Non so come si può vivere in questo fuoco!

(I don’t know how it’s possible to live in this fire!)

— AN ITALIAN IMMIGRANT ON FIRST SEEING NEW YORK CITY

PROLOGUE:
“A GREAT AND CONSUMING TERROR ”

ON THE AFTERNOON of September 21,¹ 1906, a high-spirited boy named Willie Labarbera was playing in front of his family’s fruit store, two blocks from the glint of the East River in New York City. Five-year-old Willie and his friends ran after one another shouting at the top of their lungs as they trundled hoops down the sidewalk, laughing when the wooden rings finally toppled onto the cobblestone street. They ducked behind the bankers and laborers and young women wearing ostrich feather hats, making their way home or to one of the neighborhood’s Italian restaurants. With each wave of pedestrians, Willie and the other children would vanish from one another’s sight for a second or two, then snap back into view once the walkers passed by. This happened dozens of times that afternoon.

More people passed, hundreds of them. Then, as the silvery river light began to dim, Willie turned and dashed down the street once more, disappearing behind yet another group of workmen. But this time, after the pedestrians had strolled past, he failed to reappear. The spot on the pavement where he should have stood was empty in the fading sunlight.

His friends didn’t notice right away. Only when they felt the first pangs of hunger did they slowly turn and examine the small expanse of sidewalk where they’d spent their afternoon. Then they began to look for Willie more earnestly in the lengthening shadows. Nothing.

Willie was headstrong and once boasted that he’d run away from his parents as a lark, so perhaps the other boys hesitated a few moments before entering the store and reporting that something was wrong. But eventually they had to let the adults know, and so they went inside. After a few seconds, the boy’s parents, William and Caterina, dashed from the shop and began searching the surrounding streets for some sign of the child, calling out to ask the proprietors of candy stands and small grocery stores if they’d seen the boy. They hadn’t. Willie was gone.

It was at this moment that something odd and almost telepathic occurred. Even before the police had been called or a single clue was gathered, Willie’s family and friends simultaneously arrived at a revelation about what had happened to the boy, without speaking a single word to one another. And strangely enough, people in Chicago or St. Louis or New Orleans or Pittsburgh or the tiny unheralded towns strung between them, the mothers and fathers of missing children, of whom there were more than usual in the fall of 1906, would have come to the same conclusion. Who had their child? La Mano Nera, as the Italians called it. The Society of the Black Hand.

The Black Hand was an infamous crime organization — “that fiendish,² devilish and sinister band” — that engaged in extortion, assassination, child kidnapping, and bombings on a grand scale. It had become nationally famous two years before with a letter dropped into a mailbox in an obscure neighborhood in Brooklyn, at the home of a contractor who’d struck it rich in America. Since then, the Society’s threatening notes, adorned with drawings of coffins and crosses and daggers, had appeared in every part of the city, followed by a series of gruesome acts that created, according to one observer, “a record of crime³ here during the last ten years that is unparalleled in the history of a civilized country in time of peace.” Only the Ku Klux Klan would surpass the Black Hand for the production of mass terror in the early part of the century. “From the bottom⁴ of their hearts,” one reporter said of Italian immigrants, “they do fear them with a great and consuming terror.” The same could have been said for many Americans in the fall of 1906.

When the letters began arriving for the Labarberas several days later, their fears proved correct. The kidnappers demanded $5,000 for Willie’s return, an astronomical sum to the family. The exact words the criminals used haven’t been passed down, but such letters often contained phrases like “Your son is among us”⁵ and “Do not give this letter to the police for if you do, by the Madonna, your child will be killed.” The message was reinforced by drawings at the bottom of the page: three crude black crosses had been inked onto the paper, along with a skull and crossbones. These were the marks of the Black Hand.

Some claimed that the group and others like it not only were creating an entirely new level of murder and extortion in America, a dark age of spectacular violence, but also were at that moment acting as a fifth column, corrupting the government to their aims. This idea had plagued the new immigrants from Italy for at least a decade. “There was a popular belief,”⁶ said Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge about a supposed Italian secret society, “that it was extending its operations, that it was controlling juries by terror, and that it would gradually bring the government of the city and State under its control.” Skeptics, including the Italian ambassador, who bristled at the mere mention of the Society, countered that the group didn’t exist, that it was a myth⁷ created by Americans to curse Italians, whom the “whites” hated and wished to drive from their shores. One Italian wit said about the Society, “Its sole existence⁸ is, in fact, confined to a literary phrase.”

But if the Society was a fiction, then who had Willie?

