Some of the newspapers cited in this article were accessed through Proquest Historical Newspapers, a collection of historical newspapers that provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of this region from 1785 – 2010. Proquest Historical Newspapers is available for use at the North Jersey History & Genealogy Center, in the lower level of the Morristown & Morris Township Library.
By Carolyn Dorsey
On Sept. 3, 1925, on an early Friday morning in Morristown, a large explosion blew out the back of a house at 91 Morris St. and shook the walls at Morristown Memorial Hospital across the street, terrifying its patients.
The blast also threw next door neighbors from their beds. The home belonged to Pasquale “Patsy” Mutarello, a local butcher, also known in Morristown as “The King of Bootleggers.”
Mutarello had left Morristown several months before the blast after testifying to a grand jury that he passed money to former Morris County Prosecutor James Bolitho, in a widely publicized sweep against government corruption related to bootlegging.
Mutarello was fined $1,000 and the prosecutor was indicted. Mutarello claimed that he had been in Florida and Pennsylvania for the time he was away, and that other bootleggers from whom he collected “hush money” were responsible for the blast.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the enactment of Prohibition, which made illegal the production, transport, and sale of liquors. Shortly after the amendment’s ratification, Congress passed the Volstead Act, formally known as the National Prohibition Act, to provide enforcement of the new laws.
Pasquale Mutarello’s story is one of many that illustrate the futility of enforcing national and state bans on making and distributing liquor during Prohibition. Mutarello, who was suspected in the aforementioned explosion and a murder case, became entangled in a complicated web of local bootlegging rivalries, corrupt officials, indictments, a state investigation, and a murder investigation.
In major cities and small towns, from tenements and basements to remote farms and shacks, at borders, lakes and rivers across the country, bootleggers made it next to impossible for Prohibition Bureau agents to enforce the Volstead Act.
Bootlegging was a highly lucrative underground trade where many shared the wealth, including speakeasy operators, transporters, distributors, manufacturers, attorneys – and law enforcement officers, who helped bootleggers and moonshiners avoid prosecution.
Disputes among bootleggers over territory and distribution often ended in violent crime.
Ultimately, Americans’ appetite for liquor was never diminished by prohibition, so there always was a ready market to sell booze.
Police and enforcement agents failed to keep up with the number of people making illegal liquor, whether in their bathtubs, small stills, or through sophisticated operations. Newspapers across the country reported daily raids of stills and speakeasies.
Courtrooms and jails were overflowing with bootleggers and moonshiners of all levels of sophistication, from home brewers of applejack to mobsters.
It was during Prohibition that judicial systems across the country started to use the “plea bargain” on a massive scale to reduce heavy backlogs and avoid lengthy trials.
(Nowadays, this practice has become commonplace and most convictions come from negotiated pleas rather than courtroom trials.)
Pasquale Mutarello, born in 1884 in Italy, had a mysterious career. An enterprising man, he immigrated to America in 1914 and four years later, owned and operated a meat market on Water Street in Morristown.
He owned a house on Morris Street where he lived with his wife, Immaculata. Local papers reported that he also dealt in real estate, and had a business partnership with local pig farmer, Gaetano Neopolitano. He also had a reputation as “King of the Morris County Bootleggers.”
In November of 1922, Mutarello gained notoriety in Morristown when it was reported in The Jerseyman that the rooms above his butcher shop on Water Street had been doused in flammable liquids.
The fire department found two burning candles on a table and the drapes closed in the unoccupied space. Neighbors told police Mutarello had not been seen since the day before. The building would have gone up in flames had a neighbor not called the police about the smell of the vapors.
Mutarello said he had no involvement with the attempted arson and did not know who might have wanted to destroy his shop. Police Chief Wildey recalled to Jerseyman reporters that several years earlier, Mutarello had been arrested for an explosion which damaged his house and business, but was released for lack of evidence.
Two years later in July, Mutarello was arrested for the possession of liquor from a basement raid of a house in Cedar Knolls. Despite his claim of innocence, he was held on $1000 bail by the grand jury on a charge of illegal possession of liquor. However, he was nowhere to be found.
