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 Eddie, while on their extortion collection rounds, to check pier superintendents for such a spot. Frank McCarthy, the Caledonia Lines’ pier boss, told the boys that his company’s facility at 25 Bridge Street would be available. McCarthy had failed to tell Ferry and Eddie about the fertilizer shipment that would be stored in the warehouse over the weekend.
“How stupid can you guys be?” Lovett scolded Needles and Charleston before the meeting got underway. “What are you trying to pull, setting us up in this horsehit place?”
“I swear to you, Bill,” Ferry pleaded. “McCarthy never told us anything about the crap he put in here. It wasn’t in the warehouse when we came here a couple days ago. He only told us that nobody was gonna be here, that we could use the office, and he gave us the key.”
Lovett shook his head disgustedly. He walked to a chair and stood on it.
“Fellas,” he said raspily, “I can’t stand this smell any more than you can. But there’s no choice. So hold your breaths and listen to what I have to say. It won’t take long.”
“I called you here because of what happened to Jimmy O’Toole, to Kevin Donovan, and to Mary Reilly,” he said in a voice choked with emotion. “They were killed by those dirty ginzos who didn’t even have the guts to pull the job themselves. They hired out-of-town hit men to do their dirty work. That’s because their own people don’t have the balls to handle their problems: they’ve got to bring in outsiders when they want to spill our blood.”
Lovett slammed his clenched right fist into the palm of his left hand.
“We aren’t like that, no sir,” he shouted, his face knotting with rage. “At least when we have problems we take care of them ourselves!”
He let a moment pass. As he sensed that his words had sunk in, he went on: “You better believe it that we Irishmen aren’t going to let those lousy wops get away with what they did at Sagaman’s Hall because—”
He was interrupted by a wave of applause, whistles, and shouts. The gathering approved of what he was saying.
“Tell us how we’re going to get those lousy ginzos!” a voice sounded as the tumult died down. That call was echoed a half-dozen times by others in the room.
“Okay,” Lovett said tensely. “I think there’s one man among us who’s got a right to speak his mind and tell us how he’d like to get back at those murdering Black Handers. I’m speaking about Dick Lonergan.”
Wild Bill struck an emotional note which all at once precipitated another outburst. As the applause and cheers subsided, Lonergan limped his way to the chair on which Lovett stood. Wild Bill relinquished it to Pegleg. All eyes were on Lonergan. He was the sympathetic hero; one of those who