The Labarberas reported the kidnapping to the police, and soon a detective knocked on their door at 837 Second Avenue. Joseph Petrosino was the head of the famous Italian Squad, a short, stout, barrel-chested man, built like a stevedore. His eyes — which some described as⁹ dark gray, others as coal-black — were cool and appraising. He had broad shoulders and “muscles like steel cords.”¹⁰ But he wasn’t a brute; in fact, far from it. He was fond of discussing aesthetics, loved opera, especially the Italian composers, and played the violin well. “Joe Petrosino,” said the New York Sun, “could make a fiddle talk.”¹¹ But his true vocation was solving crimes. Petrosino was “the greatest Italian detective¹² in the world,” declared the New York Times, the “Italian Sherlock Holmes,”¹³ according to popular legend back in the old country. At forty-six, he’d already had “a career as thrilling¹⁴ as any Javert in the mazes of the Paris underworld or of an inspector in Scotland Yard — a life as full of adventure and achievement as ever thrilled the imagination of Conan Doyle.” He was shy with strangers, incorruptible, quiet-voiced, brave to an almost reckless degree, violent if provoked, and was so adept with disguises¹⁵ that his own friends often passed him by on the street when he was wearing one. He had only a sixth-grade education but possessed a photographic memory¹⁶ and could instantly recall the information printed on a piece of paper he’d glanced at years before. He had no wife or children; he’d dedicated his life to ridding America of the Society of the Black Hand, which he felt threatened the republic he loved. He hummed operettas¹⁷ as he walked.

Petrosino was dressed in his customary black suit,¹⁸ black shoes, and black derby hat when William Labarbera opened the door of his apartment and escorted him in. The father of the missing boy brought out the letters he’d received but could tell the detective little else about the case. The Black Hand was everywhere and nowhere; it was almost occult in its all-knowingness, and it was cruel. This both men knew. Petrosino could see that Willie’s parents were “nearly crazed with grief.”¹⁹

The detective emerged back onto the streets and immediately went to work, pumping his informers and contacts for clues. He had a vast network²⁰ of spies and informants — nfami — spread across the metropolis: bartenders, doctors, peddlers, lawyers, opera singers, street cleaners (known as “white wingers”), bankers, musicians, scar-faced Sicilian thugs. Willie’s description soon appeared in many of the city’s dozens of newspapers.

But no one had seen or heard from the boy. A fourth letter arrived, demanding the family sell their modest home to raise the ransom. The building was the Labarberas’ only asset in America, something they’d spent their lives saving for. Selling it would doom the parents and their children to grinding poverty, a poverty they’d left the Mezzogiorno to escape. It would snuff out their American dream for at least a generation.

Somehow, the Society had anticipated the family’s reaction. Included in the fourth letter was an incentive, perhaps directed at Mrs. Labarbera. When the paper was unfolded, something fell out and tumbled to the floor. A dark lock of Willie’s hair.

THE DAYS PASSED. Nothing. The boy had been atomized.

Then, in the third week, a tip from an nfame. This man had heard²¹ a curious story from Kenilworth, New Jersey. A woman had been out strolling in a working-class neighborhood when she passed a man carrying a large bundle. Just as the woman walked past, something inside the bundle had emitted a piercing cry. The man hurried into a nearby house, so crude and ramshackle that it was described as a “hut,” and closed the door. But the woman, startled by what she’d heard, remained outside, watching the door intently. A few minutes later, the same man emerged from the house, still carrying the package — which was silent now — and placed it in a covered wagon. Then he drove away.

On hearing the story, Petrosino immediately hurried to the foot of West 23rd Street and stepped aboard one of the steamship ferries to New Jersey. As he watched the docks of the West Side recede, with the lamps that hung from peddlers’ pushcarts glowing in the dusk like distant campfires, the detective leaned over the railing and listened to the waters of the Hudson whoosh and sigh against the ferry’s prow. His mind was whirring with possibilities, names and faces of suspects, stored in his memory months and years earlier and now called to account. Perhaps he sipped a glass of buttermilk bought from one of the vendors (two cents for the unsterilized²² version, three cents for the sterilized). The trip would take about a quarter of an hour, so Petrosino had a few minutes to think.

The Black Hand was growing more daring and ruthless with every passing month. The scale of what was happening in New York was difficult to comprehend. In the Italian colonies, as the immigrant neighborhoods were known, the men patrolled²³ in front of their homes with loaded shotguns; children were locked inside barricaded rooms, forbidden to go to school; buildings stood open to the weather, their fronts ripped off by bombs the organization had planted. Certain quarters of New York, one of the most prosperous and cosmopolitan cities in the world, were being bombarded as though the metropolis were under siege from a dreadnought anchored in Upper Bay. “The society of darkness”²⁴ had killed dozens of men, mutilated and maimed others, and now held tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of citizens under its spell. The panic had grown to such proportions that a family had only to return home and spot a black hand imprinted on their door in coal dust — a sign that the Society had paid a visit — for them to hurriedly pack up their belongings and board the next ship back to Italy.

