Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (6 page)

One of the first victims in Mussolini’s war was the imprudent Don Ciccio Cuccia. A month after the insult of the piazza, Mussolini retaliated with a long jail sentence for Don Ciccio, without the formality of a trial. (The appelation “Don” is a form of honor and great respect for an individual, not an inherited or aristocratic title.)

As a method of publicly degrading those mafiosi who did come to trial, Mori constructed iron cages to exhibit them in courtrooms. Distressed at the slow pace of one of the early judicial proceedings, Mussolini issued this blunt directive: “Fascist justice must be rapid and decisive. If the trial does not go faster, the liquidation of the Mafia will not be done until the year 2000.”

Before Mori’s mass roundups and trials ended, more than twelve hundred suspected mafiosi were convicted and sentenced to terms ranging from a few months to life imprisonment. Palermo was the center of the crackdown and the accusations were usually “banding together for criminal purposes,” and the specific crimes of murder, extortion, blackmail, robbery, and theft.

Mussolini reaped a bonus from the reign of terror against the Mafia. It was a convenient pretense to arrest and eliminate Sicilian liberals, leftists, and other political opponents, all of whom were falsely smeared as mafiosi.

The Sicilian Mafia never conceived a plan to infiltrate America or to establish branches in the United States. But the Mussolini-Mori suppression proved so severe that it led to a widespread exodus from Sicily of experienced and apprentice mafiosi fleeing certain torture and imprisonment. Unlimited entry to the United States ended in 1924 with the enactment of the National Origins Act, a law that virtually halted immigration from Italy. Undeterred by immigration restrictions and portraying themselves as political victims of Fascism, many of the routed Sicilian mobsters headed for New York. They had little difficulty sneaking into the country and linking up with entrenched Sicilian gangs.

One of these earliest illegal aliens was Joseph Bonanno, who would create a Mob empire in America. Bonanno, whose father and close relatives were sworn mafiosi, came from Castellammare del Golfo (Castle by the Sea), a hallowed Mafia bastion on Sicily’s west coast. His trip to America was arranged with financial and moral support from clan members in Castellammare who had gone underground to survive Mussolini’s purge, and from Castellammarese kin in America. In 1924, at age nineteen, Bonanno slipped into the United States from Cuba, and made his way to Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section, where an immigrant Castellammarese borgata was already in business.

Like other mafiosi newcomers, Bonanno was astonished by the rosy prospects Prohibition offered. It was the “golden goose,” he rhapsodized. His first illicit venture was opening a still in Brooklyn with other young Castellammarese immigrants. “When I first got into bootlegging, I thought it was too good to be true,” Bonanno wrote in his autobiography, A
Man of Honor
, published sixty years later. “I didn’t consider it wrong. It seemed fairly safe in that the police didn’t bother you. There was plenty of business for everyone. The profits were tremendous.”

Violating or ignoring the Prohibition amendment was considered a good-natured sport, not a stigma, by most Americans. After the amendment was
ratified, Congress approved the National Prohibition Act (commonly called the Volstead Act) to define and strengthen the law. All beverages containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol were banned as intoxicating.

The bootleggers, rumrunners, and speakeasy owners who slaked the nation’s gigantic thirst were generally looked upon by most public officials, judges, and ordinary citizens as providing an essential product and service. Except for a tiny corps of diligent, incorruptible federal agents, local and federal law-enforcement agents had blind eyes and open palms when it came to enforcing a singularly unpopular law. National enforcement was delegated largely to the newly created Prohibition Bureau in the Treasury Department. The agency soon became a laughing stock, ridiculed for its huge conglomeration of politically appointed corrupt and incompetent hacks, masquerading as investigators.

Little enthusiasm was expended by most local law-enforcement units to disturb bootlegging operations. Indeed, many states and communities where political sentiment was pro “wet” (anti-Prohibition) passed laws that seemingly benefited bootleggers. New York State may have gone the farthest to protect the illegal industry. In 1923 the New York legislature repealed a weak state Prohibition law, thereby eliminating any requirement by local police to initiate or assist federal agents in arresting violators.

Encouraged by the lax enforcement in New York, the Sicilian gangs and the Jewish and Irish bootleggers abandoned the primitive, rot-gut alky cookers. They developed more sophisticated and profitable techniques, smuggling quality liquor from Britain and Canada and opening their own covert breweries. In addition to the Castellammarese overseas clan, several other loosely organized Sicilian gangs, some with southern Italian members from the Naples region, were thriving in New York by the late 1920s, mainly due to bootlegging.

