
Giuseppe Petrosino (30 August 1860-12 March 1909) was an Italian-born NYPD officer who pioneered the fight against organized crime, founding New York City's first Italian police squad in 1904. He was nicknamed the "Italian Sherlock Holmes" for his successes against the Mafia, only to be murdered while undertaking a secret mission to Palermo in 1909.
Biography[]
Giuseppe Petrosino was born in Padula, Campania, Two Sicilies in 1860, and he was sent to live with his grandfather in New York City at a young age. He was raised by a politically-connected Irish judge after the death of his grandfather, and he joined the NYPD in 1883 as its first Italian-language speaker. He befriended Theodore Roosevelt, utilized his fluency in several Italian dialects to "make" cases that other officers could not, and became the NYPD's specialist for the Italian community. He was put in charge of the department's homicide division in 1905, and he was promoted to lieutenant in 1908 and placed in charge of the elite Italian Squad by William McAdoo (who initially refused to give Petrosino funding or an office, forcing him to host squad meetings at his apartment). In 1900, he discovered an anarchist plot to assassinate President William McKinley in Buffalo, but McKinley ignored the warning and met his end in Buffalo on 6 September 1901. Petrosino also arrested the Black Hand affiliate Vito Cascio Ferro in 1903, but Cascio Ferro was acquitted and escaped to Sicily.
In 1909, Petrosino traveled to Palermo to gather evidence on the criminal pasts of several Italian expatriate criminals in New York. However, Petrosino was followed after his arrival in Rome, and the Black Hand warned their compatriots in Noto, Sicily that Petrosino was in italy. Cascio Ferro had Paolo Palazzotto and another assassin shoot Petrosino at Palermo's Giardino Garibaldi as he waited to meet his informant on 12 March 1909. Over 200,000 people attended his funeral in New York.