Joseph Petrosino

Giuseppe "Joe" Petrosino ( born August 30, 1860 in Padula, Italy, † March 12, 1909 in Palermo, Italy) was a cop from New York City, who is considered a pioneer in the fight against organized crime.

Life

Petrosino was born in Padula in the Italian region of Campania. 1874 the family emigrated Petrosino in the United States. Joseph and a cousin were brought up by his grandfather. When he died in an accident, they were temporarily adopted by a ethnic Irish judge. They got by contact with the influential middle class and access to education, the poor Italian immigrants only in rare cases was possible. On October 19, 1883 Petrosino joined the NYPD. He befriended during his service with Theodore Roosevelt, who had a high position in the New York Police Department at that time. On July 20, 1895, he became head of the Homicide Division.

In 1908 he was promoted and led the Italian Squad, a special unit to combat organized crime Italian. In this context, he arrested gangsters who had tried to blackmail the singer Enrico Caruso. His investigations against the Mafia led to the arrest of Don Vito Cascioferro and detecting crime of so-called Black Hand gang. In 1909 he was on an investigation trip in Sicily, where he was lured into a trap and murdered.

On April 12, 1909, 250,000 people attended his funeral in Manhattan. New York City declared the day of his funeral, the mourning and allowed the workers freely increase.

More

• Three biographical feature films act of Petrosino: Sidney M. Goldin's The Adventures of Lieutenant Petrosino (1912 ), Pay or Die (1960 ) with Ernest Borgnine and The Black Hand (1973 ) with Lionel Stander.
• The Joe Petrosino Prize for Investigative Reporting is named in his honor.
• In Greenwich Village, New York City, a park was named after him.