Legend of Lucchino: The Man Who Took On the Mob (Single-Page Post)
In booming Pennsylvania coal country, immigrant Italians were exploited by corporations and terrorized by mafiosi. One brave insider turned against them, risking everything to stand up for workers.
On a balmy night in July of 1920, Sam Lucchino walked home alone from work in Pittston, Pennsylvania. God only knows what weighed on his mind as he made that fateful stroll up Railroad Street toward the boomtown’s “Italian colony.”
The miner’s strike likely dominated his attention. Earlier in the day, Lucchino had met with a higher-up at the Pennsylvania Coal Company, where 10,000 men walked off the job, rallying against the company’s collusion with vampiric third-party subcontractors, who were bleeding the rank-and-file workers dry. By then, Sam, a former mobster turned detective, saw protecting Pittston’s Italian immigrant community as his life’s mission, and he was knee-deep in the mess.
Walking alone late at night was dangerous. Sam’s brother, Peter, usually accompanied him. But Peter was away, and for 10 years, Sam had lived as a marked man on Railroad Street, within spitting distance of those who wished to see him dead.
A few blocks away, his wife, Nellie Lucchino, sat on a porch swing with the couple’s only child, waiting for her husband to come home.
A neighbor, Catherine Hogan, was out on her porch across the street. She saw Sam pass by at around 10:50 p.m., with another figure following closely behind. As he approached his house, Sam bade the neighborhood butcher goodnight, buona notte, then crossed into the street, when — bang! — a .45 caliber bullet ripped into his back.
Catherine Hogan ran inside and hurriedly drew down the shades.
Nellie shot to her feet as Sam staggered forward, blood beginning to seep through his shirt. Heart pounding, she raced down the steps of their house.
Sam wheeled around and attempted to reach for his revolver — just as the second slug tore through his chest. Both bullets passed clear through his body, one first striking his metal badge.
Frozen in terror, Nellie watched as a man in a tan suit and a Panama hat stood over her husband. He calmly tucked a pistol back into his pants, then walked away.
Another neighbor watched from her upstairs window as Nellie crawled over to Sam, cradling his head in her lap. She cried out for help, then began to sob and weep bitterly.
As the authorities arrived and a crowd gathered, everyone wondered if this fifth attempt on his life would be the final chapter in Detective Sam Lucchino’s legendary and incredibly improbable career.
His story “reads like a page of fiction,” as a local paper once put it.
We know much about Sam Lucchino’s life from the robust newspaper reporting of the time. But in other ways, the inner workings of his mind remain a mystery.
Lucchino was caught in between two worlds: loyalty to his community and a need to break free from his past. Originally named Salvatore, he moved to Pittston from Sicily at 18 — a mobster in a booming coal town, soon to become one of its most feared and, later, beloved citizens. Born into the old Sicilian Mafia in a sulfur-mining village called Montedoro — where many peasants left for Pittston — he was part of a migration that carried both hardship and the Mafia’s influence into northeastern Pennsylvania.
For a time, Sam was a rising criminal star in Pittston. It was the turn of the 20th century, when southern Italians like him were widely viewed as a criminal and inferior race. He terrorized his own people with shocking bravado and violence. But then something inside him shifted, causing him to do an about-face.
There are plenty of pentiti in American Mafia lore — former hitmen and foot soldiers who rat out the mob in exchange for protection or a lighter sentence. But Sam Lucchino was apparently driven by something much deeper. When his first undercover boss — a celebrated Secret Service sleuth who later ran the FBI — asked Lucchino to explain his motivations, he replied, with deep resolve, that he had “an ancient wrong to right.”
The years immediately preceding Lucchino’s arrival were momentous for northeastern Pennsylvania. In 1900 and 1902, two historic strikes rocked the anthracite mining industry, halting production of the energy-dense, compact coal at a time when the nation relied heavily on its output. A primary grievance driving these strikes was the much-hated practice of subcontracting.
The term may sound harmless today, but for turn-of-the-century anthracite miners, subcontracting symbolized a baked-in form of exploitation. Mine owners maximized profit by renting out sections of their mines to intermediary bosses, effectively distancing themselves from responsibility for the brutal working conditions. Together, the subcontractors and mine owners sapped the workers’ earnings, leaving the miners in the proverbial dust — with no job security, no benefits and little recognition.
During the first strike, roughly 110,000 previously divided immigrant workers joined forces under the United Mine Workers of America, walking off the job in the span of a week. The second strike dragged on for six months and threatened to shut down the East Coast’s winter supply of fuel, forcing President Teddy Roosevelt to intervene to broker a deal. In the wake of the strikes, the companies begrudgingly agreed to certain concessions and eased up on subcontracting — for a while.
At the time, America led the world in coal production. Mineable quantities of “hard” anthracite, a slow-burning and cleaner alternative to more plentiful bituminous coal, only existed in northeastern Pennsylvania. Gleaming like glass, the valuable resource became known as “black diamond.”
Located along the winding banks of the Susquehanna River, Pittston, despite its tiny size, was quickly becoming a regional hub. The Bicentennial Issue of the Pittston Gazette notes its Revolutionary War settlement-era roots as a “‘tidy village’ [where] the few people who were here mostly lived in cabins.” When anthracite coal was discovered, it triggered an explosion of growth. By the time Lucchino arrived in 1903, the former coal patch town — established by the Pennsylvania Coal Company (PaCC) in 1853 — was charging into modernity. Locomotives blared. Horse-drawn buggies rolled and clacked, and trolleys rumbled down Main Street, where beautiful buildings were being erected.
There were nearly twice as many people living in Pittston then as there are now. The city boasted a dizzying number of churches, plus a synagogue; there were fruit stands, tobacconists, barbers, department stores, butchers, banks, and an outrageous number of saloons. Not to mention, of course, all the undertakers, since coal mining was one of the deadliest jobs in the country.
Below the ground, there were a million ways to meet a violent end: crushed by falling rock, kicked in the gut by a mule, eyes blown out by dynamite, run over by a line of cars.
Above ground, in towering coal breakers that belched smoke over the once verdant landscape, child laborers known as “breaker boys” sorted rock and impurities from coal, their lungs filling with poisonous, dust-laden air. Many workers lost their lives and their limbs in the gears, as happened to 24-year-old Emmanuel Skidmore, who “met a terrible death in the Pine Ridge breaker” where his clothing got snagged in the “whirling” machinery.
“Without a moment’s warning he was lifted and dashed against the beams to be turned over the shafting and dragged to the lower section again,” reported the Pittston Gazette. “Other workmen were horrified at the sight but gave the signal to stop the machinery. … He was dead.”
Death notices like these appeared in the region’s newspapers with stark regularity, and often in pairs. Beneath news of Skidmore’s death was a notice about a 15-year-old boy who had gone searching for work in the mines. After being told there was none, he was struck and killed by a line of cars as he made his way home.
Over the course of roughly a hundred years, an estimated 35,000 men and boys lost their lives. Multitudes more were seriously injured. And if you didn’t die in the mines, black lung disease would surely get you. To mine owners, workers were viewed as fungible parts in a machine — mere numbers, subject to the whims of super-capitalist financiers like J.P. Morgan, who monopolized the industry from afar.
It was, in a word, horrific. Yet, amidst all this tragedy, the industry also presented a historic opportunity for countless immigrants leaving behind legacies of misery in Europe.
In southern Italy, a virtual exodus was underway. Forty years had passed since Italy’s political unification in 1863, with promises of social and economic reform. Things were supposed to be getting better. But they weren’t.
Centuries of colonial rule and feudal landholding had left the peasant masses in shocking conditions of poverty. As new forms of corrupt power and exploitation set in, they fled in staggering numbers. In 1910, the African-American orator Booker T. Washington traveled to Europe to investigate the root causes of European migration to America, where Italians and others were competing for jobs with former slaves like himself.
In The Man Farthest Down, he recalled his visit to the province where Montedoro sits, and where he observed sulfur miners “like ants running in and out of little holes in the earth.”
