The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia by Mike Dash

way back to his apartment. The Chief splashed through the puddles on East Houston and jogged down the Bowery until he found two more of his operatives and four burly detective sergeants standing against a hoarding on the corner.
    The seven men waited impatiently for Morello to appear, but he had not yet left the Café Pasticceria. Flynn’s resources were stretched so thin by McClusky’s operation that there was no chance of freeing any agents to carry messages, and so no way of getting warning that their man was on the move. The resultant uncertainty made the watch a nervous one, more so as the wait stretched to three-quarters of an hour. It was not until 8 P.M. that the Clutch Hand turned in to Delancey Street, his slight figure silhouetted for a moment against the bright lights of the Bowery. Flynn signaled frantically to the detectives. As he did so, a second man rounded the corner and the Chief saw that Morello had a companion. Petto the Ox was accompanying him home.
    The two Sicilians had no chance; McClusky’s men were on them in an instant. The four muscular policemen hurled themselves bodily at the counterfeiters, knocking the Clutch Hand to the pavement. Petto, taller and stronger, received a punch between the eyes, swayed for an instant, and then went down as well with two detectives on top of him. The winded counterfeiters tried to reach for their inner pockets, but the policemen knocked their arms away.
    Breathing a little heavily, the detectives hauled Petto and Morello to their feet and handcuffed them. Then they began to search their prisoners. Both men proved to be heavily armed. The Ox carried a pistol in a holster and a stiletto in a leather sheath; his boss was concealing a fully loaded .45-caliber revolver in his waistband and had a murderous-looking unsheathed knife strapped to his leg. “A cork,” Flynn observed—sounding impressed despite himself—”fixed on the point of the blade prevented it scratching his leg and allowed him to bring it into play with a single motion much more readily than had he carried it in a sheath.”
    Forcing their way through the crowd of excited onlookers that had rapidly surrounded them, the four detectives frog-marched their prisoners off toward police headquarters, where the two counterfeiters were thrown into separate cells. Inspector McClusky then issued orders for all the other members of the gang to be rounded up, and the results were gratifyingly swift. Secret Service operative Frank Burns and his police escort cornered the Sicilian they had been watching in a basement room in Elizabeth Street and managed to get him out of the building without attracting a crowd. Pietro Inzerillo was arrested without incident in his store, and Joseph Fanaro was seized outside Morello’s restaurant on Prince Street. None were given time to draw the weapons they were carrying. The closest McClusky’s detectives came to trouble was on the Bowery, where two other members of the gang glanced up in time to see a quartet of policemen bearing down on them. The Sicilians half drew their revolvers, but the policemen disarmed both with their nightsticks, relieving their prisoners of two more guns and a set of lethal stilettos.
    Eight members of Morello’s gang were arrested that evening, and a ninth at midnight. Almost all proved to be as well equipped as their boss—the next day, newspapermen were invited to photograph a table-top laden with all the daggers and revolvers found on them—and most, to Flynn’s considerable annoyance, had permits that entitled them to go about the city armed.
    McClusky was jubilant at his success—”radiant,” one newspaperman described him, and “all smiles.” His men, relieved to have made so many arrests without serious incident, celebrated, too. But, the man from the New York Sun observed, “Flynn and his Secret Service agents didn’t smile or express any particular joy. The agents who did all the clever work in this case looked bored.”