And it wasn’t happening just in New York. As Petrosino had long predicted, the fear had spread from city to city, blazing across the country like a prairie fire. The Black Hand had materialized in Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco, Newport, Boston, and in hundreds of smaller cities, midsized towns, mining camps, quarries, and company villages in between. It had murdered men and women in many of those places, blown up buildings, triggered lynching parties, and deepened the mistrust of Americans for their Italian neighbors. Countless Americans — not just Italian immigrants — were in the thrall of the Society, and more would soon fall victim: millionaires, judges, governors, mayors, Rockefellers, lawyers, members of the Chicago Cubs, sheriffs, district attorneys, society matrons, gangster kingpins. That January, members of Congress had been threatened by a series of Society letters, and although their story had a unique and rather bizarre ending, several of the representatives from various states had fallen victim to “nervous prostration”²⁵ as a result.

There were towns in the coal belt of Pennsylvania that had been taken over by the Society as if by armed coup; its leaders held the power of life and death over their citizens. After a shocking Black Hand murder, the residents of Buckingham County would send a message to the Pennsylvania governor that resembled those from settlers in the early West surrounded by Apache: “Conditions here intolerable;²⁶ a gang of assassins strongly entrenched three miles away; one citizen shot in back, others threatened; county authorities appear powerless.” The petitioners asked for “detectives and bloodhounds.” New laws were being written and passed to slow a wave of terror that seemed incapable of being stopped. The South was in revolt against Italian immigrants, largely because of the Society’s outrages. President Teddy Roosevelt, a friend of Petrosino’s from his days as New York police commissioner, was said to be²⁷ closely following developments from the White House. Even the diminutive king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, had taken time away from the vast coin collection that obsessed him to write Petrosino about the issue, which was close to his heart, enclosing an expensive gold watch²⁸ along with the letter. Citizens of nations from India to France and England were enthralled by this contest between the forces of civilization and those of anarchy, and perhaps touched with Schadenfreude at the difficulties the young upstart of a country was having with its dark-eyed immigrants.

Petrosino was well aware of this attention, with good reason. He wasn’t just a salaried employee of the New York Police Department; he was famous, perhaps the most famous Italian American in the country. And with fame, at least in Petrosino’s eyes, came responsibility. Along with a small vanguard of his compatriots — a lawyer, a district attorney, the founder of a fraternal society — the detective had set out to spark a movement that would lift Italians out of their precarious situation. They were accused of being a savage people unfit for American citizenship; Petrosino furiously disagreed. “The Italian has a natural love²⁹ of liberty,” he argued to the New York Times. “He has had to fight bitterly for enlightenment in his own country and what Italy is today has been attained by heroic struggling.” But his struggle, to make Italians into full-fledged Americans, was faltering in the face of the ongoing war against the Society; even the Times had joined the calls for an end to immigration from southern Italy. How could you redeem your race when the “vampires”³⁰ of the Black Hand were bombing, maiming, and killing their way across the entire country?

As Petrosino had learned, you couldn’t. The struggles were too intimately connected. The writer H. P. Lovecraft would later provide an example of the animosity Americans felt toward the newcomers in a letter to a friend in which he described immigrants from Italy crowded into the Lower East Side as creatures who “could not by any stretch³¹ of the imagination be call’d human.” Instead, “they were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities.”

If Petrosino had been winning the battle against the Black Hand, his crusade would have proceeded more smoothly. But 1906 had gone badly; blood, allies, and territory had been lost. The shadow of the Society now extended over the whole of Petrosino’s adopted homeland, from the stone mansions of Long Island to the craggy inlets of Seattle. Petrosino was filled with foreboding.

But tonight he would put aside his worries. He needed to find Willie Labarbera.

Petrosino reached the far shore and disembarked. He hired a carriage, and the driver hissed at the horses and sped off toward Kenilworth, about twenty miles due west, with the detective aboard. The pier cleared of its passengers, and a horse cart filled with coal trundled aboard the ferry to supply its engine room with fresh fuel, then departed, after which the ferry pulled out for the return trip to Manhattan. The dock grew quiet. A few hours later, a carriage reappeared at the dock and Petrosino climbed out. He waited for the ferry to arrive, then stepped aboard. The vessel pulled away from the New Jersey pier and slipped across the dark, rippling water toward the gas lamps glittering in the low-slung city across the Hudson. He was alone. The boy had been nowhere to be found.

When Petrosino was worried over a particularly difficult case, it was his habit³² to take refuge in the operas of Verdi, his favorite composer. He’d pick up his violin and bow and play one song in particular, “Di Provenza il mar,” Germont’s aria from La Traviata. In it, a father consoles his son over the loss of his beloved by reminding the young man of his childhood home in Provence, its dazzling sun and sweet memories:

Sitting in his bachelor apartment, Petrosino would play the aria “incessantly,” his powerful hands moving the bow slowly through the lyrical opening notes before progressing into the difficult portions. It’s a lovely piece, but a mournful one; it expresses a longing for things that are past and will probably never return.

