A Mafia Counterfeit Ring

Hey Wiretappers, listen to my short bonus epsidose and I am looking for mob fans to read the first half of a memoir about my life partly as a cop and mostly during the Civella Spero War. Email me at ganglandwire.com and I’ll send you a pdf to read. Its about 22,000 words. Once its done, I’ll send you a copy

This week, we journey back to the early 1900s—a time when the first wave of Sicilian immigrants brought more than just dreams of opportunity to America. They also brought with them an age-old criminal code that would lay the foundation for the American Mafia as we know it.

Our story begins with the Mustache Petes—those old-world mafiosi who preyed on their own immigrant communities through intimidation, extortion, and a cunning knack for organized crime. One of their earliest rackets? Counterfeiting.

💵 A Nationwide Web of Fake Money
In 1901, the Secret Service—then the only federal law enforcement agency with a national reach—uncovered a brand-new counterfeit $5 bill in circulation. This was no small operation. The National Iron Bank of Morristown, New Jersey, had unknowingly unleashed a run worth $250,000—millions in today’s money.

Agents quickly linked the phony bills to a sophisticated, coast-to-coast counterfeit ring run by Sicilian gang leaders like Ignacio “Lupo the Wolf” Lupo and Giuseppe Morello. These men were more than petty crooks—they were the original godfathers of organized crime in New York City.

🔪 Violence and Betrayal in the Shadows
As the Secret Service tracked counterfeiters from Yonkers to Pittsburgh to San Francisco, they met ruthless opposition. Notorious mobsters like Vito Catone didn’t hesitate to attack federal agents. One desperate fugitive even tried to escape by lunging at agents with a knife, fleeing through a rail yard, and getting knocked down by bricks thrown from a moving train. Law enforcement, often under-armed and outnumbered, were up against killers willing to silence anyone in their way.

🩸 The Barrel Murder
This bloody saga culminated in one of the earliest and most chilling mob murders on record: the infamous Barrel Murder of 1903. When a New York City woman stumbled upon a barrel with a nearly decapitated body inside, investigators connected the corpse to the Morello gang’s counterfeiting operation. The victim, Benedetto Madonia, had apparently been lured to New York to help secure legal fees for his jailed brother-in-law, Giuseppe DiPrimo—only to be betrayed and butchered by the very men he’d come to help.

🕵️ Secret Service Stings and Underworld Justice
The Secret Service made arrests and even staged elaborate stings, using marked bills and informants to infiltrate the gang. But corruption, fear, and an underdeveloped justice system left many ringleaders untouched. One killer, Tomasso “Petto the Ox,” was freed despite damning evidence, only to be gunned down years later in a revenge hit that many believe was ordered by DiPrimo himself after his release from prison.

🔗 A Blueprint for the Mafia to Come
These early black handers and Mustache Petes were rough drafts of the organized syndicates that would soon flourish under Prohibition. Counterfeiting required a clear chain of command, trusted lieutenants, and loyal foot soldiers—known back then as “queer pushers” who spread the fake bills far and wide. In many ways, it was a proving ground for the hierarchy that would one day run America’s underworld.

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[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there. Good to be back here in the studio. This is a special bonus episode about the barrel murders and what’s his name? Tommaso the Ox Peto and a lot of those guys, Joe Petrocino. It’s kind of a shorty. And also, I’m putting this out because I’m asking for your help. I have a book that I’ve been working on about half, a little over halfway through. It’s going to be a memoir about my career and mainly about my interactions with the mob during the Savella Spiro War and what we did during that time. So I’m doing it. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a little bit different sort of a style.

[0:39] It’s a real short and punchy and to the point style. I’m not I’m really trying to take all the words I can out of it. I need some feedback. I want to see, you know, I got 20,000 words and I don’t know how many hours into this thing. And hell, I don’t know if it’s any good or not. And, you know, it may not be, it may be stupid for all I know, you know, I think it’ll, I think you’ll find it somewhat entertaining. And, and so I, I, what I’m looking for is some real critical feedback, you know, something that you like, something that you didn’t like. You’re not going to hurt my feelings. Promise me that. I mean, you see something you don’t like, or you think I’m redundant, or you see some errors where I repeat myself in it or something. Let me know. It’s about, I said, it’s about halfway through. I got up to the point where, uh, Carl Sparrow has been shot. He’s coming out of the hospital, and he has to go to dialysis and has to get his car fitted with hand controls. And so from there on, the war between the Savellas and Spiro is really on. Give me a feedback.

[1:37] What you have to do, I think, is email me at ganglandwire at gmail.com.

