The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (4 page)

The trail that had led Flynn to Stanton Street worried the Secret Service chief considerably. For one thing, the previous owner of the butcher’s shop, the man who had agreed to sell the store, had vanished on the day the sale was due to be completed, and the police could find no trace of him; they were increasingly convinced he had been murdered. For another, Laduca himself had been arrested for counterfeiting some weeks earlier. He had been picked up in Pittsburgh early in January on suspicion of passing the same forged five-dollar bills that were now circulating in Manhattan, and though the Pennsylvania authorities had been unable to make the charges stick, investigation had established that Laduca’s New York associates were not the sort a law-abiding man would choose as friends. Some, such as the confectioner Pietro Inzerillo, whose café stood just around the corner, had no police records but were of growing interest to the Secret Service. Others were known criminals. Of these, by far the most daunting was the counterfeiters’ leader, a slight man of nearly forty who came from Corleone, south of Palermo. He had a criminal record on both sides of the Atlantic, having been arrested for a double murder in Sicily and in New York for forging bills. He also had a maimed right hand and jet-black eyes.

William Flynn had built his reputation on a formidable ability to catch the most elusive forgers; in the course of his six-year career he had set out on the trail of dozens of counterfeiters and failed to convict only one. But Giuseppe Morello and his men had proved to be formidable adversaries. Two months earlier, in February, Flynn had asked one of his Italian informants to infiltrate the gang, but the Sicilians were clannish and shunned approaches from strangers. In March, trying a different tack, Flynn ordered a second stool pigeon to strike up a business acquaintance with Messina Genova, who kept a store of his own a little way down Stanton Street. Giovanni La Cava, the most reliable man the Chief had in Little Italy, made the approach with an offer to sell real estate at bargain prices, but Genova haughtily rebuffed him, remarking that Sicilians had had enough of being cheated by crooks from mainland Italy. “La Cava is a good man,” Flynn wrote despairingly to Washington, “but he won’t connect with [them]. It seems next to impossible for an outsider to break into this gang.”

La Cava’s failure was a blow to Flynn, who found himself forced to resort to far more time-consuming measures to gather evidence against the counterfeiters. With no man on the inside of the group, long hours of covert observation would be needed to deduce the size and hierarchy of the gang. It was a decision that the Chief would rather not have taken; keeping watch in Little Italy was no easy task, and it placed a huge strain on his limited resources. At least three operatives were required to monitor a single location, and he had only nine agents to deploy across the whole of New York. But, beginning early that April, Flynn’s men took up positions on Stanton Street and began to take careful note of every man who went into or out of the butcher’s shop.

It was tedious and unrewarding work that required a keen eye and a memory for faces. The surveillance began each day at 8
A.M
. and ran until after dark. Flynn’s agents, disguised as laborers, hung about in doorways and had to be careful not to say too much, for fear of giving themselves away in a district in which everybody spoke Italian. They rotated duties where they could, relieving one another every few hours to reduce the chances of attracting notice and working usually in pairs, so there was a man available to tail a suspect and another to maintain the watch.

The results of the first two weeks of work were mixed. Several of the most frequent callers to the shop proved to be well known to the Secret Service; in time, with tips and help provided by informants, the operatives put names to almost a dozen members of the counterfeiting gang. But seven or eight others could not be identified, and on April 13, after work, Flynn decided to travel up to Stanton Street himself to make a personal assessment of the situation.

It was a cold and blowy evening, threatening rain, when the Chief alighted from his streetcar on the Bowery, downtown Manhattan’s great thoroughfare. Laduca’s store stood several hundred yards away, down a busy street clogged with pushcarts thrust hard up against the pavements and peddlers sending up a cacophony of Sicilian slang as they hawked everything from hardware to vegetables from their stalls. Despite the weather, the sidewalk and the street were thronged with men hastening home from work and women dressed in black hunting for bargains, and everywhere there were gangs of rough-clad children, playing in between the carts or scavenging food or change that had fallen in the dirt. Flynn, cocooned in an overcoat and with his head bowed against the wind, forced his way through the crowd until he picked out the first of his agents, Operative John Henry, who was skulking against a doorway across the road from the butcher’s store. Henry had been hanging around in the vicinity since 1:15
P.M.
N
OW
, he rapidly explained to Flynn, Morello and two of his associates were holding a discussion of some sort in Laduca’s shop. A fourth Italian, a stranger Henry had not seen before, had left the shop a little earlier. He was now lounging, smoking a cigarette, against a streetlamp down the street.