At the mouth of a mine, Washington encountered a haggard-looking worker who was “almost stark naked,” his graying skin dripping with sweat. After exploring the mine’s infernal depths, he commented, “I am not prepared just now to say to what extent I believe in a physical hell in the next world, but a sulfur mine in Sicily is about the nearest thing to hell that I expect to see in this life.”
The sight of carusi — child laborers as young as 7, laden with heavy sacks of ore — left Washington shaken. The children had ashen skin and misshapen spines. Many spent the rest of their lives as debt bondage “slaves,” he learned, their desperate parents entrapped in predatory loans for their children’s labor that they could never repay. “I could never mistake their slow, dragging movements,” he wrote, “and the expression of dull despair upon their faces.”
Sam Lucchino, like so many others, fled the hardships of Montedoro for Pittston. On August 14, 1903, Sam Lucchino arrived aboard the steamship La Veloce to be processed at Ellis Island. His older brother, Pietro (later known as Peter), had preceded him by three months, and his younger sister, Rosina, had arrived just two days before. According to her manifest, Rosina intended to find her father, Tranquillo, at a Lower Manhattan address that would later be linked to a future Lucchese crime family capo, hinting at early ties between the Lucchinos and other powerful mafiosi.
In Pittston, immigrants from Montedoro mingled with others from Sicily, southern Italy, and a contingent of displaced workers from Umbria, further north in the country. Like the overwhelming majority of Italian men, Sam went to work in the mines, as the Lucchinos re-connected with other families that would form the Men of Montedoro, or the Pittston Crime Family — years later run by Russell Bufalino, one of the most powerful mafiosi in American history.
According to The Informer, a publication that covers the history of American organized crime, the Men of Montedoro was “a shadowy organization [that] played an important role in the development of the American Mafia, serving as an adhesive force between the New York City and Buffalo Mafia clans … and blurring the boundary between underworld rackets and legitimate enterprises.”
While the word “Mafia” occasionally appeared in local papers, the term “Black Hand” struck more fear. Black Hand crime referred to a method of extortion achieved through intimidation and extreme violence. It was typically — but not always — perpetrated by Italians, and so named for the signature death-threat letters that were sent to victims, featuring crude depictions of a mano nera, alongside other ominous imagery, like daggers with dripping blood.
“This will be the last, and believe it will end the question,” read one chilling Black Hand letter, “because you are so miserable that you would rather die, and not, blood of God, disburse the money requested by us. … From today on we will adapt ourselves to your destiny. … Therefore think of the funeral, think blood of God, that for money you will die, and you are so serene …”
In 1904, a Black Hand hitman named Tomasso Petto, known as Il Bove, or “The Ox,” fled to Pittston after evading a sensational murder charge in New York, where the mutilated body of a Sicilian man was found stuffed in a barrel in Lower Manhattan.
In Pittston, he settled in a suburb called Browntown, located up a series of hills from the river, surrounded by thick woods, just outside the city limits. Browntown was where Railroad Street ended, and where the Pittston Black Hand established its reign.
Petto reportedly had a “large following throughout the city.” But karma caught up with him on a rainy night in 1905, when he was riddled with bullets after receiving a knock at the door. One of the shots struck his revolver and exploded his right hand. A dagger was reportedly found in his chest, along with “a little brass bound crucifix with a skull and cross bones at the Saviour’s feet, an exact duplicate of that taken from the body of the man found in the barrel.”
Naturally, the Pittston Police got nowhere with their investigation into his death. “The Italians of the community are as usual very reticent,” a local paper reported. “Not one in a dozen can be found who will admit having had any acquaintance with the man.”
The immigrant community’s historical distrust of authority didn’t help. But more pressingly, they were terrified of Black Hand retribution.
“The authorities have been almost helpless,” another article reported. “On numerous occasions frightened Italians have informed the police that they have received the usual threatening letter … but when told they would be required to appear as witnesses, they wilted. … Many have fled from the region to avoid the wrath of the society. Even in flight there was no safety. A few months ago an Italian who refused tribute fled with his family to Berwick [a town 40 miles way], and there one morning was called to his door by three men and shot dead.”
Others were literally beheaded. In 1905, a breaker boy named John Swift Jr. discovered a decapitated body on his way to work at 6 in the morning.
The victim’s body was half submerged in a culm bank, “neatly attired in a black suit, with black shoes of good quality.” Cigars, “such as Italians smoke,” were found in one of his pockets. His .38 caliber revolver rested next to him in the culm, “wrapped in a red handkerchief,” still in its leather case.
The man’s head was later found down a mineshaft.
Sam Lucchino’s name first hit the headlines in February of 1907, when two industrious Italian immigrants reported a harrowing story to police.
In the early hours of February 15, Pittston’s chief of police led a raid in Browntown with 35 state troopers. Twenty-five Italian immigrants were apprehended and a wagonload of weapons was confiscated. Lucchino and his brother, Peter, were among those apprehended, along with key members of the future Men of Montedoro.
The next day, 13 Black Hand suspects, “all swarthy of complexion,” as described in one paper, were arraigned at a courthouse in Wilkes-Barre.
The hearing was buzzing with lawyers and witnesses, and a throng of Italian spectators packed behind the back bar. Prosecuting “the largest haul of Black Hand members ever made in this country at one time,” the trial was attended by members of the U.S. Secret Service and the NYPD.
Lucchino stood handcuffed in a line with the other suspects. They waited in “sullen silence” as the charges were read against them. First in English, then in Italian, whereupon, “there broke out an excited babbling,” which was “interpreted to be a plea of not guilty.”
The case centered around harassment and assault claims by the Rizzo brothers, who were described as “small and slight of build, but with an immense quantity of iron nerve in their little bodies.” Aspiring developers who later ran brothels, the Rizzos likely had a little money, which put a target on their backs.
The intimidation they suffered was instantly felt when Joseph Rizzo took the stand, and became “so palsied he could hardly proceed,” as the defendants were “muttering” threats. But he proceeded to tell his tale after a detective removed the men “looking their blackest” to another part of the room.
Their trouble had started on Christmas Eve in 1905, he said, in Browntown, while the Rizzos were hosting a party.
A feast was being prepared when Joseph Rizzo’s wife heard rustling outside. Looking out a window, she saw Sam Lucchino “standing about three paces away from an electric light,” and another suspect, Charles Gonzaga, crouching alongside the house with a gun.
When she tried to open the back door, a pistol was shoved in her face. Seconds later, a bomb went off in the backyard, sending the guests inside stampeding to the front door, where men with leveled guns were waiting to “bade them to remain in the house.”
Lucchino and Gonzaga were accused of setting the bomb, which had been positioned to instill “terror” rather than injure. Days later, another suspect known as “Jimmy Long” dropped by the Rizzos’ house. He presented himself as a “friend” and invited the brothers to join his “society,” but they cautiously refused.
Not long after, the Rizzos were lured to Long’s house, where a Black Hand meeting was underway. The brothers were told to sit down and listen. It was explained that the men inside belonged to a larger society called the Iron Head, with 500 members and branches in dozens of cities. There would be no use in running. The association would find them wherever they went. The Rizzos were then “invited” to join, but they refused.
They were shown a large display of “vicious looking” knives and guns, “used for the purpose of getting revenge from persons who did not heed their suggestions.” The brothers were told that “in America it was absolutely necessary for all Italians to belong to the society in order to get justice in the courts and other places.”
But still, they refused. They reportedly “begged to be let off,” to which Jimmy Long responded that if anything bad should happen, “they should blame themselves.”
A relentless campaign of harassment then followed through 1906, culminating in early 1907. In the middle of the night in June, their home was riddled with bullets. Then they received a Black Hand letter.
“Browntown, June 13
Dear Friend: For the last time you are notified that our advice is that we shot last time only to warn you. If you want trouble you will get only trouble. If you don’t answer by Wednesday evening we will make our answer by blowing your house to pieces.
Your friend,
“STRONG ARM”
The Rizzos became “determined to defy the society.” They asked the police department for permission to bear arms, and took turns standing guard at night with a “repeating rifle” poking out of loopholes they cut into a barn.
