The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (45 page)

For Maranzano, Buster from Chicago was a dream come true: deadly, dependable, a loyal Castellammarese, and, best of all, unknown to anyone on Masseria’s side. Domingo, he realized, could pass unnoticed anywhere in the city and get close enough to any of Joe the Boss’s men to kill before they realized the danger they were in. So far as Maranzano was concerned, one potential target was more important than all the others put together. He would use Buster to remove the brains of Masseria’s operation. His new gunman would be dispatched to kill Morello.

“MARANZANO USED TO SAY
that if we hoped to win the war we should get at Morello before the old fox stopped following his daily routine,” Joe Bonanno would recall. “Once Morello went undercover, Maranzano would say, the old man could exist forever on hard bread, cheese and onions.” Then they would have no hope of finding him.

Morello never got the chance to change his diet. At 3:45
P.M
. on August 15, 1930, two and a half months after the first shots in the Castellammare War were fired, two killers drove up to the office he maintained in the heart of Italian Harlem. It occupied the second floor of a four-story brownstone at 352 East 116th Street, just seven doors down from the old headquarters of the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative. One of the Castellammarese gunmen was Sebastiano Domingo; the other has never been identified. They were armed with .32-and .38-caliber revolvers.

Maranzano had gotten his timing right. Satisfied with the havoc he had unleashed on his enemies and convinced they were in full retreat, Morello had grown overconfident. There was no security inside the building and no guards. The assassins climbed the stairs and reached the office without being stopped or seen.

Buster found three men at work inside the room. Two of them, Morello and Gaspare Pollaro, were leading members of the Masseria faction. The third man was Pollaro’s nephew, Joseph Perranio, a twenty-six-year-old with a conviction for larceny. According to Pollaro, who lived just long enough to tell a policeman what had happened, the three men had been discussing building contracts when they heard a knock. None of them had felt any sort of sense of danger, and they were given no chance to react to the intrusion. When the ever-cautious Morello opened the door a crack, the killers forced their way in and opened fire immediately. Finding more men in the office than they had expected, Maranzano’s assassins responded by pumping as many shots as possible into the room. Their excitement compromised their accuracy; at least four bullets missed their intended marks as Morello and his colleagues sought desperately to dodge the fusillade.

Perranio, the least obvious target and perhaps also the farthest man from the door, took two bullets and spun around but was only wounded. He staggered to a window and either jumped or pitched the twenty or so feet into a yard at the rear of the building; the fall completed the work the shots had started. His uncle was also hit. Morello, Buster explained to Joe Valachi, “was tough. He kept running around the office, and [we] had to give him a couple of more shots before he went down.”

After seconds that seemed like minutes, the firing ceased. At least a dozen shots had been discharged, perhaps as many as fifteen. The acrid tang of gun smoke hung in the heavy August air.

Pollaro slumped next to a desk, mortally wounded by a bullet in the chest. The broken body of his nephew lay outside. Giuseppe Morello survived long enough to stagger from his office into a dusty room next door. He was trying to reach a window when he collapsed.

America’s first boss of bosses lay on his back, head facing north, legs splayed, a gray fedora still on his head. Blood trickled from his mouth and nose. There were bullet holes in his cheek and jaw, his left shoulder, right side, right hip, back, and leg. Two shots had penetrated his lungs, and one of these had sliced through his aorta. Another had shredded his intestines; a fourth had severed his left jugular vein and opened the carotid artery. A considerable hemorrhage distended the skin around his neck, and a quart of blood had pooled inside his chest. He had lived as much as half a minute after being hit, and in that time had bled to death.

EPILOGUE

J
OE THE BOSS, BONANNO SAID, “HAD LOST HIS BEST MAN, THE brains of his outfit.” And, with the Clutch Hand dead, his prospects took a sharp turn for the worse. While Morello was alive, Masseria had dictated the course of the Castellammare War—and he had been winning it. Now Maranzano and his men seized the initiative. Deprived of Morello’s experience and cunning, the boss of bosses was soon cut down to size.

