The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (44 page)

Masseria followed up this murder with some deft maneuvering in New York. The boss of bosses demanded and received ten thousand dollars of tribute from Cola Schiro’s family, then arranged for the murder of Vito Bonventre, one of the richest of the Castellammare faction. Both incidents, Bonanno thought, bore witness to Morello’s touch. “If Masseria had killed Schiro, his Family would surely have sought revenge. However, by intimidating Schiro, a timid man, Masseria stood to domineer us all.” And by murdering Bonventre, the Clutch Hand had denied his boss’s enemies much of the cash that they would need to fight a war.

New York’s Italian underworld, Bonanno thought, resembled a volcanic chamber packed with magma: molten, seething, perpetually ready to erupt. Now, with Schiro humbled and humiliated and Joe the Boss’s opponents in disorganized retreat, “a sense of foreboding gripped the Castellammaresi in the city.” Masseria had more money, more support, and more men than his enemies. No real attempt had yet been made to coordinate resistance. Yet the situation was now acutely dangerous. Morello and his master had done more than merely declare war on the Castellammaresi—or so the Brooklyn Mafia believed: They had condemned them all to death. Joe the Boss himself had threatened to “eat them like a sandwich.” Something had to be done about the situation, quickly.

Cola Schiro, plainly, was too old and far too indecisive to make a decent leader in the coming war, but the Brooklyn boss, mindful, apparently, of Tom Reina’s fate, solved this problem by disappearing from the city shortly afterward. Schiro was next heard of back in Italy, and in his place the Castellammaresi chose a younger and more warlike man. Their new leader, Salvatore Maranzano, was forty-two years old and unusually well educated for a Mafioso; he was reputed to speak seven languages and had at one time trained to be a priest. The theft of a number of his family’s valuable cattle soon drove him to renounce his vows, however, and with a mother who was the daughter of a powerful boss from the province of Trapani, Maranzano soon found himself initiated into the Mafia. Arriving in the United States sometime before 1926, he became a bootlegger with extensive connections in the north of New York State and rapidly built up a flourishing business, manufacturing alcohol in his own illegal stills and moving quantities of liquor across the border with Canada. “In his own way,” Bonanno said, “his was a classic American success story.”

Most of those who encountered Maranzano seem to have found him thoroughly impressive. To Bonanno, he was handsome, smartly dressed, and straightforward: “a fine example of the Sicilian male … a bold man and a ready fighter, an apostle of the old Tradition.” His voice was said to be particularly striking; it had “an entrancing quality,” Bonanno said: “When Maranzano used his voice assertively, to give a command, he was the bell knocker and you were the bell.” However, Joe Valachi, a far less intelligent man who was recruited to the Mafia in Brooklyn at the outbreak of the war and soon found himself appointed one of Maranzano’s bodyguards, was more struck by other aspects of his personality. For Valachi, the new boss was shrewd, well educated, and a first-rate planner, a man who seemingly had little in common with the coarse and poorly educated “soldiers” he was asked to lead: “Gee, he looked just like a banker. You’d never guess in a million years that he was a racketeer.”

Morello, too, held his new opponent in high regard. The two men had met in Palermo in 1921, and even before Maranzano properly succeeded Schiro, the Clutch Hand had been anxious to neutralize his threat. “No one,” Joe Bonanno would recall,

as yet knew that Maranzano had committed himself to war against Masseria, not even the people in our family in Brooklyn. People in Masseria’s camp, meanwhile, were trying to persuade Maranzano to remain neutral. The other side had already singled out those Castellammaresi who might give them special trouble. As a result, Maranzano was invited to a friendly meeting with Masseria himself.

It was a dangerous suggestion. “Tête-à-têtes with ‘Joe the Boss’ had a history of ending badly,” Bonanno said, and Morello had a well-deserved reputation of his own for savagery. But Maranzano needed more time to prepare for war—to build up his strength and organize his finances—and, if only to delay matters, he agreed to go. The meeting was to take place in a private house “in uptown Manhattan”—probably one of the Clutch Hand’s many strongholds. Masseria would be accompanied by his chief adviser, whom the Castellammaresi knew as Peter Morello, “Don Petru,” an alias he had adopted after leaving prison. For his part, Maranzano asked Joe Bonanno to attend. The date, apparently, was sometime in June 1930.

