Читать книгу The Rise of the Mafia - Martin Short - Страница 11

Sicilians first emigrated to America in the 1840s. By the 1890s they were arriving in tens of thousands but the real rush came from 1902 to 1913 when over 100,000 entered the United States each year. In the 1880s the most popular destination was not New York but New Orleans. Its climate was like the old country’s. More important, there were jobs to be had.

After the disastrous Civil War, the South with its sugar and cotton industries was booming. Railroads reached the Mississippi Delta in 1873. At last its rich soil could be farmed commercially but there was a labour shortage. Slavery had been abolished and blacks were not prepared to work in the fields for low wages, preferring to migrate north or west. Plantation owners soon realized that Sicilians were ideal replacements for blacks. They were far more productive because they were willing to work longer hours seven days a week without supervision. Men and boys arrived first, living cheaply in overcrowded shacks to save money fast and bring across the rest of their families. Soon they had saved enough money to buy land of their own to grow the vegetables and fruit they grew back home in far less productive soil.

By 1890 Sicilians made up more than 10 per cent of the population of New Orleans and were a major economic force. They turned the celebrated ‘French market’ into an Italian-dominated market which it remains to this day. Sicilians now controlled for the most part New Orleans’ supply of fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, flowers and cheap clothing. International shipping on the Mississippi was becoming a Sicilian domain. In less than a generation the immigrants had risen from agricultural labourers to independent farmers, prominent businessmen and industrialists. They feared only two things. One was the hostility of the white establishment. The other was the Mafia which had crossed the Atlantic with them.

Giuseppe Esposito, joint-kidnapper of John Rose, set himself up in style as soon as he arrived in New Orleans in the spring of 1879. He took the name Vincenzo Rebello and was soon well known as the boss of the city’s infant Mafia. He married a Sicilian girl and they had a son despite the fact that he already had a wife and five children in Sicily. Someone in the Sicilian community in New Orleans betrayed him to the Italian authorities who were still diplomatically obliged to put him on trial because of the Rose affair. The city’s police chief handed the task of recapturing him to David Hennessey, a rising young detective. The intrepid Hennessey arrested Esposito on 5 July 1881 in broad daylight without a struggle. He shipped him off to New York for extradition. The story goes that Joseph Macheca, a steamship magnate and New Orleans’ leading Sicilian businessman, now offered Hennessey $50,000 to say at the extradition hearings that the arrested ‘Rebello’ was not Esposito after all. The policeman refused. Esposito was extradited to Rome where he was convicted of six murders and died in jail.

Hennessey became a national hero. The son of a New Orleans policeman murdered by robbers in 1867, he was flash and ambitious. He wanted to become chief of police but found that Joseph Macheca was gaining his revenge. Macheca allegedly ensured that William Devereaux was appointed chief over Hennessey. The two policemen hated each other and on 13 October 1881 they quarrelled. In the gunfight that ensued Mike Hennessey – David’s cousin and also a policeman – was wounded and David shot Devereaux dead. The cousins were tried for murder and although they were acquitted they lost their jobs. David Hennessey became a private detective and allied himself with the city’s reform movement. Its leader, Joseph Shakspeare, was elected mayor in 1888. He made Hennessey chief of police. The new chief declared his main task was to destroy the Mafia. Within a year he announced that he had dossiers on ninety-four murders committed in the city since 1868 and made public his intention to crush one man above all, Joseph Macheca.

At 11.15 p.m. on Wednesday, 15 October 1890 Hennessey left his office with his friend Bill O’Connor, the captain of a private police force almost as big as Hennessey’s. After a meal at an oyster bar they parted at Girod Street where Hennessey lived alone with his mother. Hennessey was only a few doors from his home when five men appeared firing shotguns, hitting him six times. He drew his revolver and fired back. Conflicting accounts state that the gunmen either continued to fire, forcing Hennessey back down the street, or that Hennessey’s shots made his assailants flee in all directions. Hennessey shouted out for O’Connor who had heard the shooting and ran to his aid with some patrolmen.

‘Who gave it to you, Dave?’

‘Put your ear down here,’ Hennessey whispered. ‘The Dagoes.’

Hennessey was lifted into a wagon and taken to Charity Hospital. Within minutes New Orleans was in uproar. Crowds gathered at the scene as police searched the locality. Exploiting O’Connor’s story that Hennessey blamed the ‘Dagoes’ the mayor ordered police to ‘Scour the whole neighbourhood. Arrest every Italian you run across.’ One hundred Italians were promptly arrested and locked up in the parish prison. Strangely, no one bothered to ask Hennessey if he could name his attackers even though he was conscious and talking for most of the night. At 9 a.m. the next morning he died. Even before the shooting Hennessey was the most famous policeman in America. His death, at only 32, made him a national martyr and nearly caused a war with Italy.

