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four days. But not, I swear this week’s time not even the dust of your family will exist. With regards, believe me to be your friend.’
    Usually these letters used a mockingly deferential form of Sicilian, though sometimes they were more blunt:
‘You got some cash. I need $1,000. You place the $100 bills in an envelope and place it underneath a board in the north-east corner of 69th Street and Euclid Avenue at eleven o’clock tonight. If you place the money there you will live. If you don’t, you die. If you report this to the police, I’ll kill you when I get out. They may save the money, but they won’t save your life.’
    Most people paid up. They felt that the authorities could not protect them, especially if they spoke no English. Instead, they armed themselves. According to a police report: ‘Ninety-five out of every one hundred Italians are armed with some sort of deadly weapon.’

    Gang members in an alley known as ‘Bandits’ Roost’ in Manhattan’s Little Italy around 1900. Only the brave passed by this way.
    The Italian Squad
    The police took the situation seriously in New York. First of all, they set up a special Italian Squad under Detective Sergeant Giuseppe ‘Joe’ Petrosino. An immigrant from the Salerno region, Petrosino had dealt with extortion rackets earlier in his career with the NYPD. In 1902, he accompanied prosperous wholesale tailor Stephen Carmenciti to a rendezvous at which he had arranged to pay $150 to an extortion gang calling itself the ‘Holy House’. Carmenciti lived on East 103rd Street in the Italian neighbourhood of East Harlem. Two Holy House members – Carmine Mursuneso of East 106th Street and Joseph Mascarello of East 107th Street – were arrested, but they were acquitted when Carmenciti refused to testify, fearing for the safety of his family.
    Petrosino rose to prominence in 1903, when the corpse of a man with 17 stab wounds was found in a barrel on a piece of waste ground near Little Italy, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. His throat had been cut so savagely that his head was nearly severed from his body and his genitals had been cut off and stuffed into his mouth. The case was reminiscent of a murder that had taken place in the previous year, when the partially dismembered body of a grocer named Giuseppe Catania had been found in a sack on the beach at Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The murderers had not been found, but they seemed to be exacting revenge for a trial in Palermo, some 20 years before, where Catania’s testimony had sent a number of men to jail for 20 years.
    The body in the barrel was not immediately identified, but Petrosino believed that he had seen the victim at the trial of counterfeiter Giuseppe De Priemo. The detective travelled to Sing Sing to interview the prisoner. When De Priemo was shown a photograph of the dead man he immediately identified him as his brother-in-law, Benedetto Madonia. The victim had been a member of a counterfeiting gang who had been in hiding in Buffalo, Upstate New York.
    He had recently visited De Priemo with a man named Tomasso Petto – known on the streets as ‘Petto the Ox’.
    According to De Priemo, his brother-in-law always carried a watch with distinctive markings. The watch was found after a number of pawn shops had been checked. It had been pawned for one dollar by a man answering to Petto’s description. When the police went to question Petto in the Prince Street Saloon he pulled a stiletto, but the officers managed to grapple him to the ground. Once he was restrained, they searched him and found another knife, a pistol and a pawn ticket for the watch. Petto denied murdering Madonia or getting the watch from him.
    An Italian named ‘John’ had given it to him, he said. He did not know the man’s last name, though they had been friends for three years.
    According to the Secret Service – then part of the United States Treasury – Madonia’s role in the counterfeiting ring had been to distribute forged bills