The others looked at me with a mixture of admiration and sorrow, as if to say,

—What a lucky bastard! What a dead stiff!

The following day, the day of the meeting, I picked up Maranzano at his home, being extra sure I was on time. Maranzano always harped on about punctuality. He didn’t say anything to me in the house. I was starting the car when he finally spoke:

—Andiamo e ritorniamo
.

—Let’s go and let’s return.

Once at the meeting place, Bonanno wrote, Masseria and Maranzano

exchanged greetings in the Sicilian manner: cheek-to-cheek, one eye looking at the man and the other looking over the man’s shoulder. They and Morello sat at a table by themselves, while I and a couple of Masseria’s bodyguards sat to the side. Espresso coffee was served, the steam spiralling out of the demitasse cups. As for the finer points of the discussion, Masseria said,

—Let Don Petru talk for me.

Masseria sat back, yielding the floor to his second, Peter Morello. This Morello had a deformed right hand, from which he got his nickname, “the Clutch Hand.” There was nothing of the buffoon about Morello. He had a parched, gaunt voice, a stone face and a claw. It was probably Morello who had advised Masseria to try to neutralize Maranzano.

—Thank you, Mr. Joe, Morello said, nodding slightly at Masseria, who grinned smugly.

Morello congratulated Maranzano, first of all, on his success in America. These repeated references to Maranzano’s success were intended to point out that continued success would depend on whether Maranzano had the right friends. Then Morello said he wanted to clarify some recent events which Maranzano, being a Castellammarese, no doubt must be concerned about.

—The Milazzo slaying, Morello admitted, was from our part. We can’t deny it.

But Morello accused Milazzo and Aiello of plotting to kill “Mr. Joe.” And since Stefano Maggadino [Bonanno’s uncle, another Castellammarese and the head of Buffalo’s Mafia family] had refused to talk with Masseria, Morello continued, there was every reason to suppose Don Stefano didn’t like Mr. Joe either.

—Perhaps you, Morello told Maranzano, can go to Don Stefano and put in a good word for Mr. Joe. Tell him to come see Mr. Joe. We just want to clarify everything, that’s all.

Maranzano gave no indication of what he really thought of the suggestion.

—I’ll see what I can do, Maranzano said coyly. But really, Don Petru, I’m just a soldier in the House of Cola Schiro, as you know. I have no authority.

—Try, try, Masseria bellowed out of a cloud of smoke.

—Do try, Don Turridru, Morello reiterated.

—It can’t hurt to try, Maranzano said. But I can’t promise anything.

—If something isn’t done, Morello said, there might be bloodshed. And if there is fighting, I think the wisest course for an intelligent man such as yourself would be neutrality. On that we can all agree.

—We understand each other, Maranzano said.

The two had been treating each other gingerly and tactfully. Suddenly, Morello leaned closer to Maranzano and, dropping his voice to a lower pitch, said:

—If you’re fooling us, your fight will be against me. In Sicily you have never fought against anyone like Petru Morello.

Maranzano replied quickly in a calm, level voice:

—And you have never fought against anyone like Turridru Maranzano.

They stared at each other for an instant and then tried to smile, to make it appear they had only been kidding.

—What a bunch of comedians, you two, Masseria declared.

MARANZANO MADE READY
to strike back.

The members of the old Schiro family, he said, must be an army now. The Brooklyn Mafiosi were divided into squads and placed under the command of handpicked leaders. “Only these group leaders knew who the other group leaders were and their whereabouts.” Intelligence would be supplied by an intricate network of informants, many of them cab-drivers from the Italian quarter who could identify the leading members of Masseria’s gang by sight. Conscious of what had happened to Milazzo and Reina, Maranzano was determined never to be caught unaware by his enemies.

The new boss’s own strategy was straightforward: strike at the leaders of Joe the Boss’s gang. “Now we are all one,” Valachi was told.