We can imagine that Petrosino’s neighbors heard the aria many times that night.

1

ON JANUARY 3, 1855,¹ a dead man lay on an embankment of the Mississippi River not far from New Orleans as the water just a few feet from his out-flung hand rolled southward toward the Gulf of Mexico. Even from a distance, it would have become clear to any observer that the man’s passing had been a violent one. His shirt was covered in blood and pierced at several points; he’d been stabbed over a dozen times. In addition, his throat was cut from ear to ear, and the blood from the wound was caking thickly in the heat. The man’s name was Fransisco Domingo, and he was the first known victim of the Black Hand in America.

Joseph Petrosino wouldn’t be born for another five years. The Society had preceded him to the continent by almost two decades.

Unlike Domingo, unlike the majority of his future enemies, Petrosino wasn’t Sicilian. He came from the province of Salerno in the Campania region, near the front of the ankle in the boot of Italy. Giuseppe Michael Pasquale Petrosino was born in the village of Padula, home to a famous Carthusian monastery, on August 30, 1860. His father, Prospero,² was a tailor, his mother, Maria, a housewife. It was a small family by Italian standards; Petrosino had one younger brother and one younger sister in the tailor’s humble house, which was struck by twin tragedies when Giuseppe was young. His mother died during his boyhood — of what was never recorded — and Giuseppe came down with a case of smallpox, an often fatal illness, in the 1860s. He survived but bore the scars on his skin for the rest of his life.

The first crisis was likely the one that affected the young child most deeply. Petrosino never spoke of his mother — he rarely spoke of personal matters at all — but he would become notorious for his silences, for an inwardness that many would remark upon and give their theories for: his lack of a good education and the difficulties of his job were two popular explanations. “He never smiled”³ was a stock description in the newspaper profiles that proliferated in the early 1900s as Petrosino rose to national fame. It was untrue. Petrosino was capable of strong emotion, of joy and tenderness as well as great rage; a few intimates even swore he could be persuaded to do impersonations at parties. But certainly the loss of his mother left a deep and mournful mark on his personality.

His boyhood years were formative ones for Italy. Giuseppe Garibaldi was leading the war to unify the states of the peninsula, including the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the Papal States, to create the modern nation of Italy. But poverty and misrule persisted, especially in the southern regions, and in 1873, when Petrosino was thirteen years old, his father decided to try his luck in America. Prospero bought tickets for the family on a steam-assisted sailing ship headed for New York City.

Thirteen is considered an important age in the Mezzogiorno: it marks the time when a boy leaves his childish cares behind and learns the shape of the world and how one is expected to act in it. It’s widely considered to be the age when manhood begins. By that point Petrosino would have absorbed many of the rules of Italian life and honor, the most important being the ordine della famiglia (order of the family), the essential values and customs that dictated all behavior in the towns of southern Italy. One of the most important tenets of the ordine said that you never placed yourself before the family, never allowed your ambitions to overrule your duty. The harsh Mezzogiorno, where life was a battle, demanded obedience to your loved ones.

Twenty-five days later, the Petrosinos arrived in New York, part of an early wave of Italian migration made up mostly of skilled workers and the educated. They settled in Manhattan and Petrosino enrolled in public school, where he began to learn English. (As an Italian speaker, he would have been held back from his natural grade.) The age of mass Italian immigration to America hadn’t yet begun. There were only 25,000 immigrants from the old country by 1875, and they’d assimilated into the fabric of cities like New York and Chicago with relative ease. It wasn’t until the 1880s that huge numbers of desperately poor migrants from Italy would begin to pour into the Eastern Seaboard. This often caused simmering tensions with the native population. In 1888 a series⁴ of cartoons in a New Orleans newspaper ran under the title “Regarding the Italian Population.” One panel depicted a cage crowded with Italians being lowered into a river. The caption read, “The Way to Dispose of Them.” But even in 1873, the young Joseph met hatred in the streets of lower Manhattan.

Italians were moving into neighborhoods that had belonged to the Irish for at least two generations. The new arrivals, with the strange, flowing music of their language, their riotous festivals, their olive skin and bewildering foods, were outnumbered and bitterly despised. When an Italian family moved into a tenement, the Irish often moved out. At one flashpoint,⁵ policemen lined the streets every day as the last bell rang at the local school. When the Italian kids emerged from the front door, a howl rose up from the nearby tenements, echoing off the cobblestones as one Irish mother after another pulled up the sashes on their windows, leaned out, and shouted at their sons below to “kill the dagos!” The fair-skinned boys heard them, picked up rocks, and sent them spinning at the heads of the Italian boys and girls, who fled the school in packs. Small gangs charged at the dark-haired children and attempted to cut off the stragglers. If they cornered one, they beat him until his blood flowed. “It used to be simply bedlam,” recalled one man who had endured the daily ritual when he was a boy.

