Contents Title Page Contents Copyright Dedication Epigraph Prologue: “A Great and Consuming Terror” “This Capital of Half a World” Hunter of Men “In Mortal Dread” The Mysterious Six A General Rebellion Explosion Wave The General Photos “The Terror of Hurtful People” Once to Be Born, Once to Die “War Without Quarter” Backlash A Secret Service The Gentleman In Sicily Black Horses Goatville A Return Acknowledgments A Note on Sources Notes Select Bibliography Index Sample Chapter from AGENT GARBO Buy the Book About the Author Connect with HMH Copyright © 2017 by Stephan Talty All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016. www.hmhco.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 978-0-544-63338-4 Cover design by Brian Moore Cover photograph © J. S. Johnston/Getty Images eISBN 978-0-544-63535-7 v1.0317 To the memory of my father, the immigrant Non so come si può vivere in questo fuoco! (I don’t know how it’s possible to live in this fire!) —AN ITALIAN IMMIGRANT ON FIRST SEEING NEW YORK CITY PROLOGUE: “A GREAT AND CONSUMING TERROR” O S 21, 1906, - W N THE AFTERNOON OF EPTEMBER A HIGH SPIRITED BOY NAMED ILLIE Labarbera was playing in front of his family’s fruit store, two blocks from the glint of the East River in New York City. Five-year-old Willie and his friends ran after one another shouting at the top of their lungs as they trundled hoops down the sidewalk, laughing when the wooden rings finally toppled onto the cobblestone street. They ducked behind the bankers and laborers and young women wearing ostrich feather hats, making their way home or to one of the neighborhood’s Italian restaurants. With each wave of pedestrians, Willie and the other children would vanish from one another’s sight for a second or two, then snap back into view once the walkers passed by. This happened dozens of times that afternoon. More people passed, hundreds of them. Then, as the silvery river light began to dim, Willie turned and dashed down the street once more, disappearing behind yet another group of workmen. But this time, after the pedestrians had strolled past, he failed to reappear. The spot on the pavement where he should have stood was empty in the fading sunlight. His friends didn’t notice right away. Only when they felt the first pangs of hunger did they slowly turn and examine the small expanse of sidewalk where they’d spent their afternoon. Then they began to look for Willie more earnestly in the lengthening shadows. Nothing. Willie was headstrong and once boasted that he’d run away from his parents as a lark, so perhaps the other boys hesitated a few moments before entering the store and reporting that something was wrong. But eventually they had to let the adults know, and so they went inside. After a few seconds, the boy’s parents, William and Caterina, dashed from the shop and began searching the surrounding streets for some sign of the child, calling out to ask the proprietors of candy stands and small grocery stores if they’d seen the boy. They hadn’t. Willie was gone. It was at this moment that something odd and almost telepathic occurred. Even before the police had been called or a single clue was gathered, Willie’s family and friends simultaneously arrived at a revelation about what had happened to the boy, without speaking a single word to one another. And strangely enough, people in Chicago or St. Louis or New Orleans or Pittsburgh or the tiny unheralded towns strung between them, the mothers and fathers of missing children, of whom there were more than usual in the fall of 1906, would have come to the same conclusion. Who had their child? La Mano Nera, as the Italians called it. The Society of the Black Hand. The Black Hand was an infamous crime organization—“that fiendish, devilish and sinister band”—that engaged in extortion, assassination, child kidnapping, and bombings on a grand scale. It had become nationally famous two years before with a letter dropped into a mailbox in an obscure neighborhood in Brooklyn, at the home of a contractor who’d struck it rich in America. Since then, the Society’s threatening notes, adorned with drawings of coffins and crosses and daggers, had appeared in every part of the city, followed by a series of gruesome acts that created, according to one observer, “a record of crime here during the last ten years that is unparalleled in the history of a civilized country in time of peace.” Only the Ku Klux Klan would surpass the Black Hand for the production of mass terror in the early part of the century. “From the bottom of their hearts,” one reporter said of Italian immigrants, “they do fear them with a great and consuming terror.” The same could have been said for many Americans in the fall of 1906. When the letters began arriving for the Labarberas several days later, their fears proved correct. The kidnappers demanded $5,000 for Willie’s return, an astronomical sum to the family. The exact words the criminals used haven’t been passed down, but such letters often contained phrases like “Your son is among us” and “Do not give this letter to the police for if you do, by the Madonna, your child will be killed.” The message was reinforced by drawings at the bottom of the page: three crude black crosses had been inked onto the paper, along with a skull and crossbones. These were the marks of the Black Hand. Some claimed that the group and others like it not only were creating an entirely new level of murder and extortion in America, a dark age of spectacular violence, but also were at that moment acting as a fifth column, corrupting the government to their aims. This idea had plagued the new immigrants from Italy for at least a decade. “There was a popular belief,” said Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge about a supposed Italian secret society, “that it was extending its operations, that it was controlling juries by terror, and that it would gradually bring the government of the city and State under its control.” Skeptics, including the Italian ambassador, who bristled at the mere mention of the Society, countered that the group didn’t exist, that it was a myth created by Americans to curse Italians, whom the “whites” hated and wished to drive from