Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (7 page)

Maranzano, in effect, had declared himself
“capo di tutti capi,”
boss of bosses.

In New York he began issuing organizational decrees to the Castellammarese mafiosi and to the other borgatas. Recalling his admiration for Caesar, he wanted the families modeled loosely on the military chain of command of a Roman legion. Towering above all others, a father, or boss, or
representante
, would govern with unquestioned authority. His main assistant or executive officer was the
sottocapo
, underboss. Crews or street units,
decini
, would be formed, consisting often or more inducted soldiers or button men. Each crew would be led by a
capodecina, capo
, or captain, appointed by the boss, and the units would be the family’s workhorses for all illegal operations.

Maranzano further mandated that Mafia rules, which were inviolable in Sicily, be imposed on all the New York clans. His fundamental precepts, all carrying the death penalty if ignored, were unquestioned obedience to the father, or boss, and his designated officers; no physical assaults or insults against a fellow mafioso; a ban on desiring or courting the wife or sweetheart of another mafioso, and, most important, obeying
omertà
, the code of secrecy.

Maranzano’s high-handed moves provoked Luciano, who now reassessed him as more backward in his thinking than Masseria had been. Not only had Maranzano reneged on their deal for equality in New York, but he was thirsting for power throughout the country.

From his trusted crony Tommy Three-Finger Brown Lucchese, Luciano got
wind of more alarming news. The duplicitous Lucchese had cozied up to Maranzano and his top lieutenants and learned that Maranzano had marked Luciano for a machine-gun assassination by the Irish cutthroat Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll.

Befitting his new grandeur, Maranzano had moved his headquarters from Little Italy to an elegant suite of offices in the building atop Grand Central Terminal. Lucchese’s spies tipped off Luciano that Maranzano was having tax troubles and expected that his phony export-import business records would be scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service. In anticipation of an audit, Maranzano had instructed his bodyguards to be unarmed while in his office to insure there would be no arrests for gun violations.

Acting quickly to catch Maranzano off guard, Luciano decided that the Grand Central office would be his best chance. On September 10, 1931, Lucchese showed up unannounced at the office for a courtesy call on Maranzano. Minutes later, a group of men swept in, announcing they were 1RS agents. None appeared to be Sicilian or Italian, and neither Maranzano nor his bodyguards suspected they were hired killers. Before the bodyguards could react, the hit men got the drop on them, and at gunpoint lined them up along with Lucchese and a female secretary, with their faces pressed to the wall.

Lucchese identified Maranzano with a head movement and a gunman nudged Maranzano into his private office. There were sounds of a struggle followed by a barrage of gunfire. Five months after his arch foe Joe the Boss had been annihilated, Maranzano lay dead, his body torn by bullets and knife wounds.

Organized-crime historians are uncertain if Luciano had schemed from the start to remove both Masseria and Maranzano as dinosaurs, antiquated obstacles to the Mafia’s progress and realignment. A thin, slightly built, dark-haired man with an impassive, pockmarked face, Luciano came to New York as a boy of nine from a village near Palermo. A school dropout at fourteen, within a decade he compiled an arrest record for armed robbery, gun possession, assault, grand larceny, gambling, and possession of narcotics. Remarkably, most of the charges were dropped, and except for an eight-month sentence, Luciano avoided any long jail time. A prison psychiatrist aptly analyzed him as highly intelligent but “an aggressive, egocentric, antisocial type.”

As a teenager, Luciano held only one honest job as a five-dollar-a-week shipping clerk in a hat factory. He quit the day after he won $244 in a dice game, but used his experience at the factory to hide heroin that he transported and
sold in hat boxes. At age eighteen, he admitted to a probation officer that he found regular work unsuitable for his personality. “I never was a crumb and if I had to be a crumb, I would rather be dead,” he told the interviewing officer. In Lucky’s lexicon, “a crumb” was an average person who slaved at a dull or laborious job, squirreled away money, and never indulged in extravagant pleasures.

