The Good Killers

1921’s Glimpse of the Mafia

By Thomas Hunt
and Michael A. Tona

“Diu miu!”

The shout drew Michael Fiaschetti’s attention to the figure silhouetted in the dim gray light passing through the hotel window.1

Fiaschetti was on self-imposed guard duty, ostensibly protecting barber Bartolo Fontano from gangsters who wished him dead but secretly working to squeeze a big confession out of the small, skinny 28-year-old who had requested his help.

Fiaschetti

A detective sergeant in official rank with the New York Police Department, Fiaschetti was serving at the time as acting captain in charge of the department’s Italian Squad. In that job, the 39-year-old Brooklynite had large shoes to fill. Previous Italian Squad leader Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino had become a legend since being martyred in March 1909 on an official trip to Palermo, Sicily.2

Fiaschetti, however, was well equipped for the job. He was tall and muscular – he once described himself as “husky enough to make a reputation as a piano mover.”3 So his was a particularly imposing presence among the generally moderate-sized residents of New York’s Little Italies.

Fiaschetti was both street smart and savvy to the internal politics of the police department. Another asset was his relationship with the press.

Newsmen in that highly competitive era for print media were hungry for sensation, and the cigar-chewing Fiaschetti knew how to deliver it, while keeping his name conveniently attached. Finally, Fiaschetti possessed the ability to crawl into the mind of a perpetrator. That knack served him well in his dealings with Fontano.

Broadway Central

The detective, sleeping lightly in his Broadway Central Hotel bed with a revolver under his pillow, had been awakened earlier by the sound of Fontano’s pacing. But he remained still, feigning sleep and listening, until the barber stopped at the window and shouted at the late summer dawn.4

Fontano ranted most likely in a dialect of his native Sicily. Fiaschetti, born in Rome, Italy, and brought to the United States as a child,5 was able to approximate the meaning of the monologue:

“My God! He was my friend, my brother, and I killed him. But you know, my good God, I didn’t want to do it. I had to do it. They made me kill him.”6

That was enough for Fiaschetti. Conscience had done its work at last, and Fontano seemed in a talkative mood. Fiaschetti rose, switched on the light and approached the window. He asked nonchalantly why Fontano was up so early.

When Fontano mumbled and appeared likely to clam up again, the detective decided it was time to end all charades.

“You know what has been going on, and they know all about it at headquarters,” he disclosed to Fontano.

“They know all about how you killed Camillo Caiozzo and threw his body in the river.”

Fontano

That information, the detective revealed years later in his autobiography, had been supplied to him by a Brooklyn girl named Carmela Pino, in love with Fontano but rejected by him.7 Fiaschetti had been quietly holding onto the specifics while escorting Fontano to a Broadway show, taking him to dinner and then staying with him at the hotel that night.8

Once the detective started on Fontano, he didn’t let up. He threw everything he had, voiced every detail Carmela Pino had supplied about the barber’s life, his involvement with gangsters, his fears, his love affairs. There was nowhere left for Fontano to hide. Then Fiaschetti played his ace: “I don’t want to see you go to the chair, when you are not to blame. ...They are to blame, and I want to get them. I want to get them for having made you kill your friend.”9

That morning, Bartolo Fontano told the story of the murder of Camillo Caiozzo and of the gang of assassins he referred to as the Good Killers.10