The standoff culminated in the middle of the night on January 24, 1907, when one of the gang members banged on their door and demanded to speak with Charles Rizzo. Seeing armed men outside, Charles grabbed a “pump gun” from upstairs, and stormed out onto his porch, unloading 10 shots into the crowd of Black Hand gangsters. Three men were hit and dragged away by friends.
An uneasy calm followed, until Sam Lucchino came by a couple of days later to talk.
“Now see what you’ve done?” the Rizzos claimed he said. “One of the men is dead and another is near dead.”
Lucchino reportedly demanded $500 to “keep things quiet.” But the Rizzos went to the police instead.
Lucchino was described as a “ringleader” of the harassment operation. His involvement became a focus of the prosecution’s attack. One witness claimed that he and Gonzaga had threatened to kill him, “cut off his head and use it for a football.” Another, when asked to identify Lucchino in court, started trembling “as though he had a bad case of chills,” then refused to ID him.
Given the number of witnesses and level of detail involved, it was a slam dunk case for the prosecution. The suspects were already licking their wounds when a verdict was reached in May. The day got off to a rough start for the defendants, when the county prison van lost a wheel and flipped over on its way to court.
“All the prisoners were inside and handcuffed together,” it was reported. “When the smoke cleared way, one Italian defendant was found to be painfully injured by a gash across his head. … Everyone was more or less shocked and bruised.”
Eleven of the 13 men were found guilty.
Incredibly, the judge only sentenced them to a single year in prison, explaining that he went easy because they were new to the country and not “familiar” with its laws. Perhaps the fact that the district attorney had received death threats played a role in influencing his decision.
The ‘Iron Head’ trial was reported far and wide, dealing another black eye to the image of Italian immigrants in America.
On one hand, Italians were readily portrayed as comic figures. Around Pittston, the poems of a humorist named T.A. Daly appeared in the local papers, which were written in caricatured Italian dialect, with titles like “Da Comica Man” and “Da Leetla Boy.”
On the other, Italians were widely viewed as criminal by nature. In 1907, an opinion piece titled “Criminal Italians in Pennsylvania” appeared in the Wilkes-Barre News:
“It is time to make some wholesale raids on these offending aliens and teach them that they cannot further continue their vicious and criminal practices … it might be good politics for the state constabulary and the police in the cities and towns to raid all suspects in the various Italian Colonies and sections, and at least confiscate the murderous weapons owned and concealed by hundreds of these people. Too wide a latitude is given to them.”
While Lucchino was in prison, a race riot erupted in Pittston. A local man named Parke Clelland had been shot and killed during a brawl on Railroad Street, where he and his friends clashed with a group of young Italian men.
“A shudder of horror ran through the city,” reported the Pittston Gazette. “The scene that followed the murder was such as had never before been witnessed in this city.”
The city police kicked into high gear. “All the Italians in the neighborhood were stopped and searched,” the story continued, “a half dozen Italian houses in the neighborhood were entered … prisoners were picked up one after another.”
As word spread, thousands of enraged Anglo-American citizens poured into Pittston’s streets, and surrounded the city prison where the Italian suspects were being taken. As the police escorted them through the mob into jail, “there were ominous threats of lynchings.” (These were not empty threats. In 1891, one of the largest mass lynchings in American history occurred when 11 Italians were killed by a mob in New Orleans.) Others spoke of burning Italian homes.
In the ensuing chaos, one of the Italian suspects was bum-rushed and nearly beaten to death before Pittston’s Mayor William Gillespie charged out of City Hall “hatless and coatless” to pry the man free.
Fearing a “fatal race war,” Gillespie called in state troopers on horseback, who struggled to drive the “mass of humanity” away, as “probably 2,000 men remained on the streets until daylight.”
The following day, 1,500 residents attended a mass meeting at the state armory. A citizens committee was formed, issuing an “A Letter to Italians” that was published in the Pittston Gazette. The letter expressed regret for the mob violence, “by which one of your countrymen, without being proven guilty of any offense … was assaulted and wrongfully abused.”
“We do not believe for a moment that all Italians are desperadoes,” the letter read. “But you must be aware,” it added, “that circumstances have arisen in the history of communities, when existing and available authority could no more control public indignation …”
The letter urged “every member of the Italian race in this community … to do everything possible, by precept and example, to suppress crime of whatever nature.”
It continued: “Depend upon it, your conduct will now be more closely watched than ever, and your future in America is in your own hands. You must know that you are being boycotted. You must know that very soon, if a radical change is not made, that you will have no market in this country for your labor, and that thousands of your race will not be able to make a living on this continent.” (Directly below the letter, a headline reported another unfolding disaster: “Trapped in a Mine: Thirty Men Are Probably Dead in Burning Shaft.”)
This was the climate when Sam Lucchino and the other Iron Head men were released from prison in 1908.
Friends and family gathered to greet them with cheers. “Wives kissed their husbands,” it was reported, “male friends shook hands, and for nearly five minutes the court room was practically turned over to the foreigners. … One of the defendants attempted to kiss Attorney James Morris.”
For the Black Hand leaders, the trial seemed to mark a turning point. With so many eyes now explicitly trained on them, they slowly began to pivot from brazenly aggressive exploits to a more strategic and insidious, if no less violent, Mafia-style corruption. But one of them was headed in the opposite direction.
While we can only speculate what was going through Sam Lucchino’s mind during his time in prison, his journey was about to take a sharp turn.
In September of 1909, a year after his release from prison, a 24-year-old Sam Lucchino declared his intent to become an American citizen.
He was listed as a miner from Montedoro, standing 5 foot 4, and weighing 155 pounds. “Color: white. Complexion: dark.” His name was recorded as “Samuel Lockin.”
One month later, on October 9, Secret Service agent William J. Flynn received an intriguing phone call from Philadelphia in New York City.
“At 11.00 a.m. Operative Griffin telephoned,” Flynn noted, “that Chief of Police of Pittston has an informant named Sam Lockin, an Italian who returned to Pittston, Pa., from New York City last Wednesday.”
“Lockin” claimed to have met a man named “Joe” in the city who showed him a suitcase stuffed with counterfeit bills. “Joe” gave “Lockin” a sample $5 bill and asked him to find buyers in Pittston at $.35 cents on the dollar.
Flynn thought he knew who “Joe” was: Giuseppe Boscarino, a middle man for the Lupo-Morello crime syndicate, one of the earliest, and most feared, Mafias in American history.
Flynn had been surveilling their gang for years. In fact, he had helped gather evidence that was used to apprehend their former hitman, Tomasso “The Ox” Petto, before he fled to Pittston.
Ten minutes after the call, he received a wire from Bayonne, New Jersey, that reported that “young Italians” had been caught passing fake $2 bills.
He phoned Griffin back with a question: Would “Lockin” be willing to return to New York?
“Lockin” thought it over, and said yes.
Two days later, he left home in the dead of night, slipped down Railroad Street and caught a red-eye train from Pittston to Manhattan.
What could have driven him to make such a risky decision?
Lucchino, after all, was intricately connected to the heart of Pittston’s criminal underworld. His sister had recently married his close friend, Stefano La Torre, who had gone to prison with him after terrorizing the Rizzos, and whom some considered the first leader of the Men of Montedoro. His brother, Peter, was also married into the La Torre family.
Furthermore, the Pittston Mafia had deep ties to New York City. Why would he rock that boat? Was there internal Mafia warfare at play? Did the thought of returning to the mines, or a life of crime, depress him? Both options, in a sense, were like death sentences.
Perhaps Lucchino, ever the showman, saw flipping the script as a way to stay in the limelight. Known for his charisma and bravado, he may have viewed the decision as a challenge. Or perhaps, during his time in prison, he experienced a crisis of conscience.
It’s also possible that Lucchino was growing weary of the backlash being caused by Black Hand crime and the early Mafia’s rise, like many other Italian immigrants at the time.
Notably, eight months before Lucchino’s undercover mission to Manhattan, the nation had been captivated by the story of an Italian-born NYPD detective named Joseph Petrosino, who had taken a stand against the mob.