Fearing shattered teeth and cracked bones, one group of Italian students turned to a newcomer who seemed to radiate strength. Young Joe Petrosino⁶ never avoided a battle with the Irish; in fact, he seemed to relish them. When the dismissal bell rang, Joe would lead his fellow immigrants out into the streets, his eyes alert for enemies. If an Irish kid managed to slip by a cop and aim a rock at one of the Italian children huddled behind him, Joe would turn and charge. He would begin by raining haymakers on the assailant’s head and then attempt to crack the Irish boy’s skull on the cobblestones. Petrosino often returned home with his shirt covered in blood. Over time, a small legend began to grow up around his name.

Despite his often brutal initiation into Manhattan life, Petrosino showed signs of being a typical American immigrant: he began looking for a way up. He and another Italian boy, Anthony Marria, opened a newspaper business and shoeshine stand directly in front of 300 Mulberry Street in what would soon be known as Little Italy. The building happened to be the headquarters of the New York Police Department, and while Petrosino hawked copies of the World and the Herald, he polished the shoes of the beat cops in their dark blue wool uniforms with shining gold buttons. Some of the officers treated the boys with kindness, but others called them “dago,” “wop” (short for “without papers”), or “guinea,” a particularly hated slur that linked the Italians directly to slavery, as the term originally referred to the people stolen from Guinea, on the west coast of Africa.

The abuse didn’t deter the young teenager. “Petrosino was a big,⁷ strapping boy,” his friend Anthony remembered, “and he was very ambitious.” Most Italian kids abandoned their schooling early on and went to work in the garment sweatshops that sprang up all over Little Italy, or they picked rags or were apprenticed to junk dealers or pushcart men. Joe held on longer at school than most other immigrant boys while holding down what amounted to a full-time job shining shoes. But his education eventually lost out to his need for money. Petrosino quit his classes at Public School 24 at the corner of Bayard and Mulberry after the sixth grade.

With his school days over, Joe joined the thousands of other Italian boys, some of them barefoot even in the freezing New York winters, who swarmed the streets as bootblacks, crying out “Shine your shoes?”⁸ Once hired, Petrosino would throw down an old piece of carpet to cushion his knees and take a brush from his box, knocking away the muck from workingmen’s brogans and the ankle-high lace-ups of the lawyers and journalists who clustered around police headquarters, before bringing the leather to a high shine with his cloth.

Bootblacks, who might make twenty-five cents a day, dwelled at the bottom of the economic ladder in 1870s Manhattan. The job introduced the young Italian to the raw side of New York capitalism — that is, to Tammany Hall. Under the Irish politicians who ruled the city, Italian bootblacks were forced to pay cash for the privilege of working a certain corner, and were even required to shine⁹ policemen’s shoes for free, as a bonus. Any boy who rebelled invited a visit from a head-cracking son of Galway.

There was an urgency to Petrosino’s drive; his father’s tailoring business had failed, and the only other male in the family, Joe’s younger brother, Vincenzo, had proved himself to be a complete no-account. “He was irresponsible,”¹⁰ says their grandnephew Vincent Petrosino. “One profession after another. He never found his feet in America.” In fact, Joe’s entire family lacked his burning ambition; they were, according to grandnephew Vincent, “a bunch of bums” who soon began to depend on the teenager’s earnings just to survive. Joe’s father, Prospero, dreamt only of returning to Italy, buying a plot of land, and living out his last years amid the citrus groves of Campania. But Joseph was different. “He was bent,¹¹ bound, and determined to make it in New York,” remembered his friend Anthony Marria.

Along with determination and brute strength, Joe as a teenager began to display signs of what the Italians call pazienza. The literal translation is “patience,” but the term had a special meaning in southern Italian culture. It meant to keep one’s innermost feelings close, awaiting the proper time for their release. It was part of the masculine code of life in the Mezzogiorno, a defense against oppression and miseria. “Pazienza does not involve¹² a repression of the forces of life,” writes Richard Gambino. “The code of reserve, of patience, of waiting for the moment, of planning for the event, and then of decisive impassioned action, serves life … Impetuous, ill-controlled behavior meant disaster.” One way to show pazienza was to remain cool, almost detached, until the need for action arose. Then, nothing less than violent passion was called for.