Profits from breweries were enormous. Each barrel of beer cost less than five dollars to produce and netted about $36 upon delivery to a speakeasy. The illegal, untaxed income from supplying whiskey and other hard spirits was even greater.

In the competition between ethnic rivals, the Sicilian-Italian bootleggers lacked the political influence of the Irish underworld; the largely Irish police force gave them an advantage in corrupting cops. And the Jewish gangsters were almost equal in numbers to the Italians. But the Italian mobsters had a distinct asset: they were recognized by their rivals as better disciplined, more vicious, and more deadly whenever fights erupted over territorial control and customers.

New York’s largest Italian gang in the mid-1920s was based in East Harlem and headed by Giuseppe “Joe” Masseria, a middle-aged Sicilian immigrant. Short and corpulent, Masseria’s puffy cheeks and small, narrow eyes earned him the nickname “the Chinese.” Masseria, however, dubbed himself “Joe the Boss” and was the first to use that designation for the head of an American Mafia family instead of the traditional Sicilian title “father.”

Masseria’s ascension rested on a violent, blood-soaked record. He led a gang that killed more than thirty opponents in battles over bootlegging territories and illegal gambling operations. His favorite expression for ordering the execution of a rival was instructing an underling to “Take that stone from my shoe.”

Despite his unathletic portly physique, Masseria possessed an uncanny agility when dodging bullets and outrunning and escaping assassins in street ambushes and gunfights. His carnal appetite was as gross as his quest for power. He would sit down several times a day to huge meals, wolfing down three plates of pasta just as a side dish. Masseria’s trencherman habits and atrocious table manners—food often splattered from his mouth as he harangued dining companions—gave rise to another nickname from his detractors: “Joe the Glutton.”

Masseria’s success stemmed partly from a keen eye for talent to run and protect his rackets. Three of his brightest young recruits, who had emigrated as boys to America, were Salvatore Lucania, Francesco Castiglia, and Gaetano Lucchese. Lucania would become Charles “Lucky” Luciano; Castiglia would change his baptismal name to Frank Costello; and Lucchese would be better known as Tommy “Three-Finger Brown.” Later the trio would attain eminence in the American Mafia’s pantheon.

In 1925 the Castellammarese clan was rejuvenated by the arrival of Salvatore Maranzano, another illegal immigrant driven out of Sicily by the Mussolini-Mori juggernaut. A well-established mafioso with the honorific title Don Turriddu, Maranzano, then in his early forties, was a devoted defender of Mafia tradition. One of the clan’s best warriors in the old country, he came to America with a small fortune and quickly branched out into bootlegging.

No small-time operator, Maranzano built quality whiskey stills in Pennsylvania and upstate New York, and took the twenty-year-old Joe Bonanno under his wing. Bonanno handpicked a squad of armed marksmen to safeguard Maranzano’s whiskey trucks, often camouflaged as milk tankers, from rival hijackers.

Unlike Joe the Boss Masseria, Maranzano fancied himself a sophisticated, educated European. Although he had sparse command of English, Maranzano bragged about being literate in Latin and Greek and, in his basso profundo
Sicilian dialect, delighted in lecturing his unschooled, barely literate minions on classical literature and the virtues of his idol, Julius Caesar. As a cover to conduct his bootlegging business, Maranzano set up a company in Little Italy that supposedly was involved in export and import trade.

There was a harsher side to Maranzano’s business and personality that he revealed in a monologue to young Bonanno. He cautioned his protégé that hunting animals was relatively simple, but taking the life of another man demanded courage and caution. “When you aim at a man, your hands shake, your eyes twitch, your heart flutters, your mind interferes,” Bonanno recalled Maranzano advising him. “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.”

Those words soon proved to be prophetic. In 1930 other members of the Castellammarese borgata turned to Maranzano for guidance and leadership when Masseria demanded $10,000 payoffs as tributes recognizing his assumed position as “Joe the Boss” of all New York mafiosi. Masseria also began dispatching hit men against recalcitrant Castellammarese soldiers. The firebrand Maranzano refused to submit to Masseria or acknowledge his supremacy, thereby igniting an unprecedented large-scale conflict between the area’s two largest borgatas. As casualties mounted, each side sought reinforcements from the other New York gangs and from mafiosi in other cities. In the Sicilian-Italian underworld, the Mob carnage was spoken of as “The Castellammarese War.”

