Badges in Little Italy

Joseph Petrosino and New York's Italian Squad

Antonio Vachris

Antonio Vachris

Petrosino�s heir-apparent among Italian detectives was Antonio F. Vachris, the supervisor of the Italian Legion�s Brooklyn division.

Vachris was born about 1867 in France to Italian parents. Before his third birthday, the family moved to the United States, settling in Brooklyn. He married at age 18. His wife was a slightly older woman named Raffela. The couple, living for years at 636 39th Street in Brooklyn, had a son, Charles, in 1886.(94) Vachris was naturalized an American citizen in 1888.(95)

The New York press first noticed Vachris when he was a 29-year-old detective (his official rank appears to have been �roundsman�) of the Brooklyn police trying to enforce a public decency law, Section 675 of the Penal Code.

In July, 1896, Vachris happened across a couple of �adult� entertainments on Coney Island. He arrested Adjie Costello of the Streets of Cairo show and Dora Denton of Bostock�s Algerian Theater on Surf Avenue. Both were charged with performing a vulgar display known as the �coochee-coochee� dance.(96)

The dance, also known as the danse du ventre (belly dance) and the hootchy-kootchy, became a sensation after it was performed for crowds at Middle Eastern-themed exhibits of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It made its first Coney Island appearance in the Streets of Cairo two years later.(97)

(It swept into Manhattan more quickly. In December 1893, �Clubber� Williams made headlines by halting performances of the dance in the Cairo Streets show of the Grand Central Palace, located near the railroad terminal at Lexington Avenue and 43rd Street. Having heard about the display, Williams took a front row seat to see for himself. He and a packed house looked on through three of four dancers. But when the final dancer, one named Ferida, began her routine, Williams stepped up onto the stage and ordered, �Stop that!� (98) )

Vachris could not have been prepared for the public spectacle that was to result from the arrest of the two dancers. Following his action, another officer went out to Coney Island and arrested dancers Fatima Slema, May Asher and Lou Mattin, who he found dancing suggestively at Tilyou�s Walk (West Sixteenth Street). The whole bunch appeared before Judge John Lott Nostrand in the Coney Island Police Court on the morning of July 21, 1896. The charge against Slema, Asher and Mattin was quickly dismissed, since the arresting officer�s statement to the court did not agree with the written complaint. However, attorney John U. Shorter, representing both Costello and Denton, demanded trials by jury �to give the jurors a chance to see the dance which is complained about.�(99)

Performance of the coochee coochee captured on film

After a number of postponements, Costello�s case came to trial on Aug. 7. Vachris was the first witness, and he was asked to describe Costello�s immoral movements in detail. After the detective tried in vain to put words to dance, Judge Nostrand asked, �Can you do it?�

�Oh yes,� Vachris replied.

�Well then, you had better show it to the jury,� the judge instructed.

Vachris stepped down from the witness chair, walked to the front of the jury box and delivered his rendition of the coochee-coochee.(100) The New York Times, which poked a great deal of fun at the detective the following day, described his performance:

...Daintily clutching the skirts of his uniform coat, he began the first lazy movements of the dance. Backward he bent and forward. Now he stood on one foot, and now a mighty policeman�s boot went toward the ceiling. Now he swayed to the right, now to the left, and in a trice he was almost on the floor, wriggling and twisting until he was red in the face.

When he finished, the courtroom erupted in applause. Though the jurors seemed to genuinely appreciate the detective�s show in the steamy, hot courtroom, they found Adjie Costello not guilty. The Times decided to spend some paper and ink speculating on the future Vachris might have as a professional coochee-coochee performer.(101)

While dealing with the same anti-Italian prejudice as Petrosino, Vachris faced a political hurdle as well. The police department in the last years of the 19th Century was largely under the control of Republican administrators, and Vachris was a Democrat. In 1900, he secured a promotion from roundsman to sergeant �with a jimmy and a dark lantern,� in the terminology of the day. He brought Police Commissioner �Colonel� John N. Partridge to court. Vachris argued that he had been doing detective sergeant work for years and deserved the appropriate title and pay. The court found in his favor.(102)

Brooklyn's 'Little Italy'

Like Petrosino, Vachris, who spoke and understood several dialects of Italian and Sicilian, was put to work on cases involving Italian immigrants.

Shortly after winning his promotion to detective sergeant, Vachris was assigned to the Catania murder case � one that resembled the later Barrel Murder so closely that the two incidents merged in the minds of some journalists.(103) On July 23, 1902, some boys taking a late afternoon swim at a cove off Bay Ridge found a dead man within a potato sack on the rocky shore. His throat had been cut and his body folded in half and tied with twine before he was placed in the sack.(104)

Tree-lined streets of Bay Ridge

After some investigation, Vachris and several other Brooklyn detectives identified the victim as Joseph Catania, a 40-year-old immigrant grocer, of 167 Colombia Street. Catania had been missing since the 22nd. Vachris managed to trace Catania�s movements on that day to a business meeting with an importer in Manhattan named Ignazio Lupo. The investigation became sidetracked when it was learned that Catania had recently engaged in an altercation with a Brooklyn customer who owed him money (105) and that the grocer had betrayed two gangsters in Palermo, Sicily, before coming to America. The police eventually decided that Sicilian assassins had crossed the Atlantic for an act of vendetta and disappeared immediately after the deed was done.(106)

(William Flynn of the Secret Service followed the case closely. He was convinced that Catania was part of the Morello-Lupo counterfeiting operation and was murdered because he talked too much. When Lupo was arrested in the Barrel Murder case the following year, Flynn urged that he be charged with the Catania killing as well. (107) )

As plans for Petrosino�s Italian Squad were being worked up, Vachris earned notice for his untiring pursuit of Vito Laduca.

