Italy was another country where political unrest and foreign rule made organised crime respectable. In Sicily in the Middle Ages, the word mafia meant disdain for anything foreign; over the centuries it came to mean criminals who defied the foreign authorities (in the nineteenth century the letters were believed to stand for: Morte Alia Francia Italia Anela – Death to France is Italy’s Cry). In Naples, organised crime went under the name of the Camorra; in Calabria, the Fibbia; the Stoppaglieri in Monreale. (Anyone who wants to understand how this kind of lawlessness developed should read Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed -I Promessi Sposi – set in the 1620s.) The Italian tendency to indulge in blood feuds that sometimes went on for generations fostered the spirit of lawlessness. Yet, oddly enough, it was Garibaldi’s unification of Italy in 1860 that turned the Mafia into a full-scale criminal organisation. One reason was that the Mafia placed itself at the disposal of Garibaldi when he invaded Sicily (because, as one historian says, it could not afford to be on the losing side), and so achieved a kind of respectability. Besides, the Mafia constituted a sort of private army of mercenaries that could be hired by landowners – or the central government – to keep the peasants in order. And now that Italy at last belonged to the Italians, the mafiosi could forget political quarrels and concentrate on the business of extortion and intimidation. The criminal was no longer a social outcast, living in the mountains; he had become a force in society. By the late 1860s, the Mafia had organised itself into a society with its own rules and initiation rites. (On the west coast of America, the same thing was happening with the Chinese ‘tongs’.) In fact, the aim of all these criminal brotherhoods was to be a kind of secret local government. They made farmers and small landowners pay taxes (later to be called ‘protection’), destroyed the property of those who refused, and corrupted judges and police officers to prevent criminals from being successfully prosecuted. They developed the rule of Omertá – meaning the code of silence, the refusal to talk to authority, even when dying from an assassin’s bullet or a stiletto. The Mafia leaders soon discovered that crime was not the best way to make a living. It was far easier to rent an estate from an absentee landlord, then let it to peasants at an extortionate rate. By the 1890s, the Mafia had become a kind of criminal aristocracy in Sicily. By the turn of the century, the leader, Don Vito Cascio Ferro, was a kind of benevolent despot.
It is Ferro who is suspected of organising the importation of the Mafia into America. The most popular city for Italian immigrants was New Orleans, which had a climate much like that of southern Italy. It was there that one of Sicily’s best known brigands, Giuseppe Esposito, decided to settle in 1880. Esposito had also made the discovery that, even for a mafioso, violence must be used with caution. In November 1876, his gang had kidnapped an English curate named John Forester Rose and demanded a £5,000 ransom. Rose’s wife declined to pay, and Esposito sent her one of her husband’s ears. A week later, she received his other ear, and a note telling her that unless she paid up the next package would contain his nose. She paid, but there was an international scandal like the one that followed the Dilessi murders; the Italian government sent its carabinieri looking for the gang, and after a battle nine were killed and fourteen captured. Esposito succeeded in bribing his way out of jail, but decided that Sicily was no place for him and sailed for New York. Soon New Orleans, with its large Italian population, proved more attractive than the inhospitable north. But Esposito was filled with contempt for the relatively unambitious scale of lawlessness in New Orleans, and began to apply rules of Mafia organisation. He would undoubtedly have become America’s first ‘godfather’ if it had not been for the persistence of the Sicilian authorities, who instituted extradition proceedings. In July 1881, two police officers – Mike and Dave Hennessey – arrested Esposito, who was betrayed by a friend named Tony Labousse. A few days later, Labousse encountered a friend of Esposito’s named Gaetano Arditto, and shots were exchanged which resulted in the wounding of Arditto and the death of Labousse. It was probably America’s first Mafia killing. Arditto was tried and sentenced for the murder, and Esposito was returned to a Sicilian jail. But the Mafia organisation in New Orleans persisted, and led to many more killings before the end of the century.