By the time he was in his twenties, Luciano had been tagged with the nickname Lucky, but it is unclear whether he acquired it for his gambling exploits, for surviving gun and knife attacks, or from American mispronunciations of his Italian surname. His closest call came in 1929 when he was abducted, beaten, and strung up by his hands from a beam in a Staten Island warehouse. True to his calling, Luciano refused to tell the police who had taken him for a ride and the reason for it. The episode left a jagged scar on his chin.

On the Lower East Side, as a wild teenager before joining Masseria’s gang, Luciano cemented alliances with Jewish gangsters that would endure for a lifetime. Charlie Lucky’s closest Jewish criminal companions were the shrewd Meyer Lansky and Lansky’s volatile colleague, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.

There was little doubt among New York’s mafiosi that Luciano had engineered Maranzano’s murder and that the hit team had been mustered by his Jewish confederates. Luciano, however, circulated the message that he had indisputable evidence that the power-mad Maranzano, without cause, had been preparing to kill him, and therefore the hit was justifiable under Mafia rules.

The Castellammarese clan presented the only danger to Luciano of a new war or an assassination attempt to avenge their chiefs death. But Luciano’s self-defense claim was readily accepted, even by Maranzano’s staunchest protégé, Joe Bonanno. Reflecting on Maranzano’s imperious behavior after winning a brutal struggle, Bonanno decided that his patron had been an astute warlord but unable to adapt to the culture and tactics of the new, Americanized breed. Despite six years in America, Maranzano spoke little English and was unable to communicate with younger criminals or comprehend their street talk and slang.

“Maranzano was old-world Sicilian in temperament and style,” Bonanno explained in his autobiography. “But he didn’t live in Sicily anymore. In New York he was adviser not only to Sicilians but to American-Italians.”

Set for anointment as head of the Castellammarese borgata, Bonanno saw the wisdom of Luciano’s new look for the Mafia and accepted what he characterized as the “path of peace.” With the war between them over, Luciano and Bonanno held a conclave with the heads of three other substantial borgatas in New York
whom Luciano considered agreeable to his plans. The other bosses were Gaetano Gagliano, Vincent Mangano, and Joe Profaci. Without any specific blueprint, in 1931 five Mafia families had evolved from a convulsive decade.

The five families would survive, under various names and leaders, into the next century. No other American city would have more than one Mafia family, nor would any other borgata come close to matching the size, wealth, power, and influence of any of the New York families.

Before the year ended, the New York bosses traveled to Chicago for a national conference with Al Capone, Chicago’s Italian Mob titan, and the leaders of more than twenty other Mafia factions in the country. The great innovator, Luciano, explained his concepts for avoiding intra-family and interfamily Mob wars and for establishing lasting prosperity. He accepted as pragmatic Maranzano’s organizational structure of crews performing the bulk of the work for the families but added a wrinkle for the hierarchies. Besides a
sottocapo
, an under-boss, each family regime or administration would have a consigliere, a skilled counselor or diplomat, to iron out problems inside the family and to resolve feuds with other borgatas.

Luciano saw the practical wisdom of the Sicilian traditional reliance on
omertà
, absolute loyalty to the family, and many of the other rules and security measures that Maranzano had suggested to prevent penetration by law-enforcement agents. These behavioral standards would serve as the Mafia’s sacred code, its Ten Commandments.

Without discussion or debate, it was universally understood by the bosses that membership throughout the country would be open only to men whose parents were both from Sicily or southern Italy. Italian heritage of only one parent would be insufficient for acceptance into a family. Bloodlines were critical factors for determining trustworthiness and for acceptance as a Man of Honor. The size of each family was fixed at the number of made men it had at that time, with replacements allowed only for dead members. Freezing the strength of each borgata was intended to prevent surreptitious expansions to dominate other families and possibly ignite territorial conflicts. Limiting membership also was seen as a business-like means of selecting the best and most competent candidates.

