The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia by Mike Dash

Author:Mike Dash
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Criminals, Social Science, Fiction, United States - 19th Century, Social History, Criminals & Outlaws, Espionage, Organized Crime, Murder, True Crime, Turn of the Century, United States - 20th Century (1900-1945), Serial Killers, Science, United States, History, General, Biography & Autobiography, Mafia, Biography, Criminology
ISBN: 9780345523570
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2009-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

IT WAS THE Herald that announced the news, on February 20, 1909.

Theodore Bingham had taken stock of the situation in Little Italy and decided on a radical solution, the New York newspaper reported. There would be no further expansion of the Italian Squad, no revisions to existing regulations. Instead, a brand-new squad had been created, a “secret service” branch of the Police Department, and Petrosino had been appointed to head it. The lieutenant had been given fourteen men and instructed to use them “to crush the Black Hand and anarchists of the city”—extortionists and political radicals alike being more than willing to use bombs in order to achieve their aims. That was not all, however, for the Secret Service branch was to have a far wider jurisdiction than the Italian Squad. Bingham reserved the right to deploy Petrosino and his men “for any purpose that [he] may see fit”—which, as the Herald noted in a worried aside, meant, at least in theory, that “New York now has a secret police service similar to those in Paris and other national capitals.”

For the moment, though, the Secret Service branch was to be devoted to Italian crime, and it was to work covertly. Petrosino aside, none of its officers were named; nor were its men to be subject to scrutiny by the NYPD. Petrosino was to answer directly to the commissioner, and Bingham had secured thirty thousand dollars of private funding, almost certainly from the same rich Italians who had tried and failed to set up the White Hand society seeking to take a stand against Italian criminals. It was enough to keep his new squad running for at least a year without the need to account to New York’s aldermen, or anybody else, as to what the cash was being spent on.

What persuaded Petrosino to accept a transfer to the Secret Service branch is not known. Quite probably he was persuaded by the commissioner’s promise that the new squad would be better equipped to tackle Italian crime and that someone would be sent to Europe to obtain the longed-for penal certificates. If so, the lieutenant’s enthusiasm failed to survive the general’s next bombshell. Bingham wanted Petrosino himself to travel to Italy.

Going home as an important emissary, nearly forty years after arriving in the United States, ought to have appealed to the detective; it might have been seen as one of the great challenges of his career, perhaps even as an opportunity to recuperate from his exhausting round of work in Manhattan. As it was, though, the offer was not welcome. The mission demanded a diplomat, someone capable of establishing warm relations with the Italian police, which Petrosino assuredly was not. It might also be dangerous. Bingham’s man knew perfectly well that plenty of his former adversaries were now at large in Italy, particularly Sicily, and that many would be only too pleased to renew acquaintance with an old enemy on their home ground.

In truth, though, the reason why the detective preferred to stay at home was more personal.

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