A New York cop shot by the Mafia in Italy

Born in Salerno, Italy, in 1860, Giuseppe “Joseph” Petrosino joined the New York Police Department in 1883. He is the only New York cop killed in the line of duty on foreign soil.

Petrosino grew up in Little Italy. Fluent in many Italian dialects, he rose through the NYPD ranks quickly, earning a promotion to detective in 1895 and then founding the NYPD bomb squad to thwart Mafia bombings. 

After another promotion, to lieutenant, in 1908, Petrosino was put in charge of the Italian Squad, an elite group of detectives who handled mob-related crimes. On his watch, thousands of arrests were made, and crimes against Italians dropped by half.

In March 1909 he went to Palermo, Sicily, on a top-secret investigation. Mobsters in the U.S. would not kill a policeman. But in Palermo, things were different. Lured into a meeting with a supposed informant, Petrosino was shot dead.

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers attended his funeral; the procession went from Little Italy to Calvary Cemetery in Queens. In 1987, Kenmare Square, on Lafayette Street, was renamed Joseph Petrosino Square. 

Tags: Black Hand, Calvary Cemetery. Kenmare Square, Giuseppe Petrosino, Italian Squad NYPD, Joseph Petrosino, Joseph Petrosino Square, Mafia, Mafia in the 20th Century, New York City Mafia, NYPD bomb squad