The Mob and the City (12 page)

A REVISIONIST HISTORY OF THE CASTELLAMMARESE WAR OF 1930–1931

Mob history really is written by the winners. The conventional history on the Castellammarese War of 1930–1931 and its leader Salvatore Maranzano has been driven by his protégé Joseph Bonanno's autobiography
A Man of Honor
. In Bonanno's romanticized account, his “hero” Salvatore Maranzano rallies the Castellammarese clan—the true defenders of the Sicilian “Tradition”—against the bastardized gangster Joe Masseria. Bonanno's compelling story of an underworld band of brothers sold many books. Is his history accurate?
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I plan to offer a revisionist history of the “Castellammarese War” by balancing Bonanno's version with the perspectives of others as well as with additional facts. It strips away the romanticism for a more realistic portrait of the modern Mafia.

SALVATORE MARANZANO: MAN OF HONOR OR OPPORTUNISTIC DEMAGOGUE?

In May 1930, Maranzano was nominally just a forty-three-year-old soldier under his boss Nicola Schiro of the Castellammarese clan of Brooklyn. Back in Sicily, Maranzano had been the provincial
capo
of all the Castellammarese clans until he was forced out by the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini in the 1920s. In America, Maranzano became a successful bootlegger.
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A pompous man, Maranzano and his supporters made sure everyone knew he had once studied to be a priest, spoke Latin, and read histories of ancient Rome.
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Salvatore Maranzano was a political demagogue. Back in Sicily, he had been active in electoral politics, politicking alongside his endorsed candidates. Those who saw Maranzano hold forth remember emotional speeches full of reckless charges and inflammatory rhetoric. As a mob rival, he called Joe Masseria “the poisonous snake of our family,” and he said Al Capone was “staining the organization” of “the honorable society.” Even Bonanno admitted Maranzano may have “overstated Masseria's avarice” and “frightened us a little in order to make us bolder.”
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Maranzano further exploited ethnic identity, a tactic the Mafia would return to over the years. As the mob soldier Joe Valachi later testified before a Senate Committee, the Maranzano camp baldly asserted that “all the Castellammarese were sentenced to death,” though the soldiers “never found out the reason.” “He has condemned all of us,” Maranzano told the Castellammarese, referring to Joe Masseria. “He will only devour you in time.” Nicola Gentile similarly describes how Maranzano “began to inflame…the hearts of his Castellammarese townsman inciting them to vindicate Milazzo” and then goaded “the Palermitani inciting them to vindicate Totò D'Aquila.”
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Maranzano's rallying speeches should be taken with a mountain of salt. Nothing in Joe Masseria's past suggests he would engage in ethnic cleansing of the Castellammarese. Joe the Boss welcomed Sicilians and non-Sicilians of every region into his Family. Two of his “four we are” burglary partners—the brothers Salvatore and Giuseppe Ruffino—were in fact Castellammarese.
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Masseria cared about greenbacks, not bloodlines.

Nonetheless, Maranzano played the ethnic-identity card effectively. Several Castellammarese and Palermitani (the fellow townsmen of D'Aquila) rallied behind Maranzano. The charges resonated: “Masseria has always been our enemy, so much that he had our boss Totò D'Aquila killed,” said Vincenzo Troia.
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FOLLOWING THE MONEY: ECONOMIC ROOTS OF THE MAFIA REBELLION OF 1928–1931

Though less trumpeted as an “official” cause, the Reina Family and the Castellammarese clan also had strong economic motives to depose Masseria. By 1930, the Masseria Family, along with its allies, had achieved territorial dominion over most of Lower Manhattan and South Brooklyn, and also much of East Harlem. The major untapped territories were held by the Reina Family in East Harlem and the Bronx, and by the Castellammarese elsewhere in Brooklyn.

