BOOK OF THE DAY: PETER CUNNINGHAMreviews The First Family: Terror, extortion and the birth of the American MafiaBy Mike Dash Simon Schuster438pp; £12.99
WHEN THE Godfather by Mario Puzo was published in 1969, it became an international publishing sensation and introduced such Italian criminal terms as Cosa Nostra, omerta, consigliere and caporegime to an English-speaking audience. With the success of the book, the Mafia myth, like Italian cooking, went global. The romanticisation of murderers and thugs in the novel was not hindered by the fictional character of famous singer and movie star, Johnny Fontane, supposedly based on Frank Sinatra, as if Sinatra’s talent needed the help of crooks to succeed. The Godfather movies, the first of which was in 1972, sent the mythology of illiterate Sicilian hit men into orbit. Marlon Brando and Al Pacino’s characterisation of mafiosi as reasonable family men battling against unfair odds was an instant screen success. A decade of film-going youngsters learned to shrug their shoulders and say, “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
Mike Dash’s extensively researched and well-laid-out book goes some of the way towards deconstructing the Mafia as a romantic alternative to law and order. The author uses contemporary newspaper reports, which it is claimed have been overlooked, to tell the story of Giuseppe Morello, a gangster from Corleone, Sicily, who went to the United States in 1892 and founded what appears to be the first Mafia-type organisation. Morello, whose deformed hand earned him the nickname “Clutch Hand”, surrounded himself almost exclusively with men from Corleone, and demonstrated pathological ruthlessness in the extermination of his enemies.
Unlike the “godfathers” in the famous films, Morello and his numerous low-life associates and rivals did not slip into peaceful old age in gated compounds in New Jersey, but mostly died, usually from gunshot wounds, in public or in federal penitentiaries.
At the beginning of the 20th century, where this story begins, long before the US government made the inestimably valuable gift of Prohibition to the mob, the likes of Morello thrived on extortion rackets and counterfeiting. There were the coal, ice and artichoke rackets, to name but a few.
The artichoke racket was “a major source of income for Italian gangs, since artichokes were an indispensable ingredient in minestrone soup”.
The gangs ensured that wholesalers formed price cartels, then enforced these cartels with brute force and skimmed a lucrative levy off the top.
In the early 1900s, the artichoke racket alone was estimated to be worth over $200,000 a year to Morello and his associates.
This book, with its parade of bloodthirsty miscreants, is most absorbing when it deals with the counterfeiting rackets that partly ended in 1910 when Morello went to jail for a decade.
The Secret Service, based on Wall Street and headed by William Flynn, an Irish-American, was charged with “keep the biggest city in the country free from counterfeiters and forged bills”. Morello’s gang had been ingenious in printing $2 bills and then getting them into circulation, often for discounts as high as 75 per cent.
Flynn painstakingly built up a case against the Sicilians and eventually broke them.
Although this book somewhat irritatingly refers to Morello and his fellow criminals throughout as “the first family”, Dash brings a well-ordered and sober eye to the birth of organised crime and its squalid reality. A world in which men died regularly from wounds “large enough to admit a teacup” and where the butchered remains of rivals were routinely stashed in empty sugar barrels, is proof, if proof were needed, that crime does not pay.
Peter Cunningham's recent novel, The Sea and the Silence, is published by New Island
