American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [159]
Lamarca’s stay in Brooklyn lasted less than a year. In May 1915, an Italian immigrant named Vincenzo Palumbo was arrested for running a gambling house and brothel at 116 Van Brunt Street, the same house where Giulietta Lamarca resided. As it turned out, Palumbo had brought Lamarca to America to work as a prostitute; his brother had originally recruited Lamarca from Italy to work in a brothel in Algiers. Marco Giro was merely an associate of Palumbo, not Lamarca’s fiancé. Palumbo was convicted of procuring prostitutes and sentenced to seven and a half years in an Atlanta jail. Giulietta Lamarca was brought to Ellis Island and detained.
At her hearing, Lamarca began to spin a tale about her life. Despite her Italian ethnicity, she claimed to have been born in Algeria. She maintained that she had a husband in the United States, but that she left him. She vehemently denied she was a prostitute.
Witnesses claimed otherwise. One testified that Lamarca had purchased a watch from him and offered to pay him with sexual favors. The most damning testimony came from Ellis Island inspector Frank Stone, who called Lamarca’s case commercialized vice “in its most vicious forms.” He claimed that she was infected with syphilis and that she charged men 50 cents for sex. Lamarca’s home was along the Brooklyn piers and her clientele was almost exclusively sailors. Stone also hinted at greater evil. Obstetrical instruments were found in the rooms at the brothel and a vaginal speculum was discovered hidden in the springs of a couch. Furthermore, Stone noted, obscene photos “depicting the most revolting sexual and carnal scenes” were found.
With her pimp in jail, the case against Lamarca was clear-cut. Having been in the country for just a year, she came within the statute of limitations for deportation, but much in the world had changed since her arrival. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had been assassinated in Sarajevo just two weeks after Giulietta arrived. Officials could no longer deport immigrants back to war-torn Europe, as steamships were now in danger from German U-boats. Lamarca would have to be detained on Ellis Island until further notice.
ALTHOUGH ATTITUDES ABOUT SEXUALITY changed dramatically as the
twentieth century progressed, the concept of moral turpitude has remained a viable tool in immigration law.
The Supreme Court failed to clear up the ambiguity of the phrase when it ruled in the 1950s that the moral turpitude clause was not unconstitutionally vague. Between 1908 and 1980, almost 62,000 aliens were deported for moral turpitude, one-quarter for immoral behavior and the rest on criminal charges.
The reach of the moral turpitude clause extends into the twentyfirst century. When visitors to the United States fill out an entry form at the border, one of the questions they are asked is: “Have you ever been arrested or convicted for an offense or crime involving moral turpitude?” Vera Cathcart would be amused.
Part IV
DISILLUSION AND RESTRICTION
Chapter 14
War
We must not forget that these men and women who file through the narrow gates at Ellis Island, hopeful, confused, with bundles of misconceptions as heavy as the great sacks upon their backs . . . these simple, rough-handed people are the ancestors of our descendants, the fathers and mothers of our children.
—Walter Weyl, 1914
I have seen so much of the human wreckage of Europe pass through Ellis Island during the past two years.
—Frederic C. Howe, 1916
AT A FEW MINUTES PAST 2 O’CLOCK IN THE EARLY MORNING of July 30, 1916, Peter Raceta, the captain of a barge docked at a Jersey City pier, found himself tossed some twenty feet in the air by the force of a blast he could only describe as something akin to the explosion of a Zeppelin and what others likened to the sound of the firing of a large cannon. Raceta landed in the waters