One day Anthony and Joseph¹³ were shining shoes in front of a saloon at the corner of Broome and Crosby streets. Petrosino knelt on his old carpet, buffed the leather boots of a customer, then stood up to collect his pennies. Part of his earnings would go toward paying his family’s rent, another for their food, coal, and clothing. This left little, if anything, for himself and his dreams of breaking out of the Italian colony.

That afternoon, something in Petrosino rebelled. As Anthony watched in astonishment, Joseph picked his heavy shoeshine box off the pavement, hoisted it over his head, his thick arms bulging with the effort, then brought the box down and smashed it onto the sidewalk. The box cracked apart and split into pieces. Anthony stared up at his partner as passersby stepped around the shards of wood and walked on. “Tony,” Petrosino told him calmly, “I won’t shine shoes anymore. I’m going to be somebody.”

The story is so iconic in its Americanness that one suspects Anthony lifted it from a Horatio Alger novel, which often featured starry-eyed bootblacks. But Anthony swore it really happened. Young Joe had drunk deeply of the American ideal. With his box broken beyond repair, Petrosino had to find another way to make a living. He never shined another shoe, in New York or elsewhere, again.

His outburst told Anthony something. Behind his friend’s quiet exterior, strong emotions churned.

PETROSINO WENT LOOKING for a better job, roaming all over Manhattan inquiring in stores and shops. He tried a succession¹⁴ of tasks: butcher’s assistant, railroad crew timekeeper, hat store associate, stockbrokerage runner. He even toured the country¹⁵ as an itinerant musician, playing his violin as far away as the Deep South before returning to Manhattan. But none of the assignments offered Petrosino a way up and out of the humiliating poverty he saw all around him.

Finally, when he was seventeen or eighteen, Petrosino landed a position as a “white winger,” or street cleaner, for the City of New York. It didn’t sound like much of an advancement, but at the time, the city’s sanitation department was run by the New York Police Department. For the right kind of immigrant, it could be a stepping-stone to greater things.

Petrosino had the good fortune to come under the protection of the tough and fabulously corrupt inspector Aleck “Clubber” Williams, known as the “Tsar of the Tenderloin.” Williams was Irish to the marrow, gregarious and physically intimidating, a figure instantly recognizable to New Yorkers as he strode down Seventh Avenue, patrolling his precinct. (And it was very much his precinct: no saloon could operate, and no criminal could long survive, without Williams’s permission.) “I am so well known¹⁶ here in New York,” he once boasted, “that car horses nod to me mornings.” One day, wanting to impress¹⁷ some newspapermen who’d come to interview him, he hung his watch and chain on a lamppost at 35th Street and Third Avenue, in the heart of the wild, crime-ridden Gas House district, then took a leisurely stroll around the block with the reporters. When the group returned to the lamppost, Williams’s watch was still hanging where he’d left it. None of the hundreds of gangsters who populated the neighborhood had dared to touch his valuables.

Williams’s talent for corruption was another envy of the department. He owned a sprawling seventeen-room mansion in Cos Cob, Connecticut, and a fifty-three-foot yacht, all ostensibly on the modest salary of an NYPD inspector. When asked how he’d come by his fortune, he had a splendidly nonsensical answer: “Japanese real estate.”¹⁸

In his new position, Petrosino worked hard. New York was infamous for its grime; the city was far dirtier than London or Paris. It was Petrosino’s job to push his three-wheeled cart through the streets and sweep the cobblestones clean of the incredible array of filth that had collected there overnight. Horse manure was a particular challenge. The 150,000 horses¹⁹ living and working in New York and Brooklyn (an independent city until 1898) produced 3 to 4 million pounds of manure each and every day, and the animals themselves lasted only an average of two and a half years before dropping dead from overwork. The carcasses weighed over a thousand pounds, too heavy for the white wingers to lift, so they had to wait until the corpses had partially decomposed before they could hoist the various body parts onto their carts. Petrosino spent his days sweeping up heaping piles of ash, fruit rinds, newspapers, and broken furniture, as well as dead pigs, goats, and horses.

He advanced. Petrosino was soon commanding the scow that towed the city’s garbage far out into the Atlantic, where he would dump the malodorous stuff among the breakers. Every day, Petrosino would steer the scow into the waves, the water smacking the front of the vessel and sending bursts of salt spray back over the pilothouse. If he looked to his left or right, he might have caught a glimpse of the trim runabouts commanded by rich Madison Avenue swells as they swept by him. Perhaps he was even passed by the robber baron Jay Gould as he commuted from his home in Tarrytown in his magnificent 230-foot yacht, the Atalanta, the “most magnificent²⁰ private craft afloat,” whose interiors were decorated as sumptuously as any rajah’s palace. A man less secure in himself might have felt a bit ridiculous in the company of these glamorous ships, commanding a vessel filled to the gunwales with rotting horse heads and banana peels. A sparkling dream ship for the son of Campania! But Petrosino was undeterred. He never lacked for confidence.

