“YOU GOTTA BE ROUGH” The Cop Who Protected Christ Cella’s Speakeasy, or “To Hell with Sherlock Holmes” Long ago in my research, I came across mention of Christ Cella operating his speakeasy, where Christopher Morley and his friends gestated the BSI during late Prohibition years, under the protection of one of the toughest cops in New York, Michael Fiaschetti. Christ Cella was born in Piacenza, Italy, on May 8, 1894, and came to America with his parents in 1904. He lived initially in Baltimore, and when young, with his brawny build, he worked for a year or so for Barnum & Bailey as a roustabout—an experience that in the 1920s made him a founding member of New York’s chapter of the circus-world philanthropic society, Saints and Sinners. He first worked as a cook in Baltimore, according to his New York Times obituary of November 11, 1947, but also worked in New York as a muralist and decorator, giving the latter as his occupation in the 1930 Census (“speakeasy proprietor” being impolitic for a federal form). He and his wife Elizabeth, a German-speaking Belgian who came to America in 1913, were married in 1922, the year he became a U.S. citizen. They had a son Richard (an Air Force brigadier general at his retirement decades later) and a daughter Anna, and took in boarders at their 144 East 45th Street brownstone—eight listed in the 1930 Census, including Arthur Choate, 70, a year or two later discovered to be a once wealthy missing man, penniless and starving to death now. The earliest date I’ve seen for Cella operating his speakeasy is 1923, while other sources say 1926 or ’27. When Repeal came in December ’33, it became a licensed restaurant. Cella moved it to new East 46th Street quarters in 1946, but died the next year, November 10, 1947, only fifty-four years old. Of hypertension from hectic modern life, grumbled Christopher Morley. The link between Christ Cella and Mike Fiaschetti comes from the December 1966 “Along the Boulevards” in Gourmet Magazine, a series begun in the mid-1940s by Lucius Beebe and carried on at intervals by others, including Vincent Starrett and, at the time in question, Leslie Charteris, author of the Saint thrillers. Charteris had first been taken to Cella’s speakeasy in 1932 by Malcolm Johnson, his U.S. publisher at Doubleday, Doran’s Crime Club, and a charter member of Chris Morley’s BSI. Charteris loved Cella’s and the atmosphere around that Irregular table in the kitchen, and worked it into his 1934 novel The Saint in New York, calling Cella Chris Cellini. (See Irregular Memories of the ’Thirties, pp. 141-43.) “[Simon Templar, the Saint] sat back and sipped the drink that Chris brought him, watching the room through half-closed eyes. The flash of jest and repartee, the crescendo of discussion and the ring of laughter, came to his ears like the echo of an unforgettable song,” wrote Charteris: “It was the same as it had always been—the same humorous camaraderie presided over and kept vigorously alive by Chris’s own unchanging geniality. Why were there not more places like that in the world, he began to wonder—places where a host was more than a shopkeeper, and men threw off their cares and talked and laughed openly together, without fear or suspicion, expanding cleanly and fruitfully in the glow of wine and fellowship?” Very much the spirit that originally animated the Baker Street Irregulars. This December, in a Christmas mailing, Ray Betzner (“The Agony Column,” BSI) enclosed Charteris’s “Boulevards” column. The writer remembered more than thirty years later how wonderful his hours at Christ Cella’s speakeasy had been. Charteris devoted that column to his 1932 visit, and in describing Cella and his speak, he wrote: “He was built like an oak barrel and was just as hard, and no one doubted his boast that in their younger days he could lick his old friend Mike Fiaschetti, who was half as big again and reputed to be one of the toughest detectives down on Center Street. Mike hated gangsters and racketeers and enjoyed circumventing their lawyers and political protectors by the kind of summary methods that are regarded so unfavorably today, but like most police officers of his time he took a tolerant view of the kind of public-service lawbreaking in which Chris was engaged, and was himself a regular customer. With such an association, it is understandable that no mob ever tried to sell Chris protection.” Charteris wrote from memory long after the fact. Mike Fiaschetti was no longer a policeman in 1932. After quite a career in the New York Police Department, he was now a private detective in New York City. But he was Christ Cella’s close friend, may very well have met Morley and his Irregulars there, and at any rate had read Sherlock Holmes and had pronounced views on the subject. Michael Fiaschetti was born in Rome in 1886, came to America with his parents in 1896, and died in New York in 1960. He was a prominent policeman of the ’teens and ’twenties when a member of the NYPD’s Italian Squad, originally under the legendary Lt. Joseph Petrosino, who was murdered in Italy in 1909 by the Black Hand—a career depicted in the 1960 movie Pay or Die starring Ernest Borgnine. Mike Fiaschetti’s father had been a bandmaster in Italy, and then in America, and as a child he expected to become a musician himself one day. But he became interested in crime and detection while growing up in North Adams, Massachusetts, in the state’s northwest corner. Fiaschetti’s family moved to New York when he was sixteen, and when old enough a few years later he joined the NYPD, initially walking a beat in Brooklyn’s densely populated, immigrant-heavy Williamsburg district. Fiaschetti was powerful in build, once calling himself “husky enough to make a reputation as a piano mover.” A popular writer of 1928 described him as “a man tall and of massive frame and muscular brawn. He had a dark, frowning face, with features large and bold, yet cut with an Italian correctness and grace of line; eyes of constantly narrowed attention and a dusky grey; a well-creased soft hat that seemed never removed from his head; and a cigar as big as a section of broom handle projecting from the corner of a defiant mouth; not at any sporty upward angle, but stuck straight out as if in violent aggression.” Joe Petrosino had been his mentor from the start: I had got on the New York police force through Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, the famous head of the Italian Squad, who was later killed by the Black Hand while on a mission in Naples. Petrosino was devoted to music—we Italians all are. He used to be a familiar figure around the Metropolitan Opera House, listening to Rigoletto or Butterfly. My father was a Roman bandmaster who came to America and toured the states at the head of a band. Petrosino was a friend of his. He was a regular visitor at our house, where my father was forever playing the piano or the guitar or clarinet—he could play anything. Petrosino used to sit for hours listening, the strength and shrewdness of his face softened and made dreamy by the old, well remembered tunes of the operas. In those hours of music he could forget all about the deadly woven web of the Black Hand, which was eventually to snare him. [Robert K. Leavitt, one of Morley’s kinsprits at Cella’s speakeasy, has said elsewhere what a remarkable performer on the accordion Cella was. — J.L.] I was just growing up, and naturally the great detective was a great hero in my eyes. I decided that I wanted to become a detective. Petrosino looked me over. I was big and strong. He encouraged me, and, when I became old enough, advised me to join the force. I would have to do my bit as a patrolman, but if I worked hard for the Detective Division I could make it. He would help me. I took his counsel, and presently found myself patrolling a beat out in the wilds of Williamsburg. Petrosino soon brought Fiaschetti into the Italian Squad. There he learned the art of detection, in those days a casual combination of informants, psychology, and “the third degree,” the last instilled in the turn-of-the-century NYPD by a famous predecessor, Alexander S. “Clubber” Williams, originally from Canada, once-living testimony that not all Canadians are polite. But psychology was more important, said Fiaschetti: “You’ve got to use psychology in this detective business. Psychology will catch more crooks than a mile of rubber hose.” And most important of all, in his opinion, were informants. After Joseph Petrosino’s murder the Italian Squad was dormant for some years, but reactivated in 1918 with Fiaschetti as its new commander. He was given a detective of Irish descent as a bodyguard, one Irving O’Hara, possibly because O’Hara lacked ancestral ties by which the Mafia might corrupt him; or maybe because he was Mayor Hylan’s brother-in-law. Fiaschetti operated not only in New York, but in one or two undercover missions to Italy to gather information about its Mafia’s ties to mobs in America, the kinds of mission that had gotten Petrosino killed. Although highly decorated, Mike Fiaschetti served as commander of the Italian Squad only to 1922, shoved out at the behest of a Tammany politician he’d ejected from a stationhouse for interfering with an interrogation. At Tammany’s insistence the Italian Squad was shut down, its men reassigned to other duties, on the pretext that it was discriminatory because there were no Chinese or Jewish or other ethnic squads in the NYPD. But one historian remarks: “To many law-abiding immigrants, the Italian Squad was not an ethnic slur, as Tammany and others charged, but a cause for ethnic pride, and a reason to feel a greater sense of belonging in an adopted country. The romantic lure of the outlaw existence paled in comparison with the adventures of those Italians who dedicated their lives to keeping others safe.” Fiaschetti was credited with over 1,000 arrests, including twelve killers sent to the electric chair. He spent a couple more years in the Homicide Bureau, then