The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia
By Mike Dash
Random House $27 416 pages

There are so many books and movies on the Mafia, it’s reasonable to ask what can be learned from another one. It is a question that Mike Dash poses to himself in his introduction to The First Family. But he is rather good at filling in the gaps and providing texture to popular knowledge, as he has shown before. A previous work, Tulipomania, was an enthralling take on the 17th-century rage for flower bulbs.

His purpose now is to trace the origins of the Mafia not in Sicily but in New York, where the organisation took shape. Dash’s protagonist is Giuseppe Morello – also known as the “Clutch Hand”, from a birth deformity, and, at the end of his career, as Don Petru, who built the model later emulated by more famous Mafiosi.

Morello was born in the cradle of crime in Corleone, Sicily, and went to the US as a child. He scraped out an existence before settling on a more profitable life beyond the law in Little Italy and East Harlem at the turn of the 20th century.

The Mafia was mostly a neighbourhood business until Prohibition in the 1920s brought opportunities to make serious money on a national scale. Before this, fiercely defended family turfs were measured in city blocks and the wages of sin were quite modest, gleaned from extortion, protection, trade in ice, coal and vegetables and counterfeiting currency – and some legitimate enterprises. The Irish-dominated New York police knew little and cared less about the teeming Italian slums.

Morello set up production as a counterfeiter on a remote farm in upstate New York. His organisation, run with his three half-brothers, was more efficient, ruthless and violent than its competitors. But in 1903 the murder of a rival brought him to the attention of famous secret service agent William Flynn and Joe Petrosino, a New York police sergeant, though they never nailed him for that offence.

Flynn did get lucky seven years later, by which time Morello was the informal capo di tutti capi in New York – not that he ever claimed the title made famous in The Godfather. Flynn caught one of his counterfeiting printers, who snitched and earned his boss 10 years in a penitentiary. Petrosino, less fortunate, was murdered on an investigation in Palermo.

Out of prison Morello found that family fortunes had faltered under his half­brothers, two of whom met bloody ends. He never regained his former status but he re-emerged as adviser to “Joe the Boss” Masseria, the New York kingpin, who was challenged by his Brooklyn rival Salvatore Maranzano.

The First Family isn’t always easy to follow – so many names and nicknames cascade across the pages. But the research is impressive, as are the pen portraits – and it repays to persevere to the end. There is one final dilemma for the Mafia enthusiast: who should play Giuseppe Morello in the movie now that Brando is gone.

Jurek Martin is a former FT Washington bureau chief