Flynn and Henry kept watch as the sky darkened and the conversation in the butcher’s store grew more heated. They felt sure that the counterfeiters had not seen them. But, after a while, one of the men inside 16 Stanton Street broke off from the conversation and came to the door carrying a hammer and a curtain. He tacked the cloth across the entrance, barring the interior from view as the muffled voices drifting from the shop rose higher still.

Unable to see or hear anything of importance, Flynn switched his attention to the stranger smoking down the street. In the gathering twilight it was difficult to make out his face. Light from the flickering streetlamp slanted down, throwing most of the Italian’s features into shadow as he pulled hard on his cigarette. Still, the Chief was able to get a long look at his suit—brown, it seemed in the fading light—and profile. He felt certain he would recognize the man again.

THE EVENING PAPERS
, when they arrived at the Treasury Building next afternoon, led with lengthy coverage of the barrel mystery. The
Brooklyn Eagle
, the
Sun
, and the
Evening World
all reported in the same shocked tones the discovery of the body on East 11th Street and described in vivid detail the wounds that it had borne. Enterprising newsmen had sought out and interviewed Frances Connors and buttonholed Inspector McClusky who had told them that the murder was most likely an act of vengeance. In the absence of an established motive, the rival papers speculated wildly as to who had killed the victim and why. “Death by torture seems to have been the fate of the man,” the
World
suggested, with an almost audible rubbing of hands. “There were no bruises to the body, [and] it appeared as though the man had been held by the arms and legs. … This is one of the most interesting murders that has mystified New York in many years.”

Sitting alone in his office at the end of the day, Flynn leafed through these reports with interest. The detective in him enjoyed absorbing the details of the case and puzzling over what the newspapers agreed was the most baffling of its mysteries—the problem of the dead man’s identity. Beyond the likelihood that the victim was Italian, none of the dozens of journalists and the hundreds of patrolmen who had been scouring Manhattan had any real idea who he was. The
Eagle
focused most of its attention on the torn slip of paper that had been found in the dead man’s pocket, which McClusky thought might have been a note sent to lure the man to his death, but the fragment was not much of a clue: “It was exceedingly hard, because of the fact that it was blurred, bloody and burned, to decipher the writing,” the newspaper confessed. Only the
Mail and Express
had come up with anything more promising. “An employee of the Street Cleaning Department, named Zido, called at the station and saw the body,” it informed its readers. “He said it looked like a man whom he had seen peddling fish on the East Side.” But among several hundred East Siders sent by the police to shuffle past the cadaver, Zido was the only one who thought he recognized that face. “Twenty hours of zealous searching by three sets of detectives and by many reporters have failed to reveal any clue to the identity of the murdered man,” confirmed the
Evening World
.

Thus far, Flynn had no reason to suppose that the barrel victim, found on an Irish East Side street, had any connection to his own investigation. It was only when the Chief opened that day’s
New York Journal
that he sat up with a start. Hearst’s daily had secured the only photograph of the dead man lying on the slab. Its picture had been hurriedly composed and poorly shot—it had been snatched from a low angle and showed the corpse’s face only in profile. But there was something deeply familiar about those features.

Flynn felt certain he had seen the man before. Where, though? The Secret Service man closed his door, lit a cigar, and searched his mental files of suspects. After a while it came to him. The face of the man in the morgue was that of the stranger he had watched the previous night slouching against a streetlamp in Stanton Street. He had the same hair, the same straight nose. Folding up his copy of the
Journal
, the Chief summoned Operative Henry. Get down to the morgue as soon as possible, he said. Call back when you have seen the body.

