The Good Killers

1921’s Glimpse of the Mafia

Window into the underworld

The story of the Good Killers has intrigued many through the past eight and a half decades, as it is one of a very few glimpses of the American Mafia in its formative stages. While Fontano’s confession cleared up the Caiozzo murder, his statements about the Good Killers gang also shed light on more than a dozen other murder cases in New York City and Detroit, Michigan,11 and helped to define an interstate network of Sicilian immigrant criminals.

The story became a national sensation, arguably the highlight of Fiaschetti’s career (certainly the high-water mark 12), as authorities followed the bloody trail of the Good Killers through the Northeast and the Midwest. The assassins’ tracks reportedly turned up in western New York State, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, even Colorado.13

Hennessy

Americans were confronted with a vast criminal conspiracy that appeared to be controlled through a Mafia command structure stretching back across the Atlantic Ocean to Sicily.14 That they were not already fully aware of such a conspiracy may be considered evidence of a persistent head-in-the-sand mentality.

As early as 1890, the Pinkerton National Detective Agency connected the assassination of New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy to the work of a widespread Mafia organization in the United States. Robert J. Linden, superintendent of Philadelphia’s Pinkerton office, composed a memo in that year documenting the discovery of the Mafia:

“[Agent Francis P.] Dimaio tells me that the Mafia is quite strong in this city [Philadelphia], also in New York, but the Sicilians go to New Orleans, as it is the headquarters, and is better than Philadelphia or New York.”

Posing as a captured Sicilian counterfeiter, Dimaio was later able to win the trust of one imprisoned New Orleans Mafioso and learn the details of the Hennessy assassination conspiracy.15

Dimaio

Within two decades of the Pinkerton revelation, the U.S. Secret Service unearthed Mafia segments in the Northeast that had been engaged in counterfeiting and blackmail. Those segments were also linked to underworld activities in Illinois; Louisiana; and Palermo, Sicily.16

The Postal Inspection Service followed quickly in 1910 with discoveries concerning a band of Sicilian extortionists in Ohio, which had alleged connections in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana and North Dakota.17

By 1921, when the country learned of the Good Killers, there was an abundance of evidence of Sicilian criminal societies organized at regional (possibly national or transnational) levels. Americans, however, seemed determined not to assemble the pieces of the puzzle and appeared genuinely shocked at each fresh revelation through the early 1960s.