Some detectives thought that the names of Hennessey’s killers would be in his dossier of the ninety-four Mafia murders allegedly committed in New Orleans since 1868. He had known that the city’s Mafia was split into two factions. The more powerful faction was led by Charles Matranga and backed by Hennessey’s enemy, Joseph Macheca. The weaker faction was led by an old-timer, Joe Provenzano. Matranga’s strength lay in the backing not of the Mafia itself but of the Stoppaglieri, the brotherhood which ran crime in his home town of Monreale in Sicily. More than 300 Stoppaglieri had emigrated to New Orleans when the Mafia’s increasing strength in Palermo threatened to overwhelm them. In New Orleans they outnumbered Provenzano’s small Mafia crew by six to one.

Hennessey knew that one of Matranga’s strengths was his ability to find jobs for immigrants, especially those who had come in illegally. He was a ‘padrone’. He could get them street pedlars’ permits, find them somewhere to live and sort out any problems with American authorities. Matranga wanted sole patronage over jobs in the New Orleans docks and fought with Provenzano over who was to hire labour to work the steamships on the Mississippi waterfront. In 1889 the factions began killing each other.

First Joe Provenzano sent a man to negotiate peace with the Matrangas. They split his head open with an axe. Provenzano then murdered one of Matranga’s lieutenants. Hennessey called both men together and told them to settle their differences. They agreed but there was to be no peace. The Provenzanos, backed by Hennessey, got their blow in first. Before dawn on 6 April 1890 they ambushed a wagonload of Matranga’s men on their way to work in the docks. No one died and only two were wounded. Hennessey was obliged to arrest the Provenzanos but he was only going through the motions. He knew Italian crooks were sworn never to seek justice in the courts. So he was astonished when the Matrangas named the Provenzanos as their attackers.

Hennessey was in trouble. Joe Provenzano was a personal friend. They socialized at an exclusive club which the Italian was able to join only because Hennessey sponsored him. When the Provenzanos went on. trial twenty of Hennessey’s men perjured themselves by swearing the defendants were boozing in another part of town when the attack happened. The jury did not believe them and convicted. Pressure was brought to bear on the judge overnight and the next day he rejected the verdict on the grounds that the Provenzanos had not been positively identified. A new trial was ordered.

Hennessey now stated publicly that he would discredit the Matrangas by revealing their criminal activities. Joseph Macheca responded by telling the newspapers: ‘Hennessey is investigating the Provenzano case the wrong way and he will pay for it.’ His murder took place five days before the Provenzanos were due to be re-tried.

Nineteen Sicilians were charged with the killing, ten for murder. Among the other nine charged with conspiring to kill Hennessey were Matranga and Macheca. Mayor Shakspeare publicly blamed ‘stiletto societies’ (stilo means dagger in Italian) for Hennessey’s death. He was ‘the victim of Sicilian vengeance … because he was seeking to break up the fierce vendettas that have so often stained our streets with blood’.

The Provenzanos had an incontrovertible alibi: they were still in prison awaiting trial. Three days later in an interview with a reporter Joe Provenzano blamed Matranga for the murder, on the grounds that Hennessey would have been a witness for the Provenzanos. He then volunteered that Matranga was head of the Stoppaglieri. Asked about the Mafia he said, ‘They’ve got the Mafia society everywhere, in San Francisco, St Louis, Chicago, New York and here.’ Accused of being boss of the Mafia he denied even being a member. ‘We had a labourers’ association when we had the stevedore business and never let any greenhorns in it. All our men were Italians who were raised here. They were Americans.’ Provenzano thus saved himself and dished his enemies, a wise move because Hennessey’s murder was causing riots against Italians in every American city where they lived in large numbers. He was soon cleared and released.

His enemies were locked in the same jail. So was Frank Dimaio, a private detective pretending to be a Sicilian gangster, who insinuated himself into their confidence. He subsequently claimed that one of the defendants, Joe Polizzi, had told him Matranga and Macheca had ordered Hennessey’s murder.

There were two murder trials. The first, on the main conspiracy charges, started on 16 February 1891. During the trial stories appeared in the newspapers that the Mafia had raised $75,000 for the defence and had fixed the jury. On 13 March the jury reported that it could not come to a verdict on three defendants, and cleared the other six who included Macheca. Other charges remained so all the defendants were returned to prison.

