I should tell you about the artichokes, because otherwise you’ll think I made them up.
In 1935, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia showed up at the Bronx Terminal Market at dawn — with a fanfare of trumpets — and announced that the sale of artichokes was hereby banned in the City of New York. Photographers captured the scene: the Little Flower himself, standing among crates of vegetables at five in the morning, looking genuinely delighted to be declaring war on a thistle.
The ban lasted three days. Just long enough to arrest the men running the racket.
The man La Guardia was targeting was Ciro Terranova — known to the press, and to anyone who bought vegetables in an Italian neighborhood, as the Artichoke King.
The Morello-Terranova organization was one of the most powerful criminal enterprises in early twentieth-century New York. Founded by Giuseppe Morello and his half-brothers — including Ciro Terranova — in the 1890s, the family operated out of the blocks around 116th Street in East Harlem. Their business was extortion, gambling, counterfeiting, and the systematic control of legitimate commerce in immigrant neighborhoods.
Ciro Terranova’s particular genius was the artichoke. He cornered the market on the small, thorny variety beloved by Italian families — buying from California suppliers, controlling the distribution through the city’s wholesale markets, and reselling at markups that made the vegetable a luxury in the neighborhoods where it should have been a staple. Vendors who tried to source artichokes outside his network discovered that their carts had been overturned, their stock destroyed, their willingness to negotiate suddenly sharpened.
The artichoke racket sounds almost comic — and La Guardia, a showman who understood the value of a good headline, played it for maximum theater. But the underlying system was anything but funny. The street tax, the protection money, the daily shakedowns of pushcart vendors and shopkeepers — these were facts of life in East Harlem. Every transaction carried an invisible surcharge, paid to men whose authority derived not from law but from the neighborhood’s understanding of what happened to people who didn’t pay.
In 1919, when The Promise Trilogy takes place, the Terranovas were consolidating power after years of violent conflict with rival Camorra gangs from Brooklyn. The artichoke stand in the novel — the toppled pyramids, the beaten vendor — is fiction, but the world it describes is documented. La Guardia’s intervention was still sixteen years away. In 1919, there was no one coming to fix it.
What interested me as a novelist wasn’t the crime family at the top. It was the families at the bottom — the ones buying artichokes at inflated prices, paying the street tax folded into every purchase, navigating a neighborhood where the line between legitimate commerce and criminal enterprise was drawn in pencil and erased whenever it suited the men holding the pencil.
For the Santoro family, the racket is atmospheric — it’s the air they breathe, the cost they’ve absorbed so thoroughly they barely notice it. Until a basket of apples arrives at the house with a single artichoke perched on top like a crown. A gift that is also a claim. An offering that is also a reminder of who owns what — and who owes whom.
The artichoke isn’t about artichokes. It’s about the cost of becoming someone in a neighborhood where power operates through the same channels as groceries.
What the artichoke racket reveals — and what I wanted the novel to make visible — is how organized crime embedded itself in the daily economy of immigrant neighborhoods. It wasn’t a separate world that respectable families could avoid. It was the price of bread, the cost of a pushcart license, the fee for doing business on a particular block. It was the man who loaned you money when the bank wouldn’t and collected interest in ways the bank never could. It was the cousin who got your son a job and expected silence in return.
Italian immigrants in East Harlem didn’t choose the racket. They inherited it — brought from the old country in some cases, grown in the new one in others, fed by the same conditions that fed everything else: poverty, exclusion from legitimate institutions, a justified distrust of the police, and the knowledge that the law protected some people and extracted from others.
The women of the neighborhood understood this calculus with particular clarity. They were the ones who handed over the street tax at the market. They were the ones who noticed when the price of artichokes went up and the quality went down. They were the ones who kept the household books and knew exactly what the invisible tax cost their families — in dollars, in dignity, in the slow erosion of the belief that things could work differently.
Fiorello La Guardia’s artichoke ban was a stunt, and he knew it. Three days of theater didn’t dismantle the Terranova organization — the family’s power eventually declined through a combination of federal prosecution, internal rivalries, and the neighborhood’s own slow transformation as Italian families moved to Brooklyn, Queens, and the suburbs.
But the stunt mattered because it named the thing. It said, publicly and loudly, that the artichoke racket was real, that it cost real people real money, and that the men running it were criminals, not businessmen. In a neighborhood where the racket had been as invisible as the air — because naming it was dangerous — La Guardia’s trumpets at dawn did something the law alone couldn’t: they made the invisible visible.
That’s what novels can do too. Not solve the problem, but name it clearly enough that the reader sees what the characters have been living inside all along.
In the world of The Promise Trilogy, the artichoke on top of the apple basket is the racket made visible — small, specific, sitting in a family’s kitchen where it can’t be ignored. The rest of the story unfolds from there.
And there are other posts that explore the men and the criminal worlds they thrived in:
Nucky Johnson
Mickey Duffy
Miami: Mob City
Atlantic City Conference
Atlantic City
Monk Eastman