opened Fiaschetti’s International Detective Bureau, with offices at 401 Broadway, a few blocks from Little Italy. In the early 1930s he returned to public service when newly-elected Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia appointed him as deputy commissioner of the Department of Markets to investigate racketeering in New York’s produce industry. In 1938, he returned to private-detective work. He lectured nationally on organized crime, and took part in Army Reserve training programs during the war. He was seventy-four years old at his death at Brooklyn’s VA Hospital on July 29, 1960. Michael Fiaschetti in U.S. Army (Military Police) uniform during World War II. In 1930 he published his memoirs, You Gotta Be Rough, and his publisher was none other than Malcolm Johnson, BSI, with his Crime Club imprint. Did Mike Fiaschetti ever sit at that table in his friend Christ Cella’s kitchen while Christopher Morley was there with his friends gassing about Sherlock Holmes? I don’t suppose we will ever know. If he did, I’m sure he was polite about it. But You Gotta Be Rough, ch. 3 (an item unknown to De Waal), contained a candid minority report on Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s sagacity as a detective: How the Detective Really Gets His Man, or, To Hell with Sherlock Holmes Ask a fiddler how he fiddles, and he’ll tell you. Ask a doughboy how the A.E.F. won the war, and he’ll tell you plenty. Ask a man-hunting, crime-sleuthing detective how he gets his man, and most likely he will give you a stall. Here’s telling. There are a lot of ways of catching a crook, and a best and most usual way. And that reminds me of a fine old gent with a gold-headed cane and a long silk ribbon hung onto his eyeglasses who came flat-footing it in to see me one day during the time when I had become commanding officer of the Italian Squad He took a good look around, gazed with a sparkling eye at bare, discolored walls, battered desk and chairs and dented cuspidors, typewritten pages of official orders tacked to the wall, and rogues’ gallery pictures lying in the basket. My office at Police Headquarters was a lot different from his own downtown banking sanctum with deep, soft rugs and a spread of paintings on the walls. And I suppose that I, leaning back in my squeaky swivel chair, did not look the part of any dignified cashier or sleek teller. He was in novel surroundings, and it hit him right. He adjusted his dark-rimmed spectacles on his thin nose, handed me an expensive cigar from a leather case, and settled back with his dead-white hands over the head of his walking stick. He was set to listen to something snappy. “And now, Mr. Fiaschetti”—he smiled like a school principal beaming on a pupil who has got off the class oration without balling it up entirely—“and now, Mr. Fiaschetti, tell me how you did it. How did you manage it?” A couple of weeks previously his expensive apartment had been turned off and a lot of gilt-edged junk started on its way to the fences. The usual story—no clues, up against a blank wall, a mysterious case. It was in the papers a lot, a couple of arrests on suspicion, no evidence, prisoners released. But it was all over now. That morning I had collared the mob and locked them up in the Tombs. You couldn’t blame the old gent for wondering how the seemingly insoluble case had been broken. “Oh,” I replied, “I got a little information and grabbed those guys.” I slurred over the word “information,” passed it quickly and negligently. You often hear that same word, “information,” in police circles. Sometimes it is called the “tip.” You find it constantly cropping up at critical places in stories of detective cases—in actual, real-life cases and not the kind you read in books. Ask any reporter who has covered headquarters. I’ve never analyzed cigar ashes, but have often got a little information, often given attentive ear to a tip. My million-dollar visitor did not notice the information part of it. His soul was not attuned to such prosy things, anyway. Detective meant to him something of the Sherlock Holmes order. He was bent on hearing a tale of ingenious unraveling, of subtle and brilliant sleuthing; a classic of how the detective gets his man. It beguiled him that so romantic a thing, as he supposed, had come within the placid circle of his existence. “But,” he persisted, “tell me all about it. What was the real detective work in the case?” I chewed on the cigar he had given me—and a good stick of Havana it was—and then reeled off a few things that had happened in the hunt for the burglars. “It was like this,” I said. “I picked one of the mob and tailed him. Then my men covered the place where he lived. A couple of guys came to see him. We shadowed them. Pretty soon the three of them went to dicker with a fence, and we grabbed them.” I amused him with full details of this part of the case, an important part, but by no means the heart of the matter. It had taken sharp work and made an interesting story. The trailings and shadowings, the figuring things out, and the quick jumping in for the arrest—guns drawn and a short fight—were the kind of yarn my banker friend expected. He was satisfied. “A fine piece of detective work, Mr. Fiaschetti,” he put the O. K. on me. And later, when he arose to go, he repeated, patting me on the shoulder patronizingly, “A fine piece of detective work—you are quite a Sherlock Holmes.” I did not disclaim the praise, nor tell him to take his thanks to a certain vagued-eyed, loose-jawed hanger-on of an East Side pool room. That was the kind of thing you keep to yourself as a professional secret when you are a member of the detective staff of a police organization. You pass it off with a casual, indirect reference. The detective doesn’t tell the public how he gets his man. But it was that vague-eyed, loose-jawed gangster who had given me the information, the tip. He was the stool pigeon. I’ve got a grudge against Sherlock Holmes, managia i piscetti, cursing all the fishes. Most actual, workaday detectives have. Conan Doyle’s stories are all right as literature, I suppose, but then the John Laws, as a general thing, are not literary, and it’s enough to knock you flat to see how much they can print on a page that won’t work out on the job. In some ways Watson’s needle-jabbing friend has done us a good turn. He has made our line of business quite a romance, made detectives romantic gents, like movie actors or dare-devil heroes of war, almost as romantic as the crooks. Boys dream of becoming sleuths, and you often see a gleam in a girl’s eye as she glances at some plain-clothes dick. I don’t say anything against that. But Sherlock Holmes has made people expect weird, wall-eyed stunts of the real coppers. You are stumped on a case. “What’s the matter?” somebody says. “Why doesn’t he read the history of the crime by studying a footprint with a magnifying glass, or catch the criminals by analyzing the cigar ashes?” Well, sometimes we do—but not often. The public blames us if we don’t, and makes us out a lot of simps—which sometimes we are. All these later-day detective story writers follow the Sherlock Holmes tradition. It makes me tired to read how those bulls in books solve mysteries with their deductions—although deductions in their place are all right. Why doesn’t somebody write a detective story with a stool pigeon in it? Why didn’t Conan Doyle tell about Sherlock Holmes’s stool pigeons? Holmes had stool pigeons. Of course he did. How could he break a case if he didn’t? In the honest-to-God story of how the detective gets his man, stool pigeon’s the word. Clues, deductions, and even the green whiskers have their place, but nearly always as mere embroidery around a central theme. Take away information, the tip, the secret whisper of the stool pigeon, and the detection of crime would be paralyzed. The police organization of every city of the country, and of the world as well, would stand helpless and gaping. I learned my lesson early, the A B C’s of the business. I should like to recommend it for the curricula of some of these detective schools you see advertising in the papers. It would go well in a correspondence course in the noble art of sleuthing. That little bit of instruction in plain and fancy man-hunting, practical hint to a beginner, came during those weeks when I was a harness bull pounding a beat out in the wilds of Williamsburg. Beats are long in Williamsburg, and it was tiresome, day after day, mile after mile. It’s no fun flattening your feet on the pavements, especially in Williamsburg. How long would I have to endure this drudgery before I got a promotion to the Detective Division? I was getting sick of it. If only I could pick up a chance to distinguish myself, to pull something, to crash in on a hold-up or stumble upon a trail that would lead to the solving of a crime—anything that would help me to get advancement. I wore out my shoe leather as diligently as a cop with a conscience should, and got nearsighted looking for things, but never a hold-up or a cunning trail did I spy. In those days—twenty years ago—one of the favorite activities in Williamsburg was stealing horses. At the station house I saw a notice of a robbery—twenty horses had been stolen. The animals were described, and patrolmen were told to be on the lookout for them. I studied the descriptions carefully, and for the next day or so, as I pounded my beat, I kept my eyes going right and left. If I could only catch sight of one of those horses and grab it, a good mark, A-1, would be chalked down on my record. I thought my conscientious vigilance should surely be rewarded, but never a horse did I see that looked like one of those described. One afternoon I sat in a little hole-in-the-wall grocery store, resting and talking with the proprietor. I had struck up a small acquaintance with him. He happened to pull the drawer of his cash register out rather far, and there, in the back, I saw a big forty-five looking at me. He caught