An “implacable foe” of the Lupo-Morello syndicate, as Flynn later wrote, Petrosino had been dispatched to Sicily to gather evidence that would be used to deport them.
For millions of Italian immigrants, he was a light. Choosing to fight against organized crime, he represented hope, a path away from violence and fear.
When Petrosino was assassinated in Sicily, that hope was shattered. News of his demise traveled across the country, and when his body was returned to New York, 200,000 people marched through the streets of Manhattan in his honor.
It’s hard not to wonder if Petrosino may have inspired Sam Lucchino.
Lucchino’s first meeting with Flynn must have made for a comical sight.
Like many southern Italians, Lucchino was short and compact, a well-built man at 5 foot 4. By contrast, Flynn towered over him at 6 feet tall and weighed more than 300 pounds. Known as “the Bulldog” of the Secret Service, Flynn wore a derby hat and sported a thick, bristling mustache.
The Secret Service was primarily known for combatting counterfeiting at the time, and Flynn was in charge of its Manhattan office. He would later be tapped to direct the Bureau of Investigation, the agency that preceded the FBI.
At this stage in his career, Flynn still adhered to the era’s prejudices. He subscribed to the positivist racial theories of a northern Italian eugenicist named Cesare Lombroso, who viewed southern peasants as a subaltern people and searched for marks of the “born criminal” on southern Italian skulls.
But after years in the field, Flynn changed his tune, writing that “many a young man has ‘gone wrong’ because of unfortunate associate or bad environment, and that he is not always inherently a criminal.”
For now, Flynn was intently focused on taking down New York’s most feared Mafia clan, and he likely couldn’t believe his luck that Lucchino had emerged out of nowhere to help.
The suitcase full of counterfeit money that Lucchino was shown had come from a remote farmhouse in upstate New York, where an Italian immigrant with printing skills had been kidnapped and forced to print fake dollar bills under threat of death.
That particular counterfeiting scheme may have been the most audacious stunt ever concocted by the Lupo-Morello gang, which was led by two fearsome men. Giuseppe Morello, known as the “Clutch Hand” on account of a congenital deformity, was a Corleone native who ruled Italian Harlem.
His brother-in-law, Ignazio “The Wolf” Lupo, was born in Palermo in 1877, and now ran Little Italy. He reportedly killed or ordered the deaths of more than 60 people over the span of a decade.
Flynn was determined to take the two men down. He spied on them in the part of Lower Manhattan that is now known as Nolita, where Lupo owned a grocery store and Morello ran what Flynn described as an “evil-smelling, dingy little spaghetti joint,” tucked away in the back.
Flynn gave Lucchino a wad of marked cash and instructed him to buy counterfeit bills from Boscarino, the gang’s middle man. He advised Lucchino to mention that friends in Pittston were pooling money to buy more.
Flynn’s deputies traced Lucchino as he and Boscarino wandered around Lower Manhattan, popping in and out of butchers, barbers and grocers. Later, the men boarded an elevated train headed uptown, where Boscarino said he was going to retrieve the counterfeit cash. But it never materialized, and Lucchino returned to Flynn empty-handed, then headed back to Pittston.
Flynn pleaded with Lucchino to return. He agreed, on the condition that he be accompanied by Pittson’s chief of police. The back-and-forth continued for some time before Lucchino scored in October, securing $50 in counterfeit bills from Boscarino.
Flynn later traveled to Scranton to meet with Lucchino, Pittston’s chief of police, and Mayor William Gillespie. Together, they devised a plan: Lucchino would pen a letter to Boscarino with a marked $20 bill in the envelope. The counterfeit money that Boscarino mailed back, along with another batch Lucchino later acquired, sealed the deal. In November, Flynn raided the gang’s operation. Lucchino’s testimony proved crucial in putting Lupo, Morello, and many others behind bars.
For Flynn, taking down the leaders of New York City’s first Mafia was an enormous, long-sought-after win. He wrote that “Locino [sic] was perfectly well aware of what it meant to go on the witness stand and ‘squeal.’ But after thinking the matter over, he “loosened up and declared that he had an ancient wrong to right!”
Flynn added that Lucchino “never explained to me further just what his grievance against the ‘Black-Handers’ was.”
The decision to become an informant marked a turning point in Lucchino’s life. It was apparently noticed by some of his extorted Italian friends and neighbors, as they began to confide in him.
Shortly after testifying in New York, Lucchino provided Flynn with a Black Hand letter that an Italian immigrant in Pittston had received. The man’s willingness to share the letter with Lucchino showed an impressive level of trust. Had the letter’s authors found out, both men’s lives would have been in danger.
Lucchino had not yet broken ties with Pittston’s emerging Mafia. How could he? They were his friends and family. In a way, they were his world. But it also appears clear that he began to represent a counterweight to the Mafia’s influence in Pittston, as he emerged as a leader and a problem solver in his community.
Meanwhile, a communal ethic of sharing and solidarity was developing in anthracite-mining towns, as immigrants from diverse backgrounds resisted systemic exploitation by the mine owners. By this time, the detested practice of subcontracting had been revived, and the labor wars were again heating up.
The resistance saw women standing alongside men on the front lines. During a wildcat strike outside of a colliery in 1910, a band of Italian women sparked a riot by standing their ground as attempts were made to shove them aside.
For many Italians, joining this multiethnic coalition was an entirely new experience. After generations of toiling under feudal circumstances, they were finally fighting back against their masters.
A few months before testifying in New York, Sam Lucchino married Rosalie Tuzzolino in Pittston.
Rosalie — nicknamed “Nellie” — was 17. Sam was 25. Not much is known about how they met, or what their courtship may have looked like. No pictures of Nellie in her youth could be found. Arranged marriages were common in Sicily, and Sam was familiar with her father, Joseph, a popular Italian who died in the mines the previous year.
Maybe he and Nellie walked along the river in West Pittston, holding hands. Or maybe Nellie spotted Sam at a dance, or in a poolhall where she shouldn’t have been.
One way or another, she was already pregnant when they were married in the fall of 1910.
Weeks later, the baby was delivered stillborn — marking a tragic, ominous start to a marriage that would be visited by continual loss.
Two months after the loss of their child, Sam Lucchino was walking along Railroad Street, talking to a wealthy local Italian named Charles Consagra.
A light snow fell, and moonlight shone brightly down on Pittston. Lucchino and Consagra were deep in conversation when two gunshots suddenly rang out, fired at close range into the side of Lucchino’s neck. He collapsed to the ground, his blood staining the snow. He later claimed that in his semiconscious state, he saw Charles Consagra frantically running around, trying to find help.
Neighbors rushed over and carried Lucchino up the road to the house where he and Nellie lived on Railroad Street, “where his bride of three months was horrified at the murderous attempt upon her husband’s life.”
Blood was pouring from his neck. A doctor was summoned and later declared that if either bullet had sunk in slightly farther — a “small fraction of an inch, a sixteenth would have been enough” — Lucchino would have bled out and died on the spot.
But miraculously, he survived. The next day, he was convalescing in bed, and already receiving visitors — including none other than Charles Consagra.
According to The Informer, Charles Consagra was a foot soldier in the Pittston Crime Family. A nervy, impulsive man with striking sociopathic tendencies, even by Mafia standards, Consagra had been born in Montedoro 15 years before Lucchino, in 1870. His last name, spelled “Consagra,” first appeared in local papers in 1911. But given the tendency toward butchering Italian surnames at the time, it is likely that he was one and the same as “Charles Gonzaga,” who had worked with Lucchino to set off the bomb outside of the Rizzos’ house in 1907.
“‘Mano Nero,’ the notorious Black Hand, again struck with reprehensible force against this community last night,” read a front-page story in the Pittston Gazette.
A connection to Lupo and Morello was immediately suspected. But as the investigation unfolded, a tangled web of local interests took shape. Consagra initially told the police that two men jumped out of an alley on the right side of the street, armed with “short rifles, commonly termed carbines.” He tried to play himself off as an innocent bystander. But the close-range nature of the attack, on such a quiet, moonlit night, quickly drew suspicion, and on February 13, he was arrested along with seven other men.