Mafiosi throughout the city sensed that the balance of power was shifting. Defectors began going over to the Castellammarese side. They came mostly from Manfredi Mineo’s family at first, then from the Reina family in the Bronx, which by the end of 1930 had begun to work covertly with Maranzano, too. Mineo himself realized that things had changed, and when Joe the Boss asked him to succeed Morello as his adviser and strategist, his first act was to urge Masseria to go into hiding. It was a necessary precaution but also a humiliating admission of weakness and a substantial blow to the boss’s esteem. With Morello gone, it was said, the two sides were evenly matched at last.

Mineo certainly lacked his predecessor’s guile and subtlety. Masseria’s former strategy had been flexible and deadly; following the Clutch Hand’s advice, Joe the Boss had struck at the Castellammarese leadership in New York, Detroit, and Chicago and had also undermined his enemies’ financial ability to win the war. Mineo’s policy, in contrast, boiled down to a single, stark idea: Find Maranzano, and kill him before he could kill Masseria. As a strategy, it made sense; the Castellammare leader was plainly crucial to the rebels’ hopes of victory. But as an achievable objective, it was less realistic. The enemy’s forces were better disposed and better organized than “Mr. Joe’s.” If the war was to be won by one side discovering the rival boss’s hiding place, the odds favored Maranzano.

It was Joe Valachi who made the next breakthrough for the Castellammaresi, and it came about thanks to the Maranzano “spotting system.” The date was November 5, 1930. “They tell me,” Valachi said,

to rent this apartment up on Pelham Parkway [in the Bronx] because they found out this was the address of one of the guys under Masseria. His name was a hard one to say—[Steve] Ferrigno. They wanted me to get this apartment because these other guys don’t know who I was. … At the time I’m just “proposed”—meaning I’m in line to be a member, but I ain’t one yet.

We’re in this apartment for I’d say a month, and there’s no Ferrigno. I’m beginning to wonder where the hell he is, but they explain that this is only one of the addresses he has and we got to wait. …

It was only a few days later that I was out with Buster somewhere and he left me off on the corner of Pelham Parkway in front of the apartment building. Buster left, and another car pulled up in front of me. Now we had all gotten pictures of Masseria to recognize him in case we ever see him. So, to my amazement, I saw Masseria get out of the car. I recognize him fast. This Ferrigno is with him, and they look me over suspicious-like. You got to understand this is a Jewish neighborhood, and they can see that I ain’t no Jew.

Obeying orders, Valachi went into the building with Masseria and Ferrigno, even standing with them in the elevator. Then he ran to alert his colleagues. Maranzano’s gunmen kept a nervous watch from the apartment as more and more of Joe the Boss’s men—more than twenty in all—arrived at Pelham Parkway during the afternoon.

The meeting went on all night and most of the next day; it was not until mid-afternoon that Masseria’s thugs began to leave the building in pairs. The Castellammaresi watching them held their fire, scanning faces, looking for the boss. To their intense frustration, Masseria was not among the men who streamed into the street—he had held back, they learned later, so as to be the last man to leave. Valachi and his friends saw Manfredi Mineo and Steve Ferrigno, though, and behind the blinds they leveled shotguns. According to Joe Bonanno, “Maranzano had already decided that if Masseria eluded our ambush, the sharpshooters were at least to fire on Ferrigno and Mineo. The sharpshooters did their job.”

Now Mineo, too, was dead, and his murder, Bonanno thought, robbed Masseria of his last chance for victory. In one sense this was fantasy; even now, with the war going so badly for him, Joe the Boss still controlled more men and had more money than his enemies. In other respects, however, Bonanno was absolutely right. Mafia “wars” are not like conflicts between nations; the participants are weaker, less determined, less committed to a cause. Above all, few are willing, as Maranzano was, to place the achievement of long-term objectives over personal safety and their own short-term profit. The war had already dragged on for half a year, and it was disrupting normal business; hoodlums who were traveling the city in packs, hunting one another, could not be terrorizing unfortunate storekeepers or managing extortion rackets. New York’s Mafia families had lost thousands of dollars, and most of the participants yearned for peace.