For the Reina Family faction, the replacement of Gaetano Reina with Masseria's ally Joseph Pinzolo was seen as power play in East Harlem. As exemplified by Joe Valachi's account, the anti-Masseria coalition complained that when a
soldier made a lot of money, “Joe the Boss will send for him and he will tax him so much and if the guy refused, he will be a dead duck.”
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For many in the Castellammarese clan, and others in Brooklyn, it was the Masseria Family's demands for money tributes that spurred the resentment against Joe the Boss. According to Bonanno, in the summer of 1930, Masseria coerced a $10,000 payment from Cola Schiro, the boss of the Castellammarese clan in Brooklyn. Then, on July 15, 1930, Vito Bonventre, one of the wealthiest bootleggers among the Castellammarese clan was shot down in Brooklyn. Maranzano portrayed this as a Masseria protection racket muscling in on their businesses.
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Even Maranzano had something of a financial angle. In the midst of the conflict, Maranzano gave his soldiers a contract to kill Joseph “Joe the Baker” Catania of the Masseria Family. His soldiers dutifully carried out the hit on Catania, though they were not told the full reasons. His soldiers later learned “that Joe Baker was hijacking [alcohol] trucks on Maranzano.”
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Or take Joe Profaci. Profaci was not a Castellammarese. But he wanted to protect the growing profits of his olive oil company and the illegal numbers lottery in Brooklyn. Despite his wealth, Profaci was known as a cheap boss, and he did not have enough men to take on Masseria himself. The armchair general Profaci started going to strategy meetings of the Castellammarese, boasting “we are going to get rid of these [Masseria] guys, all of them.”
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SALVATORE MARANZANO VS. JOE MASSERIA

Central to his version of the “war,” Bonanno repeatedly ridicules Joe Masseria's weight and slovenliness as metaphors for a defective character. “Joe the Glutton,” as Bonanno calls him, “attacked a plate of spaghetti as if he were a drooling mastiff.” This somehow becomes interpreted as reflecting flaws in Joe the Boss's leadership. “Maranzano believed that Masseria was the type of man who, under intense pressure, would get crazier and crazier and fatter and fatter,” asserts Bonanno.
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This image has stuck. Most recently, in the Home Box Office (HBO) series
Boardwalk Empire
, Masseria is portrayed as a doughy, treacherous bully.

In reality, Salvatore Maranzano was less svelte than Joe Masseria. At 5 feet, 4 inches Masseria weighed 155 pounds for a body mass index of 27, while Maranzano,
at 5 feet, 8 inches, weighed 218 pounds with a body mass index of 33. Or, as a doctor put it, Maranzano had a “tendency to obesity.” A vain man, Maranzano took to wearing a “rubber abdominal support”—a male girdle—underneath his suits to try to smooth down his gut. And while Maranzano dressed well, Masseria was no slouch either: he was a tailor in his youth and is described as almost invariably wearing a suit and hat.
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Although Salvatore Maranzano spoke more eloquently than Joe Masseria, their characters were not so different. Frank Costello saw right through Maranzano. Like Masseria, Frank Costello used his native intelligence to become a wealthy bootlegger and well-coifed powerbroker in New York. Nevertheless, Costello never bought into Maranzano's image. Comparing his one-time boss Masseria to the pompous Maranzano, Costello told his friend that a “greaseball is a greaseball,” by which he meant “that Maranzano, despite his polished appearance was of the same ilk as Masseria.”
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3:50 P.M., FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1930, EAST 116TH STREET, ITALIAN EAST HARLEM: THE SNEAK ATTACK ON GIUSEPPE MORELLO

East Harlem was enduring a sweltering summer in 1930, with temperatures topping 100 degrees, until the heat wave broke the second week of August. That week, Giuseppe Morello went to his second-story office in a building he owned at 352 East 116th Street.

