Legend of Lucchino, Part II: The Inside Man
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.
This is Part II of our epic four-part series, “The Legend of Lucchino: The Man Who Took on the Mob.” If you haven’t read Part I yet, click here to dive in.
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.