The Bootleggers (4)

The Black Hand

By KENNETH ALLSOP AT a 1950 Washington public hearing of Senator Estes Kefauver's Senate Crime Investigating Committee, Salvatore Moretti, a New Jersey gambler and racketeer, was asked: `Do you know what the Mafia is?'

`What?' said Moretti.

`The Mafia,' repeated Counsel Rudolph Halley. `M-a-f-i-a.'

`I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about.'

Halley said incredulously: 'You never heard that word before in your life? Do you read?'

`Nab,' said Moretti, sardonically. 'Like I says before—I don't read very much on account of my eyes.'

Similar blank puzzlement was encountered by the Committee in other cities. In Kansas City Tony Gizzo (identified as one of the leaders of that city's intensely active Mafia) asked: 'What's the Mafia? I don't even know what the Mafia is.' In Chicago Jack Dragna, a Los Angeles Sicilian resident, had read about the Mafia in the news- papers—but that was all—and Philip D'Andrea, once a gun-guard for AI Capone and President of the Unione Siciliana, conceded that he had heard of the Mafia when he was a child but 'knew nothing' of its current activities. Asked if it was a subject discussed among Italian families, D'Andrea replied: 'Oh, God, no. No, sir! It's not discussed out of the home.'

An indication of the hooded stealth that sur- rounds the Mafia is that it was not until the Kefauver Committee prised up the lid a few inches eleven years ago that it was often discussed, or even heard about, outside an Italian home. Some of the witnesses called before us,' Kefauver reported after the hearings, 'who we had good reason to believe could tell us about the Mafia, sought to dismiss it as a sort of fairy tale or legend that children hear in Sicily where the Mafia originated. The Mafia, however, is no fairy tale. It is ominously real, and it has scarred the face of America with almost every conceivable type of criminal violence, including murder, traffic in narcotics, smuggling, extortion, white slavery, kidnapping and labour racketeering.

Even then there was an understandable reluc- tance among adult citizens of a modern democ- racy to accept the idea that a kind of comic-strip secret society, replete with unwritten codes and a Black Hand insignia, was anything more than the rather pathetically infantile compensation-device for under-privileged foreign immigrants, a poor man's Masonry with a twist towards petty skul- duggery The Black Hander?—a mildly comic cartoon caricature with an inky handlebar mous- tache, a Chico Marx pudding-basin hat and a bomb like a smoking cannonball. It seemed Patently absurd that such buffoon characters could form a national network of organised, cor- porative crime, intangibly but intrinsically in control of the industrial, political and social life of most large American cities. In fact that was, and largely still is, the func- tion of the Mafia. Some damage was done to the engine of the organisation by the famous raid on the Apalachin convention in 1957. It was this that awokethe public at large to the reality of the Mafia, to the fact that it was neither a fable nor a triviality swollen into melodrama by newspaper feature-writers. On a November afternoon in _157 Sergeant Edgar Croswell, of the New York State Police, was intrigued by the herd of Cadil- lacs, Chrysler Imperials and Lincolns with out- of-state number plates drawn up at the house at Apalachin, near Endicott, New York, which belonged to Joseph Barbara, proprietor of a soft-drink company. He took the chance of in- vestigating. Inside were found sixty-five dons, the capi mafiosi, or elders of brotherhood, many of them bolted, lumbering in their soft calf shoes over the fields towards the distant woods, but were rounded up. They sat, white-faced and smoking incessantly, these big, dignified digni- taries, and not talking. Pressed for explanations, each gave a similar one: poor Joe Barbara had a heart condition, and he had just happened to be passing by and had called in to cheer Joe up. Joe luckily happened to have 2001b. of steak on the premises to give the unexpected guests all a bar- becue snack.

It emerged that these casual callers were from points as far-flung as Los Angeles, Dallas, Tuc- son, Kansas City, Cuba and Italy; also that twenty-five of them were related by blood or marriage; half of them had been born in Sicily or Italy, the rest were of Sicilian or Italian extrac- tion; fifty-six of them had in aggregate teen arrested 275 times and shared a hundred convic- tions for serious crimes ranging from homicide and extortion to pimping and narcotics-trading.