Sensing an opportunity, the Pittston Police reopened two cold case murders from years past. One case involved the unsolved murder of Giuseppe Castellina, who had been blown away on Railroad Street six years prior. Consagra was now the lone suspect.
When this news reached him in his cell, he immediately fingered another suspect in Lucchino’s shooting — Peter Lacatta, his very best friend and in-law. Consagra started spinning a desperate narrative, claiming that Lacatta had committed the murder, apparently not caring that he was in earshot in a nearby cell. But Consagra’s story fell apart under light questioning, and he erupted in fury after realizing his error.
“You have my life in your hands,” he screamed out at Lacatta. “If I get you in the same cell with me, I will cut your head off with a plate.”
Later, when Consagra was “marched to the warden’s office” and “taken into the presence of his accuser,” the two men reportedly “stared at each other for an instant,” when, to the surprise of everyone present, Consagra fainted and had to be given medical attention.
Meanwhile, Sam Lucchino was developing an even more high-profile reputation, with one local paper hailing him as the “deadliest foe of organized crime in this community.”
A preliminary hearing was held in Pittston to address Lucchino’s shooting, alongside the reopened murder cases. As reported by the Pittston Gazette, “crowds of the swarthy sons of Italy, and some of their wives, were crowded up against the bar in the rear of the room.”
Tensions were running high. Word had just spread that another attempt was made on Lucchino’s life. The night before the hearing, two gunmen, one disguised as a woman, were spotted outside his house, leading to a shootout with Lucchino’s cousins, though no one was hurt.
Lucchino was still recovering from the gunshot wounds when he took the stand. According to William Gillespie, the former mayor, Lucchino showed “no sign of fear,” and needed little coaching as he “stolidly, almost indifferently, told his tragic story.” It was reported that he tried to speak in English at the trial.
Lucchino claimed that no one else was around when he was shot. He said that Consagra moved “from the left to the right side” and added that Consagra was left-handed. A judge ruled that Consagra and seven other men be held for conspiracy to kill a government witness.
Hearings for all three cases were held in unison. The waterworks flowed when the first cold case was called, and the widow of a murdered Italian immigrant named Peter Salvagi took the stand. Salvagi had been found butchered the previous year, shoved down a “cave hole” by a burbling creek, with his head nearly severed. On the stand, his widow screamed in Italian and ripped at her dress. She pulled out a “portrait of the late husband surrounded by several of his children,” and shoved it at the suspects, who were “unmoved.” Salvagi had been harassed for years, she claimed, adding that on one occasion Lucchino had saved his life.
When the second cold case brought Consagra’s ex-best-friend Peter Lacatta to the stand, Consagra — the lone suspect — asked the courtroom interpreter to step aside so that he could look the witness “in the face.” He then lifted up one of his children and plopped her on the floor, directly in front of Lacatta. The infant was removed by a detective who dryly noted that Consagra “would [later] have an opportunity to play his sympathy act in court.”
Following the hearing, Railroad Street went into lockdown. Lucchino’s friends posted themselves up and down the road, “armed with shotguns and rifles,” prompting one paper to describe the scene as “feudal.”
But Lucchino remained undeterred. He reportedly continued to walk around town late at night, alone and unafraid.
The first of the three cases to be tried was the Castellina shooting, with Charles Consagra as the only defendant. Lucchino appeared as a star witness and “made an impressive appearance.”
Consagra’s lawyer, Miner B. Schnerr, a well-known socialite and rising local legal star, tried to shake Lucchino by dredging up his Black Hand past. He called on Joseph Rizzo to testify against him as a character witness. But Lucchino was backed up by a powerful lineup of city officials, including the current mayor, who testified to his “good reputation.”
However, Schnerr did manage to wrestle out one revealing detail.
“How much did you get from the county last year?” he asked Lucchino.
“About seven hundred dollars,” Lucchino responded. And so it became known that Lucchino had worked as a “special” detective on this case and many others.
As the trial continued and Peter Lacatta took the stand again, he testified that Consagra had borrowed a gun from him shortly before the shooting — and later returned it with the cartridges missing.
“Has Consagra told you anything about the case since?” he was asked.
He replied: “Last Christmas night … he called me to one side and said: ‘What you think of that Sam Lucchino making that arrest in New York?’”
“I said, ‘I don’t know anything about it.’”
“He said, ‘I will have to kill that Lucchino, or he may make big arrest around here.’”
“I said, ‘You ought not kill Sam Lucchino, he is Godfather to your child.’”
“He said, ‘I don’t care.’”
In a shock verdict, Charles Consagra was acquitted, despite his testimony having gone to “pieces.”
He began “sobbing” with his wife when the decision was read and translated into Italian. But he wasn’t off the hook, as his trial for Lucchino’s attempted murder still loomed.
Following his acquittal, Consagra’s demeanor changed dramatically. The next week, he appeared at the courthouse as an observer and seemed “an altogether different man from the [gloomy] individual who was fighting for his life a few days ago.” At one point, he kissed the hand of one of his attorneys in a conspicuous display of gratitude. What followed next reeked of corruption and quickly turned into a roller coaster.
In mid-May, charges were dropped against all the remaining men being held for Lucchino’s shooting — except for Charles Consagra. Then, in a sensational twist, warrants were issued for Peter Lacatta, Stefano La Torre and Sam Lucchino himself — along with Lucchino’s brother, Peter.
The inclusion of Stefano La Torre — Lucchino’s old friend and brother-in-law, a reputed Pittston Crime Family leader — in this legal stunt suggested some level of internecine Mafia warfare. Lucchino and La Torre were still allies, indicating just how mixed up and murky Lucchino’s life had become, living side by side with friends and enemies alike on a roughly one-mile stretch of road.
Lucchino was stunned to learn that he’d been accused of killing Peter Salvagi. Meanwhile, Consagra went to the press, claiming to have received a Black Hand letter. He stated: “While these men are in jail there will be no crime in Pittston. They doin’ all the killing.”
Whether Consagra’s sudden leverage within the local justice system stemmed from ties to law enforcement or mutual blackmail remains unclear. Regardless, five days later, the charges were summarily dropped, and Lacatta, La Torre and both Sam and Peter Lucchino were released. As one paper noted, the “general impression” was that the charges were “trumped up against Lucchino by his enemies, who are opposed to him because of his police work.”
Interestingly, it bears mentioning that in the lead-up to Lucchino’s legal trouble, Charles Consagra’s lawyer, Miner Schnerr, became embroiled in a shocking scandal of his own. Facing a charge of sodomy — which was classified as a crime in early 20th century America — his predicament cast an unusual shadow over the events surrounding Lucchino’s case.
One month earlier, in April, a married, immigrant Italian father of five from Pittston came forward to accuse him of the act, incriminating himself in the process. In the ensuing trial, Schnerr claimed that he was being viciously blackmailed. Complicating matters further, Schnerr’s legal defense presented a letter that was signed by the plaintiff, which read, “I undersigned, do declare that all I have done I did because Sam Lucchino made me do, because I did not know how to talk.” Yet in court, the man reverted to his original accusation, stating that he signed the letter after Italians paid him a visit in prison, insinuating coercion.
In early May, Schnerr was acquitted, but not without receiving a court censure for bringing “odium upon his profession.” His reputation had been ruined. Disbarment proceedings soon followed, charging him with 18 counts of professional misconduct, one of which particularly infuriated a judge: Schnerr had received a retainer to defend Charles Consagra, despite being appointed his public defender. After being disbarred, Schnerr closed up his offices in Pittston and Wilkes-Barre and split town for good. Months later, he was picked up in southern Italy and arrested for passing counterfeit money, along with an Italian-born companion, “a young married man who formerly lived in Pittston.”
In the midst of all this chaos, Charles Consagra’s charges for shooting Lucchino were mysteriously dropped. No mention or explanation of why could be found in the press, despite numerous articles noting that a “strong case” remained to be tried against him.
At the same time, Lucchino’s family began to unravel. The first blow came in late May when his mother, Pasqualina, was arrested for larceny, accused of stealing several hundred dollars worth of clothes from a Pittston department store on the very same day that her son was “vindicated” in the Salvagi cold case.
