My Washington Times On Crime Column On The Italian Squad, Part Two

The Washington Times published part two of my On Crime column on Paul Moses’ The Italian Squad: The True Story of the Immigrant Cops Who Fought the Rise of the Mafia. 

You can read the column via the below link or the below text:

BOOK REVIEW: 'The Italian Squad,' part two - Washington Times

 

As I noted in part one of my coverage of Paul Moses’ “The Italian Squad: The True Story of the Immigrant Cops Who Fought the Rise of the Mafia,” I’m half Italian, and I grew up in South Philadelphia’s Little Italy.

 

I knew many future Cosa Nostra members as a kid. As a writer, I’ve interviewed many Cosa Nostra members, including Philip Leonetti, the former underboss of the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra crime family who became a cooperating government witness; Ralph Natale, the former boss of that crime family who became a cooperating government witness; and Michael Franzese, a former New York Colombo Cosa Nostra crime family captain who walked away from the criminal life and became a Christian public speaker and author.

 

I also know many Italian police officers.

 

So with my background, I was interested in “The Italian Squad.” I contacted Mr. Moses (seen in the below photo) and asked him who the most interesting and prominent Italian Squad members were.

 

“After Joseph Petrosino, three of the detectives he’d worked closely with took center stage at various times. All three — [Anthony] Vachris, Lt. Charles Corrao and Sgt. Michael Fiaschetti — were nationally celebrated sleuths. Vachris (seen in the above photo) completed the mission Petrosino was on in Italy when he was murdered.

“He was an impressive commander, but throughout his career he ran into political obstacles. A commissioner transferred him to patrol in far-off City Island in the Bronx — a four-hour commute from his home in Brooklyn — in retribution for speaking up. Corrao was the first recipient of the NYPD’s highest award, the Medal of Honor; he snuffed out a bomb’s burning fuse in a tenement. Fiaschetti was a national celebrity for, among other cases, using his sources in New York to help convict the killers of four police officers in Akron, Ohio.”

 

Was the Black Hand in America affiliated with the Cosa Nostra in Sicily?

 

“No. The first thing to know about the Black Hand was that it wasn’t a single organization, but rather a brand name that different groups of thugs used, aware that drawing a black hand on a blackmail letter would terrify the recipient. The Italian Squad detectives often made that point to reporters, but it didn’t sink in.

“There was one gang with ties to the Mafia in Sicily, however. Ignazio Lupo and Giuseppe Morello, brothers-in-law who both fled from criminal charges in Sicily, were the leaders. The evidence indicates they were probably responsible for the murder of Petrosino in Sicily, working with a leading Sicilian mafioso. No one was convicted of the murder, but the Secret Service sent Lupo and Morello to prison for counterfeiting.”

 

Did the Italian Squad make a difference in New York?

 

“It made a big difference for the many people who found a unit of savvy detectives willing to take them and their crime problems seriously. It helped to break up some serious gangs that were starting to grow into multi-tasking criminal enterprises, but ultimately, the Italian Squad wasn’t able to stop the rise of an American Mafia. It was shut down in 1922, just when needed most: Thanks to Prohibition, the gangs were becoming rich and powerful.”

 

Why was the Italian Squad disbanded?

 

“One reason was that leaders of the Italian community, who’d initially wanted the squad when it was created in 1904, began to push back against having an ‘Italian’ squad. After all, there were major gangs from other ethnicities, but no specific squads for them. Another reason is that it lost all sponsors in the internal police politics.”

 

Like me, you are part Italian. What was the most surprising thing you discovered about immigrant Italians in your research?

 

“Yes, my ancestry is Italian on my mother’s side. My grandfather was from Cerasi, a village in the Aspromonte mountains in Calabria, and my grandmother from Laurenzana, a town in Basilicata. (Both died before I was born.) Writing this book further heightened my appreciation for what they went through to establish themselves in America; they lived on Mott Street, right in the middle of many of the crimes I describe.

 

“From researching this book and the previous one on the Irish and Italians, I was surprised to see just how much Italian immigrants were despised. I knew, of course, that it was difficult for them, but saw that under eugenic theory that was widely accepted at the time, they were viewed as if inherently unfit to be Americans. It’s humbling, but I also came to appreciate the innate sense of dignity those Italian immigrants had. Through their focus on the family and willingness to work hard, they rose above it.”

 

Readers interested in history and a good crime story will enjoy “The Italian Squad.”

 

 Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction and thrillers.

You can read part one of my On Crime column on The Italian Squad via the below link:

Paul Davis On Crime: My Washington Times On Crime Column On 'The Italian Squad: The True Story Of The Immigrant Cops Who Fought The Rise Of The Mafia,' Part One 

My Washington Times On Crime Column On 'The Italian Squad: The True Story Of The Immigrant Cops Who Fought The Rise Of The Mafia,' Part One

The Washington Times published part one of my On Crime column on Paul Moses’ The Italian Squad: The True Story of the Immigrant Cops Who Fought the Rise of the Mafia.

 

You can read the column via the below link or the below text:

BOOK REVIEW: 'The Italian Squad' - Washington Times

 

Being half Italian and growing up in an Italian American neighborhood in South Philadelphia, I was aware of organized crime at an early age. Back in the 1960s, I lived around the corner from Angelo Bruno, who was then the boss of the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra crime family.

 

I also lived around the corner from Richard Zappile, the Italian American Philadelphia chief of detectives who fought the Cosa Nostra and later served as deputy police commissioner. There were and are far more Italian police officers than Italian mobsters.

 

So I was interested in Paul Moses’ “The Italian Squad: The True Story of the Immigrant Cops Who Fought the Rise of the Mafia,” and I contacted him and asked why he wrote the book.