Luciano made it clear that Mafia membership was a lifetime obligation; there were no provisions for resignation or early retirement. “The only way out is in a box,” Lucky emphasized.

While not a written document, the code illuminated the Mafia’s fundamental
guiding principle: the survival of each family and the combined national Mafia overshadowed the needs and safety of the individual mafioso.

Every family was therefore obligated to maintain the organizational viability that would withstand any assault by law enforcement. The purpose of the code was to enable the family to continue functioning efficiently, even if the boss or other hierarchs were removed.

The organization would be supreme; its parts, replaceable.

Luciano unveiled one more idea, his most striking innovation, without precedent in the Sicilian Mafia or among Americanized gangsters. It was the creation of the Commission, the equivalent of a national board of directors that would establish general policies and regulations for all families in the country and would settle territorial and other disputes that might arise. The Commission would be the vital link between families throughout the nation, ensuring cooperation and harmony on joint criminal ventures. It would be analogous to an underworld Supreme Court, whose primary function was to prevent warfare while recognizing the sovereignty of the individual groups.

Luciano and Bonanno originally wanted to name the new body, the “Committee for Peace,” after its main purpose. But younger, American-reared mafiosi found the name too difficult to pronounce in Italian or Sicilian.

Clearly defining New York’s keystone position in the Mafia’s national pecking order, Luciano gave representation on the Commission to all five New York families. Other members of the new body would come from Chicago and Buffalo, with the proviso that more families could be added if necessary.

Chicago’s selection was an obvious recognition of Capone and his gang’s strength, wealth, and domination of numerous rackets in the Midwest. The boss of the Buffalo family was Stefano Magaddino, another immigrant from Castellammare del Golfo. Magaddino was highly respected and feared because he was a cousin of Joe Bonanno and had business ties to Mafia organizations in the Midwest and in Canada.

Luciano surprised the underworld convention by insisting that each family on the Commission have a single vote, with all decisions determined by the majority. His successes in New York had elevated him into a position of unrivaled national importance, and there was little doubt that among the nation’s Mafia bosses he was first among equals.

There would have been no opposition if Charlie Lucky had nominated himself as the first
capo di tutti capi
, boss of bosses. But Luciano realized that the bloodshed in the previous decade as families fought for dominance and
underworld monopolies, climaxed by the Castellammarese War, had demonstrated the futility of attempts to impose a supreme leader.

Martin A. Gosch, a Hollywood movie producer, claimed that thirty years after the Chicago conclave, Luciano reminisced about it with him in preparation for a proposed film version of Luciano’s life. Gosch asserted that Luciano summarized his main purpose for the meeting with this colorful quote: “I explained to ‘em that all the war horseshit was out. I explained to ‘em we was in a business that hadda keep movin’ without explosions every two minutes; knockin’ guys off just because they come from a different part of Sicily, that kind of crap was given’ us a bad name, and we couldn’t operate until it stopped.” Although the substance of Gosch’s conversations with Luciano was never documented elsewhere, the quotation matched accounts that investigators dug up of Luciano’s goals at the session in Chicago.

Cosa Nostra experts agree that all of Luciano’s remodeling proposals were accepted by the nation’s Mob families. Luciano’s game plan clearly established that the American borgatas would never be subsidiaries or satellites of the Sicilian Mafia. Although drawing on Sicilian traditions, especially
omertà
, America’s independent mafiosi were adapting themselves to the unique social and cultural forces that existed on their continent.

The Chicago secret meeting reportedly ended at the Blackstone Hotel, with Al Capone hosting a feast where the delegates, acting as if they were at a jazz era orgy, made merry, enjoying the favors of a plethora of prostitutes.

Without the awareness of the nation’s vast law-enforcement apparatus, in 1931 an American Mafia had been custom-designed for efficient plunder. And New York was its epicenter.

Dirty Thirties