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

The reporter was right to note the difference in the response of the detectives and Flynn’s operatives, but he was quite wrong in guessing the reason. The Chief was not bored; he was worried. He felt sure that McClusky had just made a serious mistake.
    IT WAS OBVIOUS , as early as the next morning, that Flynn’s concerns were justified. Searches of all the prisoners’ apartments turned up large quantities of correspondence, written in impenetrable Sicilian, but no sign of any contraband—no forged notes, no bad coins, and no printing plates—nor anything to link the barrel victim directly to Morello’s men. Nor were the “strenuous efforts” that the police made to squeeze statements from the suspects any more fruitful, despite application of the brutal methods of the third degree. Not one of the arrested men would talk, and when Flynn took the Sicilians, one by one, down to the morgue to ask them if they recognized the body, none said a word to indicate they did. Morello, whom the Chief’s men had seen talking at length to the barrel victim two days earlier, “showed not the slightest sign of recognition or agitation,” a disappointed Flynn confessed. “He shrugged his shoulders and volunteered the statement: ‘Don’t know.’”
    In the absence of a confession, McClusky’s case remained slender indeed. Several cigars found in Petto’s pocket were of a variety identical to the ones Petrosino had discovered on East 11th Street. A sample of the sawdust from Morello’s restaurant, which Carey took after the arrest, looked much the same as the bloodstained shavings in the barrel. And a search of the Clutch Hand’s dingy attic room on Chrystie Street turned up a collar of the same size and make as the one worn by the dead man. It was enough to impress the newspapermen covering the story, who reported that charges were expected any day, but scarcely sufficient to convince either the district attorney’s office or the Secret Service. “The police redoubled their efforts,” Flynn recalled, “but to no avail. Every clew, and there were few enough of them, led to nothing. Each new line, which was run down to no purpose, left the case more baffling.”
    THE BREAKTHROUGH THAT MCCLUSKY had been praying for came three days later, unexpectedly, when a clerk opening the mail at police headquarters discovered an anonymous letter addressed to the inspector. “I know the man who was found in the barrel,” the note began.
He comes from Buffalo for the purpose of getting money … he was condemned for false papers. The police have made the proper arrests, bring the condemned Giuseppe Di Priemo from Sing Sing, promise him his liberty and he will tell you many and many things, do as I write and you will discover all. We salute.
Yours friends S.T.
    McClusky read the letter through more than once without feeling much the wiser for it. It had evidently been composed by an Italian with a limited command of English but a rather better knowledge of Morello’s gang. The reference to “false papers” suggested that the dead man in the barrel had been a forger, too, and the suggestion that he came from Buffalo made sense—it certainly explained why no one in Little Italy had recognized the corpse. But the name Giuseppe Di Priemo meant nothing to the men of the Detective Bureau; nor did McClusky have any idea why such a person should be locked up in Sing Sing, an infamous prison on the banks of the Hudson River thirty miles north of New York, where a large proportion of Manhattan’s criminals spent at least a part of their careers.
    Still, if the murder was the product of some counterfeiters’ feud, the Secret Service would most likely know more, and a brief phone call to William Flynn was all it took to enlighten the inspector. Flynn was perfectly familiar with the name: Di Priemo, he informed McClusky, was a middle-ranking member of Morello’s gang, one of four Sicilians who had been arrested on New Year’s Eve for passing