As the young Italian advanced, the city around him was growing higher, brighter, and faster. The first elevated subway had opened along Ninth Avenue in 1868. Electric light began to replace²¹ the old gas lanterns in 1880; steam heat pulsed out from underground mains beginning in 1882; the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, stretched its gorgeous and improbable frame across the East River. The country was hungry for new labor; its industries were growing at a rapid clip, and they needed strong backs to mine, quarry, forge, build, and dig. New York was at the center of this transformation. Eighty of the nation’s one hundred largest companies had their headquarters in Manhattan. “Wall Street supplied the country²² with capital,” wrote the historian Mike Dash. “Ellis Island channeled its labor. Fifth Avenue set its social trends. Broadway (along with Times Square and Coney Island) entertained it.” Every four years, the city added to its numbers the equivalent of the population of Boston; it was already the largest Jewish city and the largest Italian city in the world. (One writer fondly called Manhattan “this capital of half a world.”)²³ And many of its new citizens were newcomers from southern Italy, contadini, poor peasants of the Mezzogiorno. The number of Italians living in the city swelled from 833 individuals in 1850 to half a million by 1910.

For many Americans, the swarming mobs, the dark faces and unfamiliar languages, were a sign not of progress but of anarchy. Henry Adams was one:

But to others, the changes were an opportunity to make money and secure their hold on power. Tammany Hall, which was reaping millions from the new wealth pouring into Manhattan, took notice of the immigrants who were blasting out the subway tunnels and manning the garment factories. The Irish needed men who could make their way among the Sicilians and Calabrians and bring them to the polls on election day. So when Clubber Williams saw a scow maneuvering gracefully along the waterfront, with a young Italian calling orders in a commanding voice, he paid attention. There was something in Petrosino’s manner — a calmness across his brow — that drew the inspector’s eye.

Williams called out across the waves, “Why don’t you join²⁵ the police force?” Petrosino eyed the inspector, steered the vessel to shore, hopped out, and walked over. Williams could immediately see there was a problem. At five feet three inches, the young Italian was too short to qualify as a police recruit; the minimum standard was four inches taller. But the Irish cop had solved far thornier problems than a lack of height, and he began lobbying to get Petrosino on the force. Soon after, on October 19, 1883, the twenty-three-year-old was sworn in as a policeman.

It was a coup for the former bootblack. Petrosino became one of the first Italian policemen hired by the NYPD, which in 1883 was an overwhelmingly Irish force, filled out with a sprinkling of German and Jewish cops. His hiring was also a milestone for Italian Americans, who’d managed to gain only tiny footholds in the power structure of their new country. But if Petrosino thought his breakthrough would be hailed among his own people, if he thought shield number 285 would earn him the cheers of Neapolitans and Sicilians out on Mulberry Street, he was to be deeply disappointed. On his first day on the job, the new policeman walked out of the building in Little Italy where he rented an apartment, dressed in his woolen blues and a domed felt helmet, a locust-wood nightstick slotted into a leather loop at his side. The new clothes were the outward signs of his reinvention as an American. From his first steps, Italians began calling out to him — not words of congratulation, however, but “insults and obscenities.”²⁶ Street peddlers, when they saw him coming, yelled, “Fresh parsley for sale!” (in Sicilian dialect, petrosino means “parsley”), warning the neighborhood criminals that a cop was approaching. Not long after, Petrosino received his first death threats in the mail.

In the sun-withered places that southern Italians came from, as Petrosino surely knew, any man wearing a uniform was considered an enemy. “The government is a huge²⁷ personified monster,” wrote an official in the Sicilian town of Partinico in 1885, “from the office servant all the way up to that privileged being who calls himself King. It desires everything, steals undisguisedly, disposes over property and person for the benefit of a few because it is supported by henchmen and bayonets.” Even the church²⁸ despised the people who enforced the law. In the Taxae cancellariae et poenitentiarieae romanae, published between 1477 and 1533, the archbishop of Palermo absolved those who perjured themselves in court, including those who bribed judges or obstructed justice in other ways, provided the defendant went free. In the church’s view, criminals could redeem themselves by paying alms to their local parish; they were even allowed, under this special interpretation of church law, to keep the stolen goods. But the birro, the policeman? He was a rotting piece of carrion.

In an Irish or a German neighborhood, a newly minted cop was often a cause for celebration, but this wasn’t the case in Little Italy. Petrosino, many believed, had joined the oppressors in the new land. He “was contadino-born,”²⁹ one Sicilian American said later. To join up with the foreigners and volunteer to police your own kind was “an extreme and deliberate affront” that wasn’t easily forgotten. “Petrosino’s behavior constituted a very offensive immorality, nothing less than an infamia that demanded punishment. As [Sicilians] saw it, Petrosino [had] violated a kind of extended ordine della famiglia by publicly taking the side of strangers against his own kind and thus advancing his own individual position in life.” In the minds of some southern Italians, Petrosino had sold his honor to the whites.