It would have been dangerous, of course, to say any such thing openly, but one man on Joe the Boss’s side acknowledged the truth. Lucky Luciano, who had become, after Mineo’s death, the most influential of Masseria’s surviving aides, had little in common with veteran Mafiosi such as Morello and Mineo. A short, thin man of thirty-three with a sallow, scarred, and pockmarked face, Luciano had arrived in the United States from the Sicilian town of Lercara Friddi when he was nine, and spoke better English than he did Italian. He was shrewd and ruthless, but more of a businessman than he was a man of action and far from a traditionalist when it came to the vexing question of sharing money and power with non-Sicilians. He was also far less interested in the internal struggles of the Mafia than he was in maximizing profits.

Luciano, more perhaps than any of Masseria’s lieutenants, saw no point in fighting for a losing cause. Maranzano realized this. Early in 1931, the Castellammaresi issued a proposal.

It was Bonanno, once again, who told the tale. Maranzano, he said, “let it be known through various intermediaries that he would not seek vengeance on Masseria supporters or soldiers once Masseria was eliminated. In other words, Maranzano was telling the other side that the quickest way to end the war and save their lives was to take care of Masseria themselves.” This proposition soon had the desired effect. Luciano made secret arrangements to call on Maranzano.

The meeting took place in a private house in Brooklyn—Castellammarese territory. Bonanno, as usual, was present, and he recalled that

Maranzano and Luciano engaged in one of those classic Sicilian dialogues in which every word carried manifold implications but nothing is stated directly.

—Do you know why you are here? Maranzano asked.

—Yes.

—Then I don’t have to tell you what has to be done.

—No.

—How much time do you need to do what you have to do?

—A week or two.

—Good, Maranzano said. I’m looking forward to a peaceful Easter.

Maranzano did not get his wish, not quite. Easter that year fell on April 5, and on April 5, Masseria was still alive. But, as Bonanno said, “Joe the Boss had a limited number of meals left to eat in this life,” and his last one came not quite a fortnight later, on April 15, a Wednesday. It was lunch at the Nuova Villa Tammara, an Italian restaurant in Coney Island, a spot chosen for him by Lucky Luciano.

According to New York legend, the boss of bosses’ murder was accomplished with all the panoply of a fictional Mafia killing. First Masseria was wined and dined by Luciano, “gorging himself on antipasto, spaghetti with red clam sauce, lobster Fra Diavolo, [and] a quart of Chianti.” Then the two men settled down to a game of cards. They played a few hands before Luciano excused himself from the table. Once he was safely out of the way—the story went—three assassins, driven to the spot by Ciro Terranova, walked into the restaurant. Masseria had barely time to register their presence; he died at his table, six bullets in his body and “an ace of spades clutched in one bejewelled paw.”

The truth, according to police reports, was rather less dramatic: there was no huge meal, no ace of spades, and no sign, apparently, of Luciano or of Terranova. The end result was the same, however. Masseria died, and with his death the Castellammare War was over.

—

TO NOBODY’S SURPRISE, Salvatore Maranzano emerged as the dominant Mafioso in New York. Soon after Joe the Boss’s death, he called a general meeting of all the city’s families. It was held in a large hall on Washington Avenue in the Bronx, and four or five hundred men attended, as Joe Valachi said. When everyone was gathered, Maranzano addressed the throng.

“Whatever happened in the past is over,” he said. “There is to be no more ill feeling among us. If you lost someone in this past war, you must forgive and forget. If your own brother was killed, don’t try to find out who did it to get even. If you do, you pay with your life.”

In the past, the Castellammare man continued, Joe the Boss “was always shaking down members, right and left.” Now things were going to be different. New York’s Mafia families were to be reorganized along military lines, “to keep everything businesslike and in line.” Some of the families would get new bosses—Luciano took over Masseria’s gang. Maranzano himself would be
capo di tutti capi
, boss of bosses.

