By Mary Elizabeth Brown

One of the first Italian American detectives Joseph Petrosino gave his life to rid American communities of crime. Born in Padula on April 30, 1860, he and his family migrated co New York City in 1873.

Within few years, he found work with the Sanitation Department. In 1883 he became a uniformed police officer and two years later was promoted to detective.

Americans stereotyped Italian immigrants as lawbreakers and pieced every incident of Italian criminal activity into a pattern of organized crime. Petrosino was drawn into the into the investigation of crimes involving Italians, most notably the 1905 New York barrel murder case. In York City, reformers suspected that all malefactors of whatever ethnicity escaped punishment because the police were corrupt.

In 1908 reform-minded police commissioner Theodore Bingham appointed Petrosino to head a new unit within the New York City Police Department, a supposedly secret service to dismember the Black Hand. Testing the hypothesis of an international criminal syndicate with headquarters in Sicily and a branch in New York, Petrosino  immersed himself in Italian community life.  He spent hours sitting unobtrusively in restaurants where the criminals were said to congregate. He also studied New York court  records, searching for patterns that would indicate organized criminal activity. His work helped to disprove the existence of syndicate crime.Ironically, Petrosino was shot to death on the evening of March 12, 1909, while visiting Palermo as part of a deportation; any immigrants with criminal records in their home countries could be sent back. The assassination resurrected the claim of an nternational criminal syndicate, whose members on both sides of the Atlantic cooperated to trap Petrosino. Such collaboration was unnecessary;  news of Petrosino's upcoming trip had appeared in New York papers, and any criminal who wanted to enhance a local reputation by killing the famous guest had the information that made it easy to do so. The  murder remained unsolved. The most likely suspect, Palermo criminal Don Vito Cascio Ferro, died in prison during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943.

Petrosino's murder also became a human drama; there were no widow's pensions for police detectives killed in the line of duty, and Petrosino, age 49 at the time of his death, left a young widow, Adele, and an infant daughter.  Petrosino's remains were returned to the United States, and he was buried from Saint Patrick's Old Cathedral on Mott Street. A monument over his grave in Calvary Cemetery, Queens, was unveiled March 14, 1910. A plaza north of the former police headquarters at 240 Centre Street is dedicated to his memory.

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Petrosino's papers March 18, 1909