The Blood Remembers

I'd often wondered exactly who she was.

When I read the hardcover edition of John Kobler's Capone, the following anecdote struck a nerve with me.

In New York, a girl who had traveled the Colosimo-Van Bever circuit defied threats of death and publicly exposed the system. Pending indictments against the white slavers, she was whisked away for safekeeping to a hideout in Bridgeport, Connecticut. There, according to neighborhood witnesses, two men called for her in a car, showing Department of Justice credentials and saying they required an affidavit from her. The next day her body, torn by a dozen slugs, was found sprawled across a grave in a cemetery outside Bridgeport. (Kobler, p. 55)

If what Kobler wrote in his excellent work was accurate, this unnamed prostitute died under conditions that were both gruesome and heroic. But he didn't tell us- or me, anyway- enough. Who was she? What was her background? Did she really die in a dark cemetery? I wanted to know more about this ephemeral character who was one of the earliest recorded victims of the one-way ride.

Research has confirmed that Rose Rossi alias Rosina Bruno alias Jennie Cavaglieri, former Levee prostitute, was found murdered on October 22, 1912, on a lonely country road between Stratford and Shelton, Connecticut, two hours after she had been retrieved from her hiding spot in Bridgeport. This is her story.

*****

William Hall, an employee of Webber's Garage in the town of Bridgeport, blurted a chilling story to the Stratford police on October 22. He stated that at 7:00 pm, two men of clearly Italian descent hired him to drive to 39 Union Square in Bridgeport, where Francisco Pizichens, also known as Joseph Pizzicherri, had a restaurant. At the eatery, Pizichens, a waiter named James Matteo, a third Italian man, and Rose Rossi joined the two Italians in the vehicle. Hall was then instructed to drive out to a roadhouse known as the Stratford Inn, four miles from Bridgeport. Minutes from this destination, the chauffeur was given brand new instructions: drive to another roadhouse known as Paradise Glen. Hall complied, but became increasingly nervous, a condition that developed into near panic when he was suddenly ordered to go on past Paradise Glen. Fighting to keep calm, he continued to drive until, at Peck's Mill Bridge, he was told to stop.

The five men and Rose Rossi spoke in heated Italian. Hall sat there in uneasy silence until all six got out into the dark fall night, whereupon one of the men told him to drive about 200 yards, then turn the car about. He was in the middle of following this instruction when five revolver shots sounded.

Anxiety gave way to full fledged panic, and Hall drove to Stratford, abandoning his yelling passengers in his haste to get to the town police station. After hearing his story, Constable Judson, Deputy Sheriff Williams, and other officers climbed into the car and ordered the rattled chauffeur to drive to the site he had just fled. They came across one of Hall's former passengers running blindly along the dark road and arrested him on the spot. He was later identified as Joseph Buonomo, or Bruno.

A Stratford fish peddler named Jennings came across Rose Rossi's mangled body hours later, lying in a trampled patch of grass yards away from Putney Cemetery. Five bullets had disfigured her face and embedded in her head, leaving powder burns so vivid that detectives concluded that she had been mere inches from her killers when shot. Her purse, when searched at the morgue, yielded the calling card of Reverend Alice Phillips Aldrich, an official of the Chicago Law and Order League, which was currently campaigning for the imprisonment of black pugilist Jack Johnson on white slave charges, as well as instigating the closure of one Levee brothel after another. In the dead woman's pockets were $44.75 worth of tickets from a Chicago pawn shop, where she had recently disposed of a diamond ring, gold bracelet, and gold chain.

Constables from Shelton who had been assigned to search the roads found two running, perspiring Italians about two miles from the scene of the crime. When questioned by the officers, they denied involvement in the woman's death, but William Hall identified them as Pizichens and Matteo. The pair broke down and admitted both their identities and the fact that they had hired Hall to drive them about, but initially insisted that no woman had been in the car with them at any time. A search of the Bilberry swamp, where they were picked up, yielded a .38 caliber Army revolver loaded with dum-dummed bullets.

Bruno, Matteo, and Pizichens were soon exposed as key figures in the New York - Chicago white slave traffic that had become more of a public obsession as the decade progressed. The organization that they represented had been hard hit in recent months by resentful prostitutes who turned state's evidence against them. In 1911, an eighteen year old Brooklyn girl, Cherry Francis, escaped from a New Haven, Connecticut, brothel where she had been sent via a 'stock exchange', and exposed her captors and the system. Nearly every New Haven vice operator associated with her transportation and enslavement received a prison term. Two that evaded punishment, however, were 'Big Andrew' Capone and Jimmy Ricco alias Lewis. The Francis case was recalled when William Hall viewed police mug shots and identified Capone and Lewis as the two ex-passengers still at large. Both men were traced to the town of Derby after witnesses claimed to have seen them boarding a trolley bound for that destination, but after they alighted, the trail went cold. Neither was ever found and charged with complicity in the Rose Rossi murder.