Then, in late August, as Sam and Nellie ate breakfast, they were startled by the sound of two gunshots coming from the second floor of their house, where both of Sam’s parents lived. Fearing another Black Hand attack, Sam grabbed his pistol and climbed up the stairs, where he was shocked to find his father, Tranquillo, lying in a pool of his own blood, with a gun.
The Pittston Gazette reported:
“Melancholy because his health was failing him, Tranquillo Lucchino, aged 70 … father of Samuel Lucchino, the young detective who has taken such a prominent part in the prosecution of the recent Black Hand cases, attempted to take his life this morning by firing two bullets into his head. … He has been suffering from miner’s asthma …”
Two days later, Tranquillo died. Sam was blindsided. He tried to hide what had happened from the press, claiming that his father had fallen down the stairs and accidentally discharged his pistol. But no one believed the story.
In September, Pasqualina Lucchino appeared in court to face her theft charges, “bent down with the weight of many years, and apparently friendless and alone.” Neither Sam nor Peter accompanied her or helped her find legal counsel. When she was convicted, the judge rebuked her sons for their “unfilial attitude” and commuted her sentence due to her age.
We will never know what went on behind the Lucchino family’s closed doors — how Sam Lucchino’s parents felt about their son’s shock decision to work with the law, or what it meant for their reputation in the intimate environs of Pittston’s Italian colony.
But through it all, Sam Lucchino remained unphased. He doubled down harder than ever in Pittston and refused to back away, even after receiving a fresh death threat — a letter that was signed simply, a “friend.”
Life in America rolled on. In November 1911, Lucchino involved himself in a political effort to allow Pittston’s Italian immigrants to vote in local elections. In December, he became an American citizen.
In 1912 and 1913, he and Nellie had two more stillborn children, which was incredibly tragic but hardly uncommon at the time, as parents regularly lost children to disease, hardship or accidents.
The deaths in his family and attempts on his own life had a mellowing effect on Lucchino’s character. During the Rizzo trial, he had come across as brash, cocky and violent. But the picture of him that emerged in this later period was more taciturn, if no less defiant in nature.
Lucchino continued to work as a “special detective” in Pittston, where he kept his friends close — and his enemies closer. Remarkably, he served as a witness for Charles Consagra’s citizenship petition in 1913. The two men were practically neighbors, underscoring how tiny and tight-knit Pittston’s Italian colony really was.
Perhaps an elder mafioso like Charles Bufalino — uncle to future boss Russell, the infamous “Quiet Don” — brokered a temporary peace. Lucchino’s shooting had surely roiled Pittston’s underworld. A need to preserve powerful interests likely made it imperative for the two men to keep out of each other’s way — or, in Lucchino’s case, to turn an occasional blind eye.
Consagra moved forward by becoming a hated subcontractor for the Pennsylvania Coal Company, alongside a shadowy figure named Santo Volpe — marking the Mafia’s first infiltration into the anthracite mines.
An experienced sulfur miner from Montedoro, Volpe became known as the “King of the Night.” He ran the Men of Montedoro through the 1920s and ’30s, ruthlessly crushing any and all opposition. The PaCC’s No. 6 shaft, where he and Consagra oversaw brutal, old-world subcontracting operations, would soon become involved in a number of high-profile murders, putting Consagra at odds with Sam Lucchino once again.
By 1915, Pittston was hitting its stride. “Sanitary sewers were being laid, the city was being wired for electricity and streets were being paved,” notes the Greater Pittston Progress. “Automobiles were taking over for horses … the Bell ‘Hello Girls’ handled 24,000 calls from the 3,000 telephones.”
In March, Lucchino made a rare appearance in a humorous news story: “‘Flowers and no council meeting,’ remarked Mayor M. N. Donnelly as he entered the council chamber in the city hall last evening at eight o’clock and beheld a potted plant in full bloom adoring the council table, but no commissioners.” The mayor then asked Lucchino to put newspaper under the pot, but “not understand[ing] English very well,” he covered them with broadsheet instead.
In May, Nellie finally gave birth to a healthy, breathing child. They named her Pasqualina in honor of Sam Lucchino’s mother, and called her Esther for short. But as always, their joy was short-lived. Only two months later, bullets again flew in Sam Lucchino’s direction.
The initial reports stated that the third attempt on his life occurred when Nellie woke up in the middle of the night to attend to a “sick baby.” As Sam “lighted a lamp and started to dress,” a man named “Joe Shandro” — aka Giuseppe Sciandra — who had been arrested and freed after the first attempt on Lucchino’s life — took aim at their bedroom window.
Hearing the shots fired, a policeman engaged Sciandra in a winding foot chase through nearby streets, which ended when Sciandra “step[ped] into the arms” of an “awaiting blue-coat” while attempting to climb out of the window of a nearby boarding house.
At least, that’s how the episode was originally reported.
Later, it was reported that Lucchino had advance warning of the plot and was preparing to board a midnight train after learning that a “mysterious stranger” had come to town — supposedly a Lupo-Morello affiliate — offering $800 dollars for his life. According to this story, when Nellie learned about the bounty on her husband’s head, she begged him to flee.
Later still, it would be claimed that the entire family had already split, and that Sciandra was in fact taking aim at a dummy that Sam had propped up as a decoy.
Whatever version of the story was actually true, the press agreed on one thing: Sam Lucchino had finally been run out of town.
“On good authority,” it was reported that he would “never return.” A newspaperman visited his “aged mother” and “anxious and tired-eyed wife,” writing “they are tired, very tired.”
Just a few weeks later, Lucchino returned to Pittston after reading in an Italian-language newspaper that attempts would be made on the lives of his family. “That was enough for me,” he said. “We go away together, soon, and then it’s for good.”
But true to his unbending, iron-willed form, he was back in Pittston with Nellie and Esther just five months later, investigating another vendetta murder, this one related to a miner employed at Consagra and Santo Volpe’s No. 6 shaft, which the authorities believed traced all the way back to Tomasso Petto’s 1903 barrel murder.
Lucchino continued to work high-profile cases. That April, he provided intel to detectives from New Jersey that resulted in the arrest of a Pittston man who had committed a murder in Newark.
The detectives sang Lucchino’s praises and expressed “keen surprise” to find out he was only employed as a “special detective,” similar to a freelancer.
In May, a petition with “hundreds of signatures” was presented at Pittston City Hall to name Lucchino an official city detective. But the measure failed. It had recently been reported that “certain political interests” were “opposed to his appointment.”
Meanwhile, mineworker discontent continued to grow. By 1916, United Mine Workers of America leadership had weakened — or fallen into the pocket of management, as it were — and an unlikely heir apparent emerged: a radical, socialist labor union called the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
The labor radicalism was particularly appealing to Sicilian immigrants, especially for those familiar with old-world sulfur mining experience. Local membership swelled as an Italian anarchist named Luigi Galleani organized scores of momentous and often violent strikes throughout the spring and summer, which included interunion feuds at Consagra and Volpe’s No. 6 shaft.
The authorities responded by arresting IWW members, who were charged and harshly sentenced for “inciting riots, unlawful assemblies, vagrancy.” The federal government soon joined in on the crackdown. In 1917, under the Espionage Act, President Wilson jailed and deported much of the IWW’s immigrant leadership, dealing a decisive, crushing blow to its influence nationwide.
By 1918, World War I was raging and young men from Pittston were being sent to the front lines, where reports of a “strange malady” were circulating.
That spring, the Pittston Gazette reported on a “big sale of war stamps” in town, noting that Lucchino had purchased $1,000 worth. It marked the first time that he was ever referred to in print as an “Italian-American.”
In May, Lucchino helped organize a mass rally at the state armory in downtown Pittston to celebrate Italy’s third anniversary as an Ally power. Santo Volpe, who increasingly sought to involve himself in community leadership roles, also helped organize the event.
A procession marched through Pittston’s streets toward the armory, where 10 years earlier an anti-Italian hate fest had been held following Parke Clelland’s murder. “Seldom, if ever, has there been such frequent and enthusiastic outburst of patriotism,” it was reported. The armory, which was festooned with Italian and American flags, was “hardly large enough” to fit the thousands in attendance. “Several hundred Italian children, dressed neatly in white, added much to the appearance.”
