The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia by Mike Dash Page A

fast.
    “Did you see who shot you?”
    “Cows, cows … the Mafia,” Vella groaned. He meant Streva’s gang of cattle rustlers. Then he began to babble a list of names—the members of the Corleone Fratuzzi. The carabinieri man scribbled rapidly, but as Vella rambled on, he interrupted. There were too many names; they could not all have been involved in the shooting. The policeman tried a different tack. Had there been any recent quarrels, he asked—disputes that had taken place in the last few days?
    “Yes,” the dying man replied. “I quarrelled with Ortoleva yesterday. He wanted to take my job away—take the bread from my mouth.” The words came in a bubbling gasp. Vella’s lung was collapsing; he was coughing blood, and, worse, air had seeped into his bloodstream. Moments later, the first bubble of oxygen reached his heart, causing a massive cardiac arrest.
    Giovanni Vella’s dying words posed a dilemma for the Corleone police. There was plenty of evidence that the Fratuzzi had played a part in the Field Guard’s murder; aside from Vella’s accusation, questioning of members of the crowd still milling in the alleyway produced a witness who claimed to have seen Morello in the passage and to have watched as Morello concealed his gun beneath a pile of rubbish. A search quickly revealed the weapon, which proved to have been recently discharged. On the other hand, the dying Field Guard had also named Ortoleva as a suspect, and Vella’s rival was arrested that same night. When the police learned that two men had been seen lurking in the shadows, they also detained another of the candidates for Vella’s job.
    There are clear hints in what happened next that Streva and the bosses of Corleone’s Fratuzzi brought their influence to bear on the police investigation. Morello was arrested and held, pending questioning, but his pistol, the main evidence against him, disappeared soon afterward from the police lockup, apparently removed by a member of the carabinieri who had been paid to dispose of it. Ortoleva, meanwhile, supplied the police with an apparently solid alibi: He had been confined to his apartment, he explained, by a grocery wagon that had parked in the narrow street outside the building, so close that he could not open the front door. Before long, however, several of Giovanni Vella’s friends, pursuing inquiries of their own, were approached by a prostitute who claimed to have watched the middle-aged Ortoleva shin down a rope from his fourth-floor apartment just before the shooting. How the mayor’s son could have known, in those circumstances, where to find Vella was not explained; nor did anyone ever discover whether the prostitute was sincere, mistaken, or paid by someone to give evidence. What was certain was that the carabinieri investigating Vella’s death seemed a lot more interested in Ortoleva than they were in Morello. When, some days after the murder, the Clutch Hand was bailed out, Ortoleva remained in prison, rotting on remand.
    But Morello was not quite free of suspicion. Other Corleonesi had seen or heard things that they should not have on the night of the murder. One was a woman named Anna Di Puma, a neighbor of Vella’s, who had been returning to her home along the alleyway shortly before the shooting when she saw two men lurking in the shadows. Di Puma recognized one of them as Morello, whom she “knew very well,” and when she heard gunfire a few moments later and ran back up the alley to find out what was happening, she found Vella lying at the spot where the men had been. A second possible witness was Bernardo Terranova’s next-door neighbor, Michele Zangara. Zangara had been in his apartment when, late one night soon after the Vella murder, he had heard voices drifting through the thin wall between his apartment and his neighbors’. “Peppe, what have you done?” he heard Angela Terranova ask her son. “Now they will come to arrest you.” There was a moment’s pause