The Artichoke : The fruits of organized crime

Cynara scolymus, aka the artichoke, is native to the Mediterranean, So was Ciro Terranova. Long before ordinary New Yorkers had ever heard of the Black Hand or the Mafia, Terranova had imported the latest incarnation of ethnic crime from Corleone in Sicily. Terranova-the name itself suggesting a hearty transplant-also imported artichokes, an original staple in minestrone soup, from California. Headquartered in East Harlem, then an Italian enclave, he cornered the market, terrorized merchants into carrying his produce, and earned the sobriquet "The Artichoke King."

In New York and other big cities, homegrown organized crime typically was accompanied by an ethnic dimension--beginning with nativist gangs and later encompassing virtually every immigrant group, each of which imposed its own distinctive cast. Irish and Jewish gangs proliferated in their respective ghettos, supplanted- as the sons and grandsons of gangsters graduated into medicine and law and Wall Street and moved to the suburbs--by blacks, Puerto Ricans, Asians, Colombians, and Russians.

Virtually no group was exempt from the curse of criminality, but none captured the public's imagination more than the Italians (they had the best nicknames). It would take Fiorello La Guardia, an Italian-American (and part Jewish) mayor-so sensitive about stereotypes that he banned organ grinders and their monkeys from the city-to challenge their stranglehold over immigrant neighborhoods and entire industries.

Terranova was larger than life, almost literally. He was the sole survivor of a trio of racketeer siblings (the other two had been gunned down) and the step-brother of Giuseppe "Clutch Hand" Morello. He was the father of ten children; moved them into a million-dollar home (in today's dollars) on Peace Street in Pelham, just across the Westchester border; and drove an armored limousine. He also figured in the unsolved robbery of a testimonial dinner he was attending on behalf of a Bronx magistrate. The dinner triggered sweeping investigations into the judiciary by Samuel Seabury, a descendant of the first Episcopal bishop in America. Seabury's crusading commission forced the resignation of Mayor James J. Walker and laid the political ground work for the election of La Guardia.

Introduced by the blare of uniformed police buglers, La Guardia went to the heart of the matter in 1935. He banned the sale, display, and possession of artichokes in New York City in an attempt to topple Terranova's empire. "There is only one way of breaking a racket," he declared, "and that is either to remove the source or remove the individuals from the scene of operations. In the retail markets we removed the individuals. In the wholesale traffic of the commodity we are going to remove the source."

Terranova might also have been the only person threatened with arrest if he ventured into the city. La Guardia exiled him to Westchester. The threat was fulfilled when he was charged with vagrancy in 1937. He died at age forty-nine, supposedly penniless, after a stroke.