my glance and seemed frightened, and I knew right off that he had no permit to have that chunk of artillery around. “What are you doing with the gat?” I demanded. “Oh, it ain’t nothin’,” he stuttered. “There’s lots of robberies. I may need protection. I don’t want nobody to rob me.” I knew him to be what is described as a law-abiding citizen, but it was my duty, strictly speaking, to place him under arrest for unlawful possession of firearms. It would have caused him trouble. Having weapons around was not so common then as now. I didn’t want to haul him around to the station house, but thought a small lesson about keeping strictly within the law wouldn’t hurt him. Being a new cop I felt exceedingly conscientious, and was, I suppose, a bit over-important and officious. I told that grocer that it was my business to lock him up, and he begged me not to. I explained to him that he was liable to fine and imprisonment, and he vowed he wouldn’t do it again. I protested that I might get into trouble if I didn’t make a pinch then and there, and he offered me money. I bawled him out for that. Briefly, I had him scared. “But,” I concluded, feeling like a magnanimous cop, and sometimes it’s a pleasure to feel magnanimous, “I don’t want to get you into trouble. You are a good fellow, and I am a friend of yours. I won’t say anything about that gun, but get it out of the way or take out a permit to have it around, or somebody else will pick you up—and won’t be a friend of yours.” That took a load off his mind, and he was full of gratitude. In spite of what philosophers may say, I have found plenty of gratitude in men—and stool pigeons. The majesty of the law is such that when a copper does you a good turn you appreciate it. “Mr. Fiaschetti,” the grocer cried eagerly, “if I can ever do anything for you, you just let me know!” “Well,” I responded, “I wish somebody would tell me a thing or two about those stolen horses.” I hadn’t any particular purpose in starting out on that subject. It was just naturally on my mind. The grocer, though, thought I was hinting that he knew something about the nags, as he easily might—if I had thought about it. His shop was a meeting place for the neighborhood, a headquarters for gossip. “If I could pick up those horses,” I was thinking out loud, “it would mean a lot to me.” He seemed to be debating with himself. Squealing, in certain nooks and corners of this wide country, is not a healthy pastime. But he was grateful, and, besides, I had something on him. He must have known I didn’t mean to lock him up for that gun, but when the cops have got something on you there is a subtlety in it, a blind, reasonless compulsion. It holds you, and twists your thoughts and feelings around, and is liable to make you do things that would surprise you. It is a better persuader than a lawyer. “I don’t know who done the job,” the grocer said thoughtfully. Then he came over to me and sat down on the chair beside me. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you, Mike.” He spoke in a low voice. “I heard where those horses are.” And he gave me the address of a stable. I hot-footed it out of the place. Pretty soon I was at the stable. In the stalls were the twenty horses. Arrests followed. The livery-stable gang was an outfit of horse thieves. I strutted around, a proud rookie, for the next few days. Then General Bingham gave me an Honorable Mention—my first decoration.* And that made me feel like Caruso singing “Cielo e mar” in Gioconda. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ * Theodore A. Bingham, New York Police Commissioner from 1906 to 1909. My acquaintance with the grocer did not end there. It came considerably closer, in fact. I had more than ever on him now—the fact that he had given me the tip. It’s a law of science, once a stool pigeon always a stool pigeon—with a few exceptions. The grocer was a regular source of information about all kinds of things, usually petty ones: which kid it was that knocked the baseball through the plate-glass window, or about the young fellow down the street who was running around with a bad mob in New York. That sort of thing is useful to the copper on the beat, just as it is to the detective assigned to the local station house. I was able to report a few more things. Petrosino was looking for a chance to get me on his Italian Squad. He had it now and went right to bat. I was ordered into plain clothes and put under his command. The Police Department nowadays has a detective school with lectures and black-boards and all that for educating gumshoe sleuths, but in my time the college course for dicks was simpler. They put you in tow of an experienced man, and you went around with him, helped him, and watched how he did things, and generally played second fiddle before you got a solo. I plugged it around with one veteran of the Italian Squad and then another. After a while they began to send me out on minor cases alone. About this time I got lesson No. 2, some more of the A B C’s. I was cultivating a few sources of information, had a couple of stool pigeons lined up. One night I walked up to a street corner. A man was waiting there. “What’s new?” I asked him. “A thing or two,” he replied. We stood in a shadowed doorway and talked. He gave me a fact or two about an important case I was working on. At least, it seemed important to me. It was about some cheap-skate graft that didn’t amount to much, but when you’re new to the game a two spit that you happen to pick up looks like a flock of aces. Then the stool pigeon went on to talk about other things. “There’s going to be some trouble,” he volunteered, “in that pool room upstairs at Grand and Mulberry.” “Yes?” I responded absently. I was thinking about the big case. “Going to bump off a guy there,” he went on, as if discussing some matter-of-fact detail. “Dopey Joe’s in wrong with the Orchard Street gang. Running a crap game with a couple of them, and he gypped them. They’re going to square things with him, and are all set to get him in that pool room this coming Saturday night.” Somehow or other I didn’t pay much attention to this. He talked a lot and was likely to come around with exaggerated tales. He had a lot of gossip, much of which was rot. And I suppose I was all taken up with the big case. Anyway, I didn’t follow the lead or think about it afterward. I forgot it. It happened that on the following Saturday night I was at dinner in a restaurant just down the street from the pool room at Grand and Mulberry. It was a warm summer evening. I was in my shirt sleeves—dining formalities are not rigorously observed in that neighborhood. The door was open, and a pleasant breeze blew in. I was in the middle of a plate of excellent ravioli when suddenly—bang, bang, bang—three shots. “There it is,” I yelled. The telltale sound of shots which came from up the street brought back into my mind in a blazing flash the story the stool pigeon had told me. I nearly knocked the table over, getting out of the door. Up the street and up the stairs to the pool room. I dashed in, pistol in hand. It was too late. Dopey Joe lay dead on the floor, and the murderers had got away by the side entrance. I felt like kicking myself all over the place. As I looked at the dead man, with his cocaine-haunted face white beneath the lights, it almost seemed as if I had killed him. I could have saved his life, although it was not much of a life as things go. I could have laid in wait and grabbed those guys as they came in on their vengeful mission. As it was, Dopey Joe was dead, and it turned out that we never did get the murderers right, could not build up a court case against them. That small happening makes lesson No. 2 read as follows: Take in everything a stool pigeon has to say, and look up every lead. You may think it mere vaporous gossip, but it may mean the difference between a pinch and a getaway. What’s the use of having stool pigeons if you won’t listen to a squeal? I listened after that experience—made ’em talk and listened. You’ve got to get the idea of the stool pigeon system if you are going to understand what the big dramatic show of crook and detective is all about, and right here I’m going to try to put the idea square in front of you, with handles on it so that you can get a good grip. As a detective working at all kinds of sleuthing, and particularly as head of the Italian Squad, I built up one of the biggest stool pigeon organizations on record, a system that had its ramifications high and low, far and wide. It was an instrument on which you could produce startling effects, as a virtuoso of the violin draws a miraculous note out of some rare old Strad. You could learn more from it than from any library of books, and sometimes you could make those wizards of crime detection in fiction stories look cheap. I’d like Sherlock Holmes to get out his magnifying glass and take a look at this one. Watson should have been around to mutter “Wonderful!” There wasn’t any Watson, but there was a good crowd just the same, and what a crowd! Talk about astonishing the natives, well, there weren’t only natives to be astonished. In addition to half the neighborhood looking on, the gang from headquarters was assembled in force. You never saw such an array of wise, hard-boiled handcuff snappers. That was what I liked especially. Nothing like startling the professional talent. In an olive oil, cheese, and macaroni store on Central Avenue, Brooklyn, two brothers, Salvaggio by name, who lived in the rear of the shop, were found shot to death in their beds. It was a weird-looking affair, and made quite a bit of stir—drama, grim mystery, and all that. There had been several prominent unsolved murders of late. The evening papers put the Central Avenue case in banners on their front pages, and orders from up above were to break the case at any cost. Men from headquarters were rushed over, and the investigation was made in a big way. I was busy with some other matters and did not get