A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

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.
On 14 April 1903, a barrel on a vacant lot in Manhattan proved to contain a corpse that was almost
decapitated; the man had been stabbed seventeen times. One of New York’s best detectives, Joseph
Petrosino, finally identified the corpse as a small-time crook named Benedetto Madonia. When
Madonia’s watch was found in a pawn shop, the man who pawned it - Tomasso Petto, known as
Petto the Ox - was arrested. It emerged that both Petto and Madonia were working for a ring of
Italian counterfeiters, and that their job was to distribute the forged money. Madonia had been
pocketing more than his share of the proceeds; so he had been murdered and left in a public place
as a warning to other members of the gang. The nature of the crime attracted wide publicity. And
once again, the public felt thoroughly frustrated when the case against the accused collapsed
because witnesses suddenly became forgetful - even the dead man’s wife and son declined to
testify.
The problem, of course, stemmed from the fact that the criminal syndicates had been tolerated in
Italy because they were opposed to rulers that the people hated. This anarchistic spirit transplanted
well to America, where the ‘dagoes’ were looked down on by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. And
in America, the land of opportunity, many previously poor Italians became relatively affluent, and
so aroused the envy of those who remained poor. Extortion was an easy - and almost foolproof -
way of parting the better-off from their money. A threat to kidnap a child or dynamite a home was
enough to make most Italians feel that money was a small price to pay for peace of mind. Even
criminals were not immune. The head of the counterfeit gang, Ignazio Saietta (known as Lupo the
Wolf) divulged at one point that he had paid $10,000 over the years for ‘protection’. He was as
vulnerable as anyone because his own criminal activities made him unwilling to go to the police.
In 1907, the New Orleans Mafia was again in the national press. Seven-year-old Walter Lamana,
son of a successful undertaker and landlord, walked off with a man who promised him ice-cream; a
few hours later, his father received a ransom demand for $6,000. Italian businessmen decided it was
time to put an end to the power of the Black Hand and formed a committee. Various arrests were
made, but the men had to be released for lack of evidence. Then another Italian businessman who
had received an extortion letter - demanding $2,000 - brought it to the police, telling them that he
was sure it had been written by a man named Tony Gendusa. The police compared it to the Lamana
ransom note and decided they were in the same handwriting. Tony’s brother Frank was arrested
and, under a certain amount of ‘persuasion’ from the police, admitted that Tony had been involved
in the kidnapping. A group of vigilantes called on a farmer named Campisciano - whose name had
also been mentioned - and induced him to talk by the use of a time-honoured method: they bound
his hands, placed a noose round his neck, and pulled it tight over the branch of a tree. Campisciano
broke down and led them to the small corpse that was wrapped in a blanket, lying in the water of