If Italians had entered America as the last and poorest of the western Europeans, they didn’t lack confidence in or love for their homeland. In many ways, they believed that the culture they carried in their blood was superior to that of the Americans. It was the duty of every Italian to honor it.

But Petrosino had completed a voyage that many southern Italians found difficult to make: he’d wholeheartedly embraced the promise of his new country. He’d accepted its values as his values. The looks of hatred from his own must have been a shock. To be called an nfame, an informant and a spy, on the streets of Little Italy would forever remain painful to him. “Parsley will make³⁰ the American police taste better” went one witticism about the new cop, “but indigestible it will always be.”

There were many Italians who felt differently, who knew that Italian policemen were badly needed in the colony and were proud of Petrosino’s achievement. But others sent him a constant stream of menacing letters, letters that became so alarming Petrosino was forced to look for another place to live. He found a small apartment in an Irish neighborhood and moved his meager possessions there. In Italian American culture, it was almost unthinkable for a single man to leave the colony and live alone among foreign people. It marked Petrosino as a straniero, a foreigner, living among the pale and inscrutable Irish. To be alone without one’s family was to almost cease to exist, to become what the Sicilians called un saccu vacante (an empty sack), un nùddu miscàto cu niènti (a nobody mixed with nothing). But early in his career, Petrosino signaled his willingness to break with the traditions that had ruled life in the Mezzogiorno for centuries. In order to rise, he would leave.

FOR HIS FIRST assignment, Petrosino was sent to the Tenderloin, between 23rd and 42nd streets, from Fifth to Seventh avenues, the most fractious precinct in the city. His first arrest³¹ to make the New York Times was of an overzealous actor who’d been so eager to practice his craft that he’d broken the ban on Sunday theatricals. As he gained more experience, he was assigned to other beats as well. One evening he’d ventured as far as the piers at the foot of Canal Street, a festering hellhole filled with sailors’ bars and bordellos. As he strode along³² at his usual energetic pace, Petrosino heard urgent cries. Ahead of him he spotted a commotion. A group of white men were bent over a figure on the pavement, viciously attacking a black man named William Farraday.

The reputation of African Americans among the officers of the NYPD wasn’t a favorable one. Many cops were thoroughgoing racists. Even the man who would soon be police commissioner expressed a low opinion of the city’s black citizens. “The Tenderloin Negro,”³³ said William McAdoo, “is an overdressed, bejeweled loafer and in many instances a general criminal.” But, hearing Farraday’s cries, Officer Petrosino didn’t hesitate. He dashed forward, pulling his club from its leather ring as he ran and, on coming up on the scrum, slammed the locust-wood stick into the head of the first white man he encountered. After a few more blows, the attackers ran off. “Four men were trying to kill me,” recalled Farraday. “Joe came along and saved me in the nick of time.” Farraday would remember the incident for the rest of his life.

Petrosino proved to be a natural policeman. He was a wizard at languages: he’d mastered not only the regional dialect of his native Campania but also most of the regional tongues spoken by New York’s Italians: Abruzzese, Neapolitan, Sicilian,³⁴ and Pugliese. He was incorruptible: not once would he even be accused of taking a bribe. And he was exceptionally tough. If he lost a single street fight in his long career, no one ever reported it. But his excellence went mostly unnoticed in the early years of his career. Petrosino had joined an Irish fraternity composed of the same kind of men who had tried to separate his head from his neck in street brawls when he was a schoolboy. There was little hope of advancement for an Italian in the New York City police department. Only the Irish and the Germans seemed to be chosen for the homicide unit or the detective bureau, considered the elites of the department. There wasn’t a single Italian detective sergeant in the entire department in the late 1800s — in the entire country, for that matter. The Irish looked at a spot within the NYPD as their birthright; veteran cops often gave³⁵ their young sons toy nightsticks as birthday gifts, to tide them over until they were old enough to join the department. Wrote one Irishman: “You couldn’t walk two city blocks without running into a bluecoat named O’Brien, Sullivan, Byrnes, O’Reilly, Murphy, or McDermott … Deep down my father’s desire to make me a policeman was ruled by the Irish blood in his veins, even when I lay in my cradle.”

Even with a mentor like Clubber Williams, Petrosino was an outsider. The police reserve stations where he often slept that first winter, his uniform steaming on a line hung against one wall and a potbellied stove blazing in the center of the room, were cold places for any son of Italy, where Irish cops regarded him with disgust or thinly veiled hatred. Some refused to speak to him or, when they did, addressed him as “guinea” to his face. “Every hand³⁶