over to the Central Avenue grocery store until mid-afternoon. A crowd was on the street and in the shop, lookers-on, reporters, photographers, and there must have been twenty plain-clothes men questioning people, nosing around and standing around. They were in charge of Deputy Inspector Lahey. He was standing outside near the curb. I reported to him. He told me that nothing had been discovered, no clue or sign or anything to work on. “It’s a tough case, Mike,” he said, “but we’ve got to break it.” I started through the rubbernecking mob to the store. In the crowd I saw a stool pigeon of mine. When he spotted me he began edging toward me. I gave him the eye and went into the store. He followed. I pretended to be busy examining something, as if snooping around for a clue, footprints or the cigar ashes. He came alongside and managed to get a few words to me. “Go to the Municipal Baths. You will find a big six-footer—Lillo Grillino. He’s bathing there now. At his house you will find the gun and counterfeit money. It was a counterfeiting job. Those two who were killed gypped the others.” I went out and told the Deputy Inspector I thought I had something, and was going to follow it down. A quick trip to the Municipal Baths, and sure enough I found the long, lank Lillo Grillino. He was just dressing after an invigorating swim. He nearly fainted when I put him under arrest. I took him to his house and there found a pistol and a stock of counterfeit money. I had him right, and he came through right there on the spot. Later he took a plea and got twenty years. When I returned to the grocery store with the prisoner and his confession the boys there opened their eyes. Those rhinoceros-hided dicks weren’t usually astonished at anything, but in this case it certainly looked as if some of Sherlock Holmes’s lightning deductions had been pulled. “How did you do it, Mike?” they demanded, wondering. I gave them a chance to guess a while, puffed at my cigar, and made a remark or two that might indicate I had solved the mystery by some masterpiece of intellect beyond their comprehension. It’s fun to swell around once in a while. “How did you do it, Mike?” Inspector Lahey asked. You don’t try any monkey business or witty comedy with your superior officer. “Inspector,” I replied, “as I came in I saw a stool pigeon of mine in the crowd.” “Oh, yes, I see.” He smiled with a saturnine grimace. He didn’t ask me another. There are things that even your superior officer doesn’t pry into, and one of these is who your stool pigeons are. I looked good in that case, I’ll admit it. I wish I was as good as I looked. It isn’t pretty or elevating, that term stool pigeon, but then neither is crime. You’ve got to do it. That statement excuses a lot of things in this world, especially in police departments. You can’t tie yourself up with delicate scruples in your dealings with the underworld, and if you aren’t any rougher with the boys than getting tips from stool pigeons they’re lucky. Take this as an axiom of the science of crime detection—a detective is as good as he is able to cultivate sources of information, as successful as he is able to line up stool pigeons. I’ll tell you how Sherlock Holmes really broke his cases. Being a great detective Holmes was a master hand at making stool pigeons—that’s a special art—and at keeping them on the job—and that’s another special art. No, he didn’t have any little black book with names, addresses, and telephone numbers. Suppose he lost it or somebody grabbed it on him or somehow the dope got around and got to the boys who were being squealed on—there might be a bit of bumping off in those neighborhoods. Sherlock Holmes kept his sources of information deep inside of his noodle, and he never let them slip. You could not drag the name of a stool pigeon from him if you beat him to death or gave him ten thousand dollars. No, he did not exchange notes on this particular subject with his brother detectives. Each sleuth has his own personal and private list and doesn’t divulge it even to his superior offices. If he leaves a precinct or the force he does not bequeath to his successor any legacy of stool pigeons. Sherlock Holmes, of course, was particularly secretive. That very likely was why Conan Doyle didn’t get the real story. Anyway, it was the reason why Holmes was able to hold his sources of information so well. His stool pigeons knew they could trust him to the death. With that long, unwritten list of his, Holmes knew pretty much what was going on in the underworld. All kinds of leads, both useful and useless, came to him constantly, and whenever he needed a tip in some particular case he picked out the stool pigeons who would be likely to have contacts pertinent to the matter in hand, and pretty soon they were snooping around and sending him reports. Then, with a good strong hint right in the vital middle of the case, Holmes would carry on with some of his brilliant reasoning and analysis. He’d have to do that to build up his case, because you couldn’t expect him to bring his stool pigeons into court. The ordinary detective works for the most part in the limited world of his own precinct. There he organizes his little stool pigeon system. It is a small revolving part of a great whole, and the local detective is the cog that connects it with the general machine covering the entire underworld—and some parts that are not underworld. He drags his pond day in and day out, sifts out his catch. His net may not be large, but it snares strange fishes. You know the old story of the needle in the haystack; well, Chicago is a pretty big haystack, and a single man is a mighty small needle. Picking out a lone individual in a huge, crowded city is always one of the classical pieces of detective work. Suppose the man hunted is a stranger in the town, with no criminal connections, you might think the stool-pigeon system would be unable to function in such a case. A citizen of a small burg in Iowa became involved in some marital tangle. He got a bad case of jealousy aboard, hauled out a gun, and knocked off his best friend. He escaped, and remembering that the best place to hide is in a crowd, went to Chicago, leaving no trail behind aim, and lost himself in teeming multitudes. He kept his peace, and did not babble. He did not wander to any place where criminals might ordinarily be found. Yet the Chicago police picked him out. They had nothing more to go on than the usual circular, sent far and wide, asking for his arrest and giving a picture of him. The fugitive overplayed his hand just a trifle. Wanting to get as far away as possible from parts where he might be sought, he reasoned that nobody would think of looking for him, a native American, in some foreign quarter. He picked a Polish neighborhood and took a furnished room there. He stuck close to his retreat, and associated only with the Polish people of the vicinity. The detectives of the local precinct had their sources of information, their stool pigeons. One of these, in the course of reporting desultory facts and fancies, told of the American who for no apparent reason had taken up residence among the Poles. The tip didn’t seem important, but the detective, an efficient worker, wasn’t overlooking any tricks, however insignificant they might seem. He gave his man the once-over, and compared him with pictures of sundry malefactors who were wanted all over the country. Sure enough, here was the fellow who had done the shooting in Iowa. Soon the culprit was on his way back to his native town to stand trial. Moral—if the cops are looking for you, don’t hide in a foreign quarter. Likewise, no matter where you go you are exceedingly likely to be tipped off. The stool pigeons will get you sooner or later. Don’t do anything to have the cops looking for you. Some Irregular comments: I enjoyed the Fiaschetti story. The Count Luckner of the law? As told to Prosper Buranelli? Two more interesting names that I had never heard of as well. I enjoyed looking them up..... — Burt Wolder, “The Third Pillar from the Left” Fascinating. And in my experience, CSI Everywhere notwithstanding, Fiaschetti’s comments are probably as true today as they were then. Most cases are made by tips and confessions, not shoeprints and fiber analysis. DNA is certainly compelling evidence, and has been critical in some celebrated cases, but the question typically is not who, but rather why and with what mental state. — Peter Ashman, “Peter Steiler the Elder” (Judge Ashman also provides this related link) Fascinating stuff. Doris has been saying for the past few weeks that she’s convinced that even today few crimes get solved without informants. — Clifford Goldfarb, “Fordham, the Horsham Lawyer” This is fantastic stuff! And I love the book jacket! — Daniel Stashower, “Thurston” Boy, he looks like a NY cop doesn’t he? And writes like one. I can hear him speaking NYese in my ear. This is a pretty neat thing. — Susan Dahlinger, “The Bruce-Partington Plans” Mike Fiaschetti sounds like someone dug up by central casting. I’m reading a noir crime novel about Santa Claus called The Fat Man; Fiaschetti and his snitches could fit in unnoticed as Santa's elf enforcers. You continue to amaze with your discoveries; finding You Gotta Be Rough is a real coup. — Russell Merritt, “The Trepoff Murder” A delightful discovery. I have some information about Petrosino in my files: According to Arthur Train (Courts, Criminals, and the Camorra, 1912, p. 227), Petrosino, a New York police officer murdered in Palermo, was a national hero in Italy, where he was known as “Il Sherlock Holmes d’Italia.” Il piccolo Sherlock Holmes (1909) was an Italian short made by the Itala Film Co. in Turin, released in the U.S. as The Italian Sherlock Holmes (1910), advertised in Moving Picture World as involving Petrosino, who “was undoubtedly one of the bravest sleuths ever detailed on an important case by the New York Secret Service Bureau.” Alas, the film seems not to have survived.