Later, Mutarello appeared at Boonton and “$1000 bail was furnished by his associate, Louis Marinaro.” (Jerseyman, July 24, 1924.) A thousand dollars in 1924 would be worth worth approximately $14,000 today.
In May of 1925, as a result of a sweeping state investigation into the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office, Mutarello was indicted along with 14 other men.
They included Morris County Prosecutor James H. Bolitho, the assistant prosecutor, detectives, the Sheriff’s brother, and other Morris County officials and citizens.
The charges against the individuals included bribery, arson, extortion, conspiracy, malfeasance, assault and battery and violation of the Hobart Act, the state’s prohibition statute.
Mutarello was charged with bribery, conspiracy, and sale of liquor. Mutarello’s associate, Daniel Marinaro, was charged with conspiracy and was expected to be a key witness in the trial.
Then a few weeks before Bolitho’s trial, on Sept. 3, 1925, the bomb blast happened at Mutarello’s home. Witnesses saw two men leave the front of the house in a car before the blast. The explosion was reported in several newspapers in the tri-state area. Neighboring houses also sustained damage.
Meanwhile, former Prosecutor James H. Bolitho’s trial commenced on Sept. 14th, for nine counts of 47 indictments charging misuse of his office. Thirty-seven witnesses, including Mutarello, were summoned before Supreme Court Justice Parker.
Mutarello testified as a material witness in the widely publicized trial, claiming he paid Bolitho protection money for his bootleg operation. Outraged that the courts accepted Marinaro’s and Mutarello’s testimony, Bolitho’s attorney, John A. Matthews, addressed the jury in front of a standing-room only crowd in the Morris County courtroom.
“You are asked to send this man [Bolitho] away to the state prison on the word of Patsy Mutarello, the bootlegger, the real estate man, the runner, encompassed as he was in this house of crime which he sought to pull down around him when caught and throw it over to his neighbor.”
In his questioning of Bolitho, Deputy Attorney General Wilfred H. Jayne brought into the court record that Mutarello visited him several times, once together with Marinaro and a man accused of breaking and entering a house in Kinnelon.
Bolitho admitted to meeting Mutarello on a few occasions — one time about a real estate deal in Rockaway — but claimed he never knew about the bootlegging. Bolitho was convicted on charges of accepting bribes and failure to make arrests in liquor cases, and was sentenced to two- to three years in State Prison. Others in his department were found guilty and sentenced as well.
A year later, on Sep. 23, 1926, Mutarello’s partner, Gaetano Neopolitano, was found dead in a ditch, shot in the heart in front of his Whippany Farm. Neopolitano’s death led to a search of his farm, which unearthed one of the largest stills seized in northern New Jersey.
On Sept. 24t, Morris County Prosecutor Albert H. Holland announced that he was seeking assistance from neighboring counties, and even considering calling on the New York Police Department to help solve the murder. (New York Post, Sept. 24, 1926)
From The Jerseyman, Oct. 2, 1926:
“The still was located in a large rambling barn. The still, which is capable of redistilling alcohol at the rate of a gallon a minute, is a piece of engineering cleverness. A huge copper tank, fitted to a 1,000 gallon drum, extends from the ground to the roof of the barn. Inside this copper tank are wound copper coils and taps are connected to it every six inches. The plant was operated by a boiler located on the ground floor of the building. In this coke was burned. It was learned that the coke was purchased form Boonton and delivered in trucks owned by some of the men to the “pig farm” of Neopolitano. This was later re-transported from the pig farm to the scene of the still. The same plan was used in transporting the “raw” alcohol and later the redistilled product. It was always taken to Neopolitano’s place and later delivered either to the still or to the trade. This was done, it is said, to throw off any suspicion in the neighborhood as to the location of the still or to ward off any officers who might by chance look up the delivery of the coke or the alcohol.”
According to the Oct. 2 edition of The Jerseyman, Morris County detectives believed that the partners in the still were responsible for Neopolitano’s death, but Mutarello was held as a material witness.
On Oct. 19, 1926, The Jerseyman reported that after the murder, Mutarello was held both as a witness and a potential murder suspect.
