The Good Killers

1921’s Glimpse of the Mafia

Press sensationalism

The American press, perhaps not fully recovered from its “yellow” period,80 appeared to delight in sensationalizing reports of the Good Killers investigation. Print journalists accepted and printed as fact the speculations of law enforcement officials, grossly exaggerated the gang-related death toll and expanded the gang’s stomping grounds without any apparent cause aside from a motivation to sell papers.

From the single homicide reported in the newspapers Aug. 9-16, the story justifiably grew to the 17 murders in Detroit, New York City and New Jersey that were defined in Fontano’s initial confession. While such a figure should have been stunning enough, the number subsequently grew to fantastic levels.

As early as Aug. 17, there were published claims that the Good Killers might have been responsible for as many as 70 deaths. That figure was the result of tallying the number of suspicious Italian deaths in Detroit between 1917 and 1921.81 The following day, one paper upped the total to 87, while another hit the streets claiming 100 were killed.82 To reach the century mark, the newspaper had to expand the known territory of the Good Killers gang from New York, New Jersey and Michigan into Pennsylvania and Illinois.

Not to be outdone, the New York press decided on Aug. 19 that 125 people were massacred by the gang.83 Those included the estimated 70 from Detroit, 20 believed killed in Chicago, 18 in Pittsburgh and 17 in New York.

The press quickly tired of inflating numbers and moved on to other unwarranted and irresponsible assertions.

After McPherson learned from Fontano that some Good Killers’ victims had been buried secretly in the area of Seven Mile Road and Gratiot Avenue on the outskirts of Detroit, newspapers proclaimed a nationwide search for gang burial grounds.84

Petrosino

Fiaschetti fanned the flames of sensationalism. He pronounced the Good Killers’ bust as “the most important capture ever made by him and his men.”85 On Aug. 20, without any apparent justification, he announced to the New York media that the break up of the Good Killers band could finally lead to a resolution of the Petrosino assassination of 1909. Possibly revealing a lingering inferiority complex relative to Petrosino, Fiaschetti took the opportunity to reveal that his life, too, had been threatened during a recent visit to Italy.86

For weeks, newspapers across the country reacted hysterically to any report of homicide related to Italians. Each was said to be linked in some way with the Good Killers.87

Throughout the press coverage, the Good Killers gang was represented as a murder-for-hire mob, a society of paid assassins, though little evidence was ever offered in support of the claim. It appears far more likely that the organization known as the Good Killers was merely a single crew or an enforcement arm of a Castellammarese criminal syndicate that later evolved into crime families in Brooklyn, Buffalo and Detroit.88

It would probably be going too far to state that payments were never provided to gang gunmen. (Joseph Ales, another confessed killer associated with the Castellammarese gang, told police in 1921 that he was paid $30 each for killing two men.89) But Fontano made clear in his confession that Good Killer slayings were typically motivated by vengeance rather than profit. He indicated that assassins were compelled to act through their gang allegiance or through threats of violence against them.

By mid-September, long before the courts had resolved any of the issues relating to the gang’s alleged crimes, the story had been played out, and the major newspapers had lost interest. There would be little coverage of actual legal proceedings in the case.