The power of the organisation may be judged by the fact that even this disclosure-was no more than a temporary discomfort. In April, 1960, Kefauver said dispiritedly in an interview : 'The gambling syndicates, united by the infamous Mafia, are worse today than they were ten years ago,' and a newspaper asked : 'What's the point of exposing the rackets and the Mafia bosses who run them? It all goes on still, as though the Kefauver Commission had never existed.'

It has had practice in survival. The Mafia may go back as far as the ninth century in Sicily, when the islanders secretly fought as an underground army against the Arab invaders. Another theory is that it was founded in the year 1282 when the Sicilian peasantry rose and slaughtered the French occupiers to the cry of Worm alla Francia Italia anela' ('Death to the French is Italy's cry'), from the initials of which the society is said to have taken its name. Historians doubt this. What is certain is that the tyrannising and torturing by the Bourbon rulers in the middle of the eighteenth century welded the Sicilians together into a tough, consolidated, disciplined and ruthless alliance of families, and the man who could use a gun and knife accurately, and seized every opportunity to avenge his family and his race, was honoured and respected.

Gradually the code of omerta evolved. In its general application this means a conspiracy of silence, but the five specific rules of the credo— which still bind the brothers as rigidly today— are : (1) A mafioso must aid his brother in trouble even at the risk of life or fortune. (2) A mafioso must obey implicitly the orders of a council of senior brothers. (3) A mafioso must regard an offence by an outsider against a brother as against himself and the brotherhood, and avenge it. (4) A mafioso must never appeal to the police, the courts or any government authority for redress. (5) A mafioso must never admit the existence of the brotherhood, discuss its activities or reveal the name of a brother. Death is the instant pun- ishment for infringement of any of these rules.

Other characteristics developed. A mafioso is polite, reserved, disciplined—a difficult, and therefore recognisable, rule of conduct in a volatile Sicilian.. He lives modestly, no ,matter how great his wealth; he eschews ostentation; he is abstemious, church-going, and a kind and attentive husband and father.

The later role of the Mafia in Sicily has also produced other characteristics. From being an underground rebel force, a self-protective family structure resisting invaders and oppressive land- owners, it began, for baser reasons, to exploit its power and reputation for implacable savagery. It entered into compacts with the landowners, and in turn began to live off the peasantry, by means of extortion, kidnapping and primitive racketeer- ing.

There were two big migration waves of Mafia members to the United States, first in the 1890s, when the word passed back that the opportunities were glittering, and second in the 1920s when Mussolini, jealous of the authority of the Mafia, tried to stamp it out. They took with them their skill at blackmail, their promptness to murder and their unshakeable loyalty to each other. There is a further, at first knowledge baffling, aspect of the mafioso. His traditional condition- ing has created a personality that to the outsider is as weirdly contradictory as the Bushido code of the Japanese officer who was able during the war to perform monstrously degenerate and sadistic violence upon prisoners and his own sol- diers, and yet remain, according to his own lights, an honourable man. So with the mafioso. He does not belong to a club; he is the privileged initiate of a philosophy, and a mystique. In this private, esoteric morality he does no wrong even when he kills, violates and bleeds other humans. If he abides by the precepts of ornerta he is, to himself and his brethren, in grace. He is, as a Catholic, at peace with God—although this may be a less weighty consideration than it would appear to be. Helen A. Day, head of a Little Sicily social settle- ment, wrote in 1929: 'He [the Siciliali peasant immigrant] is nominally a Roman Catholic. A vein of superstition holds him to the church. but not to the point where it clashes with his own in- terests. His attitude toward the saints is pro- prietous and patronising rather than reverent.

In America the mafioso found that the land and future were bright. He had immense status, springing from fear and personal experience of his methods, among his prey, the hordes of poor and illiterate peasants settled in the slum zones of New York, New Orleans and Chicago. As a further basic statute of the Mafia is that a brother does not labour with his own hands but lives off others, this he proceeded to do. The Black Hand came into existence. Quickly it was dismal general knowledge that when you received a written demand for money with the La Mano Nera insignia at the bottom, you paid up, or had a bomb containing nails and nuts tossed into your shop, or had your child kidnapped, or died your- self.