We’re only a few here, but in a month we’ll be four or five hundred. We have to work hard. The odds are against us. The other side has a lot of money. … You will all be placed in different apartments around the city. We will have spotters out on the street. These spotters will have the telephone number of main headquarters. When a call comes in from the Bronx, for instance, that somebody has been spotted, the apartment we have in the Bronx will get a call. And when that call comes, you will have to respond as fast as you can. Of course, you have been given a picture of Masseria. He’s the most important one.

We must concentrate on getting their main bosses, and we must get Masseria himself. There will be no deal made with Joe Masseria. The war will go on for ten years if we don’t get him.

Every effort was made to give the Castellammare forces a chance against the well-armed opposition. Supplies were brought in and organized: food, equipment, ammunition. Several safe houses were set up, some in New York, others in Yonkers and Long Island, and Maranzano and his bodyguards shuttled among them to evade possible ambushes by Masseria’s forces. The new boss had used his contacts in Detroit to equip himself with two armored limousines, with “special metal plates on the side and bullet proof windows,” and he rarely moved anywhere without them. The cars traveled in convoy, to make them difficult to ambush, and according to Bonanno, Maranzano himself sat in the backseat “with a machine gun mounted on a swivel between his legs. He also packed a Luger and a Colt, as well as his omnipresent dagger behind his back.”

Bonanno, impressed as ever by his soldierly bearing, found Maranzano’s meticulous attention to detail both an inspiration and a comfort during long days and nights spent shuttling around New York. But it was the new boss’s cool determination that impressed him most:

I watched Maranzano loading shotgun cartridges. I watched him weigh the black gunpowder on a small scale and fill the cartridges with pellets. Maranzano eschewed store-bought shotgun cartridges—he liked to prepare them himself. He did this last thing every night, before turning in.

He performed the loading of the shotgun shells as if it were a sacred ritual, with great precision, even elegance. … Then, without looking up at me, he began a hushed monologue.

—To kill a rabbit, to kill a deer, to kill even a bear is simple.

You aim steady and you shoot. But man is the hardest animal to kill. When you aim at a man, your heart flutters, your mind interferes. Man is the hardest animal to kill. If possible you should always touch the body with your gun to make sure the man is dead. Man is the hardest animal to kill. If he gets away, he will come back to kill you.

ONE DECISION THAT
Maranzano made at about this time would have a decisive effect on the outcome of the war.

The opposing sides were evenly matched in one respect: Each knew the other very well. Mafiosi on both sides easily recognized their enemies, and there were a number of incidents in which the members of one faction spotted a rival from a car or on the street and were able to give chase to him. On several occasions, scouts noticed leading members of one side or the other disappearing into buildings, and—as Maranzano had foretold—elaborate ambushes were organized to catch the men as they emerged.

The Castellammaresi had a neat solution to this problem, one that simultaneously addressed their lack of manpower: Maranzano initiated a number of new Mafiosi into the ranks of Schiro’s family and brought in several gunmen from outside New York. Most of these men had been born in Castellammare del Golfo, though Masseria’s threat was far too pressing for this to be a formal requirement; Valachi, a Neapolitan, was one of a number who found himself admitted to the Schiro family in this way. The best were already experienced killers, rendered all the more lethal by their utter anonymity. Among their number was a young gangster from Benton Harbor, Michigan, a “sharpshooter,” Valachi said, who had left his home after several relatives fell victim to the local bootleg wars. His name was Sebastiano Domingo, though to the Mafiosi of Brooklyn, with their love of nicknames, he was always known as “Buster from Chicago.”

Buster was only twenty-two years old when he came to New York, but he was already heavily scarred by violence. His sister-in-law, Mary, had been “mutilated almost beyond recognition” by a car bomb that detonated as she drove home in September 1927. His brother, Tony, was murdered two years later, shot nine times as he ate at a café, then blown nearly in half by a shotgun placed against his back. Buster himself, remarked Valachi, “looked like a college boy” but was deadly with any sort of weapon. He was, as Joe Bonanno recalled, “the quickest to set up and the best shot among us. He could shoot from any angle and from any direction. His speciality was the machine gun, with which he was a virtuoso.”