Prominent politicians made riveting speeches, and when the Montedoro Band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” then the Italian national anthem, the hall “fairly shook” with cheering and yelling.
Later that fall, a devastating wave of the Spanish Flu hit Pittston. Deaths from “the grip” quickly eclipsed those in the mines. In West Hazleton, an entire family, including four children, was “wiped out.” In and around Pittston, “foreign speaking people” were reportedly hit hardest.
Schools, cinemas, saloons, churches and “stores and shops of every kind” were shuttered, as Red Cross workers toiled relentlessly. The community came together, with private residences converted into canteens and large garages functioning as open-air day cares.
But there was no respite for the coal miners in Pennsylvania, where the governor urged mine companies to “speed production” and “keep ablaze the fires that win the war.”
Lucchino, for his part, contributed in no less an impactful way by assisting a local woman who tended to the welfare of Pittston immigrants.
Miss Emily Johnson later wrote: “[During] the influenza epidemic I went to him many times for advice [on] how to help families of the Italian colony who had suffered from the disease to the point of destitution and despair. He never failed to find the best thing to do, and never was too busy to help the sufferers take the first steps back to independence. I have no idea how many times he took a dollar from his pocket and sent it by me to some widow or some prisoner’s wife or children.”
When World War I ended, “pandemonium broke loose in Pittston.” Steam whistles blew. Church bells rang. Citizens cheered in the streets, giving “vent to their feelings of joy.” Impromptu street parades took place throughout town, and Lucchino marched as a community dignitary, alongside — uncomfortably — Santo Volpe.
By 1920, Pittston’s city population had peaked, totaling over 18,000 people, and Lucchino had finally been named an official “city detective.”
An “insurgent” labor movement was brewing, which returned the United Mine Workers of America to its revolutionary roots. Local membership swelled when two anti-subcontracting firebrands were elected to represent the workforces of the PaCC and other nearby mining companies. A general strike was called on July 16, with subcontracting listed as a point of no compromise.
It was Lucchino’s moment of truth. In advance of the strike, he had aligned himself unequivocally with the rank and file, in direct opposition to the Mafia’s interests.
“It was Lucchino who took the first step against the contractors,” District 1 Vice President Joseph Yannis later claimed. “He worked among the Italian miners of this city and organized them.” Additionally, Lucchino secured affidavits from employees of subcontractors who received pay “for work never performed” — or no-show jobs as they were known, a form of labor corruption typically practiced by the Mafia. He referred to Consagra’s “crowd” as the “most vicious element in the city,” and urged the strikers to remain resolute.
It seems he had finally chosen his side.
On the morning of July 21, Sam Lucchino awoke next to Nellie, made coffee in their kitchen on Railroad Street and kissed their 5-year-old daughter goodbye.
Lucchino traveled to Scranton, where he had been “summoned” by the PaCC’s general superintendent, William P. Jennings. Shortly before the meeting, Lucchino had been offered money to break the strike, but he refused. What he discussed with Jennings remains unknown, but he was likely asked to stand down.
Around 7 p.m., back on duty in Pittston, he reported to a colleague “that there were some strangers in town whom he did not know.” Sgt. Anthony Reddington said he would investigate and made plans to reconvene with Lucchino at the end of his shift.
Around 10 p.m., Lucchino began to make his way home. He walked down Main and turned left onto Railroad. Meanwhile, Emily Johnson, the social worker, was desperately trying to find him. She was “trying to head it off,” claimed labor historian William A. Hastie Sr., an ex-Pittston mineworker himself. “She knew it was coming.”
Bang! … Bang!
After the shooting, a carpenter named Ora White saw a man run down Railroad Street. He chased after him for a few blocks before calling the police.
Sgt. Reddington found Lucchino lying prostrate on the pavement, with Nellie wailing beside him.
He was rushed to Pittston Hospital, where doctors and nurses worked on him, as he drifted in and out of consciousness. The chief of police in Pittston at the time, Leo Tierney, arrived soon after. He approached Lucchino and asked him who had fired the shots.
“A stranger,” he weakly replied.
Tierney asked Lucchino again, with more force: “Who shot you?”
“A stranger shot me,” he reportedly gasped. “But it came through the hands of Charles Consagra.”
There would be no recovery this time. His life slipped away shortly before midnight.
“This has been a very quiet day in the miner’s strike,” the Pittston Gazette reported on July 22. “There is universal mourning – mingled with intense indignation.”
Thousands of striking miners milled about in the streets. A mass rally had been planned, but it was canceled out of “great respect,” in recognition of Sam Lucchino, who had given his life to their cause.
That morning, a Colt .45 pistol was found in a nearby field. Two men had been arrested the previous night, hours after Lucchino was shot: Peter Enrico and Tony Puntariro, hitmen for hire from Trenton, New Jersey.
At 11 p.m. that night, they were escorted to Lucchino’s house, as a “terrifying” thunder storm raged. In handcuffs, they were led to Lucchino’s casket, which was open, and told to “take a good look” inside. They reportedly “never quivered or showed any signs of emotion.” Through flashes of lightening and peels of thunder, Nellie studied their faces, then reportedly pointed to Puntariro as the man who she saw shoot her husband.
Peter Lucchino was in Buffalo when he received word of his brother’s death. He raced home as fast as he could. When his train arrived at the station, a large crowd was gathered, waiting for him, and he “collapsed into the arms of his relatives.”
Lucchino was eulogized in the papers as a “tower of strength.” William Gillespie, the former mayor of Pittston, referred to him as “fearless” — a word that popped up over and over during the roughly 20 years of reporting that exists on his life.
Emily Johnson, whom Lucchino had worked with during the pandemic, wrote a powerful tribute to the fallen officer in the Pittston Gazette:
“He never had a price,” she wrote, “and he could never be scared off from something he undertook.” Her tribute went on to state:
“The respectable Italian people often told Sam Lucchino items of news about murder cases and important prosecutions, that they would not come to the police station or to the Court House and report openly. … Sam Lucchino’s death does not prove that hiding facts about crime is the only safe way to get along in Pittston. It does prove, to my mind, that we have some men in this region so bad, so vile, so bloodstained, that they were desperately afraid of this honest Italian officer.”
In the following days, intriguing details from his life story emerged in the press, casting an almost mythological sheen over his memory. One newspaper claimed that Lucchino had deliberately prevented his Iron Head friends from escaping after their prison van flipped over on the way the court in 1907, where they were set to be sentenced for harassing the Rizzo brothers.
Another account related a previously untold fourth attempt on his life, which one newspaperman said he was “in constant fear of losing.” A visit to Lucchino’s bedroom revealed that he had lined his window curtains with giant pieces of sheet metal.
His house became “a shrine to which scores of men and women, most of them Italians, humbly came to pay homage to the slain detective.” Their “grief-stricken” faces showed the “assassin’s bullet had taken a man who was beloved by a host of people.”
The articles noted that his home bore “evidence of refinement” and showed that the Lucchinos “were assimilating.” They had become “real Americans,” as one paper put it. In death, he finally received full acceptance.
On July 24, between 4,000 and 6,000 residents marched “in a body” through Pittston’s streets to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, as the Montedoro Band played Chopin’s “Funeral March.” It was the largest funeral procession in the city’s history, with “what seemed to be the entire Italian population of Pittston and surrounding towns.”
Members of the police force somberly carried Lucchino’s casket, as a delegation of striking miners followed behind with floral pieces. Included among that delegation was none other than Charles Rizzo, whom Lucchino had terrorized as a Black Hand member more than a decade before.
His death “hardened the strikers,” write labor historians Robert Wolensky and William Hastie in their book, Anthracite Labor Wars.
The miners knew that “Consagra, Stefano La Torre, and the alleged top boss, Santo Volpe, wielded strong influence over the subcontracting system.” They knew, “it was highly unlikely that the murder could have occurred without the approval of the main crime leaders.”