The butcher arrested in the Barrel Murder case was wanted in connection with the kidnapping of young Antonio Mannino. A ransom of $50,000 was demanded in exchange for the boy�s safe return. In mid-August 1904, police arrested several people believed to have taken part in the kidnapping, and evidence pointed to Laduca as the ringleader.(108) Antonio Mannino turned up unharmed a few blocks from his Brooklyn home on the morning of Aug. 19, leaving police to wonder whether the kidnappers had buckled under their pressure or Antonio�s parents had made a secret deal.(109) The pursuit for Laduca was momentarily suspended.

More than a year later, six-year-old Antonio Mareamiena was kidnapped. The Mareamiena and Mannino families were distantly related, and Vachris noted another common element in the two kidnappings. During the Mannino case, the detective several times followed a suspect named Salvatore Picona. The same Picona repeatedly visited the Mareamiena home after the kidnapping and offered to broker the safe return of the boy. Vachris had him arrested on Sept. 30, 1905.(110)

Certain that Laduca was behind the crimes, Vachris managed to track him to Baltimore, where he executed an arrest warrant charging the kidnappings of Mannino and Mareamiena.(111) Laduca was returned to New York just as young Mareamiena was quietly returned to his family. Vachris� tenacity earned him nothing. The families of the kidnapped boys would provide no evidence against the alleged ringleader Laduca.(112)

Heir Apparent

Upon receiving the news of Petrosino�s assassination, Vachris seemed to have no doubt of who was responsible. He immediately summoned Detective Michael Fiaschetti and two other members of Petrosino�s command and rushed out to a Brooklyn saloon run by Erasmo Rubino. There they placed Rubino and his bartender Giuseppe Arturi under arrest for violating the Sunday excise law. The detectives then headed to 195 Johnson Avenue, finding four men were running from the house into its backyard. Vachris grabbed one of the men, Tassano Castranovi, 34, as he tried to scale a fence and pummeled the man into submission. The other three men � Armando Pietro, Vito Adragna and Vito Vela � perhaps sensing that the police would not be tolerant of any nonsense, quickly surrendered.

Vachris accused the four men of �having knowledge of the recent assassination of a detective of worldwide repute.�(113) On the books, they were charged with being undesirable aliens and suspicious characters.(114) Little of any consequence seems to have resulted from the arrests.

The day after it announced Petrosino�s murder, the New York Times speculated that Vachris would take Petrosino�s place at the head of the Italian Legion (115) but made no mention of the secret service organization Commissioner Bingham had been developing. In fact, Bingham�s plan had been scrapped, and the commissioner was in some pretty hot water.

As Petrosino�s heir apparent, Vachris was granted permission in April to venture to Italy, along with Detectives John R. Crowley and A.B. Simon, to investigate the assassination and to gather up Petrosino�s records.(116)

Theodore Bingham

While Vachris was overseas, both Bingham and his grandiose plans were discarded. Bingham had offended the city�s Tammany Hall Democrat-controlled Board of Alderman through his attempts to create a privately funded law enforcement unit loyal only to him and through his backing of brutal police methods. The board brought him up on charges on July 17, accusing him specifically of releasing secret information that led to the assassination of Petrosino and of abusing his authority.(117) Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. attempted to mediate the dispute but found Bingham intractable and shoved him aside in favor of first Deputy Commissioner William F. Baker.(118)

Baker abbreviated Vachris�s mission and completely ignored the Petrosino-gathered criminal records and notes that Vachris brought back to New York with him.(119) Within those papers were 742 Italian certificates of criminal activity by deportable aliens in the United States. It took four years and two more commissioner changes for the certificates to resurface. By then, the three-year statutory limit on their use had expired.(120)

As the police department fell under the influence of pro-immigrant Tammany politicians, the Italian Legion deteriorated, its detectives gradually pulled away and assigned to various precincts with Italian and Sicilian populations.(121)

Vachris, sporting a new Vandyke beard he grew as a disguise while in Italy,(122) remained an active investigator and went back on the trail of kidnapping rings with help from William Flynn. Flynn had taken leave from the Secret Service in order to assume temporarily the position of second deputy police commissioner.(123) Despite some successes, Vachris never gained the prestige of the martyred Petrosino, and Flynn�s efforts to reform the detective bureau were largely ignored. In 1911, as Rhinelander Waldo took over as police commissioner, the remnants of the Italian Legion were scattered, and Vachris was assigned to a Bronx precinct far from his old haunts.(124)

Theodore Roosevelt

Vachris lost his first wife, Raffela, on Sept. 21, 1915.(125) He seems to have remarried twice, once about 1917 and the other time about 1921.(126) He retired from the city police force in 1919 and opened a private detective agency.(127) He was hired to serve as a presidential bodyguard for Theodore Roosevelt�s inauguration in early January of that year.(128)

After a few years, he left his longtime Brooklyn residence and moved across the East, Hudson and Hackensack Rivers to make a new home in the small borough of River Edge, New Jersey. When he arrived, the community had no police force. Vachris immediately set to work building one. In April 1924, he took an unpaid position with the borough government as police commissioner. When River Edge formally established its police department on Oct. 6, 1930, Vachris served as the first police chief,(129) a position he held until his final retirement from law enforcement in 1933.(130)

Vachris died at Hackensack Hospital on Jan. 6, 1944, exactly 25 years after Roosevelt�s inauguration. He was 76 years old. His wife, four children, eight grandchildren and eight great grandchildren survived him.(131) The family name remained a prominent one in Brooklyn for years, as his son Charles established a large construction firm, which did work on municipal projects.