THE ITALIAN SQUAD

History of a little-known unit within the New York Police Department made up of Italians who battled organized crime.

In the early 1900s, many members of the NYPD looked down on Italian immigrants, as journalist Moses documents at several points. However, Joseph Petrosino, the first commander of the Italian squad, analyzed the data and concluded that “97 percent of Italian immigrants were law-abiding and hardworking,” and their presence in criminal statistics was no greater than that of any other ethnic group. Appointed to the post by Theodore Roosevelt, then the commissioner of police for New York, Petrosino went up against the first glimmerings of the Mafia in the city. He was assassinated in Sicily, where he was on the hunt for mobsters, in 1909, succeeded by an Irish department head who expanded the squad and who learned along the way that Petrosino had been killed at the orders of a peripheral criminal the detective had shamed with a public beating. Still, Petrosino was enshrined as “the quintessential police officer and New Yorker.” Michael Fiaschetti, another Italian-born officer, eventually headed the squad, fighting the Black Hand and other criminal organizations while doing plenty of self-promotion, which, all the same, didn’t keep him from being demoted for roughing up a defense attorney. The Italian Squad was, as Moses notes, “mythologized” from the start, but Fiaschetti was a master of “inflating his reputation,” so the facts are not easy to come by. Though the narrative isn’t quite as riveting as a well-rendered crime procedural, the author does a solid job digging through the files to get at them, noting that while the squad ultimately didn’t make much of a dent in controlling organized crime—the Mafia flourished in the 1920s and ’30s—it did serve as “a bridge for an alienated immigrant community” that was all too often reluctant to help the police.

A serviceable, well-researched examination of a little-known corner of the NYPD’s past.