“YOU GOTTA BE ROUGH”

The Cop Who Protected Christ Cella’s Speakeasy,

or “To Hell with Sherlock Holmes”

Long ago in my research, I came across mention of Christ Cella operating his speakeasy, where Christopher Morley and his friends gestated the BSI during late Prohibition years, under the protection of one of the toughest cops in New York, Michael Fiaschetti.

Christ Cella was born in Piacenza, Italy, on May 8, 1894, and came to America with his parents in 1904. He lived initially in Baltimore, and when young, with his brawny build, he worked for a year or so for Barnum & Bailey as a roustabout—an experience that in the 1920s made him a founding member of New York’s chapter of the circus-world philanthropic society, Saints and Sinners. He first worked as a cook in Baltimore, according to his New York Times obituary of November 11, 1947, but also worked in New York as a muralist and decorator, giving the latter as his occupation in the 1930 Census (“speakeasy proprietor” being impolitic for a federal form). He and his wife Elizabeth, a German-speaking Belgian who came to America in 1913, were married in 1922, the year he became a U.S. citizen. They had a son Richard (an Air Force brigadier general at his retirement decades later) and a daughter Anna, and took in boarders at their 144 East 45th Street brownstone—eight listed in the 1930 Census, including Arthur Choate, 70, a year or two later discovered to be a once wealthy missing man, penniless and starving to death now. The earliest date I’ve seen for Cella operating his speakeasy is 1923, while other sources say 1926 or ’27. When Repeal came in December ’33, it became a licensed restaurant. Cella moved it to new East 46th Street quarters in 1946, but died the next year, November 10, 1947, only fifty-four years old. Of hypertension from hectic modern life, grumbled Christopher Morley.

The link between Christ Cella and Mike Fiaschetti comes from the December 1966 “Along the Boulevards” in Gourmet Magazine, a series begun in the mid-1940s by Lucius Beebe and carried on at intervals by others, including Vincent Starrett and, at the time in question, Leslie Charteris, author of the Saint thrillers. Charteris had first been taken to Cella’s speakeasy in 1932 by Malcolm Johnson, his U.S. publisher at Doubleday, Doran’s Crime Club, and a charter member of Chris Morley’s BSI. Charteris loved Cella’s and the atmosphere around that Irregular table in the kitchen, and worked it into his 1934 novel The Saint in New York, calling Cella Chris Cellini. (See Irregular Memories of the ’Thirties, pp. 141-43.)

“[Simon Templar, the Saint] sat back and sipped the drink that Chris brought him, watching the room through half-closed eyes. The flash of jest and repartee, the crescendo of discussion and the ring of laughter, came to his ears like the echo of an unforgettable song,” wrote Charteris: “It was the same as it had always been—the same humorous camaraderie presided over and kept vigorously alive by Chris’s own unchanging geniality. Why were there not more places like that in the world, he began to wonder—places where a host was more than a shopkeeper, and men threw off their cares and talked and laughed openly together, without fear or suspicion, expanding cleanly and fruitfully in the glow of wine and fellowship?”

Very much the spirit that originally animated the Baker Street Irregulars.

This December, in a Christmas mailing, Ray Betzner (“The Agony Column,” BSI) enclosed Charteris’s “Boulevards” column. The writer remembered more than thirty years later how wonderful his hours at Christ Cella’s speakeasy had been. Charteris devoted that column to his 1932 visit, and in describing Cella and his speak, he wrote: “He was built like an oak barrel and was just as hard, and no one doubted his boast that in their younger days he could lick his old friend Mike Fiaschetti, who was half as big again and reputed to be one of the toughest detectives down on Center Street. Mike hated gangsters and racketeers and enjoyed circumventing their lawyers and political protectors by the kind of summary methods that are regarded so unfavorably today, but like most police officers of his time he took a tolerant view of the kind of public-service lawbreaking in which Chris was engaged, and was himself a regular customer. With such an association, it is understandable that no mob ever tried to sell Chris protection.”

Charteris wrote from memory long after the fact. Mike Fiaschetti was no longer a policeman in 1932. After quite a career in the New York Police Department, he was now a private detective in New York City. But he was Christ Cella’s close friend, may very well have met Morley and his Irregulars there, and at any rate had read Sherlock Holmes and had pronounced views on the subject.

Michael Fiaschetti was born in Rome in 1886, came to America with his parents in 1896, and died in New York in 1960. He was a prominent policeman of the ’teens and ’twenties when a member of the NYPD’s Italian Squad, originally under the legendary Lt. Joseph Petrosino, who was murdered in Italy in 1909 by the Black Hand—a career depicted in the 1960 movie Pay or Die starring Ernest Borgnine.

Mike Fiaschetti’s father had been a bandmaster in Italy, and then in America, and as a child he expected to become a musician himself one day. But he became interested in crime and detection while growing up in North Adams, Massachusetts, in the state’s northwest corner. Fiaschetti’s family moved to New York when he was sixteen, and when old enough a few years later he joined the NYPD, initially walking a beat in Brooklyn’s densely populated, immigrant-heavy Williamsburg district. Fiaschetti was powerful in build, once calling himself “husky enough to make a reputation as a piano mover.” A popular writer of 1928 described him as “a man tall and of massive frame and muscular brawn. He had a dark, frowning face, with features large and bold, yet cut with an Italian correctness and grace of line; eyes of constantly narrowed attention and a dusky grey; a well-creased soft hat that seemed never removed from his head; and a cigar as big as a section of broom handle projecting from the corner of a defiant mouth; not at any sporty upward angle, but stuck straight out as if in violent aggression.”

Joe Petrosino had been his mentor from the start:

I had got on the New York police force through Lieutenant Joseph Petrosino, the famous head of the Italian Squad, who was later killed by the Black Hand while on a mission in Naples. Petrosino was devoted to music—we Italians all are. He used to be a familiar figure around the Metropolitan Opera House, listening to Rigoletto or Butterfly. My father was a Roman bandmaster who came to America and toured the states at the head of a band. Petrosino was a friend of his. He was a regular visitor at our house, where my father was forever playing the piano or the guitar or clarinet—he could play anything. Petrosino used to sit for hours listening, the strength and shrewdness of his face softened and made dreamy by the old, well remembered tunes of the operas. In those hours of music he could forget all about the deadly woven web of the Black Hand, which was eventually to snare him.

[Robert K. Leavitt, one of Morley’s kinsprits at Cella’s speakeasy, has said elsewhere what a remarkable performer on the accordion Cella was. — J.L.]

I was just growing up, and naturally the great detective was a great hero in my eyes. I decided that I wanted to become a detective. Petrosino looked me over. I was big and strong. He encouraged me, and, when I became old enough, advised me to join the force. I would have to do my bit as a patrolman, but if I worked hard for the Detective Division I could make it. He would help me. I took his counsel, and presently found myself patrolling a beat out in the wilds of Williamsburg.

Petrosino soon brought Fiaschetti into the Italian Squad. There he learned the art of detection, in those days a casual combination of informants, psychology, and “the third degree,” the last instilled in the turn-of-the-century NYPD by a famous predecessor, Alexander S. “Clubber” Williams, originally from Canada, once-living testimony that not all Canadians are polite. But psychology was more important, said Fiaschetti: “You’ve got to use psychology in this detective business. Psychology will catch more crooks than a mile of rubber hose.” And most important of all, in his opinion, were informants.

After Joseph Petrosino’s murder the Italian Squad was dormant for some years, but reactivated in 1918 with Fiaschetti as its new commander. He was given a detective of Irish descent as a bodyguard, one Irving O’Hara, possibly because O’Hara lacked ancestral ties by which the Mafia might corrupt him; or maybe because he was Mayor Hylan’s brother-in-law. Fiaschetti operated not only in New York, but in one or two undercover missions to Italy to gather information about its Mafia’s ties to mobs in America, the kinds of mission that had gotten Petrosino killed.

Although highly decorated, Mike Fiaschetti served as commander of the Italian Squad only to 1922, shoved out at the behest of a Tammany politician he’d ejected from a stationhouse for interfering with an interrogation. At Tammany’s insistence the Italian Squad was shut down, its men reassigned to other duties, on the pretext that it was discriminatory because there were no Chinese or Jewish or other ethnic squads in the NYPD. But one historian remarks: “To many law-abiding immigrants, the Italian Squad was not an ethnic slur, as Tammany and others charged, but a cause for ethnic pride, and a reason to feel a greater sense of belonging in an adopted country. The romantic lure of the outlaw existence paled in comparison with the adventures of those Italians who dedicated their lives to keeping others safe.”

