The Brooklyn Camorra or New York Camorra (NY Camorra) was a loose grouping of early-20th-century organized crime gangs that formed among Italian immigrants originating in Naples and the surrounding Campania region living in Greater New York, particularly in Brooklyn. In the early 20th century, the criminal underworld of New York City consisted largely of Italian Harlem-based Sicilians and groups of Neapolitans from Brooklyn, sometimes referred to as the Brooklyn Camorra, as Neapolitan organized crime is referred to as the Camorra.
Although immigration from Naples and Campania to New York City was rather small compared to that from the rest of southern Italy and Sicily, criminal groups from that area would have a substantial impact on organized crime events in the 1910s. However, their recorded links to crime organisations in Italy were "weak to non-existent".
Background
The substantial population of the New York Italian immigrant community offered plentiful economic opportunities. At the turn of the century, some 500,000 Italians, mainly originating from the impoverished southern regions of Italy, lived in New York City and had to survive in difficult social and economic circumstances. A New York Times article in 1885 mentions the presence of the Camorra in New York, involved in extortion and immigrant and labor racketeering. The extortion practice of Italian criminal organizations in New York were often referred to as Black Hand operations.
Italian immigration "made fortunes for speculators and landlords, but it also transformed the neighborhood into a kind of human ant heap in which suffering, crime, ignorance and filth were the dominant elements", according to historian Arrigo Petacco. According to sociologist Humbert S. Nelli: "New York's Italian community offered a lucrative market for illicit activities, particularly gambling and prostitution. It also provided a huge market for products from the homeland and from the West Coast, such as artichokes and olive oil, the distribution of which the criminal elements attempted to control." The Neapolitans based in Brooklyn were also active in retail cocaine sales to "theatrical people and the waiters".
Early crime bosses
The cheap labor needed for the expansion of capitalism of that time was made available by the scores of poor Italian immigrants. Like earlier immigrant generations, a few Sicilians and Neapolitans engaged in criminal activities to succeed, employing the crime traditions from their original Italian home regions. One of the prominent crime bosses was Enrico Alfano, who became one of the principal underworld targets of police sergeant Joseph Petrosino, the head of the Italian Squad of the New York City Police Department. Another prominent criminal boss around 1910–15 was Giosue Gallucci, the undisputed King of Little Italy born in Naples, who employed Neapolitan and Sicilian street gangs as his enforcers for the Italian lottery or numbers game and enjoyed functional immunity from law enforcement through his political contacts.
Apart from them there were different Camorra gangs in New York. The gangs had their roots in the Neapolitan Camorra, but most members were American born. The two New York based Camorra groups were the Neapolitan Navy Street gang headed by Alessandro Vollero and Leopoldo Lauritano, and the Neapolitan Coney Island gang under the command of Pellegrino Morano who ran his activities from his Santa Lucia restaurant in Coney Island. Camorra gangs largely dominated Brooklyn in the 1910s. Under Pelligrino Morano, the Brooklyn Camorra held the upper hand over the Mafia, then largely controlled by Manhattan's Morello crime family in Italian Harlem.
Vollero and Lauritano owned a coffee house at 133 Navy Street in Brooklyn. The coffee house was used as the headquarters for their gang, which mainly consisted of Neapolitans, and was often referred to as The Camorra. Morano opened the Santa Lucia restaurant close to the Coney Island amusements parks with his right-hand men Tony Parretti, from where his gang made money in gambling and cocaine dealing. The gangs were not tightly led organizations, but rather loose associations where everybody worked for himself, although Morano was one of the leaders that initiated recruits as camorristi.