 

“It spins off from my previous book, ‘An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians’ (NYU Press, 2015). That book explores how these two ethnic groups, once so antagonistic to each other, eventually came together. Part of that story was about the early Italian officers in the Irish-dominated NYPD. I focused a chapter on Lt. Joseph Petrosino (seen in the above photo), founding commander of the Italian Squad. He did not have an easy time in getting respect within the department, but eventually was celebrated and then mourned by the entire city after he was murdered while on an undercover mission to Sicily in 1909.

 

“Petrosino’s life and death have been well covered in many books, some movies, and even comic serials. But I saw that the history of what happened to the Italian Squad after his assassination was not as well known. I wanted to write it because it’s both an exciting crime story and a revealing window on the immigrant experience in America. It resonates in today’s debates about immigrants and crime, and police-community relations. It’s a true-crime story that explores social trends that continue to affect us today.”

How did you research the book?

“Newspaper archives from the period I covered, 1904 to 1922, were certainly important. But over-reliance on the newspapers has sometimes skewed the historical record, I found. So a lot of other sources were needed to figure out what really happened.

“These included transcripts of trials and other government proceedings; records that Joseph Petrosino’s family kept; some records, including a diary, kept by the family of Petrosino’s successor and friend, Lt. Anthony Vachris; prison records; State Department correspondence (since New York police communicated with Italian authorities through diplomatic channels); daily reports of Secret Service agents; archives such as the records of the U.S. consul in Palermo; City Hall correspondence; annual police reports, and so on.

“The NYPD’s records from the period are mostly lost, but there was a lot of detail on personnel, discipline and other police matters published in The City Record, a sort of Federal Register.”

Why did the NYPD establish the Italian Squad?

“Two reasons. First, the newspapers hyped Italian crime, instilling in the public the false idea that there was a massive ‘Black Hand’ crime syndicate directed by mob bosses in Sicily or Naples. They demanded action, creating a political headache for the mayor.

“Second, there were some serious crimes afflicting the Italian community — blackmail, enforced through bombings and kidnappings targeted at immigrant Italians who’d managed some small success, such as owning a grocery store. The Italian community demanded better policing — more Italian-speaking officers, for starters.”

Why did the immigrant Italian police officers join the squad and agree to fight the Black Hand?

“Joseph Petrosino and his successors felt that the entire Italian immigrant community was being tainted as crime-prone because of crimes committed by a small minority. They knew that their fellow immigrants by and large just wanted to improve their lives by working hard.

“Because of language barriers and perhaps indifference, the NYPD was failing to protect the community. And most Italian immigrants wouldn’t cooperate with law enforcement, either, partly because of their experiences with police in Italy, and partly out of recognition that the criminal justice system in New York was stacked against them.

“The mission that Petrosino began and passed on to his successors was to be a bridge between an Italian community that distrusted the police and a police department that was very skeptical of the immigrants flooding into the city.”

How was the Italian Squad perceived by Tammany Hall politicians?

“Tammany did not like the idea of having an Italian Squad. Tammany leaders had a lot of influence on the Police Department, and that helped protect their gambling interests. The Italian Squad was a wild card; its commanders generally reported to the commissioner or a deputy commissioner, rather than through the ranks of the Detective Bureau.”

In part two, Mr. Moses discusses the Black Hand and Cosa Nostra in America.

• Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction and thrillers.

• • •

THE ITALIAN SQUAD: THE TRUE STORY OF THE IMMIGRANT COPS WHO FOUGHT THE RISE OF THE MAFIA
By Paul Moses
NYU, 304 pages, $29.95 

Note: Below is a photo of former Philadelphia Cosa Nostra crime family boss Angelo Bruno and a photo of the former Philadelphia Police chief of detectives Richard Zappile.

  

The Legendary NYPD Cop Who Broke Through "Italian Barrier"

Michael Kane at the New York Post looks back at the legendary Italian-American NYPD officer Giuseppe "Joe" Petrosino.

“Why Italians Are Useless in Police Work.”

That was the headline on an 1896 editorial in the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper — the premise being that newly arrived Italian immigrants would never bring to justice the criminal elements within their own community. One captain quoted said, “They are in dread of the vengeance of the Mafia.”

But the more likely reason was that the Irish, who overwhelming comprised the NYPD, were protective of holding onto their jobs. That was also true of dock work, construction, really any manual labor or civic work they’d claimed after their own wave of immigration 50 years earlier amid the Potato Famine of the 1840s.

No job was more fraternally Irish than police work. At the time of that newspaper article, there were a mere three Italian officers in a Brooklyn police force of 1,700. 

Enter Giuseppe Petrosino, a dock laborer who moved garbage onto barges. Petrosino, who’d become better known as Joseph, disapproved of the nonstop extortion rackets of the Black Hand, the turn-of-the-century precursor to a more organized Mafia to come. (The moniker coming from threatening extortion letters to businessmen “signed” with only an ominous handprint of black ink.)

With the backing of an Irish police captain for whom he’d briefly served as an informant, Petrosino joined the force in October 1883.

“Petrosino, though destined to become one of the NYPD’s greatest heroes, started out as an outsider,” writes journalist Paul Moses in his book “An Unlikely Union.” It took a decade for his first promotion from patrolman, yet all the while the short, scrappy man of few words continued to get collars.

In his first year after finally being promoted by then-NYPD boss Theodore Roosevelt to detective, Petrosino made 98 arrests, busted two murderers and even freed an Italian immigrant who was a week away from execution at Sing Sing by getting the real killer to confess.

His growing renown in getting the cuffs on killers even led to a backwardly respectful call from his Irish bosses when stumped by a murder puzzler: “Get the Dago!”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://nypost.com/2015/06/28/meet-the-detective-who-broke-nypds-italian-barrier/