy than it was elsewhere in Manhattan. Joseph Petrosino, who knew as much about the immigrant community as anyone, contended that only a minuscule proportion-3 or 4 percent, he thought-were actually criminals. But there were 200,000 Italians in New York by 1900, and even a small percentage of that total was still a lot of men: well over 5,000, if the detective's estimate was correct. Nor was there much chance that Italian crooks might be deterred by the prospect of punishment. "At that time," confided Giovanni Branchi, the Italian consul general in New York, or 4 percent, he thought-were actually criminals. But there were 200,000 Italians in New York by 1900, and even a small percentage of that total was still a lot of men: well over 5,000, if the detective's estimate was correct. Nor was there much chance that Italian crooks might be deterred by the prospect of punishment. "At that time," confided Giovanni Branchi, the Italian consul general in New York, whole parts of the town, whole streets, were inhabited by Italians only, with their shops, cafes, etc. All these places were virtually without police supervision with the exception of the regular Irish policeman at the corner of the street, who did not care a rap what Italians did among themselves so long as they did not interfere with other people. At the time there were only two or three policemen who spoke or understood Italian ... so that in nine cases out of ten any Italian committing a crime was nearly sure of going unpunished if he only escaped a few days from arrest.

According to various figures that were bandied about at the time, in fact, only one out of every 250 crimes committed in the Italian quarter was reported to the police; of these, only one case in every five yielded arrests; and of the cases that did come to court, as few as one in three hundred resulted in a conviction. Small wonder that, for many immigrants, justice was something a man had to obtain for himself. And small wonder that for Morello and others like him, the prospects of a successful criminal career began to seem as bright in the United States as they had ever been in Sicily.

It did not take long for Italian crooks to demonstrate just how lucrative organized crime could be in several American cities. Extortion rings, which had been commonplace in Sicily and sprang up in the Italian quarter of New Orleans as early as the 1850s, appeared in New York during the last years of the nineteenth century and in Chicago-home to another large and growing Italian community-after 1901. The methods adopted by the men responsible were very similar. The victims, generally storekeepers or bankers or other wealthy immigrants, would receive a letter demanding a substantial sum of money. They would be directed to take an envelope of money to a lonely meeting point or hand the cash over to a man who would call on them at their place of business. Failure to comply, they were warned, would result in the destruction of their premises and perhaps in their own deaths.

The letters, which were always anonymous, were often phrased in bizarrely courteous Old World language, but the underlying threat of violence was ever present. "I beg you warmly," one such missive concluded, "to put them [the notes] on your door within four days. But if not, I swear this week's time not even the dust of your family will exist." Another, even blunter, letter warned: You got some cash. I need $1000.00. You place the $100.00 bills in an envelope and place it under a board at the northeast corner of 69th Street at eleven o'clock tonight. If you place the money there, you will live. If you don't, you die. If you report this to the police, I'll kill you when I get out. They may save your money but they won't save your life.

Sinister communications of this sort-received unexpectedly by victims who knew all about the impotence of the police-usually had the desired effect. Most of the extortionists' targets were terrified, and unknown hundreds handed over sums that they could barely afford. Not everyone complied, of course, but the brave and the stubborn few who ignored the letters could expect to get a visit from the gang, and though it was not unheard of for a victim to shrug off even their threats and remain unmolested or to negotiate the payment of a smaller sum, everyone in Little Italy had heard of stores destroyed by dynamite, children kidnapped and sometimes murdered, and rich men shot or knifed to death for failing to hand over cash.

Bombs were the favored tool of the extortionists. They were anonymous, created a terrifying effect, and were easily a.s.sembled-so many Italians were employed in the construction trade that it was a simple matter to steal dynamite. They could even be used outside the streets of Little Italy; a New Jersey justice of the peace, who had convicted several members of one gang, was "literally blown to pieces" by a parcel bomb delivered to his office. Even in high-profile cases of this sort, however, arrests were few and far between, and it was widely known that many of the most famous and influential Italians in the city had caved in to the extortionists' demands. The best-known of these victims was the opera star Enrico Caruso, who met one demand for $2,000 and, when this fact became public knowledge, was rewarded for his capitulation with "a stack of threatening letters a foot high," including another from the same gang for $15,000.

