was the killer. When he sent his bulls out to arrest The Bull, a funny thing happened.
They took into custody Giovanni Pecoraro, a spitting image of Gaetano Petto. By now, The Bull was into the wind, because no sooner had Morello’s boys gotten drift that Petrosino’s marauders were to come down hard on Petto, the big guy called him in for a talk.
“I want you to get your ass the hell out of town right now!” Morello directed. Petto shuffled off to Buffalo without a moment’s delay and joined the Mafia family of the late Benedetto Madonia.
Why would Madonia’s family welcome a member of the downstate family who put Madonia in a barrel with his throat slit and his penis between his lips like a cigar?
Because that’s what life in the Mafia was like at the turn of the century—and what it is like today: they always kill a brother who gets out of line!
Now that Madonia was laid to rest, all was forgiven. He had paid for his incursion on Morello’s perlieus, and the message was on display for all to savor:
Don’t try anything like this because this is what’s gonna happen to you.
So The Bull, a fugitive on the run from a murder rap, joined the underworld fraternity in New York’s second-largest city, 750 miles northwest, hard by the roar of one of nature’s mightiest beauties, Niagara Falls.
Back in the big town, Petto’s double, Giovanni Pecoraro, languished in the slammer only so long as it took him to convince a sitting judge in Manhattan Magistrate’s Court that he was not Gaetano Petto.
The case was thrown out and Pecoraro was free to continue his pursuits as a member of the Morelli mob.
Ironically, while Morello had wanted nothing to do with counterfeit currency in 1903 when Madonia tried to plant his funny money roots in East Harlem, the time came when Don Giuseppi decided that it wasn’t such a bad idea.
He and Ignazio Sieta made a deal with Madonia’s successor in the counterfeit operation and were given the distributorship in their territory. They set up candy stores, groceries, meat markets, furniture and hardware stores, restaurants, saloons, in addition to a string of other retailers, to launder their dirty money.
It worked well for about eight years—until 1913. Then Treasury agents moved in and arrested Morelli and Sieta. They were convicted and sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta to do ten years.
Meanwhile, Don Vito Ferro performed so well in New Orleans that his expertise enabled the Mafia to expand rapidly into one of the nation’s most effective and productive regions for organized crime. Unlike the landlocked cities in which the Mafia operated, the Louisiana capital had a waterfront, and it was becoming one of the country’s busiest ports. As they would soon do in Brooklyn, the Black Handers were edging into the shipping lanes with their lucrative protection rackets over cargo loading and unloading operations.
Ferro played a large part in putting New Orleans on the Mafia’s map as one of its biggest income-bearing territories. The Sicilian Maffia summoned him to Palermo and gave him a significant post in the hierarchy there. The year was 1908.
He remained as a top don in Palermo for twenty-five years—until dictator Benito Mussolini ordered a crackdown on the Maffia.
With Mussolini’s commandment, Mafiosi from all parts of the country were seized, placed in cages, and carted through the streets to be stoned by a cheering populace which had all too long suffered paying tribute to the killer-leeches.
The legend handed down through the years about Ferro is that he admitted to only one killing in his entire career as a Black Hander. That rubout took place at the Piazza Marina in Palermo on the night of March 12, 1909.
That was the night Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, who had journeyed to Sicily to pursue evidence on the New York Mafiosi’s ties with the bosses in Palermo, wandered into the marina to question a would-be informer.
The lieutenant was shot to death in what became one of the early century’s most electifying murder cases. His assassination was widely viewed as a warning to law enforcement authorities to lay off the Mafia.
Joseph Petrosino was the first lawman to die trying to bring down the Mafia.
He was not the last.
Shootout at Stauch’s Dance Hall
In February 1920 Frankie Yale had no idea Battista Balsamo was planning to retire and turn the leadership over to Vincenzo Mangano and his brother Phillipo. All Frankie knew was that he had to protect his flanks against the almost certain retaliation from the White Hand after the Sagaman’s Hall number he did on Wild Bill Lovett and his gang.
After a respectable interlude for mourning their dead and laying them to rest, the White Hand gang was summoned to a conclave called by Wild Bill Lovett. They met in the warehouse office of Calendonia Shipping Lines at 25 Bridge Street, hard by the limestone base tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. The agenda consisted of a single topic: how to effectively pay back the Black Hand for the outrage at Sagaman’s Hall.
Twenty-five of the Irish Mafia’s most notorious enforcers pilgrimaged to the ramshackle warehouse that Saturday afternoon, February 21st. A noxious, musty odor of manure hung heavy in the bleak, sparsely-furnished office at the northeast corner of the building. The stench, so thick the men could hardly breathe, was wafting into the office from the warehouse itself, where some six hundred bales of bulk potassium fertilizer had been stored for the weekend. The shipment, from Galveston, Texas, had been unloaded from the freighter “Miguel Sorcos” the day before and was to be trucked Monday to a feed and grain distributor in upstate Tonawanda.
“Couldn’t you find another place to talk with us?” complained crosseyed Jimmy “The Bug” Callaghan, contorting his face in disgust. Jimmy’s expression made his deformity seem more pronounced: his pupils now appeared to be looking at each other across the bridge of his nose. But if anyone was inclined to mock Callaghan’s somewhat comical appearance, it would not be done in his presence. The blond-haired Callaghan was a small, frail-looking man, but his violent temper more than compensated for his lack of size.
Lovett himself was sick of the stink, and he sensed that the others were as annoyed as Jimmy the Bug about having to meet in such unpleasant surroundings. Wild Bill had no idea things would turn out the way they had when he made arrangements a few days earlier to muster his troops in Caledonia’s warehouse.
But he had no other choice. He didn’t want all those men showing up at the Baltic Street Garage on a Saturday afternoon—or any afternoon: a rally of that size would surely tip off the Black Hand that something big was going on. And though no one had to alert Frankie Yale to guard against retaliation by Wild Bill and his minions for the bloodletting at Sagaman’s Hall, a gathering of so many Irish mobsters would be like sending a telegram to their rivals that Lovett and his band were preparing to strike back.
A meeting hall or restaurant was just as inappropriate, for the gang could be spotted almost as readily there. It had to be someplace more secluded. The search narrowed to the Caledonia’s warehouse after Needles Ferry and Charleston Eddie discovered that no one would be working on that Gowanus waterfront pier over the weekend. Wild Bill had asked Ferry and
