The Mob and the City (14 page)

“I am the one responsible for the office,” Maranzano interjected. “You can talk to me.” He was prepared for this harassment by the government. “There does not exist any contraband goods here. This office is a commercial office, in place with the law,” he declared. One of the lawmen held the group in the anteroom at gunpoint, including his unarmed bodyguard Santuccio. The other agents followed Maranzano into his private office.
⁷²

The plan was working: they were alone with Maranzano in his inner sanctum. The real names of the lead “agents” were Sam “Red” Levine and Abe “Bo” Weinberg, and they were not IRS agents. They were professional hit men. And they were there to kill Maranzano. Given they were on the ninth floor of a busy office building, their plan was to use stilettos to quietly stab him to death. Except Maranzano figured it out. They started shouting at each other.
⁷³

Unarmed and outnumbered, the refined gentleman disappeared. Maranzano fought fiercely. A stiletto pierced his left elbow, causing blood to run down his muscular arm, yet he continued fighting. Noise was no longer the assassin's main concern. They reached for their guns and fired shots into Maranzano's right arm, chest, and abdomen. Riddled with bullets, Maranzano fell back into his chair. The assassins then picked up the stilettos and thrust the sharp points into him. The
coup de grâce
pierced an artery in his neck.
⁷⁴

3–3: Body of Salvatore Maranzano in his Park Avenue office, September 1931. (Used by permission of the John Binder Collection)

Red Levine ran into the anteroom and told everyone to leave. The hit men ran to the stairs, followed by Tom Gagliano, Tommy Lucchese, and the rest of the waiting men. In a bizarre coincidence, on their way out the departing hit men ran into the Irish hit man Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, who was on his way to discuss a contract with Maranzano.
⁷⁵
When Lucchese was questioned as to why he left without checking to see whether Maranzano was still alive, he said lamely, “Nobody likes to stay in a place when something happens.” In truth, Lucchese had helped set the trap: his men spent the day distracting Maranzano's soldiers, keeping them from stopping by the office. Everyone had abandoned Maranzano save for two: his loyal bodyguard Girolamo Santuccio and his devoted secretary Miss Samuels, who found their boss dead in his office.
⁷⁶

THE PURGE THAT WASN'T

In the aftermath of Maranzano's murder, there were stories that his assassination was coordinated with a nationwide purge of all his loyalists. These rumors gained credence when Richard “Dixie” Davis, a disbarred mob lawyer, claimed in a 1939
Collier's
article that hit man Bo Weinberg said there was “about ninety guineas knocked off all over the country” simultaneously in a purge that “Americanized the mobs.” Less noticed was Davis's admission that he had “never been able to check up the accuracy of Bo's assertion” of a simultaneous mass murder.
⁷⁷

When historians looked for evidence of this alleged purge, they could not substantiate it. Poring over newspapers from across the country, they could find only a handful of gangland hits even conceivably connected to the Maranzano assassination.
⁷⁸
Nevertheless, the “purge myth” abides. John H. Davis's
Mafia Dynasty
asserts that Luciano “ordered a purge of the old guard” in which “sixty Maranzano loyalists” were killed.
⁷⁹

The myth is too compelling; it is an archetype of the human mind. The imagery can be traced to the legendary Night of the Sicilian Vespers, when after the Easter evening prayers of March 30, 1282, Sicilians rose up and overnight massacred their French foreign rulers. Giuseppe Verdi immortalized it in his 1861 opera
I Vespri Siciliani
. Director Francis Ford Coppola and writer Mario Puzo were playing on this imagery in their 1972 masterpiece
The Godfather
. In
the penultimate sequence, Michael Corleone is shown sponsoring his niece's Roman Catholic baptism as his men simultaneously assassinate his enemies in bloody hits. They are compelling images, but they are just images.
⁸⁰

“CASTELLAMMARESE WAR” OR GANG FIGHT?

This leads to a larger point about Joe Bonanno's romantic account. Painting these events as a “war” in service of a mob myth diminishes the gravity of the word
war
. The total number of casualties nationwide in the “Castellammarese War of 1930–1931” was under twenty
mafioso
.
⁸¹
To put it in perspective, recall that more than a thousand Prohibition-era bootleggers were killed in New York City between 1920 and 1930—an average of seventy-seven men a year.
⁸²

Although he occasionally drifts into war language, Nicola Gentile calls the conflict “The Fight between the Gangs.” This is a more accurate description. In New York, outside of a small group of men around Masseria and Maranzano, most wiseguys went about their business. Giuseppe Morello and others were not even armed for much of the “war.” After the police warned Masseria to stop the fighting, Masseria ordered his men to disarm. He was apparently more worried about a police crackdown.
⁸³