New Orleans erupted. Within hours of the verdict sixty-one men had signed a notice for publication in the morning newspapers. It called on ‘all good citizens’ to attend a mass meeting that morning to ‘remedy the failure of justice in the Hennessey case. Come prepared for action.’ A crowd of 8000 people turned out. They were addressed by William Parker son, a young lawyer who was Mayor Shakspeare’s campaign manager. He asked what protection there would be if Hennessey’s Mafia assassins were turned loose on the community. ‘The time has come for the people of New Orleans to say whether they are going to stand for these outrages by organized bands of assassins. Are you going to let it continue? Are there men enough here to set aside the verdict of that infamous jury, every one of whom is a perjurer and a scoundrel? Men and citizens of New Orleans, follow me. I will be your leader!’

Armed with an assortment of clubs, rifles and shotguns the citizens promptly headed for the prison. Locked out, they smashed down a side door and found Macheca and two others crouched behind a pillar. They were shot at point-blank range and killed. Six others huddled against a wall in the yard. They begged for their lives but their pleas went unheeded. Thousands of people outside had been deprived of the spectacle. They wanted to make their own contribution so two men were dragged out for a public execution that was both messy and brutal. Parkerson emerged from the prison, carried shoulder high by the triumphant crowd. The lynch-mob had killed eleven Italians. Three of them had been cleared, the jury had not reached a verdict on three others and the remaining five had not even been tried. Eight survived, including Charles Matranga who had hidden under the floorboards in the women’s part of the prison. The events were celebrated in the States newspaper that afternoon:

Citizens of New Orleans! You have, in one righteous upheaval, in one fateful gust of mighty wrath, vindicated your laws, heretofore desecrated and trampled underfoot by oath-bound aliens who had thought to substitute Murder for Justice and the suborner’s gold for the Freeman’s honest verdict. Your vengeance is consecrated in the forfeited blood of the assassins!

Newspapers across America applauded the lynching or condoned it as a social obligation. Editorials condemning the Mafia assumed both that the dead belonged to it and that they were guilty of Hennessey’s murder. Even the London Times approved. The Italian government was not so enthusiastic and protested. America now fell victim to a war scare. Italy had more than 2 million soldiers. The USA had only 128,000. Italy had a large modern navy. America had only three tiny warships. Fortunately for America the Italian government’s coffers were empty and it could not afford a war. It later accepted a sum of $25,000 to be distributed among the victims’ families. The King of Italy expressed his profound thanks.

In New Orleans it became clear that the lynching had not been a spontaneous outburst of public wrath but the work of an execution squad. A grand jury was sworn in to investigate the incident but in its report it indicted no one and exonerated the unknown executioners. The lynching was dismissed in a few lines. Since so many people took part, it said, it was impossible to pinpoint guilt. The grand jury was much more concerned to convict the lynch-mob’s victims and digressed completely to give a study of the Mafia, claiming hundreds of mafiosi were living in New Orleans.

Mayor Shakspeare had not finished with the ‘Dagoes’. He backed the city’s ‘white’ establishment by banning all Italians from running businesses or labour unions on the waterfront. He singled out Joe Provenzano, telling him: ‘You have not learned the lesson taught your race by the people of New Orleans. I want you to go home and tell your friends that if you make any more trouble, the police and the mayor of this city will not consider themselves responsible for the lives of you and yours.’

His conduct showed breathtaking hypocrisy. In the wide-open city over which he presided the illegal trades of prostitution and gambling were rampant. Bordellos and casinos were shut down only if they failed to pay off the politicians or the police. In 1881 Shakspeare himself set up an illegal system of licensing some casinos while forcing others to close, establishing a segregated gambling quarter where some sixteen elite casinos operated without police interference. In return they paid him a total of $30,000 a year, most of which went to his own charity: the Shakspeare Almshouse. After a few years the system collapsed. When the Italians were lynched, scores of casinos were flourishing in the heart of the city.

In the 1890s New Orleans, a city of 200,000, boasted 2000 prostitutes and 200 brothels. Shakspeare had a personal connection with the city’s favourite whore, Abbie Reed. He sold his home to this lubricious blonde who turned it into a high-class bordello. The brothels corruptly escaped the city’s property taxes. By 1898 vice was so pervasive that a segregated prostitution district was established. Storyville, as it became known, was soon the most famous and best-patronized red-light district in America.