[1:42] Let me know, and I’ll send you a PDF, and then you can get back with me. Thanks a lot, guys. Guys, now listen to my story about the Mustache Pete’s and the early counterfeiting game. Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, back here in the studio all alone today, I’ve got a quick little story of early, early New York Mafia.

[2:03] Really the mustache peach. When these guys got here, they’re looking for money. They’re looking for opportunity. They’re denied a lot of opportunity, but they brought the mafia with them. They brought this criminal mentality with them. They started sending out black hand notes and preying on fellow immigrants from Sicily and Italy and kind of branched out from that. It preied on a lot of people. Now, one thing that got into early on was counterfeiting. And the law enforcement agency that had the responsibility to investigate counterfeiting back then was the Secret Service, and it still is today. The Secret Service was really the only nationwide law enforcement agency on a federal level back in those days. 1901, there’s a brand new counterfeit $5 bill detected. Different banks across the country printed the banknotes back then. This was the National Iron Bank of Morristown, New Jersey. I read it was part of a production run of $250,000. Now, $250,000 in 1901 was a lot of money. Of course, they had to sell it for, you know, maybe 25 cents on the dollar, probably even less. So Secret Service agents quickly arrested Giuseppe Di Primo and a couple other guys for passing some of these counterfeit notes in Yonkers, New York in 1902.

[3:30] Weeks later, they arrested Vito Laduca and a couple other associates down in Pittsburgh, and they attract them from New York to San Francisco and other cities across the United States. So they’re like onto this counterfeit ring, and they were a nationwide counterfeit ring. One of these guys, Vito Catone, was a bad character. He tried to escape arrest by lunging at the agents with a knife and then ran away in the nearby rail yard, chased him down by commandeering a train, and then knocked him down by hurling bricks at him. Now, can you imagine that? They got a guy with a knife. You’re chasing him through the rail yard. You jump on a moving train, jump off, throw bricks at him, and knock him down. Actually, he might not even have had guns. Law enforcement, again, didn’t carry guns like they do today.

[4:20] You know, he was such a bad character when he got to a hospital, he tried to kill a nurse and escape with some kind of a kitchen knife he’d picked up. They found out that the Morristown counterfeits were being distributed at the direction of Mafia leader Ignacio Lupo and Giuseppe Morello. Now, these were the two big-time mob bosses in the Northeast and in New York City, particularly back in. Lupo was Lupo the Wolf. Giuseppe Morello, he was like a godfather. After his arrest for counterfeiting Giuseppe Di Primo and his two partners were locked up in New York City’s Leadlow Street Jail. Ignacio Lupo visited them and arranged payment of their attorney. And when they were standing trial, Lupo would go to the trial each day and then take news of how the case was progressing back to Giuseppe Morello. They were found guilty passing these counterfeits 1903.

[5:21] That weekend they say Lupo, Morello and everybody else in the gang Were observed holding the meeting in the rear of their Prince Street saloon headquarters, Now the Secret Service is still working on these guys And they planned a sting operation against this group They got an informant with some Mark Bills They were going to purchase the counterfeits from the gang, they put together 11 search warrants for the homes and businesses of these men but.

[5:51] The plan kind of stalled out. They were watching them pretty close, and an unfamiliar face showed up. And Giuseppe Morello and another guy were seen talking earnestly between themselves before taking the stranger to the back of a butcher stop in Manhattan. 5.30 the next morning, a Ms. Frances O’Connor was making her way to work, and she saw a suspicious barrel at East 11th Street. Looking inside, she was horrified, horrified, I say, to find a corpse. Not only was it a corpse, it would have been almost decapitated by a knife slashing across the throat. The Secret Service got called to this scene by the police. They figured out this was a stranger they had seen in Morello’s company the previous night. So they quickly arrested Morello and got Ignacio Lupo because they were like the leaders of this gang. They took in a bunch of correspondents as evidence. You know, it’s funny back then, you know, you wrote letters. These guys were writing letters to each other talking about their counterfeit business. They made more than a dozen arrests. There are a few of them that got away.

[6:55] They didn’t exactly know who this man was in the barrel. But five days after the murder, they got an anonymous letter and said that the man found in the barrel came from Buffalo. And the dead man, in the letter, it claimed that the dead man had arrived in New York to help get money for Giuseppe Di Primo, who was in jail for a counterfeiting for Giuseppe Morello. and Morello was there at the meeting.

