The first police officer in America to battle the Mafia effectively, Joe Petrosino was named head of the newly formed Italian Squad of the New York City police in 1905. The need for the Italian Squad was overwhelming. At the turn of the century, more than 500,000 of New York City’s 3 million residents were Italian. But most of the cops were Irish with a lesser number Jewish. With nary an Italian on the force, the mafiosi gangsters enjoyed the particular advantage of a police force that could not understand them.
Petrosino had first been recruited to be a policeman in 1883 by Police Inspector Alexander “Clubber” Williams precisely because of his ethnic background. By 1895, Petrosino had risen to the rank of detective and was assigned to the Lower East Side.
He took time to learn the various dialects of the Italian immigrants squashed into the ghetto and to gain their confidence; soon he was gathering information that enabled him to solve many murders and extortions of the Black Hand. He reported to superiors that the Black Hand was not a distinct organization but various freelance criminals who threatened victims with death unless they paid protection money.
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Petrosino nailed many Black Handers, including one who had tried to victimize opera star Enrico Caruso. (The singer and the detective became fast friends.) In 1901, Petrosino uncovered the infamous Murder Stable in Italian Harlem where some brutal mafiosi killed and buried at least 60 victims who operated in competition with their rackets or would not pay them protection money. It was for many the first proof of the Mafia’s existence in New York.
In 1905, Police Commissioner William McAdoo authorized the Italian Squad and put Petrosino in charge of the 27-man unit. In the four years Petrosino ran the squad, Black Hand crimes dropped by half. Several thousand arrests were made, and 500 men were sent to prison. In 1908, there were 44 bombings with 70 arrests, 424 Black Hand extortion complaints with 215 arrests. Also, numerous mafiosi were deported on Petrosino’s evidence.
Petrosino appeared before congressional committees, urging modification of the immigration laws to forbid the entry of known criminals. He warned that Italian authorities were phonying the passports of some immigrants to rid their jails of undesirables, a sort of pre-Castro boatlift.
Early in 1909 Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham sent Petrosino to Palermo, Sicily, to gather information about deportable criminals. The assignment was so secret that fellow officers were told he was home ill. Yet inexplicably a story appeared in the New York Herald attributing to Bingham the fact that Petrosino had gone to Sicily.
On the rainy night of March 12, 1909, Petrosino was standing in the piazza of the Garibaldi Garden when four shots rang out. Petrosino was hit three times, in the shoulder, throat and right cheek. His murderer got away. Later a strong case was made that the New York detective had been gunned down personally by Don Vito Cascio Ferro, the most important Mafia leader in Sicily.
Don Vito claimed to have spent the evening at dinner at the home of a Sicilian member of the Italian parliament, and his host backed up the story. However, many believe that Don Vito slipped away long enough to do the killing and then return to cement his alibi. Don Vito had the motivation to do the killing personally. A few years earlier Don Vito had come to America to expand his criminal empire, but had been run out by Petrosino.
The death of the legendary Italian detective sent shockwaves through New York City. He was brought back for a martyr’s funeral. A quarter million people jammed the streets of Little Italy as a procession of 7,000 escorted the body to the grave.
A short time thereafter, Bingham was fired as police commissioner because of the news story that revealed Petrosino’s whereabouts. Petrosino’s death had saved literally hundreds of mafiosi from deportation, a bitter fact that would plague the United States in later decades.