Fiaschetti was credited with over 1,000 arrests, including twelve killers sent to the electric chair. He spent a couple more years in the Homicide Bureau, then opened Fiaschetti’s International Detective Bureau, with offices at 401 Broadway, a few blocks from Little Italy. In the early 1930s he returned to public service when newly-elected Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia appointed him as deputy commissioner of the Department of Markets to investigate racketeering in New York’s produce industry. In 1938, he returned to private-detective work. He lectured nationally on organized crime, and took part in Army Reserve training programs during the war. He was seventy-four years old at his death at Brooklyn’s VA Hospital on July 29, 1960.

Michael Fiaschetti in U.S. Army (Military Police) uniform during World War II.

In 1930 he published his memoirs, You Gotta Be Rough, and his publisher was none other than Malcolm Johnson, BSI, with his Crime Club imprint.

Did Mike Fiaschetti ever sit at that table in his friend Christ Cella’s kitchen while Christopher Morley was there with his friends gassing about Sherlock Holmes? I don’t suppose we will ever know. If he did, I’m sure he was polite about it.

But You Gotta Be Rough, ch. 3 (an item unknown to De Waal), contained a candid minority report on Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s sagacity as a detective:

How the Detective Really Gets His Man,

or, To Hell with Sherlock Holmes

Ask a fiddler how he fiddles, and he’ll tell you. Ask a doughboy how the A.E.F. won the war, and he’ll tell you plenty. Ask a man-hunting, crime-sleuthing detective how he gets his man, and most likely he will give you a stall. Here’s telling. There are a lot of ways of catching a crook, and a best and most usual way. And that reminds me of a fine old gent with a gold-headed cane and a long silk ribbon hung onto his eyeglasses who came flat-footing it in to see me one day during the time when I had become commanding officer of the Italian Squad

He took a good look around, gazed with a sparkling eye at bare, discolored walls, battered desk and chairs and dented cuspidors, typewritten pages of official orders tacked to the wall, and rogues’ gallery pictures lying in the basket. My office at Police Headquarters was a lot different from his own downtown banking sanctum with deep, soft rugs and a spread of paintings on the walls. And I suppose that I, leaning back in my squeaky swivel chair, did not look the part of any dignified cashier or sleek teller. He was in novel surroundings, and it hit him right. He adjusted his dark-rimmed spectacles on his thin nose, handed me an expensive cigar from a leather case, and settled back with his dead-white hands over the head of his walking stick. He was set to listen to something snappy.

“And now, Mr. Fiaschetti”—he smiled like a school principal beaming on a pupil who has got off the class oration without balling it up entirely—“and now, Mr. Fiaschetti, tell me how you did it. How did you manage it?”

A couple of weeks previously his expensive apartment had been turned off and a lot of gilt-edged junk started on its way to the fences. The usual story—no clues, up against a blank wall, a mysterious case. It was in the papers a lot, a couple of arrests on suspicion, no evidence, prisoners released. But it was all over now. That morning I had collared the mob and locked them up in the Tombs. You couldn’t blame the old gent for wondering how the seemingly insoluble case had been broken.

“Oh,” I replied, “I got a little information and grabbed those guys.”

I slurred over the word “information,” passed it quickly and negligently. You often hear that same word, “information,” in police circles. Sometimes it is called the “tip.” You find it constantly cropping up at critical places in stories of detective cases—in actual, real-life cases and not the kind you read in books. Ask any reporter who has covered headquarters. I’ve never analyzed cigar ashes, but have often got a little information, often given attentive ear to a tip.

My million-dollar visitor did not notice the information part of it. His soul was not attuned to such prosy things, anyway. Detective meant to him something of the Sherlock Holmes order. He was bent on hearing a tale of ingenious unraveling, of subtle and brilliant sleuthing; a classic of how the detective gets his man. It beguiled him that so romantic a thing, as he supposed, had come within the placid circle of his existence.

“But,” he persisted, “tell me all about it. What was the real detective work in the case?”

I chewed on the cigar he had given me—and a good stick of Havana it was—and then reeled off a few things that had happened in the hunt for the burglars.

“It was like this,” I said. “I picked one of the mob and tailed him. Then my men covered the place where he lived. A couple of guys came to see him. We shadowed them. Pretty soon the three of them went to dicker with a fence, and we grabbed them.”

I amused him with full details of this part of the case, an important part, but by no means the heart of the matter. It had taken sharp work and made an interesting story. The trailings and shadowings, the figuring things out, and the quick jumping in for the arrest—guns drawn and a short fight—were the kind of yarn my banker friend expected. He was satisfied.

“A fine piece of detective work, Mr. Fiaschetti,” he put the O. K. on me. And later, when he arose to go, he repeated, patting me on the shoulder patronizingly, “A fine piece of detective work—you are quite a Sherlock Holmes.”

I did not disclaim the praise, nor tell him to take his thanks to a certain vagued-eyed, loose-jawed hanger-on of an East Side pool room. That was the kind of thing you keep to yourself as a professional secret when you are a member of the detective staff of a police organization. You pass it off with a casual, indirect reference. The detective doesn’t tell the public how he gets his man. But it was that vague-eyed, loose-jawed gangster who had given me the information, the tip. He was the stool pigeon.

I’ve got a grudge against Sherlock Holmes, managia i piscetti, cursing all the fishes. Most actual, workaday detectives have. Conan Doyle’s stories are all right as literature, I suppose, but then the John Laws, as a general thing, are not literary, and it’s enough to knock you flat to see how much they can print on a page that won’t work out on the job. In some ways Watson’s needle-jabbing friend has done us a good turn. He has made our line of business quite a romance, made detectives romantic gents, like movie actors or dare-devil heroes of war, almost as romantic as the crooks. Boys dream of becoming sleuths, and you often see a gleam in a girl’s eye as she glances at some plain-clothes dick. I don’t say anything against that. But Sherlock Holmes has made people expect weird, wall-eyed stunts of the real coppers. You are stumped on a case.

“What’s the matter?” somebody says. “Why doesn’t he read the history of the crime by studying a footprint with a magnifying glass, or catch the criminals by analyzing the cigar ashes?”

Well, sometimes we do—but not often. The public blames us if we don’t, and makes us out a lot of simps—which sometimes we are. All these later-day detective story writers follow the Sherlock Holmes tradition. It makes me tired to read how those bulls in books solve mysteries with their deductions—although deductions in their place are all right. Why doesn’t somebody write a detective story with a stool pigeon in it? Why didn’t Conan Doyle tell about Sherlock Holmes’s stool pigeons? Holmes had stool pigeons. Of course he did. How could he break a case if he didn’t?

In the honest-to-God story of how the detective gets his man, stool pigeon’s the word. Clues, deductions, and even the green whiskers have their place, but nearly always as mere embroidery around a central theme. Take away information, the tip, the secret whisper of the stool pigeon, and the detection of crime would be paralyzed. The police organization of every city of the country, and of the world as well, would stand helpless and gaping.

I learned my lesson early, the A B C’s of the business. I should like to recommend it for the curricula of some of these detective schools you see advertising in the papers. It would go well in a correspondence course in the noble art of sleuthing.

That little bit of instruction in plain and fancy man-hunting, practical hint to a beginner, came during those weeks when I was a harness bull pounding a beat out in the wilds of Williamsburg. Beats are long in Williamsburg, and it was tiresome, day after day, mile after mile. It’s no fun flattening your feet on the pavements, especially in Williamsburg. How long would I have to endure this drudgery before I got a promotion to the Detective Division? I was getting sick of it. If only I could pick up a chance to distinguish myself, to pull something, to crash in on a hold-up or stumble upon a trail that would lead to the solving of a crime—anything that would help me to get advancement. I wore out my shoe leather as diligently as a cop with a conscience should, and got nearsighted looking for things, but never a hold-up or a cunning trail did I spy.

In those days—twenty years ago—one of the favorite activities in Williamsburg was stealing horses. At the station house I saw a notice of a robbery—twenty horses had been stolen. The animals were described, and patrolmen were told to be on the lookout for them. I studied the descriptions carefully, and for the next day or so, as I pounded my beat, I kept my eyes going right and left. If I could only catch sight of one of those horses and grab it, a good mark, A-1, would be chalked down on my record. I thought my conscientious vigilance should surely be rewarded, but never a horse did I see that looked like one of those described.