In Chicago between 1900 and 1925, 300 Black Hand cases came to the notice of the police—and there were most likely twice as many which did not—from the Italian community. A typical Black Hand letter, in its shattered English and floral phrases, is this one which 'Elias run down to its source--Joseph Genite, arrested at 1001 South Racine Avenue, where a Mafia arsenal of dyna- mite, sawn-off shotguns and revolvers was dis- covered: Most Gentle Mr. Silvani:' Hoping that the present will not impress you much, you will be so good as to send me two thousand dollars if your life is dear to you. So I beg you warmly to put them on your 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 friends.

La Mano Nera.

In the early years of the century the Mafia speedily established its parasitic mode of living —and flaunted its pitiless methods of imposing its rule. In 1910 there were twenty-five unsolved Mafia murders in the Italian quarter of the city. In May, 1913, the Chicago Daily News editorialised : 'In the first ninety-three days of this year, fifty-five bombs were detonated in the spaghetti zone. Not one of the fifty-five, so far as can be determined, was set for, any reason other than the extraction of blackmail. A detective of experience in the Italian quarter estimates that ten pay tribute to one who is sturdy enough to resist until he is warned by a bomb. Freely con- ceding that this is all guesswork, then 550 men will have paid the Mano Nero since January 1. The Dirty Mitt never asks for less than 1.000 dollars.' Detectives found that inquiries usually led only to an impregnable wall of silence. A ser- geant attached to the Chicago Avenue Station said : 'All the reply I could get was "Me don't know." ' By the time Prohibition presented unpreceden- ted means of easy money and town rule, it may be seen that the pattern was already demarcated and the machinery efficiently working : through the agencies of the Unione Siciliana and the Italian Colonial Committee of the Italian Societies of Chicago, the Mafia had hegemonic control over the Italian communities of the city, and was later able to employ them as the labour in its bootleg distilleries and breweries; through the agencies of the ward political machines it was able to secure immunity for the illegal activities performed under cover of these nominally respectable bodies By an odd paradox it was a group of tree- lance. Black Hand terrorists, and not Mafia high policy, that set in train the sequence of events that led to the Capone era and its development into the present Capone Syndicate. The diamond- flashing prosperity of Big Jim Colosimo, vice boss of the First Ward, attracted the attention of local extortionists. He received La Mono Arera letters threatening kidnapping for ransom, then torture and death. Colosimo's response was to summon from New York a promising young hood, the leader of the James Street gang who operated on the East River waterfront, Johnny Torrio. Torrio handled the situation efficiently for his new boss. The day after he arrived in Chicago, the Black Handers walked into Colo- simo's café and told him that unless he instantly paid them 25,000 dollars he would be executed. Colosimo agreed to deliver the money next day at four-thirty in the afternoon under a railroad viaduct in Archer Avenue. Instead of Colosimo and the package, waiting were Torrio and three other men, who met the blackmailers with a mass blast from four sawn-off shotguns.

Torrio rose rapidly to a position of authority on ColOsimo's staff, and in turn he recruited Al Capone. Torrio was a Sicilian, and, as he rose in the gang, rose also in the hierarchy of the Mafia until he was admitted to full status as a capo mafioso. Such an honour was not accessible to Capone, for he was an Italian and therefore not eligible to membership of the closed order; but, as his abilities became more evident and his power swelled, the Chicago capi mafiosi increas- ingly were prepared to accept his leadership in the area of practical crime, consult him and work in partnership with him. The point came when Capone sat in at Mafia inner council conferences, supervised the appointment of new dons and controlled, at one remove, the Unione Siciliana.

Yet in the dark depths of these weedy waters there was incessant intrigue and dissension, for it was an unusual situation for a non-Sicilian to have the influence and sway within the Mafia that Capone had. His main antagonist was Joe Aiello, of the Aiello brothers, a partner of Bugs Moran, Capone's main enemy during the beer wars.