Andy DeLigio, ace investigative reporter, has gone farther inside the Norwegian Mob than anyone who’s lived to tell the tale.

Let’s pick up with part one of the story.

Inside The Norwegian Mob

Andy DiLigio

“Your people are  from what part of Norway, then?”

Jeff Hartelowen looks at me with a focused but blank concentration as I sit across the table from him at the Ace Cafe in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota.  In his early fifties, with thin, graying blond hair and ruddy red cheeks over a beard that needs trimming, he looks like he could be any of the other farmers sitting around the cafe, drinking his Folgers and eating krumkakke. Indeed, he is one of the farmers.

But he’s more than that.  He’s known by a name that’s never, ever said in public, and almost never in private; De Godenfar.  “The Godfather”.   And from this cafe in rural Minnesota, he runs the biggest, most powerful – and yet most secretive – syndicate in the history of organized crime.  A syndicate that is so powerful it manipulates the other crime syndicates at will – and yet remains not only unknown, but its very concept sparks derision at the very idea.

Hartelowen is sitting at a table with his Rådgiver (Norwegian for Consigliere), Art Yetterboe, and Hartelowen’s oldest son Chuck, a beefy 6’4 inch guy with a light blond mullet, leaning back in his chair, his sorel boots tapping nervously on the cement floor, cradling a Big Gulp mug he’s just filled with Folgers.

“Finnmark”, I respond.  “They were Saani”, I add, to account for my swarthy, Mediterranean features.

“Reindeer herders, then?” Yetterboe asks.

“Oh, yah”, I answer, adopting the local patois.

“Hm. Interesting” the elder Hartelowen  respondes.  “OK, then”.

And he starts to tell me the story.

———-

The tale of the Norwegian Mob started in 1891, when a 15 year old boy, Bjørn Knudsson, from the village of  Hjerteløven in Sør-Trøndelag, landed at Ellis Island.  His backstory was unclear – his father, Knud, had apparently been ostracized for applauding after the special music in church – but the clerks at the Immigration station, mistaking his naming his hometown for his last name, entered him in the record as Bjørn Hjerteløven, the name he carried until his death and gave to his family.

The ferry carried him from Ellis to the teeming, reeking streets of the Lower East Side, where young Bjørn took a job delivering ice.

It didn’t take long to figure out where the power was on the Lower East Side; his boss paid protection to the Scunzillis, the Italian gang that ran the local cartage rackets, while the landlord of the sleazy tenement he lived in paid protection to the Fitzpatrick gang of Irish thugs.   

Being neither Irish nor Italian, Hjerteløven was not welcome to join either gang; being Norwegian, he had no desire to.  But he noted and processed two key facts about these gangs as he went through his days and observed their actions, their comings and goings throughout the neighborhood.   

• Being aggressive people from demonstrative ethnic groups, they resorted to violence on the drop of a pin.
• Their gangs were “secret societies” in the sense that Nicole Ritchie is “garboesque”.

Hjerteløven hatched his plan.

———-

On a hot July day in 1892, Bart Sklopnik, another ice deliverer, called in sick.  He complained of stomach pains after having had a traditional dinner of Lutefisk and  Rømmegrøt at the apartment of his co-worker Hjerteløven.  Being a stolid, thrifty Scandinavian, Hjerteløven volunteered to cover his route. 

Sklopnik’s route included the home of both Don Guiseppe Scunzilli, capo of the gang that bore his family name.  And his regular route included the home of Dougall Fitzpatrick, head of the Fitzpatrick gang.

He stopped at the Fitzpatrick’s brownstone on Delancy Street. 

“Top ‘o the mornin'”, said Colleen Fitzpatrick, answering the service door.  “Fifty pounds, lad”.

“Oh, yah”, Hjerteløven responded.   He hauled his load into the house – and then, as planned, stop and did a theatrical double take at the photograph of Dougall Fitzpatrick.  “Oh, it’s a small world, aint it?”

“What fer ya be sayin’ that missus?” Mrs. Fitzpatarick asked, as if on cue.

“Oh, nuttin”, Hjerteløven responded.  “He just ordered some ice from me yesterday, for some drinks he was making.  Over at dat Italian lady’s place…”.

“Scunzilli?” Mr.s Fitzpatrick asked, her face already during redder.

“Is dat the name?  Could be”, Hjerteløven replied.  “Probably weren’t nuttin”. 

He left the house.

Four hours later, at the Scunzilli brownstone in the middle of Sklopnik’s route, while putting a fifty pound block into the icebox in the kitchen, he waited for Antonia Scunzilli, the wife of the clan’s leader Guiseppe, to strike up the inevitable conversation the damn always-talking Italians wanted to have.

Sure enough…

“So youse ain’t da regular ice guy?”

“Nope”.   Two beats of silence.  “I’m Bjørn Hjerteløven”

“Antonia Scunzilli”.

Hjerteløven looked at Scunzilli, feigning surprise.  “Oh, wow.  Well, dat’s a surprise then”.

“What?” Scunzilli asked, in that way people ask when they’re used to getting their answers right way.

“Oh, it’s just dat you look like a regular lady”.

“What’s ‘dat supposed to mean?”  Scunzilli asked, getting red under the collar.

“Oh, it’s just dat dat Fitzwhatsis guy said you was…y’know…a little butch, if you know what I mean.  But he’s obviously mistaken”.  Hjerteløven paused for a brief rhetorical flourish.  “Very mistaken”.

Mrs. Scunzilli paused from her building rage for a moment to thank Hjerteløven for the compliment, as he excused himself.

———-

The New York papers over the next few weeks were filled with stories of inter-gang warfare, as the Irish and Italian gangs slaughtered each other in the streets. And then, a week later, as quickly as the violence had started, it ended.

Bjørn Hjerteløven moved into a town house on Park Avenue three weeks later.  And for the next several years, an uneasy peace reigned between New York’s gangs – one that neither the police nor the newspapers could explain.

In 1895, Hjerteløven married Gerda Tørstensdottir.  In short order, they had four children; Lars, Berndt, Knud, and the youngest, daughter Ingrid.

And it’s there that the next generation of the story picks up.

More soon.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Crime and Punishment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.