One afternoon I sat in a little hole-in-the-wall grocery store, resting and talking with the proprietor. I had struck up a small acquaintance with him. He happened to pull the drawer of his cash register out rather far, and there, in the back, I saw a big forty-five looking at me. He caught my glance and seemed frightened, and I knew right off that he had no permit to have that chunk of artillery around.

“What are you doing with the gat?” I demanded.

“Oh, it ain’t nothin’,” he stuttered. “There’s lots of robberies. I may need protection. I don’t want nobody to rob me.”

I knew him to be what is described as a law-abiding citizen, but it was my duty, strictly speaking, to place him under arrest for unlawful possession of firearms. It would have caused him trouble. Having weapons around was not so common then as now. I didn’t want to haul him around to the station house, but thought a small lesson about keeping strictly within the law wouldn’t hurt him. Being a new cop I felt exceedingly conscientious, and was, I suppose, a bit over-important and officious. I told that grocer that it was my business to lock him up, and he begged me not to. I explained to him that he was liable to fine and imprisonment, and he vowed he wouldn’t do it again. I protested that I might get into trouble if I didn’t make a pinch then and there, and he offered me money. I bawled him out for that. Briefly, I had him scared.

“But,” I concluded, feeling like a magnanimous cop, and sometimes it’s a pleasure to feel magnanimous, “I don’t want to get you into trouble. You are a good fellow, and I am a friend of yours. I won’t say anything about that gun, but get it out of the way or take out a permit to have it around, or somebody else will pick you up—and won’t be a friend of yours.”

That took a load off his mind, and he was full of gratitude. In spite of what philosophers may say, I have found plenty of gratitude in men—and stool pigeons. The majesty of the law is such that when a copper does you a good turn you appreciate it.

“Mr. Fiaschetti,” the grocer cried eagerly, “if I can ever do anything for you, you just let me know!”

“Well,” I responded, “I wish somebody would tell me a thing or two about those stolen horses.”

I hadn’t any particular purpose in starting out on that subject. It was just naturally on my mind. The grocer, though, thought I was hinting that he knew something about the nags, as he easily might—if I had thought about it. His shop was a meeting place for the neighborhood, a headquarters for gossip.

“If I could pick up those horses,” I was thinking out loud, “it would mean a lot to me.”

He seemed to be debating with himself. Squealing, in certain nooks and corners of this wide country, is not a healthy pastime. But he was grateful, and, besides, I had something on him. He must have known I didn’t mean to lock him up for that gun, but when the cops have got something on you there is a subtlety in it, a blind, reasonless compulsion. It holds you, and twists your thoughts and feelings around, and is liable to make you do things that would surprise you. It is a better persuader than a lawyer.

“I don’t know who done the job,” the grocer said thoughtfully. Then he came over to me and sat down on the chair beside me. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you, Mike.” He spoke in a low voice. “I heard where those horses are.” And he gave me the address of a stable.

I hot-footed it out of the place. Pretty soon I was at the stable. In the stalls were the twenty horses. Arrests followed. The livery-stable gang was an outfit of horse thieves. I strutted around, a proud rookie, for the next few days. Then General Bingham gave me an Honorable Mention—my first decoration.* And that made me feel like Caruso singing “Cielo e mar” in Gioconda.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

* Theodore A. Bingham, New York Police Commissioner from 1906 to 1909.

My acquaintance with the grocer did not end there. It came considerably closer, in fact. I had more than ever on him now—the fact that he had given me the tip. It’s a law of science, once a stool pigeon always a stool pigeon—with a few exceptions. The grocer was a regular source of information about all kinds of things, usually petty ones: which kid it was that knocked the baseball through the plate-glass window, or about the young fellow down the street who was running around with a bad mob in New York. That sort of thing is useful to the copper on the beat, just as it is to the detective assigned to the local station house. I was able to report a few more things.

Petrosino was looking for a chance to get me on his Italian Squad. He had it now and went right to bat. I was ordered into plain clothes and put under his command.

The Police Department nowadays has a detective school with lectures and black-boards and all that for educating gumshoe sleuths, but in my time the college course for dicks was simpler. They put you in tow of an experienced man, and you went around with him, helped him, and watched how he did things, and generally played second fiddle before you got a solo. I plugged it around with one veteran of the Italian Squad and then another. After a while they began to send me out on minor cases alone.

About this time I got lesson No. 2, some more of the A B C’s. I was cultivating a few sources of information, had a couple of stool pigeons lined up. One night I walked up to a street corner. A man was waiting there.

“What’s new?” I asked him.

“A thing or two,” he replied.

We stood in a shadowed doorway and talked. He gave me a fact or two about an important case I was working on. At least, it seemed important to me. It was about some cheap-skate graft that didn’t amount to much, but when you’re new to the game a two spit that you happen to pick up looks like a flock of aces. Then the stool pigeon went on to talk about other things.

“There’s going to be some trouble,” he volunteered, “in that pool room upstairs at Grand and Mulberry.”

“Yes?” I responded absently. I was thinking about the big case.

“Going to bump off a guy there,” he went on, as if discussing some matter-of-fact detail. “Dopey Joe’s in wrong with the Orchard Street gang. Running a crap game with a couple of them, and he gypped them. They’re going to square things with him, and are all set to get him in that pool room this coming Saturday night.”

Somehow or other I didn’t pay much attention to this. He talked a lot and was likely to come around with exaggerated tales. He had a lot of gossip, much of which was rot. And I suppose I was all taken up with the big case. Anyway, I didn’t follow the lead or think about it afterward. I forgot it.

It happened that on the following Saturday night I was at dinner in a restaurant just down the street from the pool room at Grand and Mulberry. It was a warm summer evening. I was in my shirt sleeves—dining formalities are not rigorously observed in that neighborhood. The door was open, and a pleasant breeze blew in. I was in the middle of a plate of excellent ravioli when suddenly—bang, bang, bang—three shots.

“There it is,” I yelled. The telltale sound of shots which came from up the street brought back into my mind in a blazing flash the story the stool pigeon had told me. I nearly knocked the table over, getting out of the door. Up the street and up the stairs to the pool room. I dashed in, pistol in hand. It was too late. Dopey Joe lay dead on the floor, and the murderers had got away by the side entrance. I felt like kicking myself all over the place. As I looked at the dead man, with his cocaine-haunted face white beneath the lights, it almost seemed as if I had killed him. I could have saved his life, although it was not much of a life as things go. I could have laid in wait and grabbed those guys as they came in on their vengeful mission. As it was, Dopey Joe was dead, and it turned out that we never did get the murderers right, could not build up a court case against them.

That small happening makes lesson No. 2 read as follows: Take in everything a stool pigeon has to say, and look up every lead. You may think it mere vaporous gossip, but it may mean the difference between a pinch and a getaway. What’s the use of having stool pigeons if you won’t listen to a squeal? I listened after that experience—made ’em talk and listened.

You’ve got to get the idea of the stool pigeon system if you are going to understand what the big dramatic show of crook and detective is all about, and right here I’m going to try to put the idea square in front of you, with handles on it so that you can get a good grip.

As a detective working at all kinds of sleuthing, and particularly as head of the Italian Squad, I built up one of the biggest stool pigeon organizations on record, a system that had its ramifications high and low, far and wide. It was an instrument on which you could produce startling effects, as a virtuoso of the violin draws a miraculous note out of some rare old Strad. You could learn more from it than from any library of books, and sometimes you could make those wizards of crime detection in fiction stories look cheap.

I’d like Sherlock Holmes to get out his magnifying glass and take a look at this one. Watson should have been around to mutter “Wonderful!” There wasn’t any Watson, but there was a good crowd just the same, and what a crowd! Talk about astonishing the natives, well, there weren’t only natives to be astonished. In addition to half the neighborhood looking on, the gang from headquarters was assembled in force. You never saw such an array of wise, hard-boiled handcuff snappers. That was what I liked especially. Nothing like startling the professional talent.

In an olive oil, cheese, and macaroni store on Central Avenue, Brooklyn, two brothers, Salvaggio by name, who lived in the rear of the shop, were found shot to death in their beds. It was a weird-looking affair, and made quite a bit of stir—drama, grim mystery, and all that. There had been several prominent unsolved murders of late. The evening papers put the Central Avenue case in banners on their front pages, and orders from up above were to break the case at any cost. Men from headquarters were rushed over, and the investigation was made in a big way.