Late in the afternoon of Friday, August 15, Morello was sitting around a table in his spartan office with building contractors Joseph Perrano and Gaspar Pollaro. They were talking business. Around 3:50 p.m., there was a knock at the door, which Morello got up to answer. As Morello cracked open the door, two men pushed their way in. They fired at the sixty-three-year-old Morello, who “kept running around the office,” until he succumbed to five bullet wounds. After being shot, Perrano dove out the second floor window and perished. Only Pollaro barely survived.
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There is no sign that the Masseria Family even knew a “war” had been declared. Giuseppe Morello was hardly expecting trouble: he went into his office
]unarmed and answered the door himself. He never knew his killer, Sebastiano “Buster” Domingo, a hit man imported from Chicago. Salvatore Maranzano wanted an early knockout of the veteran
consigliere
because, if Morello went into hiding, he “could exist forever on diet of hard bread, cheese and onions.”
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The Reina Family faction in East Harlem was equally surprised by Morello's murder only blocks away. Until that evening, they had no idea there were other rebels. Gagliano and Lucchese were “sneaking” around, “not knowing there was someone else who had the same intentions.” Throwing their support to the coalition, they got their vengeance when Girolamo “Bobby Doyle” Santuccio killed replacement boss Joseph Pinzolo on September 5, 1930.
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2:45 P.M., WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1930, PELHAM PARKWAY SOUTH, THE BRONX: THE LIEUTENANTS FALL

The anti-Masseria rebellion got its next big break a few months later when soldier Joe Valachi spotted Joe the Boss entering an apartment complex in the Bronx with two of his top lieutenants during the conflict, Alfred Mineo (a Brooklyn boss in his own right) and Stephen Ferrigno (Mineo's deputy). Maranzano dispatched three of his best shooters: Girolamo “Bobby Doyle” Santuccio, Nick Capuzzi, and Sebastiano “Buster” Domingo. Smuggling shotguns in guitar cases, they set up a gunner's nest in a ground-floor apartment.

On Wednesday, November 5, Masseria held a conference with a half dozen of his men at the apartment complex. Around 2:45 p.m., Ferrigno and Mineo left ahead of their boss. As they walked around the garden, shotgun blasts killed them instantly. Hearing the blasts, Joe Masseria hid inside the apartment until the police arrived. Joe the Boss had narrowly evaded gunfire again. But the rapid loss of Masseria's top two lieutenants, his
consigliere
Giuseppe Morello, and his ally Joseph Pinzolo, was destabilizing the Masseria Family.
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3–1: Maranzano hit man Girolamo “Bobby Doyle” Santuccio, ca. 1930. (Used by permission of the John Binder Collection)

DECEMBER 1930, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE MAFIA

The Mafia clans on the sidelines were unhappy with the bloodshed. Gangland shootings were bad for business. The Masseria Family was being decapitated. The clans called for a general assembly of Mafia representatives to take place in December 1930 in Boston.

The general assembly tried to make peace by stripping Masseria of the title of
capi di capi
and temporarily replacing him with the well-liked Gaspare Messina. The assembly then set up a commission to try to negotiate a peace between the two sides.
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Salvatore Maranzano would have no talk of peace with Joe Masseria still alive. Maranzano thwarted peace negotiations and made overtures to potential defectors. “Those who want to cross into my ranks are still in time to do so,” said Maranzano. He sent word that if Joe the Boss were disposed of by his own men, there would be no other reprisals.
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THE BETRAYAL OF JOE MASSERIA

Joe Masseria's erstwhile lieutenant Charles Luciano had had enough. Luciano had not joined the Masseria Family for the vainglory of bosses. His cabal wanted to end the conflict. And the quickest way was to remove their weakened boss.

Charles Luciano, the high-stakes gambler, secretly accepted the overture from Salvatore Maranzano. They met in a private house in Brooklyn in the spring of 1931. The conversation between the men was veiled, but gravely clear:

“Do you know why you are here?” Salvatore Maranzano began.

“Yes,” Luciano answered. He never would have stepped foot there had he been unsure.

“Then I don't have to tell you what has to be done,” Maranzano continued.

“No,” he replied.

“How much time do you need to do what you have to do?” Maranzano asked.