BOOK: Immigrant NYC cops ‘The Italian Squad’ fought the mafia, anarchists and bigotry

If you’re going up against the mob, you’d better have a gang.

The New York Police Department put one together back in 1904. New immigrants, and new kinds of crime, were flooding the city and the old Irish cops on the beat didn’t understand either. It was time to launch a special force.

They called it “The Italian Squad.”

Paul Moses’ latest book pays homage to these officers in “The Italian Squad: The True Story of the Immigrant Cops Who Fought the Rise of the Mafia.” It’s also a story of ethnic stereotypes, immigration battles, and police brutality.

It began one sweltering turn-of-the-century summer, as the city faced a shocking wave of violence.

“A grocery at 252 Elizabeth Street was demolished in a bombing,” Moses writes, “A beer party at 456 151st Street ended with an explosion that injured twenty people; Joseph Stravalli’s barber shop at 417 Third Avenue was bombed to bits; eight-year-old Tony Mannino’s kidnapping in Brooklyn was national news.”

Prejudiced politicians and newspapers blamed the victims. They claimed immigration was the problem. Maybe it was time to shut it down and start sending people back to Europe, starting with the most recent arrivals.

“We have too many bad Italians already,” complained the New York Times. Although it admitted some good people might be deported along with the bad, “that will make no difference,” it insisted. “Protect ourselves we must.”

Adding to the fear were reports of a new kind of gang. It had first appeared in 1903, when a Brooklyn contractor named Nicola Cappiello received a note saying if he didn’t pay $10,000 in cash — a small fortune at the time — his house would be dynamited.

The note was signed Mano Nero — Italian for Black Hand.

The police nabbed the extortionists, and they were quickly sent to prison. But newspapers spread the story of this secret organization. Copycat criminals crowing is hardly new. Other gangsters began bragging they, too, were with the Black Hand, seeing the fear it struck.

“It was an early chapter in the years of sensationalized and often inaccurate coverage of the so-called Black Hand, which the papers thoroughly confused with the Sicilian Mafia and the Neapolitan Camorra,” Moses writes. “All leading to the notion that Italians were inherently criminal and therefore unfit to become American citizens.”

So, in 1904, the NYPD founded the Italian Squad, made up of about two dozen Italian-American police officers.

Its first head was Joseph Petrosino, who immediately faced three challenges. He had to win a frightened community’s trust, and break the criminals’ power. Plus, Petrosino had to convince the press to stop blaming the victims. “Ninety-seven percent of Italian immigrants were law-abiding,” he insisted.

“I wanted to give it to them straight,” Petrosino said of one frustrating interview with a Harper’s editor. “But they wouldn’t even notice.”

Still, the Squad fought hard. By now, even celebrities were at risk. In 1910, opera superstar Enrico Caruso’s life was threatened, the gangsters demanding $15,000 to ensure his safety. Caruso paid, but the Squad staked out the drop, recovered the money, and arrested the conspirators.

A far more gruesome case involved 20-year-old Maddalena Finizio. Fleeing an arranged marriage, Maddalena and her true love, Gaetano Finizio, wed quickly and fled for America in 1909, accompanied by Maddalena’s cousin, Carminio.

The trio headed upstate, where Gaetano had heard of a job. There, strangers noticed the greenhorns, and offered to show them a cheap hotel. Instead, they led them to a deserted place where they shot the two men, fatally, and beat and raped the bride. They even stole her wedding ring.

Bravely, Maddalena went to the local sheriff. He had heard the criminals were from the city, so he contacted the Italian Squad. They tracked one thug to Brooklyn, the other to East Harlem. Maddalena went to New York to testify. The ringleader was convicted, and sent to the electric chair.

In an O. Henry twist, the man Maddalena was supposed to have married had since come to America. The two now reconnected, wed, and settled happily in New Jersey.

Sadly, there was no happy ending for Petrosino. After years of grueling work in New York, the fiercely dedicated cop sailed to Italy to forge an alliance with officials there. If the NYPD had access to Italian records, he explained, they could turn back immigrant criminals at Ellis Island — and deport the ones already here.

But on March 12, 1909, Petrosino was fatally shot in Sicily. His murder was never solved.

The Squad continued under new leadership, and continued to have great successes — sometimes at the expense of civil liberties. Even at a time when the third degree was common, the Italian Squad’s interrogations were famously brutal, employing blackjacks, rubber hoses, even baseball bats.

Yet Italian-Americans continued to be victimized.

On May 24, 1921, Joseph Varotta, a 5-year-old in a hand-me-down sailor suit, was snatched as he left his family’s Greenwich Village apartment. Soon, a ransom demand arrived: $2,500, or the child dies. The Varottas didn’t have that kind of money, although neighborhood gossips incorrectly claimed the family had just received a big insurance settlement.

Suspecting the kidnappers knew the family, the Italian Squad sent in an undercover agent — the only Italian-American woman on the force, Rae Nicoletti. With the Varottas’ cooperation, she moved into their E. 13th Street apartment, where they introduced her around as their cousin from Detroit. Nicoletti watched, listened — and waited.

Soon, a helpful neighbor, Anthony Marino, arrived, offering to act as go-between with the gangsters. Tearfully, Nicoletti told him her cousins didn’t have that kind of money. She said she might be able to scrape together $600. All right, Marino agreed, but don’t tell the police.

He didn’t realize he just had.

When Marino sent a friend to collect the cash, the Italian Squad was waiting. Eventually five suspects, including Marino, were hauled down to the police station. The cops beat them for 12 hours. They even let Joseph’s enraged father help. Still, the criminals refused to talk.

On June 11, Joseph Varotta’s tiny corpse was found more than 20 miles north of the city, floating in the Hudson.

The crime was solved but the case was a mess. One confession was so obviously coerced, it was thrown out; one suspect had his charges dropped. Although three suspects received life sentences, and another was committed to an asylum, rumor was the masterminds were never caught.

In 1922, Police Commissioner Richard Enright declared The Italian Squad unnecessary. “Conditions which seemed to require the formation of the nationality organization of detectives some years ago have to a large extent disappeared,” the New York Times explained. It was time for “different methods and supervision.”

Besides, there were new enemies to confront — violent anarchists and political agitators. The Italian Squad would be merged into the Bomb Squad. Its special mission was ended, too — too soon.

“This change in ‘methods and supervision’ would, in effect, halt aggressive investigation of Italian organized crime in New York,” Moses writes. “Just as it was growing powerful, on the way to morphing into an American Mafia that would do much to corrupt business, labor and politics — and do long-term damage to the reputation of all Italian-Americans.”