To many New Yorkers, including the reporters of the English-language press, the most compelling feature of these cases was the bizarre decorations that adorned the extortion letters. Demands were accentuated with crude drawings of skulls, revolvers, and knives dripping with blood or piercing human hearts. Many also featured pictures of hands, in thick black ink, held up in the universal gesture of warning. It was this last feature that inspired a journalist writing for The New York Herald The New York Herald to refer to the communications as "Black Hand" letters-a name that stuck, and, indeed, soon became synonymous with crime in Little Italy. to refer to the communications as "Black Hand" letters-a name that stuck, and, indeed, soon became synonymous with crime in Little Italy.

From there it was but a short step to the idea of the Black Hand as a distinct organization, with its own leaders and hundreds, if not thousands, of members scattered through the country. The notion of a powerful, professional criminal conspiracy did seem to answer many questions, not least explaining why the authorities found it so very difficult to make arrests. The police, led by Petrosino, did what they could to ridicule the idea, but without success. Conviction that a Black Hand society actually existed soon took root. By 1905 the San Francisco Call Call was reporting that the organization had thirty thousand members and chapters in a dozen cities across the United States. In 1907, Black Handers were blamed for as many as three hundred killings in Manhattan alone, and the number of their outrages was said to be increasing at the rate of four a day. was reporting that the organization had thirty thousand members and chapters in a dozen cities across the United States. In 1907, Black Handers were blamed for as many as three hundred killings in Manhattan alone, and the number of their outrages was said to be increasing at the rate of four a day.

From the perspective of most New Yorkers, the Black Hand was at once a thrilling source of entertainment and a symbol of just how desperately uncivilized Italian immigrants could be. For the men and women of the Sicilian quarter, who lived with the threats of the extortionists every day, it was a reminder of how little had really changed since they had crossed the ocean, to be preyed upon in the United States as they had been preyed upon at home. For Giuseppe Morello, though, the success of Little Italy's extortionists was if anything an inspiration. For if unorganized amateurs, lacking skills and experience, could make a success of such illegal enterprises, what opportunities must there be for real criminals, men who would not scruple at raining far greater destruction down upon their victims and enemies? How much money was waiting to be made by the ruthless? What, in short, were the prospects for an American Mafia?

CHAPTER 4.

"THE MOST SECRET AND TERRIBLE ORGANIZATION IN THE WORLD"

THERE WAS NO MAFIA WHEN MORELLO ARRIVED IN THE UNITED States, no network of families such as existed in Sicily, no American "boss of bosses"-perhaps no States, no network of families such as existed in Sicily, no American "boss of bosses"-perhaps no cosche cosche operating on the far side of the Atlantic at all. But there were emigrant Mafiosi living in several states, and these men were in communication with the families that they had left behind in Italy, both actual and criminal. operating on the far side of the Atlantic at all. But there were emigrant Mafiosi living in several states, and these men were in communication with the families that they had left behind in Italy, both actual and criminal.

Men of respect had been crossing the ocean ever since the 1870s, when emigrants first began to flood from Sicily. Some left the island because they were poor and went to America because the booming of the citrus business meant there were flouris.h.i.+ng trade routes between Palermo and several U.S. ports; others emigrated to join their families. America also became a place of refuge for Mafiosi fleeing problems at home. Morello was one, but there were others who, like him, were in trouble with the law or escaping some murderous internecine feud. Tunisia, which had long been the favorite refuge of exiled Mafiosi, was closer to Sicily-a mere few hours by sea from Palermo. But the United States offered much that a sojourn in Tunis did not: prospects for work, a fast-growing Italian community, and, crucially, better chances to make money.

The Mafia initiates who did cross the Atlantic in the nineteenth century were small fry, nonetheless. The bosses of the richest families enjoyed far too much influence at home to have any need to leave their island, and on the handful of occasions when they and their immediate lieutenants thought it wise to leave Sicily for a while, they were more likely to go to the mainland under the protection of influential friends, as Giuseppe Valenza, the brutal landowner from Prizzi, had done in 1877. The same bosses also did so well out of their Sicilian rackets that they had no particular incentive to test new markets on another continent. One thing that can be said for certain about the first Mafiosi to arrive in the United States-Morello and his family included-was that they were not sent there by their superiors as part of any worked-out plan to expand the influence of the fraternity. They traveled as private citizens, and if they did continue to pursue a life of crime, it was because the mala vita mala vita offered them the best prospect of a good living. offered them the best prospect of a good living.