After Esposito’s departure (he spent the rest of his life in prison), the New Orleans criminal fraternity – at least, its Italian section – was organised by two brothers, Charles and Tony Matranga, the latter a saloon keeper. Like their Sicilian counterparts, the Matrangas angled for political power, and expanded cautiously into ‘legitimate’ business. Apart from the Matrangas, one of the most influential Italian families in New Orleans was headed by three brothers named Provenzano; their contracts with shipping companies gave them a monopoly on loading and unloading fruit at the docks; they employed several hundred Italian workers, and paid them relatively high wages – forty cents an hour for day work and sixty cents for night work. In 1886, a new shipping firm called Matranga and Locascio appeared at the docks and began competing with the Provenzanos. With their strong-arm methods, the Matrangas took only two years to wrest control from their rivals. The Provenzanos decided to retaliate. On 5 May 1890, Tony Matranga, Tony Locascio and three other men finished supervising the unloading of a banana boat and drove off in a fruit wagon; suddenly, shots were fired from ambush, and three men, including Matranga, were wounded – Matranga’s leg had to be amputated.
The chief of police, Dave Hennessey – who had arrested Esposito nine years earlier – took charge of the case. The Provenzanos were his friends, but the evidence indicated that they were responsible for the ambush, and two of the brothers – and three of their employees – were arrested and put on trial. But Hennessey was aware that the Matrangas were just as much to blame. He determined to end the power of the Mafia in New Orleans, and wrote to the police in Rome for photographs of Esposito bandits who were believed to be members of the Matranga gang. He received an anonymous letter warning him that he would be killed if he persisted, but he ignored it. The Provenzanos were found guilty, but their lawyer succeeded in winning a retrial. Hennessey announced that he would appear as a witness in favour of the Provenzanos, and would produce evidence about the Mafia in New Orleans. (His brother Mike had been killed – allegedly by the Mafia – in Houston, and Dave Hennessey was out for revenge.) On the night of 15 October 1890, Hennessey was walking home through heavy rain, accompanied by a police captain; he and his companion said goodnight, and a few seconds later, several shots sounded. The police captain rushed back to find his chief dying. Asked ‘Who did it?’ Hennessey answered: ‘Dagoes.’ He died a few hours later in hospital.
New Orleans was outraged. There was talk of lynching, and some eminent Italian families published advertisements in the newspapers, disavowing all connection with the killing. Mayor Shakespeare took over the case, and told the police: ‘Scour the Italian neighbourhood – arrest every Italian if necessary.’ Nineteen Italians were arrested, including a fourteen-year-old boy who was alleged to have signalled Hennessey’s arrival. Their trial opened in February 1891. With a single exception – Huembert Nelli in The Business of Crime – writers on the case agree that the evidence against the Italians was overwhelming. The chief witness for the defence was a shady private detective named Dominick O’Malley, who had been indicted several times for bribing jurors and intimidating witnesses. One of the accused admitted in court that he had been present at a meeting where the death of Hennessey had been decided. Yet in spite of this, the jury declared an acquittal. There was helpless rage among the American population of New Orleans, and rejoicing among the Italians, whose market stalls were adorned with bunting. The accused were taken back to prison for their own protection, but allowed to wander freely; they celebrated that night with Chianti and spaghetti. Two days later, angry citizens marched on the jail, overcame the guards and found eleven of the fourteen Italians. Most were clubbed to death; one was hanged from a lamp-post. Whether or not they were guilty of the murder, their end caused an abrupt reduction in Mafia activities in New Orleans.
The case served to make Americans aware that the Mafia had imported Italian methods of extortion and intimidation; for now, with the Mafia’s power in New Orleans temporarily broken, many New Orleans businessmen of Italian origin admitted that they had been blackmailed into paying ‘protection’. Meanwhile, the Italian crime syndicate was spreading quietly all over America. In 1903, it acquired a new name when a Brooklyn contractor, Nicola Cappiello, went to the police to report that he had been receiving threatening letters signed ‘The Black Hand’ (mano nera). He had already paid a thousand dollars, but the friends who had agreed to act as intermediaries had returned saying that the criminals were demanding another three thousand. Realising that they intended to bleed him dry, Cappiello secretly contacted the Brooklyn police. Their investigation revealed that the ‘friends’ were also the extortioners, and all were tried and found guilty.