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

forged five-dollar bills in Yonkers. He was a native of Lercara Friddi, in the Sicilian interior, had lived in New York for three years, and—thanks to his recent conviction in a federal court—had just begun a four-year sentence for counterfeiting. The Chief recalled Di Priemo as uncommunicative to a fault, but, with several years to serve, the desire to cut something from that sentence might just make him willing to talk.
    It would take a man a day to travel from New York to Sing Sing and back, but the barrel investigation was going nowhere. McClusky decided to send Petrosino to see prisoner Di Priemo. An Italian speaker would have a much better chance of getting information from the Sicilian than an ordinary detective would.
    THE GREAT GRIM BULK of Sing Sing Correctional Facility had been carved out of a hillside on the steep banks of the Hudson at a point where the river swept off in a wide bend to the west, away from New York. The whole prison had been hewn from the gray marble that abounded in the district: the claustrophobia-inducing walls that enclosed the entire complex, the main block with its minute cells (each eight feet long and three feet wide), the death house, and the multitude of workshops in which the jail’s thousands of prisoners were set to work each day. It was a terrible place in which to be incarcerated: cramped, rigidly disciplined, and so close to the fast-running river that a chilly dampness permeated everywhere. Each cell held nothing but a cot, a lamp, a Bible, and a slop bucket; the bathing facilities were nonexistent; and the whole prison, in the words of one Sing Sing warden, lay in the grip of “a coldness that hovers like a pall, and a heaviness that presses down upon the spirit like a huge millstone.”
    For a newly arrived prisoner such as Giuseppe Di Priemo, Sing Sing was very close to hell. The penitentiary squatted on a low bluff half a mile above the village of Ossining and had been carefully positioned so that the men imprisoned there could be made to break rocks in quarries within its perimeter; its very name, a corruption of the Indian phrase sint sincks , meant “stone upon stone.” The prison, indeed, had been constructed in the 1820s by its own first inmates, and a large proportion of the convicts still worked the local marble, enduring brutal conditions as they cut and shaped each stone. Over the years, though, as the prison grew, it had diversified into several other industries. By 1903, Sing Sing was one of the largest industrial complexes in the United States, and the factories inside its walls made iron stoves, forged chains, and manufactured shoes. The newest prisoners, though, were set to work in the jail’s steam laundry, where they labored in what were reputedly the worst conditions in the entire U.S. prison system, washing, drying, starching, and ironing thousands of shirts a day in temperatures that sometimes reached 150 degrees.
    It may thus have been sheer desperation that drove Di Priemo to see Petrosino when the detective reached Ossining on the afternoon of April 19. Certainly the prisoner possessed, in full measure, the Sicilian’s ingrained antipathy to the police. Di Priemo began the interview cool and uncommunicative, and despite Petrosino’s ingratiating Italian, seemed uninterested in answering anything but the most basic questions.
    The two men made for an interesting study. They were close in age—Petrosino was thirty-six years old, Di Priemo twenty-eight—and looked not unlike each other. Both men were short and stocky; both were physically strong. But the detective had one great advantage over the monosyllabic prisoner: a surprise to shock him into talking.
    “Do you recognize this man?”
    Petrosino slid a photograph of the barrel victim across the table. It had been taken in the New York morgue after the undertaker had done his best to patch up the dead man’s wounds. The eyes were glassy and the rip in the throat had been concealed by