No more than a few scant traces of Mafia activity date to the years before Morello's arrival in the United States; most come from ports, and all from towns that were home to large Italian communities. There may well have been more going on in these places than we realize; cosche cosche kept no lists of members.h.i.+p, and there is almost never any way of knowing which of the hundreds of Sicilian criminals who arrived in the United States over the years were Mafia initiates, nor how many of the several dozen men named in the American press as Mafiosi actually were men of respect. Newspaper coverage can be misleading; at times, particularly in the middle 1870s, the early 1890s, and after the Barrel Murder in 1903, the word kept no lists of members.h.i.+p, and there is almost never any way of knowing which of the hundreds of Sicilian criminals who arrived in the United States over the years were Mafia initiates, nor how many of the several dozen men named in the American press as Mafiosi actually were men of respect. Newspaper coverage can be misleading; at times, particularly in the middle 1870s, the early 1890s, and after the Barrel Murder in 1903, the word Mafia Mafia was deployed as a form of shorthand to describe all manner of Italian criminals. Only a handful of personal testimonies survive. Often the sole indication that this man or that really was a Mafioso comes from tracing the events of later life-the arrests, convictions, and a.s.sociates that he acquired in the course of his criminal career. was deployed as a form of shorthand to describe all manner of Italian criminals. Only a handful of personal testimonies survive. Often the sole indication that this man or that really was a Mafioso comes from tracing the events of later life-the arrests, convictions, and a.s.sociates that he acquired in the course of his criminal career.

For all this, even the most conservative a.n.a.lysis suggests that, by the turn of the century, men with Mafia connections could be found in Boston, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Chicago and in the rough-and-tumble mining towns of Pennsylvania. Outside Philadelphia, for instance, members of several Sicilian Mafia families began settling in Scranton, Pittston, and Wilkes-Barre during the late 1800s. The first to appear were the Sciaccatani-men from Sciacca, on the south coast of the island, a known stronghold of the fraternity-who arrived in Luzerne County during the 1880s and found work in the local pits. They were followed by families from Montedoro, who built homes in the Brandy Patch area of Pittston; their gang, known locally as the Men of Montedoro, extorted protection money from Italian miners. So did the Mafia of Hillsville, near New Castle, led by a man named Rocco Racco, who in 1906 unwisely drew attention to himself by murdering a local game warden in a dispute over a dog. And, more than a decade before Racco was arrested, tried, and hanged, the first members of the DiGiovanni family, from Palermo, arrived in Montgomery County. The Secret Service began uncovering evidence of counterfeiting in the latter district as early as 1896 and linked the business to the Sciaccatani. The ring was circulating forged currency in several Pennsylvania coal towns and as far away as Baltimore.

None of these little pockets of Mafia criminality attracted much attention from the press; even the Racco trial, a nine days' wonder in its time, was only scantily reported beyond the eastern seaboard. But one Sicilian murder did cause a sensation throughout the United States before Morello's arrival in the country. It was a killing that took place in New Orleans, at the American end of one of the most important trade routes to Palermo. It began with a dispute between two armed gangs of Sicilians, resulted in the death of a controversial police chief, and ended with one of the most notorious ma.s.s lynchings ever to occur in the United States. It also convinced several million Americans that the Mafia existed.

DAVID HENNESSY SWALLOWED the last of his oysters, washed down his supper with a gla.s.s of milk, and glanced out onto Rampart Street. It was close to midnight on October 15, 1890, and an inch of rain had fallen in the streets of New Orleans that evening, turning the city's manure-strewn, unpaved roads into a filthy slurry and forcing the handful of pedestrians braving the weather to take off their boots and socks and roll their trousers to their knees to cross between the sodden sidewalks. So he was pleased to see the storm had eased, leaving behind it little but a thick, damp delta mist that swirled through the streets of the French Quarter and drifted down toward the Mississippi. the last of his oysters, washed down his supper with a gla.s.s of milk, and glanced out onto Rampart Street. It was close to midnight on October 15, 1890, and an inch of rain had fallen in the streets of New Orleans that evening, turning the city's manure-strewn, unpaved roads into a filthy slurry and forcing the handful of pedestrians braving the weather to take off their boots and socks and roll their trousers to their knees to cross between the sodden sidewalks. So he was pleased to see the storm had eased, leaving behind it little but a thick, damp delta mist that swirled through the streets of the French Quarter and drifted down toward the Mississippi.