Charles Consagra was “was plainly nervous when arrested” on suspicion of ordering Lucchino’s death. One of his sons appeared in tears at the police station when Consagra was brought in, asking to take his father’s place. Not long after, Lucchino’s dying words pinpointing Consagra were reported in the press.
Puntariro and Enrico initially claimed that they didn’t know each other, which was directly contradicted by a witness who said he had played cards with both of them just hours before the murder. Another suspect, Sebastian Rombolo, who had hosted the card game, told police that Consagra had hired Puntariro as a killer.
In court, Rombolo — a relative of the man Lucchino had helped the Trenton detectives arrest in 1916 — claimed he had been instructed to send Puntariro a telegram requesting his presence in Pittston. He said that Puntariro had a gun wrapped in newspaper at his house, and that as the two men walked down Main Street together a few hours before the shooting, Puntariro told him that he had been offered $3,500 to kill Lucchino by Consagra. Puntariro had reportedly expressed nervous apprehension, telling Rombolo: “I don’t want to kill him, because I’m too young to go to jail.”
It looked as though the walls were finally closing in on Consagra. But then Rombolo recanted, probably after being threatened, and Consagra was set free yet again. A “sensation occurred” following his release, when Peter Lucchino approached Consagra in the courthouse halls and related a message in Italian. “Did you hear that?” Consagra exclaimed. “That man threatened to kill me!”
Meanwhile, chaos was breaking loose in Pittston.
Santo Volpe had been in Italy when Sam Lucchino was killed. That August, he boldly showed up at a mass rally of striking miners and got into it with District 1 Vice President Joseph Yannis. Yannis called the PaCC a “highway robber,” to which Volpe shot back, “Prove it!” and a fracas ensued. When a group of miners rushed at Volpe, the police had to intervene.
The next month, Stefano La Torre’s house was dynamited. The blast was almost surely set by the striking miners, and shortly afterward La Torre applied for a passport to travel to Italy.
Puntariro and Enrico were prosecuted in separate trials by future Pennsylvania state governor Arthur H. James, who had worked as a breaker boy as a child.
Puntariro’s trial began in late September 1920. “Dressed in mourning,” Nellie wiped tears from her eyes as she testified, claiming “she was seated on a porch swing at her home with her 5-year-old daughter,” at the time of the murder. When asked who shot her husband, she said: “I don’t know his name, but I see him here.” Nellie then stepped down from the stand and “in a breathless silence” approached Puntariro: “Dramatically pointing an accusing finger at him, she said in a clear distinct voice, ‘This is the man who killed my husband.’”
Puntariro reportedly “smiled at her in a sort of sneering manner … his dark eyes flashed sharp glances at the jurors, as if to seek their thoughts.”
He was sentenced to death by electrocution on October 4. On November 16, Enrico, his accomplice, was condemned to the same fate.
The strike ended a few days after Puntariro’s sentencing, when prominent subcontractors issued a public letter of resignation.
“Thousands of elated mineworkers returned to their workplaces with the belief that the subcontracting system was, at last, gone,” write Wolensky and Hastie. But their victory was short-lived. Labor violence and rebellion again boiled over in early 1921 when 13 subcontractors were rehired by local mining companies. That spring, 1,000 PaCC men walked off the job at the No. 6 colliery, after it was discovered that Santo Volpe had secured another contract.
Along the way, tens of thousands of dollars were spent to appeal Puntariro’s and Enrico’s convictions, reportedly paid for by Consagra. After three stays of execution, both men met their maker in September of 1922.
Enrico “had to be led from the cell room to the death chamber as he refused to open his eyes,” it was reported. “He would not look at the chair and kept his eyelids down until the death cap covered his features.”
Puntariro clutched a crucifix tight to his chest. His eyes “passed quickly beyond the chair” and “rested a while” upon a detective who had helped convict him. “There was no malice in his look.” He left behind a wife and two children in Italy.
The first men to be executed by electrocution in Luzerne County’s history, they were buried outside the prison’s walls.
Nellie Lucchino asked to be present at the execution, but her request was denied. “I’m glad it is over,” she said. “Some of my friends have warned me to be careful, but I am not afraid. They tried to make me change my story, but the blood of my husband was my blood, and when they killed him, all pity to his slayers left my heart. He was a wonderful husband, kind and loving to me and to his family, and it was only right and just that the men who killed him should pay in full.”
Nellie continued to raise her daughter, Esther, in Pittston, despite receiving numerous death threats. She never remarried.
A few days before the execution, Charles Consagra “mysteriously left town,” and never returned. In 1924, he was reportedly seen in Buffalo, New York. When his clothes were found “along the banks of Lake Erie,” it was assumed that he had “met with foul play,” perhaps in return for his failure to save Puntariro and Enrico from the chair.
The labor wars in northeastern Pennsylvania continued to intensify. With oil overtaking coal as the nation’s dominant energy source, demand for anthracite plummeted, prompting the coal companies to tighten their grip. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, massive strikes led by insurgent union movements shook the region. But the movement was ultimately crushed following a string of shocking, high-profile bombings and shootings that demoralized the resistance — acts almost certainly ordered by Santo Volpe.
In 1947, oil sales surpassed anthracite for the first time in northeastern Pennsylvania, and the anthracite industry began to lag behind nationally in demand and innovation. The final nail in the coffin was driven in the form of a horrific disaster in 1959, when the Susquehanna River flooded a coal shaft outside of Pittston, sending billions of gallons of water down through the underground regional maze of interlinked mines.
An investigation later found that the miners had been illegally instructed to dig too close to the riverbed, in order to extract every last bit of coal. The recklessness was driven by greed and Mafia influence — a tragic representation of the sordid legacy of subcontracting itself.
In the disaster’s wake, capital and political power began leaving northeastern Pennsylvania, while entrenched forms of local corruption remained. As men struggled to find work, women picked up the slack by working in the local garment industry, which was also controlled by the mob. Then, as deindustrialization and depopulation set in, the descendants of the men and women who championed workers’ rights in the 1910s and ’20s increasingly found that there were no jobs left to fight for. Amidst a fog of amnesia, so-called “white working class” anger and pain slowly mushroomed.
In the 2016 presidential race, Luzerne County flipped red for the first time in half a century, when 58 percent of votes went to Donald Trump. Luzerne was subsequently profiled in a book of political journalism titled The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America.
A walk down Railroad Street today belies Pittston’s violent past.
Much of the street was renamed Columbus Avenue in the 1960s. Quaint Victorian houses sit next to 1970s-era duplexes with distinctive aluminum awnings, and rusty railings lead into sunken backyards. Older, boxy, red brick buildings have Italian names faintly painted on the windows.
A car passes by. A neighborhood man mows his lawn.
At St. John the Evangelist Cemetery, there are footstones for infants and babies scattered about, as well as countless markers for men who died young in the mines or later from black lung. Birds chirp on a chilly spring morning as someone plays drums to “Two Tickets to Paradise,” blasting from a speaker in a distant garage.
Sam Lucchino’s grave can be found in the farthest reaches of the cemetery, next to his wife, Nellie. He is removed from the Irish and Welsh graves, in a mostly Italian section near the woods by the suburb of Browntown, where he first settled in 1903.
The stones that surround him are etched with many of the names you came to know in this story — Lucchino’s friends, his enemies and his foes — eternally caught between Old World and the New, the Mafia and the miners, on Railroad Street in Pittston, Pennsylvania.
Vinnie Rotondaro is a journalist and researcher based in Greater Washington, D.C. He studies how culture and history shape political belief, with a focus on the Italian American experience, and recently launched The In-Between, a platform dedicated to exploring identity, culture, politics and polarization. Vinnie’s grandparents were children in Pittston during the events of this story — his grandfather, a breaker boy at the time, was later one of the last men rescued from the Knox Mine Disaster. They are buried just a few meters from Sam and Nellie Lucchino in St. John the Evangelist Cemetery.
Brendan Spiegel, the co-founder of Narratively, is the publication’s longtime editorial director and currently leads Narratively Academy, the site’s education wing.
Julie Benbassat is an award-winning illustrator, painter and animator.