Joe Bonanno's breathless talk of Maranzano's “wartime staff” and vast supplies of “money, arms, ammunition and manpower” is just hyperbole.
⁸⁴
Although Joe Valachi heard stories of war chests, he saw little money put into the fight. Valachi testified that Maranzano's four main hit men together were paid the paltry sum of “$25 a week” (about $350 in current dollars). As it was “kind of rough” to survive on his $6 split, Valachi moonlighted as a burglar to make ends meet during the “war.”
⁸⁵
An FBI electronic bug picked up Steve Magaddino mocking Maranzano's meager funding of the hit men. “He didn't give them anything. He only would give them sandwiches,” laughed Steve Magaddino.
⁸⁶

THE “MOUSTACHE PETES”

Another myth is that the conflict was about a younger generation of “Americanized” mobsters purging the older, tradition-bound “Moustache Petes.” In his
book
Five Families
, journalist Selwyn Raab claims that “Luciano had become increasingly frustrated by Masseria's refusal to adopt his ideas for modernizing…by cooperating with other Italian and non-Italian gangs” and that he “referred disparagingly to Masseria and his ilk as ‘Moustache Petes’ and ‘greasers.’”
⁸⁷

Labeling Joe Masseria a “Moustache Pete” renders the term meaningless: Joe the Boss enthusiastically created the first pan-Italian “Americanized” mob. There is also no sign that Masseria barred his men from working with others. The Masseria Family's members collaborated with Irish and Jewish gangsters on the docks, in the garment district, and elsewhere. Indeed, in March 1930, Masseria was arrested in a gambling resort in Miami Beach in the company of Jewish gangsters Harry Brown and Harry “Nig” Rosen.
⁸⁸

Neither did the two other
mafiosi
pointed to as “Moustache Petes” fit the stereotype of tradition-bound, ethnically isolated Sicilians. Giuseppe Morello
was
a mustachioed Sicilian, his whiskers drooping down over his gaunt face. Yet when he was boss of his Morello Family, he partnered with Irish counterfeiters Jack Gleason, Tom Smith, and Henry Thompson.
⁸⁹
Even Salvatore Maranzano had in his inner circle a convicted drug trafficker in James Alescia and a Neapolitan in Joe Valachi. And it was Maranzano who ultimately validated Al Capone and his Chicago Outfit.
⁹⁰

LATE SEPTEMBER 1931: THE CREATION OF THE COMMISSION

After Maranzano, there would never again be an all-powerful boss of bosses. Between 1928 and 1931, the Cosa Nostra saw the murders of three sitting
capo di capi
: Salvatore D'Aquila in October 1928, Joe Masseria in April 1931, and Salvatore Maranzano in September 1931. All three overreached and were violently deposed. Former
capo di capi
Giuseppe Morello was killed in August 1930 as well. The general assembly concluded that giving such a title “to just one, could swell the head of the elected person and induce him to commit unjustifiable atrocities.”
⁹¹

As we will see, new technologies and rackets were expanding opportunities for more dispersed crews of wiseguys as well. Their sophisticated operations
would stretch across states and multistate regions. No dictatorial boss would be able to control everything. Although the Mafia family structure would be essential to their success, the money operations would be run by the
caporegimes
(captains) and street soldiers.

In the fall of 1931, the general assembly of the Mafia abolished the
capo di capi
title. They replaced it with a power-sharing commission. This was
not
the invention of Charles Luciano. Rather, it was the very same idea that the general assembly of the Mafia nearly adopted back in May 1931. It would serve as a forum to discuss major decisions and arbitrate disputes. As Nicola Gentile explained, “With the administration of this commission one could begin to breathe a more trustworthy air,” and men could return to “the best positions from which they could gain large profits.”
⁹²

The Commission, as it came to be called, had seven charter members. Given Gotham's importance, each of the five bosses of the New York families received a seat. These included the incumbent bosses Charles Luciano, Tom Gagliano, and Joseph Profaci, and two new bosses from Brooklyn: Vincent Mangano (who replaced a Maranzano loyalist) and Joseph Bonanno (who replaced Maranzano himself). Steve Magaddino of Buffalo got the sixth seat as an influential Castellammarese with surprising strength in upstate New York. Al Capone held the seventh seat for Chicago, which also represented by proxy the smaller western clans.
⁹³

Capone's seat on the Commission would be short-lived. On October 6, 1931, the trial of
United States v. Alphonse Capone
commenced in federal court in Chicago. Twelve days later, on October 18, 1931, the federal jury found him guilty of income tax evasion for failing to pay taxes on illegal revenues. Paul “The Waiter” Ricca of Chicago (who stands on the far left of the cover of this book) would take Capone's seat on the Commission. Maranzano's fear of the taxman was not so crazy after all.
⁹⁴

THE COMMISSION: FOUNDING MEMBERS, 1931

3–4: Tomasso Gagliano, boss of the Gagliano Family. (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)