Hennessy, at thirty-two, was the youngest chief of police in the United States, and one of the most famous. He was a good-looking officer-"pretty Dave," the New Orleans newspapers called him-and brave as well as shrewd, a teetotaler in a city of hard drinkers and a man who had survived the corrupt mora.s.s of New Orleans politics with his personal integrity more or less intact. Yet Hennessy had his dark side, too. He made arrests without worrying too much about using proper procedure. He played a full part in the squalid factionalism that undermined his city's police department. And he had favorites-friends, relatives, and allies whom he met at a private members club known as the Red Light-and no shortage of enemies. A few years earlier he had put a bullet through the brain of one of them, the then chief of detectives, and won himself a disputed acquittal at his murder trial by claiming self-defense.

More recently, in the spring of 1890, Hennessy had found himself embroiled in another dangerous dispute, a bitter wrangle between two groups of Sicilians in the city docks. In those days the New Orleans waterfront was almost entirely controlled by gangs of black and Irish longsh.o.r.emen, who competed for the most lucrative contracts and kept the best jobs for themselves. The handful of Italian stevedores were left to squabble over minor bits of business, the most important of which were contracts to handle the unloading of Italian-owned fruit boats sailing from Central America. A large proportion of this business was in the hands of the Macheca Brothers s.h.i.+pping line, and, for the best part of a decade, Joseph Macheca had awarded his contracts to a company run by the four Provenzano brothers: Peter, Vincent, George, and Joe. In 1886, however, a rival firm named Matranga & Locascio had appeared on the waterfront. Tony and Charles Matranga won several contracts by bidding low and two years later secured a monopoly over the entire Italian fruit business.

Hennessy knew Joe Provenzano, who ran the Provenzano company; both men were members of the Red Light club. He had less to do with the Matranga brothers, who had come to New Orleans years earlier from western Sicily. As police chief, he certainly knew that the Matrangas were widely hated on the waterfront-they paid miserably, less than half the wages offered by the Provenzanos-and that relations between the rival firms of longsh.o.r.emen had been deteriorating sharply. He knew that Charles Matranga blamed the Provenzanos for three recent murders in the Italian quarter, among them the unsolved killing of a man named Giuseppe Mattiani; he also knew that Mattiani's torso had been found in an attic room on the corner of Bienville Street, smeared over with coal oil and stuffed into a greasy sack, its legs removed and the head cut off and burned beyond recognition. Hennessy had heard rumors that Joe Provenzano had vowed to "soak the levee in blood" if he did not get his contracts back. But Hennessy worried more about the Matrangas. In the last few months the chief had uncovered evidence that both brothers were members of the Mafia, a society whose existence had been rumored in New Orleans for almost a decade. He may also have known that the family maintained links to the cosca cosca in their hometown of Monreale. in their hometown of Monreale.

It was the Italian authorities, oddly enough, who had gathered the first real evidence of a Mafia in New Orleans. More than a decade earlier, at the tail end of the 1870s, the Monreale police had been hunting a man named Salvatore Marino, a leading member of the Stoppaglieri-the "Stoppered Mouths" or "new Mafia" of that town. Marino had been arrested for murder in 1875 and held in jail pending a trial, only to be released when, thanks to his influential Mafia friends, a court official had stolen and burned the prosecution files. The same shadowy allies had then obtained a pa.s.sport for Marino and arranged for him to flee to New Orleans, where he changed his name and, by his own admission, established a branch of the Stoppaglieri in the city, a task made considerably easier by the presence of a large community of emigrant Monrealesi along the Mississippi. When in an expansive mood, Marino was p.r.o.ne to brag to friends of the enormous influence he wielded. He told one man who worked for his grocery business that he was the capo of an a.s.sociation numbering forty-five thousand men.

