The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (34 page)

Salvatore Cina: “You are trying to get me to blow your damn brains out.”

Giuseppe Calicchio. “Professor” who printed $100,000 worth of forged bills.

Antonio Passananti headed the Morello grocery racket and killed himself at age ninety-four.

Joe Petrosino. “Short and heavy, with enormous shoulders and a bull neck, on which was placed a great round head like a summer squash,” the pockmarked policeman was the greatest Italian detective in New York. The destroyer of dozens of Black Hand bands, and renowned for personally arresting the head of the Neapolitan Camorra, Petrosino met his match—and eventually his death—at the hands of Morello’s Mafia.

Murdered by the Mafia in Sicily, Joe Petrosino was brought home to New York for burial. A crowd said to have been twenty thousand strong lined up to file past his bier; thousands more, most of them Italians, lined the city’s streets as his coffin was driven to Calvary Cemetery for burial.

Two of the forged Morello notes that set Flynn on the trail of the first family and led eventually to the capture and conviction of Morello himself. The notes are
(top left)
a U.S. $2 bill and
(below)
a U.S. $5 bill, both engraved by Giuseppe Calicchio. The man coerced into printing the notes was Antonio Comito
(top right)
, a timid Calabrian known to the Mafia as Comito the Sheep. Comito and his mistress, Katrina Pascuzzo
(below)
, were held in a remote house deep in the woods of upstate New York for eight months in 1908-9 while the work was carried out.

William Flynn started his career as a Manhattan plumber but rose to become the most brilliant detective in the country. As head of the New York bureau of the Secret Service, his dogged perseverance over more than a decade resulted in the conviction of nearly two dozen members of the Morello family, including the boss himself.

Ignazio Lupo. Known to terrified members of the Italian community as Lupo the Wolf, Giuseppe Morello’s moon-faced brother-in-law was a pitiless killer, noted extortionist—and the brains behind the Mafia’s first moves into money laundering and real estate scams.

Dapper Salvatore Clemente, a notorious counterfeiter, emerged as Flynn’s top informant inside the Morello family. It was Clemente who, at the risk of his own life, gave Flynn the location of the Mafia’s grisly “private burial ground” on a farm upstate.

Calogero Morello, Giuseppe’s eldest son, was murdered in a street brawl at the age of seventeen. Newspapers theorized that he died in a fight over the control of prostitution. It took Clemente to reveal the real—much more disturbing—truth.

Harlem’s infamous Murder Stable. A ramshackle rabbit warren on East 108th Street, the stable lay—charged the
New York Herald
—at the center of a deadly vendetta that cost at least twenty-two lives, including those of several members of the Morello family. The stable was rumored to conceal a hidden Mafia torture chamber and killing rooms where victims were dispatched. Pasquale Greco
(inset)
, brother of one of the stable’s victims, told the
Herald’s
reporter that he fully expected to be the next to die.

Nick Terranova assumed leadership of the first family after Morello went to jail. He proved to be an able boss who tightened the Mafia’s stranglehold on extortion rackets in the Italian districts. Receiving news of his nephew Calogero’s murder, Terranova publicly vowed to “butcher every one” of the gangsters responsible—then hunted down and killed the first two of the men himself.