Detectives from Newark, Jersey City, and Burlington County questioned Mutarello about the explosion at his home and the murder of Neopolitano. They asked him about his relationship with Neopolitano, but did not share this information with reporters.
The detectives asked for a complete history of his whereabouts after the murder and explosion, and Mutarello maintained that he had been in Florida and Pennsylvania at the time of the crimes. Also it was revealed to reporters that he had sold his gun to a man in Dover, whose name was not disclosed.
On Oct. 20 1926, The Jerseyman reported that Supreme Court Justice Parker refused bail to Mutarello, who was confined to the county jail as a material witness until he told all he knew about the explosion and the murder.
Mutarello claimed the crimes were committed by enemies made during his career as the King of the Bootleggers in Morris County – bootleggers from whom he collected hush money.
From The Jerseyman: “Elmer W. Romino, counsel for Mutarello, declared that Morristown law enforcement had pinned nothing on his client and that the latter was willing to assist in every way to apprehend the persons responsible for the explosion and for the men who shot Neopolitano…”
On Oct. 21, 1926, The Jerseyman reported that Mutarello was arraigned on a $6,000 bond, (about $84,000 in today’s dollars), which was paid. He pleaded no contest to one of the seven charges against him. Then he disappeared again.
The New York Daily News also reported on Oct. 23, 1926, that “three men held on charges of violating the Volstead Act, and believed to be his partners in a vast bootlegging enterprise, were questioned yesterday in Whippany, N.J. regarding the murder of Gaetano Neopolitano.
“The three, Antonio Galate of Bloomfield NJ, Michael Calabrese of Belleville NJ, and Ernest Distafano of Whippany were arrested…Officials believe Neopolitano was on the verge of squealing when enemies ambushed him and shot him down at night.”
In November of 1926, Mutarello was struck by a car on a Convent Station road, and was taken to Memorial Hospital and then held as a material witness for the Neopolitano murder case. After this date, it appears that there was no more reporting about Neopolitano’s murder case in local newspapers.
By early 1927, a growing consensus had begun to form at the state level that Prohibition had created, and not solved, serious law enforcement problems. On Jan. 11, 1927, Governor Moore made a public statement questioning the efficacy of Prohibition, citing water, highway and crime problems.
Mrs. Murray Coggeshall collected signatures to repeal the 18th amendment in front of a store on South Street in the early 1930s. A well-known club woman and socialite, Mrs. Coggeshall was respected for her contributions to many charitable organizations in New Jersey.
The 21st Amendment sought to repeal the 18th Amendment of Jan. 16, 1919, and its passage was promoted by then presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt. On Dec. 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified, and was announced in a proclamation from President Roosevelt.
The court of pardons granted Bolitho a full pardon in 1927 for his charges related to Prohibition enforcement, but his name remained associated with many arson fires in the tri-state area.
According the New York Daily News, Bolitho, after serving his prison sentence, was arrested again on Jan. 6, 1934, on charges of setting a fires to collect insurance money.
Bolitho was suspected by State Troopers of heading an arson ring. He was beaten up outside his home in Roxbury Township by Eugene Bisson, the alleged “torch” of the ring, who also was arrested.
Several others were arrested in connection with the criminal enterprise. Bolitho was charged with arranging to set several fires throughout the state to collect insurance money. Ultimately, he was acquitted of those charges.
According to The Jerseyman of June 24, 1927, Mutarello sold his Morris Street property. Sometime between 1927 and 1931, he and his wife, Immaculata, left Morristown and moved to a house on Haines Street in Philadelphia.
Immaculata passed away in 1931 from a heart condition, according to her death certificate, which also lists Patsy Mutarielli as her husband and their address at 401 Haines St. Census records from 1940 show his name changed slightly to Mutarielli, his address still 401 Haines St., and that he had a meat market business.
By then he had remarried a younger woman named Anna who may have worked in his store. He also had two children. Prohibition was a thing of the past.
Perhaps Mutarello was given a fine or a light sentence in a plea bargaint for his testimony to convict larger players in organized crime. Or maybe the prosecutors knew that the truth about the fires and murder might never come out, so a deal was made.
In any case, it appears that Patsy Mutarello got a second chance to start his life over in a new location.
