Reviewed here: The First Family, by Mike Dash; The History of the Mafia, by Salvatore Lupo
If anything points up the difference between the best Mafia books in this season's crop, the assassination of an NYPD police detective in Palermo in 1909 does the trick: In The First Family, Mike Dash writes, “[Joe] Petrosino had been hit three times at close range, in the right shoulder, the cheek, and the throat. The third wound had been the fatal one. He lay next to his umbrella, blood still oozing from his mouth. ... [A witness] found ... an unstamped picture postcard addressed to Petrosino's wife, which ended with salutation, ‘A kiss for you and my little girl, who has spent three months far from her daddy.'”
As Salvatore Lupo has it, in The History of the Mafia, “On 12 March 1909, [Petrosino] fell under a hail of bullets in the centre of Palermo, in the Piazza Marina.”
In the event, the same man was murdered – a heroic New York City detective who travelled to Sicily to do battle with the Mafia on its home turf. The degree of colour details – and the lack of it – perfectly exemplify the different approaches taken by literary non-fiction writers and academics who write.
The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and the Birth of the American Mafia
, by Mike Dash, Doubleday Canada, 375 pages, $29.95
Dash, a London-based journalist and historian, is that rarity: a perfectionist in his research and a writer who perfectly carves out his story with a pen as sharp as a stiletto. To paraphrase Mark Twain, Dash writes with the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces. He resists the temptation to get sucked down into the mire of tabloidism – a difficult chore with a book populated by grim fellows with nicknames ranging from Clutch Hand to Petto the Ox, and events dubbed “the Barrel Murders” and the “the Murder Stable.” His writing style is deceptively novelistic and is belied only by the 34 pages of precise source notes that rival those of some of the more “serious” Mafia writers. When Dash says a murder victim ate a stew of beans, beets and potatoes, you can bet he did; when the victim was all but beheaded by a knife that penetrated his thick, three-ply linen collar, ditto. This is writing with authority.
In its skeleton, The First Family is the story of the birth of the Mafia in the United States; in its flesh, the tale documents the rise to power of Giuseppe Morello, a.k.a. “Clutch Hand” because of a birth defect that left his right arm ending in a single finger. Morello, a Sicilian murderer and cattle rustler on the run from the Mafia stronghold of Corleone, landed in the United States in 1892, at a time when the underworld was a free-for-all of various ethnic groups trying to slice themselves a thick slab of the American dream. Within a decade, Morello had put down the roots of a criminal organization that sparked the name of the book, and the tentacles of which endure to this day.
The small-time gangster from Sicily, looking for a haven exactly like today's organized crime figures, found America to his liking. He became a prolific counterfeiter, killer, kidnapper, bomber and extortionist. His story, like the sagas of legitimate U.S. tycoons, is one of avarice and single-minded determination not to be one of those left behind.
Dash has a strong sense of place. He is surprisingly vivid, almost obsessive in his pursuit of details
Pursued by the New York City Police Department – particularly the obsessive and doomed detective Joe Petrosino – and the U.S. Secret Service, Morello attracted arrests and suspicion for a myriad of criminal activities, from his counterfeiting ring to his suspected involvement in as many as 60 murders.