[7:19] Figured, you know, they must have killed a guy and they had a bunch of them in jail. Joe Petrosino, who was a famous Italian detective, went up to Sing Sing and visited Di Primo and brought a picture of the victim. And he said, that’s my brother-in-law, Benedetto Madonia. Next day, Joe Petrosino went on to Buffalo, New York, where Madonia was from, interviewed his wife, and she said that her husband had been a member of a secret society and had traveled to New York to assist her brother, Di Primo. They charged him, put Morello on the stand. He was really nervous when he was confronted with a letter that Madonna had sent him from Pittsburgh, and it showed that Morello had told Madonna to come to Pittsburgh and help secure the release of a couple of the imprisoned gang members. And they found a letter from Madonia to Morello and Madonia claimed that Morello had sent him over to Pittsburgh to try to help some of the gang members get out of jail down in Pittsburgh, but yet he couldn’t get it done Madonia continued in his letter and criticized him Morello accusing him of being unwilling to spend any money to help his men and referred to the fact that his brother-in-law Giuseppe Di Primo was still in prison for running the counterfeit money for him.

[8:45] Well, this gang, several of these gang, Morello and Lupo and their whole little crew were in jail. There were anonymous letters sent out to all the Italians in the, really, all the Italian communities in the United States. They were demanding donations to help build illegal defense funds for all these guys. They didn’t get much out of Newark, and they sat down in Newark. Nervous Italians were buying up all the secondhand guns they could because they figured that the mob, they figured the black handers were going to come after him. Even their political contacts had an Irish politician at the time named Tim Sullivan. And he said, well, Madonna brought it on himself. He caused himself to be killed because he was involved with these criminals. All these suspects in the end, they had in the end, they had a coroner’s inquest. And all these suspects were cleared and they said he was murdered by some person unknown. And in particular, a guy named Thomas O. Pedo, who really is the one that did this murder, was discharged.

[9:45] The coroner’s physician said, I’ve never heard of a more disgraceful proceeding in my life than to let this man escape punishment. The man who recommended the discharge of Pedo the Bull ought to be removed from office immediately.

[10:00] Well, that’s just the beginning of this. Two years later, 1905, someone murders Petto the Bull, and Giuseppe Di Primo had been released from prison just two weeks earlier.

[10:16] So it turns out, as they started investigating into this later on, they find out that the dead man, Madania, had sent money to New York, to Morello, $1,000 for his brother-in-law’s defense, and Morello just pocketed the money and did nothing for him. Another piece of evidence that indicated Petto the Ox had killed Madania was that they found a pawn ticket in his pocket, and it was for a watch that was Madania’s watch. He had gotten Madania’s watch after he killed him and pawned it.

[10:54] So they really had a lot of evidence on these guys, and they just got released. But Giuseppe Di Primo, he’s going to get justice. He’ll kill Peto the Ox right after he gets out of jail. And from then on, one by one, every one of these guys gets killed.

[11:12] Won’t go on to name them. Every one of these guys, including Ignacio Lupo, everybody but Joseph Morello will be killed over the next few years.

[11:22] That’s a little story of some of the earliest mob murders reported in the United States. This was when we had blackhanders, no real solid organization, just the basis of the organization that came over from Sicily and a few strong men put things together. And again, you see these organizations, they have to be based around something. Later on, they’ll refine it when they go nationwide and they base it around

[11:48] prohibition and bootlegging alcohol. But back then, they base it around this crime of counterfeiting. Counterfeiting was a pretty easy crime to get away with back then. It requires organization. It requires a boss. It requires lieutenants. It requires what they called people that pass what they call queer money out there. They had a name for that. And all of a sudden, I can’t remember what it was. It required the lowest level, what we would call associates today. And these were called queer pushers at the time. Now, that has nothing to do with being a homosexual. They called the counterfeit money queer. And if you went out and pushed it out, then you were a queer pusher. So it took a lot of those people. And then, you know, when somebody had the money, then you got to go out to the different stores and pass the money and, and buy something and bring the change back or somehow get it in, you know, get good money in exchange for this bad money.

[12:43] So thanks a lot, guys. Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles.

[12:47] Watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street. You have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website, drugs or alcohol, go see Angelo Ruggiano. Gambling, you got 1-800 bets off of Missouri. Every state’s got a different kind of organization. You know, the casinos have to pay so much. Part of their licensing fee is they have to pay money into efforts to help addicted gamblers. Don’t forget, I got things for sale out there. I got a couple of books, got three books out there. Just Google Gary Jenkins, Amazon, Mafia. You’ll find, you know, my movies are out there to stream for $1.99 each. You know, got to support the podcast, guys. It’s an easy way to do it. Thanks a lot.