Originally Posted By: Belette
I don't know if this has been posted before, but found an interesting article on Giuseppe Morello from 1922, after he was released from prison and hiding in Sicily.

I didn't realize that at least part of the counterfeit operation was really a form of extortion where they made Italian shop owners give them change for obviously fake bills. I always thought they tried to pass them as real money.

Also a clever scheme was to send shop owners black hand letters and walk into the store only minutes later and have the owner ask for his help, of course for a price.

Read the article here.


Thanks for this good old fashioned article. A very great find. I too never read of that detail of exactly how they did their counterfeiting. That's almost like money laundering through an unwilling partner. If they thought they could continue to get away with that, they were truly primitive brutes.

"For us, rubbin'out a Mustache was just like makin' way for a new building, like we was in the construction business."