Joseph Buonomo, alias Bruno, broke under questioning and admitted to killing Miss Rossi, who, he said, also went by the name of Jennie Cavaglieri. He wept that his homicidal rage had been fueled by her refusal to return to Chicago and live with him. Buonomo told investigators that he had met her in New York the previous summer. She was a recent widow and, he claimed, so lonely that she eagerly accompanied him back to Chicago, where they lived together for months. In mid-October she "ran away." Buonomo described how he had traced Rose to New York, but was unable to find her there. He finally got word that she was in Bridgeport. He insisted that he had not even intended to kill her when he and his friends picked her up, but after getting out of the car, she had slapped his face, repudiated him, and put him over the edge.

Questioned by Captain Arnold of the Bridgeport police, James Matteo admitted that he'd seen shots fired, but that it was "too dark" for him to see which of his associates had been holding guns. Pizichens said he had exited the car near Putney Cemetery along with the woman and the other men, but was stubbornly silent when asked what happened next. A detective who spoke Italian posed as a prisoner in the jail, and reported to his superiors that Matteo berated Buonomo constantly, warning him to confess his sole guilt before all three of them ended up charged with murder.

Buonomo ultimately did so, but the evidence suggested that he could not have acted alone. Medical Examiner W.B. Cogswell and Coroner Phelan announced that Rose Rossi had been hit by five bullets: two in the forehead, one on the left cheek, one in the mouth, and the last on the chin. They speculated that she must have been held upright when killed, otherwise she would have collapsed when the first bullet struck and the other four would not have hit so close to the initial wound.

News of the crime was reported widely in the Chicago press. On October 23, Chicago authorities informed the Bridgeport police that Joseph Buonomo was known in their city as a friend of Big Jim Colosimo, Levee vice lord and underworld boss. Louis Quitman of the Protective League for Women added that Rose Rossi, or Jennie Cavaglieri, was one of the Levee prostitutes registered by his organization.

"(She) was registered by us on October 1," Quitman said. "She, like many of the foreign women of the underworld, tried to give us an English name instead of her real name. She first said her name was Rosie Bloom. When pressed for her real name, she said it was Rosina Bruno and we have her registered that way. She said at that time she had been in Chicago six weeks, that she was 26 years old, and was an inmate of the resort of Angelina Marselias at 30 West Twentieth Street."

Pressed for more information about her past, Quitman said that according to his records, she had lived briefly in Boston after emigrating from Italy, but eventually moved to New York, where she took employment with the home of a well-to-do Italian named Achille Rotondo. She and Rotondo married soon after, and lived together happily until his death on September 24, 1911. Rose was waitressing in an Italian restaurant when she met Joseph Buonomo during the summer of 1912, and was somehow persuaded to accompany him back to Chicago. Buonomo was clearly a cadet for the Colosimo organization, as she ended up in one of the vice lord's resorts upon arrival.

Carl A. Waldron, attorney for the Committee of Fifteen (a reform group consisting of wealthy and / or powerful citizens determined to stamp out vice), checked his own records and determined that Rose Rossi's last known Chicago address had been a brothel at 106 West Twenty-First Street. In early October, federal agents from the Department of Justice had raided the place and took nine girls, one of whom was Miss Rossi, to New York to be held as witnesses against their former masters. The raid may have been initiated by a letter written in Italian and signed 'Rose', which had reached Assistant Chief of Police Schuettler three days previously. Detective Paul F. Riccio translated it. Questioned by reporters after Rose Rossi was found, Riccio stated, "I don't remember (the letter's) terms. It was an appeal for help from the police. She said some man intended to murder her. She wanted the police to get her out of the resort."

Detective Riccio, after viewing Buonomo's mug shot, said that he knew him as 'Giuseppe Amato'. The identification was seconded by one Joseph Diamond, manager of Joseph Nardoni's saloon at Halsted and O'Brien Streets. Riccio remembered Buonomo / Amato as being a 'hanger on' at the 106 West Twenty-First Street resort, but was not sure precisely what his business there was. If he didn't, there were hundreds who did, most of them terrorized prostitutes who had once fallen under his spell. He traveled all over the country in search of 'fresh stock'. A vicious temper lurked beneath the charm he displayed when ensnaring victims: his record indicated he had served a term in the Hartford County Jail for assaulting Edward Bromage, chief of police of Thompsonville, on January 2, 1911. Bromage caught him prowling about the train station like a hungry jungle cat, surveying incoming trains for unaccompanied females, and ordered him to move along. Buonomo pulled a revolver, but was disarmed and hauled to the lockup.

