Rochester Mafia, the Banana King, and the Infamous "Barrel Murder"

This article was scraped from Rochester Subway. This is a blog about Rochester history and urbanism has not been published since 2017. The current owners are now publishing link spam which made me want to preserve this history.. The original article was published September 16, 2013 and can be found here.

   What could be more fun than a barrel of monkeys? How about one filled with the body parts of a Rochester mobster? Yeah, I thought so. Ok, so here's the story...

   All of those parts and pieces you see laying on the ground there belonged to a fellow named Francesco Manzello, age 33 of Brooklyn. Francesco was a member of a group called "The Black Hand" (or Mano Nera in Italian). The Black Hand was an extortion racket run by immigrant Sicilian and Italian gangsters in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Kansas City... and they were quite active in Rochester as well.

Their game was simple. They would send threatening notes to local merchants (and other well-to-do individuals) demanding money and threatening pain, death or destruction of property if the money was not turned over. These crude notes were printed with black hands, daggers, or other menacing symbols.

[     See an example of a letter from The Black Hand...    ]

   On October 30, 1911, (about 9am Monday morning) a barrel containing Francesco's body was discovered in a gully along old Webster State Road by 18 year old     Frank C. Smith    . The boy was out checking animal traps he had set in the area some time earlier. That's the coroner in the photo above, ready with his basket to transport the remains.

   The coroner's report states that Francesco had been knocked unconsious by a chair or some blunt object striking him on the forehead. The cause of death was a hemorrhage following decapitation.

   Francesco was then chopped up, stuffed into the barrel, driven out to Penfield, and tossed into this gully near Irondequoit Bay; where he caused quite a stir...

   One     newspaper article

was fairly detailed with regard to how Francesco was mutilated and stuffed into the barrel. Let's give it a read:

The barrel was rolled to one side. The hands, lower part of the trunk and upper ends of the legs were visible first. The unfortunate victim had been decapitated and the head placed at the bottom of the barrel. A bruise on the forehead showed where the victim had been hit on the head, rendering him unconscious before the human butchering took place. The head had been severed from the body by one stroke of a heavy axe or cleaver. The right eye was slightly discolored, and that discoloration and a small bruise on the back of the right hand were the only marks of previous violence on the body.    The hands had been crossed and tied tightly together with the legs, which had been bent back at straight angles with the body. The legs had evidently been cut off with an axe after effort was made to saw them off. The theory is that the murderers thought the work of dismemberment progressed too slow, using the saw, and finished their gruesome butchering with an axe or cleaver, which they had used in decapitating their victim. The head rested at the bottom of the barrel on a new soft hat. The hat, which was of the Western style, was blood-soaked. The covering of the barrel, a large piece of burlap, had torn loose when the barrel rolled down into the gully, and was found several feet further up the bank.

   Webster State Road must have changed names since 1911, and I'm unable to find it on old maps. But according to newspaper reports, the barrel landed on the north side of the road, about 200 yards from the Rochester and Sodus Bay trolly powerhouse on the edge of Irondequoit Bay... and the young boy reportedly ran to the home of A.D. Brown after making the gruesome discovery. So from that information I'm guessing we're talking about     this general area

, just east of where Bazil Restaurant is today.

Anyway, back to our poor friend Francesco... Who wanted this guy dead? Well, he had recently been released from Auburn state prison (about six months earlier) after doing two and a half years for attempted extortion. Upon his release Francesco went back home to Brooklyn, but he soon returned to Rochester and got a job working for Sam Ollis, also known as "The Banana King" of the Public Market.

Francesco didn't last long working for the Banana King. After being let go for "failing to attend to business" he is said to have opened his own business--also at the Public Market--selling lettuce. But had Francesco really left behind his life of crime to sell lettuce? Police had their suspicions.

   Somewhere along the line, police received tips from people who saw a banana wagon driving along the same road where Francesco's body was found. The witnesses claimed to see an object standing upright in the back of the wagon - possibly the whiskey barrel inside which Francesco's body was stuffed?

That tip led detectives back to the Banana King and his son-in-law, Joseph Galbo. Low and behold, there's the banana wagon behind Joseph's establishment at the Public Market. Also found were similar wine/whiskey barrels, and burlap chicken feed sacks. It is here that police believe Francesco was attacked and dismembered. The wagon is actually owned by Joseph's brother, Dominico Galbo. Joseph and Dominico are both arrested.

   Now why would Dominico and Joseph Galbo want to kill Francesco in such a way? It turns out the Banana King's nephew, Antonio Ollis, had been murdered earlier in the year. Police theorized that Francesco may have had something to do with that murder, and was killed in revenge.

Joseph and Dominico were eventually indicted, but only Dominico was prosecuted. The District Attorney's case against Joseph was weaker than it was against Dominico. He was convicted and sentenced to 20 years to life at Auburn state prison. But after serving 4 years, the State Court of Appeals granted him a new trial. The higher court did not believe that Dominico could have carried out the murder of a man the size of Francesco Manzello. Why not? Because Dominico had two wooden legs!

This article

seems to indicate that the D.A. dropped the charges after that, and Dominico was never retried.

Unfortunately, my newspaper trail runs cold, so I'm not sure if anyone else was ever charged with the murder.

   This is the front of the building where the murder supposedly took place.

And this is the same     corner

today...