I was busy with some other matters and did not get over to the Central Avenue grocery store until mid-afternoon. A crowd was on the street and in the shop, lookers-on, reporters, photographers, and there must have been twenty plain-clothes men questioning people, nosing around and standing around. They were in charge of Deputy Inspector Lahey. He was standing outside near the curb. I reported to him. He told me that nothing had been discovered, no clue or sign or anything to work on.

“It’s a tough case, Mike,” he said, “but we’ve got to break it.”

I started through the rubbernecking mob to the store. In the crowd I saw a stool pigeon of mine. When he spotted me he began edging toward me. I gave him the eye and went into the store. He followed. I pretended to be busy examining something, as if snooping around for a clue, footprints or the cigar ashes. He came alongside and managed to get a few words to me.

“Go to the Municipal Baths. You will find a big six-footer—Lillo Grillino. He’s bathing there now. At his house you will find the gun and counterfeit money. It was a counterfeiting job. Those two who were killed gypped the others.”

I went out and told the Deputy Inspector I thought I had something, and was going to follow it down.

A quick trip to the Municipal Baths, and sure enough I found the long, lank Lillo Grillino. He was just dressing after an invigorating swim. He nearly fainted when I put him under arrest. I took him to his house and there found a pistol and a stock of counterfeit money. I had him right, and he came through right there on the spot. Later he took a plea and got twenty years.

When I returned to the grocery store with the prisoner and his confession the boys there opened their eyes. Those rhinoceros-hided dicks weren’t usually astonished at anything, but in this case it certainly looked as if some of Sherlock Holmes’s lightning deductions had been pulled.

“How did you do it, Mike?” they demanded, wondering.

I gave them a chance to guess a while, puffed at my cigar, and made a remark or two that might indicate I had solved the mystery by some masterpiece of intellect beyond their comprehension. It’s fun to swell around once in a while.

“How did you do it, Mike?” Inspector Lahey asked.

You don’t try any monkey business or witty comedy with your superior officer.

“Inspector,” I replied, “as I came in I saw a stool pigeon of mine in the crowd.”

“Oh, yes, I see.” He smiled with a saturnine grimace. He didn’t ask me another. There are things that even your superior officer doesn’t pry into, and one of these is who your stool pigeons are.

I looked good in that case, I’ll admit it. I wish I was as good as I looked.

It isn’t pretty or elevating, that term stool pigeon, but then neither is crime. You’ve got to do it. That statement excuses a lot of things in this world, especially in police departments. You can’t tie yourself up with delicate scruples in your dealings with the underworld, and if you aren’t any rougher with the boys than getting tips from stool pigeons they’re lucky.

Take this as an axiom of the science of crime detection—a detective is as good as he is able to cultivate sources of information, as successful as he is able to line up stool pigeons.

I’ll tell you how Sherlock Holmes really broke his cases. Being a great detective Holmes was a master hand at making stool pigeons—that’s a special art—and at keeping them on the job—and that’s another special art. No, he didn’t have any little black book with names, addresses, and telephone numbers. Suppose he lost it or somebody grabbed it on him or somehow the dope got around and got to the boys who were being squealed on—there might be a bit of bumping off in those neighborhoods. Sherlock Holmes kept his sources of information deep inside of his noodle, and he never let them slip. You could not drag the name of a stool pigeon from him if you beat him to death or gave him ten thousand dollars. No, he did not exchange notes on this particular subject with his brother detectives. Each sleuth has his own personal and private list and doesn’t divulge it even to his superior offices. If he leaves a precinct or the force he does not bequeath to his successor any legacy of stool pigeons.

Sherlock Holmes, of course, was particularly secretive. That very likely was why Conan Doyle didn’t get the real story. Anyway, it was the reason why Holmes was able to hold his sources of information so well. His stool pigeons knew they could trust him to the death. With that long, unwritten list of his, Holmes knew pretty much what was going on in the underworld. All kinds of leads, both useful and useless, came to him constantly, and whenever he needed a tip in some particular case he picked out the stool pigeons who would be likely to have contacts pertinent to the matter in hand, and pretty soon they were snooping around and sending him reports. Then, with a good strong hint right in the vital middle of the case, Holmes would carry on with some of his brilliant reasoning and analysis. He’d have to do that to build up his case, because you couldn’t expect him to bring his stool pigeons into court.

The ordinary detective works for the most part in the limited world of his own precinct. There he organizes his little stool pigeon system. It is a small revolving part of a great whole, and the local detective is the cog that connects it with the general machine covering the entire underworld—and some parts that are not underworld. He drags his pond day in and day out, sifts out his catch. His net may not be large, but it snares strange fishes.

You know the old story of the needle in the haystack; well, Chicago is a pretty big haystack, and a single man is a mighty small needle. Picking out a lone individual in a huge, crowded city is always one of the classical pieces of detective work. Suppose the man hunted is a stranger in the town, with no criminal connections, you might think the stool-pigeon system would be unable to function in such a case.

A citizen of a small burg in Iowa became involved in some marital tangle. He got a bad case of jealousy aboard, hauled out a gun, and knocked off his best friend. He escaped, and remembering that the best place to hide is in a crowd, went to Chicago, leaving no trail behind aim, and lost himself in teeming multitudes. He kept his peace, and did not babble. He did not wander to any place where criminals might ordinarily be found. Yet the Chicago police picked him out. They had nothing more to go on than the usual circular, sent far and wide, asking for his arrest and giving a picture of him.

The fugitive overplayed his hand just a trifle. Wanting to get as far away as possible from parts where he might be sought, he reasoned that nobody would think of looking for him, a native American, in some foreign quarter. He picked a Polish neighborhood and took a furnished room there. He stuck close to his retreat, and associated only with the Polish people of the vicinity.

The detectives of the local precinct had their sources of information, their stool pigeons. One of these, in the course of reporting desultory facts and fancies, told of the American who for no apparent reason had taken up residence among the Poles. The tip didn’t seem important, but the detective, an efficient worker, wasn’t overlooking any tricks, however insignificant they might seem. He gave his man the once-over, and compared him with pictures of sundry malefactors who were wanted all over the country. Sure enough, here was the fellow who had done the shooting in Iowa. Soon the culprit was on his way back to his native town to stand trial.

Moral—if the cops are looking for you, don’t hide in a foreign quarter. Likewise, no matter where you go you are exceedingly likely to be tipped off. The stool pigeons will get you sooner or later. Don’t do anything to have the cops looking for you.

Some Irregular comments:

I enjoyed the Fiaschetti story. The Count Luckner of the law? As told to Prosper Buranelli? Two more interesting names that I had never heard of as well. I enjoyed looking them up..... — Burt Wolder, “The Third Pillar from the Left”

Fascinating. And in my experience, CSI Everywhere notwithstanding, Fiaschetti’s comments are probably as true today as they were then. Most cases are made by tips and confessions, not shoeprints and fiber analysis. DNA is certainly compelling evidence, and has been critical in some celebrated cases, but the question typically is not who, but rather why and with what mental state. — Peter Ashman, “Peter Steiler the Elder” (Judge Ashman also provides this related link)

Fascinating stuff. Doris has been saying for the past few weeks that she’s convinced that even today few crimes get solved without informants. — Clifford Goldfarb, “Fordham, the Horsham Lawyer”

This is fantastic stuff! And I love the book jacket! — Daniel Stashower, “Thurston”

Boy, he looks like a NY cop doesn’t he? And writes like one. I can hear him speaking NYese in my ear. This is a pretty neat thing. — Susan Dahlinger, “The Bruce-Partington Plans”

Mike Fiaschetti sounds like someone dug up by central casting. I’m reading a noir crime novel about Santa Claus called The Fat Man; Fiaschetti and his snitches could fit in unnoticed as Santa's elf enforcers. You continue to amaze with your discoveries; finding You Gotta Be Rough is a real coup. — Russell Merritt, “The Trepoff Murder”

A delightful discovery. I have some information about Petrosino in my files: According to Arthur Train (Courts, Criminals, and the Camorra, 1912, p. 227), Petrosino, a New York police officer murdered in Palermo, was a national hero in Italy, where he was known as “Il Sherlock Holmes d’Italia.” Il piccolo Sherlock Holmes (1909) was an Italian short made by the Itala Film Co. in Turin, released in the U.S. as The Italian Sherlock Holmes (1910), advertised in Moving Picture World as involving Petrosino, who “was undoubtedly one of the bravest sleuths ever detailed on an important case by the New York Secret Service Bureau.” Alas, the film seems not to have survived. — Peter Blau,“Black Peter”