21 Facts About Joseph Petrosino

Crime fighting techniques that Petrosino pioneered are still practiced by law enforcement agencies.

Giuseppe Joseph Petrosino was born in Padula, a comune in the province of Salerno, in the southern Italian region of Campania.

In 1874, the remainder of the Joseph Petrosino family immigrated to the United States.

Joseph Petrosino married the widow Adelina Saulino on January 6,1908, with whom he had a daughter, Adelina Joseph Petrosino Burke, who gave birth to Susan Burke.

Joseph Petrosino was the first Italian language speaker in the NYPD's history.

Joseph Petrosino became friends with Theodore Roosevelt, who was a member of the council of police commissioners which governed the NYPD.

Fluent in several Italian dialects, Joseph Petrosino was able to "make" cases that other officers could not.

The pinnacle of his career came in December 1908 when he was promoted to lieutenant and placed in charge of the Italian Squad, an elite corps of Italian-American detectives assembled specifically to deal with the criminal activities of organizations like the Mafia, which Joseph Petrosino saw as a shame upon decent Italians and Italian Americans.

Joseph Petrosino was being extorted by Black Hand gangsters who demanded money in exchange for his life.

Joseph Petrosino warned the Secret Service, but McKinley ignored the warning, even after Roosevelt, who had by this time become Vice President of the United States, vouched for Joseph Petrosino's abilities.

In 1903, Joseph Petrosino arrested him on suspicion of murder, but Cascio Ferro was acquitted.

In 1909, Joseph Petrosino made plans to travel to Palermo, Sicily on a secret mission.

Joseph Petrosino was armed with a long list of known Italian criminals who had taken up residence in the United States, and intended to get enough evidence of their criminal pasts to throw them out of the country once and for all.

Joseph Petrosino said that the man was from New York, and told his friend that he saw the man duck into a telegraph office.

Joseph Petrosino told his friend that it was likely that the man had alerted his Black Hand Society compatriots in Noto, Sicily that he was now in Italy.

On March 12,1909, after arriving in Palermo, Sicily, Joseph Petrosino was invited to a nighttime rendezvous in the city's Piazza Marina, where he was to receive information about the Mafia.

Reportedly, Joseph Petrosino fired off one shot in the direction the assailants before he fell to the ground.

Enrico Alfano had been linked to Joseph Petrosino's murder, when he began to run a gambling den in the basement of 108 Mulberry Street; Alfano became one of the primary underworld targets of Joseph Petrosino who believed he was a big player in the New York branch of the Camorra.

Antonio Vachris, the head of the Italian Detective Bureau in Brooklyn, stated that Joseph Petrosino was supposed to have been accompanied by police detectives in Palermo.

Joseph Petrosino suspected that Petrosino was betrayed by someone within the Palermo police department and ultimately lured to his death.

The United States Consul in Palermo, W H Bishop, sent a cablegram to NYC Police Commissioner Theodore A Bingham informing him of the tragic news and stating that Petrosino "dies a martyr".