Marino's boastful indiscretions eventually reached the ears of Sicily's police, and a spy by the name of Rosario La Mantia was dispatched to the United States to find him. La Mantia succeeded in his mission, but Marino died of yellow fever soon afterward, leaving the agent to return to Italy late in 1878 with several compromising letters he had recovered from the dead man's house. One of these doc.u.ments was a note from a member of the Monreale Mafia addressed to Tony Matranga in New Orleans. The state prosecutor in Palermo later identified both Matranga and Marino as "members of the a.s.sociation of the Stoppaglieri."

How Tony and Charles Matranga and the New Orleans Stoppaglieri fared during the 1880s is not known, but the gang apparently grew stronger after Marino's death. Certainly Joe Provenzano-although by no means an unbiased source-claimed to have had heard a great deal about the fraternity that he called the "Stopiglieri." "They're people that work for the Matrangas," he told several reporters.

There are about twenty leaders of them. They are the committee, and there are about 300 greenhorns who have got to do anything the leaders say. ... They pay them $10, $20, or $100 to get a man out of the way, and if the man they order to kill some one won't do it they have him killed, so he can't tell anything to the police.They've got the Mafia Society everywhere ... in San Francisco, St. Louis, Chicago, New-York, and here.

The Matrangas flatly denied that a word of this was true, telling the New Orleans Daily Picayune Daily Picayune that Provenzano had spoken out to hide the fact that he himself was a Mafia boss. But the Matrangas had no proof, and it was their rival who supplied the most intriguing details of the Stoppaglieri's influence and methods. According to Provenzano-who explained he had his information from a former Matranga ally who had come to work for him-it was Mafia power that lay behind the brothers' fast-growing business on the waterfront. The man had described his initiation into the secret society: "They brought him into the room and he saw [Charles] Matranga dressed in a black domino [a loose cloak incorporating a mask], and others were dressed in dominoes, and they made him swear on a skull with a dirk [knife] in it. He said he was willing to rob people, but he didn't want to have to kill anybody, so he got out of it." that Provenzano had spoken out to hide the fact that he himself was a Mafia boss. But the Matrangas had no proof, and it was their rival who supplied the most intriguing details of the Stoppaglieri's influence and methods. According to Provenzano-who explained he had his information from a former Matranga ally who had come to work for him-it was Mafia power that lay behind the brothers' fast-growing business on the waterfront. The man had described his initiation into the secret society: "They brought him into the room and he saw [Charles] Matranga dressed in a black domino [a loose cloak incorporating a mask], and others were dressed in dominoes, and they made him swear on a skull with a dirk [knife] in it. He said he was willing to rob people, but he didn't want to have to kill anybody, so he got out of it."

No one in New Orleans paid much attention to stories of this sort at first, and it was not until May 1890 that David Hennessy himself was drawn into the struggle between the rival groups of longsh.o.r.emen. In that month the violent dispute between the two finally burst the bounds of the Italian quarter when a crew of Matranga stevedores was ambushed after midnight in the streets above the docks. Three men were badly wounded in a fusillade of gunfire, and Tony Matranga, hit in the knee, lost most of his right leg. Hennessy investigated, and when his men uncovered evidence that the Provenzanos were involved, he locked up Joe and his three brothers and announced that he would send to Italy for the records of both families. The police chief also sent letters seeking information about Joseph Macheca, the s.h.i.+pping magnate who had given the Matrangas their contracts. Macheca had been orphaned in childhood and adopted into a Maltese family, but he, too, came from a Sicilian family.

That was in the summer. Now, in October 1890, Hennessy's investigation was complete and he was expected to give evidence at the Provenzanos' trial for the docks ambush. According to two men who knew the police chief well, he had marshaled fresh information against the Matranga brothers in the form of a packet of incriminating transcripts from Italy and "a great deal of dark evidence about Joe Macheca, whom he considered to be a troublemaker." George Vandervoort, Hennessy's secretary, heard that the chief had confronted Macheca with some of this information and threatened him with the state prison. According to Vandervoort, Macheca and the Matrangas were terrified by Hennessy's investigation and likely to respond violently. "He dug deeper into the order than any outsider had ever dared," the secretary said, "and when he was up to see me he said he had evidence to uproot the Mafia in this country. He had ascertained facts that would have uncloaked their band of a.s.sa.s.sins and would have sent a great crowd to the penitentiary for perjurers." There was sufficient fear for the police chief's safety for a priv