It was a racket straight out of “The Sopranos.”
Sicily at the end of the 19th century: The estates of wealthy landowners were being attacked by greedy bandits.
Fearing for the safety of their homes and citrus groves, the landowners turned to local mafias for protection.
The irony? The mafiosos hired to protect those Sicilian orchards were likely behind the original attacks.
“It was a schizophrenic protection racket,” writes former Gambino chieftan Louis Ferrante in “Borgata: Rise of Empire: A History of the American Mafia” (Pegasus Books, Jan. 2). “A mafia don would typically cause a problem for a landowner then offer to fix it for a price.”
Such shakedowns weren’t the worst thing the powerful Sicilian mob did back in their early days. They murdered, too, even high-ranking officials.
In 1892 former Palermo mayor Emanuele Notarbartolo wouldn’t share the water on his estate with local gangsters nor hire their workers.
So he was stabbed to death and his body was tossed from a moving train.
Sicily’s Cosa Nostra (“our thing”) also had a penchant for kidnappings.
In 1876, for instance, a Brit named John Rose — whose father owned a sulfur mine near Palermo — was held for ransom by local mafioso Giuseppe Esposito.
When the Roses didn’t immediately pay up, a note from John’s kidnappers included his ear. A follow-up note included John’s second ear before the Rose family finally gave in.
Esposito was fingered for that crime, but he stayed one step ahead of the carabinieri — the Italian police — by lamming it to America.
He settled in New Orleans, a city declared by a local newspaper in 1870 as “infested with ‘notorious Sicilian murderers, counterfeiters and burglars.’”
That was hard to argue in a town where 100 Mafia vendetta murders shook the city in just one year. They weren’t delicate crimes either, Ferrante writes.
“Sometimes only heads and torsos were found.”
More than 5 million Italians emigrated to the United States between 1880-1930 — including some 1.5 million from Sicily.
Many, like Esposito, wound up in New Orleans, but far more, notes Ferrante, were cramped into ghettos along New York’s Lower East Side.
Despite facing rampant discrimination, most Italian immigrants avoided trouble in America. Others, however, stuck to their Sicilian roots.
Those roots? As Charles “Lucky” Luciano would later say, “Half the people I met in Sicily were in the mafia.”
The New York Mafia’s Sicilian roots were evident in 1903 when on 11th Street in lower Manhattan a wooden barrel was found with a dead body inside.
The corpse was “shoved in . . . after being folded in half like a cheap cot,” Ferrante writes.
Onion peels and Toscano cigar butts along the barrel’s bottom helped New York police trace it to a Little Italy cafe protected by mob boss Ignazio Lupo (a k a “Lupo the Wolf”).
Lupo had fled a murder rap in Sicily and landed in New York in 1900, where he owned an Italian grocery on Elizabeth Street along with a nearby construction company.
But his real power came from running a “borgata” (“family”) founded on horse-thieving, loan-sharking, counterfeiting, and extortion.
Lupo had imported Giuseppe Morello from Sicily to work as his underboss. Known as “The Claw” because of a deformed hand, the Corleone-born Morello was fleeing Sicilian murder charges himself.
A Sing Sing snitch helped the NYPD identify the barrel murderer as Morello henchman “Petto the Ox.”
Apparently, Morello had stiffed a Buffalo man out of some cash. Insults were exchanged before Morello invited the Buffalonian to make peace at his “Little Italy” eatery.
Instead, Morello had Petto stab their guest in the jugular. His body was left on the street as a warning.
Anyone who knew anything about the crime clammed up in court though, so with no hard evidence “the Wolf” and “the Claw” and “the Ox” all walked away scot-free.
And with that, writes Ferrante, “the New York Mafia had gotten away with its first highly publicized murder.”
As Ferrante continues in “Borgata,” going to the cops about the mob has never been a good idea — even nearly a century after the barrel murder.
Take the 1979 case of a Jordanian immigrant named Khaled Daoud, who was living his American dream by legally reselling used cars in the Middle East.
When the New York mob started stealing Daoud’s cars, he foolishly alerted the authorities.
An NYPD mole revealed to his mafia connections about Daoud’s complaint and soon the Jordanian was discovered dead in a Newark body shop.
A friend who’d accompanied Daoud was whacked, too, with his private parts chopped off and stuffed in his mouth. Don’t talk, was the message.
This was the Sicilian way — whether in Little Italy or the Old World original.
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