Towering over every other racket was the Louisiana Lottery Company which had ruled politics in New Orleans and the entire state of Louisiana since the Civil War. In 1868 the state’s corruptible carpetbagger legislature granted the lottery a monopoly charter exempting it from all state laws and taxation. In return the lottery agreed to give $40,000 a year to the New Orleans Charity Hospital. This was hardly a good deal for the state since the lottery was soon taking $1 million a year out of the pockets of Louisiana’s citizens. The deal was secured by annual bribes to the legislature of at least as much money again as went to the hospital for twenty-five years.

The lottery draw may have been straight but it was also a fraud in that the odds against winning were more than 75,000 to 1. With this kind of margin the lottery’s owners cleared at least £13 million a year and were so rich they were able to buy off all opposition. The lottery was the strongest economic force in New Orleans, controlling banks, sugar refineries, cotton presses and the waterworks company. In 1890 Mayor Shakspeare was grateful for a gift of $50,000 from the lottery to help prevent a flood from engulfing the low-lying city. Such politically motivated charity did not prevent the lottery from becoming America’s longest-running scandal. Exempt from the law of Louisiana it still abused United States law by illegally sending its tickets all over America. In 1890 President Harrison charged that it ‘debauched and defrauded’ the people of all states. It was not suppressed until 1893 when the Supreme Court upheld the postal law.

Shakspeare’s New Orleans was thus dominated by organized crime: the casinos, the whorehouses and the lottery. It is difficult to see how a few Sicilian crooks could have made the place any more evil that it already was. But the lynching had its desired effect. Those who survived kept their heads down. Joe Provenzano and Charles Matranga lived on, Matranga till 1943 when he died a rich man. For a decade lynching Italians became a national pastime, second only to lynching blacks. In the 1890s six more were lynched in Louisiana and the habit spread to five other states. It became open season for racial slurs on Italians. Three weeks after the massacre the Illustrated American published photographs and sketches of Italians in New Orleans with lurid captions. ‘Travel through the Italian Quarter of any big city, and you may find yourself in the midst of a Camorra or Mafia.’ A knife-grinder at work was said to be ‘sharpening the stiletto of a New Orleans assassin.’ The Italians’ resentment at such treatment was justified, yet in the decades following the New Orleans massacre evidence piled up that many southern Italians, and Sicilians in particular, belonged to violent criminal societies. For the next thirty years the group that caught the American imagination was not the Mafia or the Camorra but La Mano Nera – the ‘Black Hand’.

Nothing was more frightening for an Italian immigrant than to receive an anonymous letter from the Black Hand:

Most Gentle Mr Silvani,

Hoping that the present will not impress you too much, you will be so good as to send me $2000 if your life is dear to you. So I beg you warmly to put them on the door within four days. But if not I swear this week’s time not even the dust of your family will exist. With regards, believe me to be your friend.

The letter would be embellished with bloodcurdling illustrations such as a skull and crossbones or a dagger and always a black hand, either drawn or in the form of an inky palm and fingerprint. The language would usually be a mockingly deferential form of Sicilian, but sometimes the message was more bluntly expressed:

You got some cash. I need $1000. You place the $100 bills in an envelope and place it underneath a board in the north-east corner of 69th Street and Euclid Avenue 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 you the money but they won’t save your life.

Both those letters were sent to people in Chicago but Black Hand threats were common to all America’s Little Italys. The extortioners preferred rich targets but would shake down any immigrant cowed by the traditions of the Old World or too scared to trust the police in the New. Author Frederick Sondern spoke to an old Sicilian vegetable grower who had come to America at the turn of the century. His father was sent a Black Hand letter.

‘Then my father would pay. He would say, “Giuseppe, you see it is the same as at home. The Mafia is always with us.” Then I would plead with him to go to the police. After all we were in America. “No, Mother of God, no,” he would shout. “The police here cannot do even as much as the police at home. They do not know the Mafia. We get put out of business or killed and no one will ever know why. They do not understand the Mafia and they never will”.’1

From 1910 to 1912 Chicago’s Black Handers were credited with nearly 100 murders. The Daily News estimated that for every Italian living in the ‘Spaghetti Zone’ who reported a Black Hand threat ten more did not. In the first three months of 1913 fifty-five bombs were detonated against people who would not pay. Using the 10 to 1 yardstick, the News said some 550 victims must have got the message in both senses and given in. Black Handers were picking up at least $500,000 a year in Chicago. Law-abiding Italians set up a ‘White Hand’ organization in 1907 to combat the Black Hand but six years later they decided the task was hopeless and disbanded.

Occasionally police successfully followed up a complaint and a Black Hander went on trial. Most victims and witnesses, however, suffered a strange amnesia in the witness box. As cronies of the accused showed up to wave red handkerchieves, make throat-cutting gestures or point trigger fingers at their temples they would fall silent or claim mistaken identity. The prosecution’s case would collapse and the extortioner go free. In such a climate most victims naturally decided there wasn’t much of a future in resisting the Black Hand.