Henry left Wall Street flanked by two other agents who had kept the watch on Stanton Street, and it was past 6:30
P.M
. when they phoned in. All three, Henry explained, believed they recognized the dead man from Laduca’s store. But there was still at least a little room for doubt. The face of the barrel victim greatly resembled that of the man who had loitered under a streetlamp the previous evening, but his clothes seemed different. The man in Little Italy had been clad in a brown three-piece suit. The barrel victim was wearing blue.

Henry’s call bothered Flynn. He thought it highly unlikely that the dead man had changed his clothes in the few hours that separated his appearance on Stanton Street from his violent death. After mulling the problem over for a moment, though, it struck him that he and his operatives might have been the victims of some optical illusion. The man they had watched on Stanton Street had been standing almost directly beneath a slanting electric light that had made it almost impossible to make out the details of his clothing.

The possibility needed to be checked, so Flynn called the East Side precinct house where the body had been taken and arranged to have the dead man’s clothes sent over to his office. While he waited for his package to arrive, the Chief rigged up a light over his desk to simulate the streetlight by Laduca’s store. He carefully adjusted the fitting so that it shone down at the same angle as the lamp in Stanton Street, then turned off the other bulbs in the office. Soon enough there was a knock at the door and another agent entered with a package that contained the bloodstained suit. Flynn tore off the wrapper and thrust the bundle under the slanting light. He stood well back and squinted.

The cloth looked brown. He reached for the phone on his desk and placed an urgent call to Inspector McClusky.

MEANWHILE, UP IN LITTLE ITALY
, Sergeants Carey and Petrosino had found the Café Pasticceria. Its owner, Pietro Inzerillo, was scrawny, almost illiterate, and much older than the other members of Morello’s gang—he was a graying forty-four years old and sported an unfashionable mustache. Grudgingly, the confectioner escorted the policemen to his cellar and allowed them to inspect his stores. It did not take Petrosino long to spot a barrel full of sugar that was practically identical to the one that had appeared on East 11th Street. Squatting to examine it more closely, the detective noticed that it bore precisely the same markings: “W&T” stenciled on the base and “G.223” stamped along the staves.

Inzerillo freely admitted that he had purchased two such barrels from Wallace & Thompson and seemed unperturbed when Petrosino wanted to know what had happened to the missing one. When it was empty, the shopkeeper replied, he had taken it upstairs and dumped it in an alley with half a dozen others. He had then sold the lot. Three or four men had come to pick up the empty barrels, but he could not describe them. It was the common practice in the district; barrels were useful things, and he was happy to let his fellow Sicilians purchase the ones that he had finished with.

Petrosino scribbled Inzerillo’s statement down. But he did not believe it.

THANKS TO CAREY, FLYNN, AND PETROSINO
, the police now knew a good deal more about the barrel victim than they had that morning. They had learned that he seemed to be a stranger to New York and that he had links to an important counterfeiting gang. They knew he had been seen, hours before his death, in the company of several dangerous criminals. They also believed that they had traced the barrel he was found in. But one vital piece of information was still missing. They had absolutely no idea of the dead man’s name.

At midnight, responding to Chief Flynn’s call, Inspector McClusky arrived at the Treasury Building with two other senior policemen for a briefing on the Morello gang. For the better part of an hour, Flynn ran methodically through everything the Secret Service had discovered about the forgers: their names, their records, and the scale and nature of their operation. Morello, he warned McClusky, was a dangerous individual: cunning, intelligent, and—unlike the great majority of counterfeiters—perfectly willing to use violence. His friends Laduca and Genova were ruthless, too, and the remaining members of the gang were almost as formidable. Among the other members of the group, Flynn pointed out, were Joseph Fanaro, a red-bearded giant of a man—six feet four in his socks—whom Secret Service operatives had seen escorting the barrel victim around Little Italy. Fanaro, the Chief thought, had been assigned to watch over the stranger and ensure that he did not slip away.