An editorial published in the October 26 issue of the Chicago Tribune stated that the woman's murder was proof positive of "a conspiracy to stop a prosecution of traffickers in women by the United States government. (The evidence tends) to strongly indicate that the woman was killed for the same reason that Herman Rosenthal was slain in New York- because she squealed."

Rose Rossi, a government spy after her liberation from the brothel, willingly testified in New York against a Colosimo associate named Demetrio Mariano. He had brought a girl named Violet Nicholas from New York to Chicago and sold her to a resort at 104 West Twenty-First Street. Miss Rossi gave federal agents enough details for them to arrest Mariano for violation of the Mann Act, and showed every willingness to implicate such higher-ups as Big Jim Colosimo and John Torrio. Her value as a witness put her life in greater danger than before, yet for reasons that have yet to be explained, she was allowed to leave protective custody in New York and travel to Bridgeport, where she had briefly lived before moving to New York. Perhaps federal authorities felt that she would be easier to monitor and protect in the smaller town. How she was persuaded to leave the restaurant and get in a car with Buonomo after implicating his patrons remains a mystery.

Perhaps Kobler's version of events is correct: that she was lured into the car by strangers bearing Department of Justice credentials, and did not realize her predicament until the door was shut, a gun was trained on her, and she was facing the man who had been responsible for her descent into prostitution. William Hall, the chauffeur, did not mention a weapon, but the night was dark and he may not have seen one. His passengers conversed in Italian, further concealing their agenda from him, yet the menace was so intense that he was fearful the entire drive.

Whatever courage Joseph Buonomo had summoned from a bottle or his own resources in order to murder the woman he had enslaved, it all deserted him days later. On October 26, Bridgeport newspapers reported that he had collapsed in his cell at police headquarters, and been transferred to the county jail's hospital ward. Physicians who attended him speculated that his mind might have broken under the terror of imminent imprisonment and execution, and arrangements were made for a specialist to assess his mental condition. The findings were not in his favor, and his arraignment, along with that of Matteo and Pizichens, was scheduled for November 5.

In the meantime, the women of Bridgeport's underworld rallied together to give Rose Rossi a decent burial. They collected the necessary money to prevent their fallen sister from being laid to rest in a potter's field, and stood by in a silent, rouged crowd as she was buried on October 30.

Although pimps and cadets routinely murdered the women who made money for them and never suffered so much as an arrest, Rose Rossi ultimately received justice. Buonomo, Matteo and Pizichens stood trial in December. The latter two could scarcely contain their joy and relief when they received, on December 24, a court-directed verdict of Not Guilty. (The State's Attorney had previously announced that he was not seeking conviction in their cases, as the evidence 'did not warrant it'.) Buonomo, however, was found guilty and sentenced to hang at the state prison at Wethersfield on April 1, 1913. He collapsed upon hearing the verdict and had to be carried from the courtroom. However close he had been to Colosimo and John Torrio in Chicago, their ability to protect him clearly did not extend to a Connecticut courtroom.

His attorneys filed an appeal, and the Supreme Court, after reviewing the trial transcripts, found a technical error and ordered a new trial. He fared no better the second time around: once more the jury found him guilty and his execution was set for March 28, 1914. A stay was granted in order for his legal team to file yet another appeal. On April 16, the Supreme Court decided that there was no error this time around, and affirmed the guilty verdict and accompanying death sentence. His aging mother came from Italy to tearfully plead his case before the Board of Pardons, but its members declined to interfere.

Seven minutes after midnight on June 30, 1914, Joseph Buonomo entered the execution chamber at Wethersfield, reciting prayers. The guards bound his arms and legs, placed the death cap over his eyes, and allowed him to kiss a crucifix one last time before adjusting the cap to cover his entire face. Seconds later the trap was sprung and Buonomo, who had supplied Warden Garner with a written confession hours earlier, was dropped into eternity.

*****

Putney Cemetery, outside Stratford, remains a quiet spot, showing no sign of having been the site of Rose Rossi's tragic murder. It is the final resting place for war heroes who fell at Gettysburg, and scions of distinguished local families like the Wheelers and the Birdseyes, who made political and social progress in the county they called home. Rose Rossi, whose blood soaked into the same ground that finally claimed the likes of Ebenezer Hannibal (Company G., 11th Regiment Heavy Artillery, United States Cavalry) and Reverend Henry D.D. Tarrant, was a war hero and political innovator after a fashion. She defied a system publically abhorred but privately accepted as a necessary evil, and her widely reported death put a human face on the danger and terror that was the daily lot of the early twentieth century prostitute.

And now I know her name.