The Black Hand was not a single organization. The threats usually came from freelance hoodlums who found it easier to shelter behind the symbols of a feared if mythical society than to invent a new one. Even members of the Mafia and Camorra extorted in the name of the Mano Nera. For quick payoffs no emblem was more effective.

One New York cop declared a lone war on the Black Hand, the Mafia and La Mala Vita in general. Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino was born in 1860 in Calabria, southern Italy, a province which had its own criminal societies. He joined the police at a time when dozens of men were being killed in New York in a Mafia–Camorra war and became famous by crushing gangs of Sicilian and Neapolitan thugs single-handed. He was made head of a new detective team known as the Italian Squad, formed to fight what would later be called organized crime. He specialized in identifying Italian felons as soon as they landed and shipping them back to Italy. In 1908 Raffaele Palizzolo – a member of Italy’s parliament until a murder conviction forced his resignation – sailed into New York to a welcome from hundreds of cheering supporters. He was about to become the leader of the Mafia in America. Petrosino promptly moved to deport him. Palizzolo chose to sail home again before he suffered that indignity.

In the early 1900s the term Black Hand was used by police and press to describe not only freelance extortioners but also Mafia racketeers. Petrosino himself said that, ‘The Black Hand, as a large organization, does not exist.’ Ignazio Saietta, known as ‘Lupo the Wolf’, was one of Petrosino’s prime targets. He was sometimes named as boss of the Black Hand and sometimes as Mafia boss of New York’s Little Italy. Either way Petrosino showed him no respect. In 1908 he heard that Saietta was bragging that he was going to kill him. The detective was enraged. He burst into the Wolf’s lair, knocked him down and trampled all over him. If Lupo was ever a top mafioso he lost his place in 1910 when he was jailed for thirty years for fake currency dealing. Wags said he should have stuck to what he was good at: killing people.

In another act of bravura Petrosino seized three Black Handers, roped them together, dragged them down four flights of stairs and across two blocks of Mulberry Street to a police station, all the time hurling abuse at the cowardly denizens of Little Italy who were too scared to accept his invitation to spit on their oppressors. One of them turned out to be Enrico Alfano, the grand master of the Camorra of Naples whom Petrosino soon deported to face murder charges back home.

In 1909 New York police commissioner, Theodore Bingham, gave Petrosino his most important assignment: to travel to Italy and establish full liaison with police there ‘so that the Camorra and Mafia may be watched on both sides of the ocean’. His voyage was meant to be a secret but before he had even arrived in Rome the New York Herald published an editorial revealing that Bingham had set up a secret service squad to crush the Black Hand. ‘As a first step Lieut. Petrosino has gone to Italy and Sicily where he will procure important information about Italian criminals who have come to this country.’ The Herald explained he was to collect the criminal records of many New York-based hoods who could be deported only on firm evidence. For those mafiosi who could not read English the same report appeared in New York’s Italian newspapers.

By the time he arrived in Palermo every mafioso in Sicily must have known he was coming. Hundreds knew him by sight for he had got them deported from the USA. With his stocky, muscular physique he was easily recognized. Anyone who could read knew of Petrosino as Italy’s Sherlock Holmes. His exploits had been immortalized in bestselling paperbacks. In Palermo he registered at his hotel under a false name. He was exhausted by travel and influenza. His judgement was failing and he naively revealed the itinerary of his planned trip through the region’s most notorious Mafia towns to the local police.

On 12 March he returned to Palermo to meet an informer in the Piazza Marina. He was probably set up for when he arrived in the square that evening the usual crowds and police patrols were absent. He had been standing for a while at the foot of a statue of Garibaldi when two men shot him in the back and head. A third man shot him in the face. Petrosino died instantly.

One of his killers is alleged to have been Don Vito Cascio Ferro who was to become the Sicilian Mafia’s boss of bosses. The others were New Orleans-based mafiosi who had left America after Petrosino but reached Palermo well ahead of him. Many top hoods later claimed credit for the murder, including Lupo the Mafia boss and Alfano the Camorra grand master. No detective could ever have had so distinguished an assortment of would-be assassins yet no one was ever tried for his murder.

Back in New York Petrosino was given a hero’s funeral with a mile-long procession. A memorial fund raised $10,000 for his widow and infant son. Mrs Petrosino was also granted $1000 a year pension. His assassins had definitely murdered the right man. With Petrosino dead American law enforcement lost sight of the Mafia for almost fifty years.