Years later, Joe Bonanno cautioned against interpreting this title literally (it was a “vulgar, superficial” view, he said, to think of Maranzano as “ruler of all the Sicilian clans”). At the time, though, it appears that few of the Sicilian gangsters in the city saw the new boss as anything but an all-powerful overlord. In victory, Maranzano became as tyrannical as Masseria. Every Mafia family in the country was to pay him tribute—the sum collected after the war came to $115,000. And, much like his predecessor, the new boss of bosses expected to have a stake in every racket: “the Italian lottery, which was very big then, the building unions, bootlegging, bookmaking, all that kind of stuff,” Valachi said.

Maranzano was busy now, perhaps too busy. He had to find time for his own businesses, to counsel other families, and to explore new opportunities. He was besieged by supplicants. Short of time and endlessly distracted, he aroused anger among his closest allies by failing to reward them for the risks they had taken on his behalf and profound resentment among the heads of families who were being taxed by him. By September, only five months after the war had ended, he could no longer get along with Luciano or Al Capone, the boss of the Chicago Mafia. “We got to get rid of them before we control everything,” he told his bodyguards. When Luciano heard of this, he decided to strike first.

Joe the Boss had died in Coney Island deserted by even his closest friends. Six months later, Maranzano went much the same way. His murder had been carefully planned, and plenty of lesser Mafiosi seemed to have an idea of what was coming; a friend of Valachi’s advised him to steer clear of Maranzano’s office on September 10, 1931, which was the day set for the murder. When the time came, the boss of bosses was almost alone. Two Jewish hoodlums, hired by Luciano and dressed as police officers, shot and stabbed him to death.

For years afterward, rumors swirled through Mafia circles that Maranzano’s murder was only the first killing orchestrated by Lucky Luciano on that day. The boss’s death, these stories said, had been swiftly followed by the well-coordinated slaughter of as many as sixty of his followers—loyalists gunned down to clear away the clannish, murderous traditionalists who threatened to embroil their families in endless vendettas. Luciano, in this version of events, ruthlessly engineered the elimination of a number of old-school bosses—the “Mustache Petes”—who were more interested in dominating Little Italy than they were in expanding into larger and more lucrative domains. The dead men were replaced, such accounts went on, by “Americanized” gangsters—Luciano chief among them—who had less objection to working with non-Sicilians, indeed non-Italians, and were interested chiefly in making money. If they were true, Maranzano’s murder had marked the most significant shift of the period, from the first generation of Mafiosi to a new and modern Mafia, one able to dominate organized crime in the United States, and not just its Italian neighborhoods, for decades.

It is certainly true that Mafiosi elsewhere in the United States took advantage of events in New York to dispose of rivals loyal to Maranzano. There were killings in Detroit and Pittsburgh and a trio of shootings in New Jersey, which included the murder of one gangster who was thrown into the Passaic River “with an iron pipe hammered up his ass.” Proof that these deaths had any connection is lacking, though, and so is evidence that the Mafia of 1931 possessed anything like the resources necessary to coordinate slaughter on so grand a scale. Luciano’s rebellion had more to do with the rejection of the rigid hierarchy of bosses that Maranzano and Masseria had both attempted to enforce than it did with any modernizing impulse. Never again would the Mafia acclaim a
capo di tutti capi
.

The Mafia of 1900, Giuseppe Morello’s “mob,” had, indeed, more in common with Luciano’s than is usually realized. The existence of strong links between branches of the fraternity in Sicily and the United States can be traced back to the Clutch Hand’s time, as can the admittance of non-Sicilians to the fraternity, as can the existence of a Mafia “council” or “commission,” which even Joe Bonanno thought was a creation of the 1930s. Mafiosi who had served under Morello survived and prospered under Luciano, too; Steve La Salle, who was for years among the Clutch Hand’s lieutenants, reemerged in the 1930s as the operator of one of the largest numbers rackets in New York.