Read The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia for Free Online Page B

situation.
    It was a cold and blowy evening, threatening rain, when the Chief alighted from his streetcar on the Bowery, downtown Manhattan’s great thoroughfare. Laduca’s store stood several hundred yards away, down a busy street clogged with pushcarts thrust hard up against the pavements and peddlers sending up a cacophony of Sicilian slang as they hawked everything from hardware to vegetables from their stalls. Despite the weather, the sidewalk and the street were thronged with men hastening home from work and women dressed in black hunting for bargains, and everywhere there were gangs of rough-clad children, playing in between the carts or scavenging food or change that had fallen in the dirt. Flynn, cocooned in an overcoat and with his head bowed against the wind, forced his way through the crowd until he picked out the first of his agents, Operative John Henry, who was skulking against a doorway across the road from the butcher’s store. Henry had been hanging around in the vicinity since 1:15 P.M. N OW , he rapidly explained to Flynn, Morello and two of his associates were holding a discussion of some sort in Laduca’s shop. A fourth Italian, a stranger Henry had not seen before, had left the shop a little earlier. He was now lounging, smoking a cigarette, against a streetlamp down the street.
    Flynn and Henry kept watch as the sky darkened and the conversation in the butcher’s store grew more heated. They felt sure that the counterfeiters had not seen them. But, after a while, one of the men inside 16 Stanton Street broke off from the conversation and came to the door carrying a hammer and a curtain. He tacked the cloth across the entrance, barring the interior from view as the muffled voices drifting from the shop rose higher still.
    Unable to see or hear anything of importance, Flynn switched his attention to the stranger smoking down the street. In the gathering twilight it was difficult to make out his face. Light from the flickering streetlamp slanted down, throwing most of the Italian’s features into shadow as he pulled hard on his cigarette. Still, the Chief was able to get a long look at his suit—brown, it seemed in the fading light—and profile. He felt certain he would recognize the man again.
    THE EVENING PAPERS , when they arrived at the Treasury Building next afternoon, led with lengthy coverage of the barrel mystery. The Brooklyn Eagle , the Sun , and the Evening World all reported in the same shocked tones the discovery of the body on East 11th Street and described in vivid detail the wounds that it had borne. Enterprising newsmen had sought out and interviewed Frances Connors and buttonholed Inspector McClusky who had told them that the murder was most likely an act of vengeance. In the absence of an established motive, the rival papers speculated wildly as to who had killed the victim and why. “Death by torture seems to have been the fate of the man,” the World suggested, with an almost audible rubbing of hands. “There were no bruises to the body, [and] it appeared as though the man had been held by the arms and legs. … This is one of the most interesting murders that has mystified New York in many years.”
    Sitting alone in his office at the end of the day, Flynn leafed through these reports with interest. The detective in him enjoyed absorbing the details of the case and puzzling over what the newspapers agreed was the most baffling of its mysteries—the problem of the dead man’s identity. Beyond the likelihood that the victim was Italian, none of the dozens of journalists and the hundreds of patrolmen who had been scouring Manhattan had any real idea who he was. The Eagle focused most of its attention on the torn slip of paper that had been found in the dead man’s pocket, which McClusky thought might have been a note sent to lure the man to his death, but the fragment was not much of a clue: “It was exceedingly hard, because of the fact that it was blurred, bloody and