pursue my own path in the Italian-American culture (which would better define "southern-Italian-American"), which continues to be one of the "discovered" the most fascinating of my adventure in the United States. son of Italian immigrants in New York, had won the esteem of Roosevelt. He was killed by the Mafia a century ago
Gemma Contin (from "Liberation", March 12, 2009)
is celebrated today in Palermo, at the initiative of City right by the Mayor Diego Cammarata, with flamboyant statements councilor Culture Giampiero Cannella, the centenary of the first killing policeman died at the hands of the mafia, then not yet called Cosa Nostra - will be named officially, eighty years later, only after the revelations of Thomas Buscetta Giovanni Falcone - but it was my veins and pulses tremble under the name The Black Hand.
that it was the symbol with which the mafia "signed" extortion, threats and their crimes. And with that mark entirely territories, districts, parts of the city, indicating that that road, or even just a dirty alley, or a clearing full of mud and waste, were "under control" or "under protection".
is celebrated, but there is nothing to celebrate for the death of Joe Petrosino. Rather, by bringing to light "for future reference and as a warning is still current.
And that's why judges, lawyers, professors, students, and many honest Palermo, will meet up there on the site of the attack, the gate of the Piazza Marina, where the man was killed like a dog, walking thoughtfully, just like a dog on a warm evening of that Friday, March 12, 1909, at a quarter to nine, while the long dusk falls twilight of a bitter spring, when the breath comes from the nearby Cala sea full of salt, the rosemary, the smell of fish and all the Mediterranean herbs, to caress the air and the thick roots of ficus trees verdiblù times of the villa .
As always occur even later, for all the crimes of the Mafia to be - other police officers and judges, politicians and journalists, and outstanding crimes, hundreds of them - that evening, on that stretch of streets and alleys of Old Navy, just before the bright lights of the Foro Italico, in the bend of the sea that seems to be one of the houses, which were then moored fishing boats and outboard motor boats, and now the pleasure of a sudden everything went Black silence, after the hail of gunfire - three in succession to the body, one, the coup de grace, at the top - so sudden how long, and strategically orchestrated.
And suddenly it was as if the city had turned off in the darkness. In a thick darkness and silence as impenetrable as those found in front of the police authorities not only Italian but also the American investigators, sent on purpose by the Government of the United States. What else
you can not kill it the moment's most famous cop, an Italian-American started from remote Padula, another forgotten deep South in the province of Salerno, and child arrived in New York at the end of the nineteenth century, with all his family of migrant deaths of hunger, passed by the gauntlet and disinfestatoi public washrooms and Ellis Island. A kind of Lampedusa period.
Joe Petrosino was called. He was the youngest son of a tailor named Prospero who exhausted by poverty and hunger had taken over his creatures, his wife and a battered suitcase, empty of real and full of hope, and after a trip on a third-class " steam "departed from Naples, had landed in the military hospital of immigrants awaiting entry visa. And finally
had been initiated in one of those dilapidated buildings, the five-cent houses: houses for five cents, made available by the municipality in Mulberry Street to accommodate the unfortunate.
Little Joseph, who only big policeman dead and become the legendary Joe Petrosino, go to the shoe and the newsboy, but is committed, wants to study, go to school in the U.S., takes home every night for some hard cash help improve the conditions of the family fails, once adult, to obtain U.S. citizenship and get a job in the garbage, then a city police department.
But the environment of immigrants and neighborhoods Italian-Americans are crossed and exposed to harassment of the crime of which can not fail to notice Petrosino, and live in the middle, talking the same language, by understanding the slang, the jokes, gestures, winks.
see, understand, perhaps relates. It is a fact that was drafted in the 23rd district and is thus, immediately, on the other side of the fence.
the side of those who must deal with the gang, with the phenomenon of gangsterism, from the penny, which extortionists in the district, that of the most vicious organized gangs, who shoot and kill the streets, on the premises, they blow up cars and shops, stalls and bars. The logic is that those who do not pay with money paid with blood.
not very different from a century later, beyond and on this side of the Atlantic. And then there
quell'andirivieni of new immigrants "with the hat", new "families" in which cases does not reach the poverty of the countries of origin, but trafficking of all kinds, "picciotti" who control the streets of the smuggling The alcohol market (we are in full Prohibition) and opium, who organize prostitution and gambling, that lord it in Little Italy, in Brooklyn, and then in the hierarchical sequence, in the scale of wealth, until in Long Island, Queens, New Jersey, Pennsilvanya, Connecticut, where the Gathering "business" or the wars and alliances between the Sicilian families whose names are the same as always: Madonia, Cascio Ferro, and then Gambino, Bonanno, Genovese, Lucchese, to the famous Lucky Luciano and Frank Coppola's "three fingers". They will come after
also Inzerillo, the Badalamenti, the goodness, the Cali, but we are fifty years later, and we are now.
beginning of the twentieth century, what would become the legend of Joe Petrosino was only an agent with an extraordinary sleuthing and experienced staff in direct contact with the Italian-American underworld. An "experience" that enabled him to understand the dynamics, relationships, links between organized gangs who held New York in check and the families of origin who worked in Sicily.
E ' For this reason, "venerated in his homeland", admired by President Theodore Roosevelt for the brilliant operations against gangsterism that produced 500 arrests and deportations in 2500, awarded the Medal of Valor and the title of lieutenant of the police investigation of the city of New York, Atlantic on a cold morning of 9 February 1909, embarked "incognito" for a survey on overseas strange connections between the Mafia and politics (look a bit '!), stocky little man, just one meter and sixty but with powerful shoulders and muscles of steel, driven by a dull resentment against Italian criminals who infested his "American Dream", dressed in dark suit, white shirt, stiff-brimmed hat, after a trip marred statements by the careless ones of his head that had exposed the "secret mission" had landed at Palermo and had started in hunting. But
hunting stops almost immediately, because inexplicably, after having told Mr. Bishop, the American consul in Palermo, of its intention to extend the investigation not only the mafia but also notable candidates in the forthcoming elections and political elements of collusion and entrepreneurship in the face of the inspection scheduled at the Court of Palermo, is the empty files and folders' criminal suspects deliberately deleted, abraded, if not entirely disappeared.
had gone better in Caltanissetta where Petrosino was able to find valuable information and documents intact affected by the mafia, getting feedback and confirmed the suspicions of strange corridors of power in the protection against known mobsters.
for this round alone and pensive, on the evening of March 12, up from the Cala to Piazza Marina, where his accommodation at the Hotel de France, where he had an appointment with an informant. But there is no more arrived.