Aware that they were prime ambush targets, Masseria and Maranzano surrounded themselves with bodyguards, traveling around town in convoys of armored-plated cars. Maranzano relied on a custom-built Cadillac with metal-plated sides and bulletproof windows. He shared the rear seat with a machine gun mounted on a swivel to fire out the windows; for backup weapons in close combat, he carried two large-caliber handguns and a dagger.

Although he worked as a top lieutenant for Masseria, twenty-nine-year-old Lucky Luciano worried that the shoot-outs, with cadavers and wounded men sprawled on streets, attracted unwelcome notoriety to the borgata gangs. Even worse, the fighting compelled the police to launch investigations that could endanger the smooth stream of loot flowing to him and his pals.

From the start, Luciano had opposed the tyrannical thrust for absolute control and power by Joe the Boss, fearing that it would end in death and chaos for the main participants. Before the war broke out, Luciano had become increasingly frustrated by Masseria’s refusal to adopt his ideas for modernizing and
expanding their rackets. Content with the easy money from bootlegging and protection shakedowns, Masseria brushed off Luciano’s proposals to cash in on new ventures.

Luciano’s business ideas included streamlining international bootlegging by cooperating with other Italian and with non-Italian gangs to bring in greater quantities of booze and eliminate hijackings. He knew that such cooperation would also prevent interference from the law by guaranteeing that more law-enforcement personnel would be adequately bribed.

Additionally, Luciano wanted to expand the areas of labor racketeering, gambling, and prostitution. Many of these activities would require temporary or permanent partnerships with Jewish and Irish gangsters. The distrustful Masseria, reluctant to accept alliances even with rival Sicilian and Italian mobsters whom he knew, vetoed any deals with Jewish or Irish hoods.

Representing an emerging generation of English-speaking mafiosi who had been raised in America, Luciano grew increasingly contemptuous of the erratic, archaic methods of Masseria and his older immigrant counterparts. Luciano and his closest confederates referred disparagingly to Masseria and his ilk as “Mustache Petes” and “greasers.”

After eighteen months of combat and with no end in sight to the Castellammarese War, Luciano intervened by double-crossing Masseria. According to Joe Bonanno, who served as Maranzano’s wartime chief of staff, at a clandestine meeting with Maranzano, Luciano offered to halt the hostilities by eliminating Masseria and assuming control of the dead boss’s gang. In exchange, Maranzano would call off his hit men, recognize Luciano as an equivalent boss, and peace would reign between the two factions.

Armed with the secret pact, Luciano moved swiftly. He set up Masseria, inviting him to Coney Island for a lavish lobster lunch, a card game, and a conference at one of Joe the Boss’s favorite trattorias, the Nuovo Villa Tammaro, where he would feel safe.

The meeting on April 15, 1931, was ostensibly to find a way to ambush Maranzano. Masseria drove to the luncheon date in his personal armored car with one-inch-thick bulletproof windows, and with three bodyguards. Before dessert arrived, Luciano left for the toilet. Mysteriously, Masseria’s bodyguards vanished from the restaurant as four of Luciano’s killers suddenly appeared and riddled Joe the Boss with a volley of gunfire. The
New York Daily News
reported (with melodramatic exaggeration) that Masseria died “with the ace of spades, the death card, clutched in a bejeweled paw.”

Picked up for questioning by detectives, Luciano could offer no theory about a motive for the murder. Unfortunately, he added, he had no clue about the gunmen because he was washing his hands and had seen nothing.

With Masseria out of the way, Maranzano was hailed as a conquering hero by the surviving Castellammarese clan. Luciano got his reward by taking over Masseria’s large gang and Maranzano gave his blessings to new leaders of three smaller borgatas whom he considered trustworthy allies.

Maranzano, however, had a surprise in store for Luciano. Signaling his presumed dominance, Maranzano summoned Chicago’s Al Capone and Mafia leaders from the rest of the country to a meeting in a resort hotel in tiny Wappingers Falls, seventy-five miles from Times Square, to inform them of New York’s new power lineup. The major implication of the meeting was clear: Maranzano had crowned himself as the highest-ranked leader in New York, and because of the city’s prominence as the Mafia’s emerging American polestar, he expected to be recognized as superior to all other bosses in the country.