Playboy's History of Organized Crime

Part IV: War in the Underworld

The Gangland War that would end only with the death of the opposing commanders and the birth of a national underworld organization was set off in the last weeks of October 1929 not in some Mafia stronghold in New York's Little Italy but farther downtown, on Wall Street. The collapsing stock market ended a decade of exhilaration and Emile Coue optimism ("Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better") and of a frenetic search for pleasure. The euphoria of the Roaring Twenties gave way to panic and fear. Only weeks before, money had been plentiful; suddenly, paper millionaires were wondering where they could raise money for rent and food and whether the job would still be there in the morning--or where they might find work.

No one was immune, not even those who had purveyed pleasure to the nation in the good times come to an end. The leaders of the underworld still had plenty of money; they had practiced a strictly cash business, had socked away millions of dollars (not in banks) and so had the capital to see them through anything. They became one of the few sources of cash to which desperate men could turn, and thus found themselves with the means to invade a thousand legitimate fields and corrupt them. Still, their vast reservoir of money was no longer being replenished by the steady rain of hard currency that had poured down on them during the golden years, and the future promised an extended drought. "There we were," said one major bootlegger. "We had been doing damn good, raking in the dough like it was grass out in the country, and all of a sudden it was all over. We got hit just like everybody else. Maybe not so bad, because we always got paid in cash and nobody I knew ever put a nickel in the banks or the stock market. But we got hit, too, and it hurt plenty. There was a time when things were really going good when some guy would try to weasel his way in a little around the edges of my territory. Sometimes I'd knock him over and sometimes I'd figure, what the hell, everybody's got to live and there's plenty for everybody and besides, the guy's a small-timer trying to turn a buck. So I'd give him a warning and let him alone. Why make a lot of trouble over a couple of cases? But after that thing on Wall Street, when the sales started dropping off and some of us had to start tapping the dough we salted away, I don't think anybody stood for any crap from anybody anymore. A guy set his foot inside my district and I cut it off for him."

Thus, as the national economy continued to contract, and the national mood turned from optimism to desperation, rivalries that had simmered for years finally came to a boil. It happened in every field of business, legitimate and illegitimate, but most violently in the bitterly competitive and fragmented Italian underworld, where the secret society, the Mafia, was dominant. There the struggle for supremacy exploded like a capped pressure cooker. On one side was the army commanded by Giuseppe Masseria, known as Joe the Boss. On the other were the forces led by Salvatore Maranzano and dominated by his fellow immigrants from the Sicilian town of Castellammare del Golfo.

Masseria was a slob. Spaghetti stains seemed always to dapple his unvaryingly black vest and the front of his trousers; dirt and hair grease ringed the collars of his white shirts and he constantly exuded a rank, overripe aroma. Though never slim, his body had once been hard, muscular and agile, and though he never lost his surprising agility (which led many to call him the man who could dodge bullets), years of affluent living and a voracious appetite for pasta converted much of his body into rolls of fat. Even in his native Italian, he was barely literate, and he spoke English so haltingly that he used it rarely. He was an expansive man, his gestures florid, and he laughed often, the sound rising from deep in his immense stomach, his body shaking with the humor of it all--and he could find a source of laughter in anything from a crude practical joke on one of his underlings to the death of an enemy. To those who worked for him, he sometimes donned a benevolent air of the all-wise, omnipotent father, brooking no failure to meet his demands and severely chastising any sign of disobedience.

But Joe the Boss was no jolly fat man, no comic-opera clown. Most times, his hard black eyes were cold and shuttered; but when his violent temper was aroused, they turned molten. A man of cunning and shrewdness, with overweening ambition and a monstrous ego, he had no pity toward those who crossed him or stood in his way.

Masseria had left Sicily in the early years of the century a grown man with strong Mafia credentials. Almost as soon as he settled in New York, he teamed up with Mafia ruler Ignazio Saietta, known as Lupo the Wolf, an extortionist and killer extraordinary who maintained in East Harlem a stable where his enemies were hung on meathooks and then, still alive, fed to glowing furnaces. Working with Saietta in all the rackets that bled the Italian immigrants, Masseria soon became a recognized and feared power in Lower Manhattan's Little Italy. And when, in 1920, Saietta foolishly expanded his operations to include counterfeiting--with the consequences of capture, trial and a 30-year term in Federal prison--Masseria emerged as one of the main contenders for the Mafia throne and the overlordship of the Italian-immigrant community.

With the advent of Prohibition, control of the country's Little Italys meant control of the wine-making vats and liquor stills that were common fixtures in Italian households. Those stills, especially, were an important source of bootleg booze, and the Mafia leaders who controlled their output not only enriched themselves by supplying raw alcohol to other bootleggers but could then wield power and influence far beyond their traditional ghetto fiefs.

And so Masseria's self-appointment as boss of the New York Mafia, and as ruler of the American Mafia as well, met with immediate challenge. His first rival was one Salvatore Mauro, who had been a bootlegger even before Prohibition and rejected the authority of Masseria. That defiance was met with dispatch: Mauro was gunned down in the middle of Chrystie Street one bright morning in 1920.

A new rival promptly appeared in the person of Umberto Valenti, who considered himself the legitimate heir to Saietta and other Mafia rulers. More cautious than Mauro, Valenti and his faction kept up a running, sniping battle with Masseria all over Little Italy for more than a year and a half, all the while prudently keeping himself out of the line of fire. At first, Masseria considered Valenti no more bothersome than a pesky fly and gave the job of swatting him to underlings. When they proved unequal to the task, Masseria decided in May of 1922 that if he wanted the job done right, he would have to do it himself.

In these early years of Prohibition, a number of bootleggers, with the cooperation of pliant New York police, had established a kind of central exchange market in the streets of Lower Manhattan around police headquarters. Every morning, they would meet on the curbs and buy and sell needed supplies from one another, nodding to and pressing bills into the hands of the cops who emerged from headquarters during the day. It was there that Joe the Boss decided to lay a trap for Valenti. With two of his gunmen, he waited in a doorway on Grand Street, just south of police headquarters, and when Valenti showed up for his daily excursion in the market, along with his favorite bodyguard, one Silva Tagliagamba, Masseria and his men opened fire. They missed. Valenti and Tagliagamba pulled out their guns and returned the fire. For a couple of minutes, the bullets zinged up and down Grand Street. Four innocent bystanders--two men and two women--incurred minor wounds. Valenti escaped without a scratch, but Tagliagamba was critically wounded and died a month later. When they could no longer ignore the nearby gun battle, the police finally began pouring out of headquarters. Masseria turned and ran--right into the arms of a cop. (His pistol was later returned; Masseria had a gun-carrying permit issued by a justice of the New York supreme court.) When Tagliagamba finally died at the end of June, Masseria was charged with his murder, then released on bail. The charges against him were filed away in some dusty corner of the hall of justice and soon forgotten.

Enraged at both the murder of his bodyguard and the failure of justice to avenge it, Valenti loudly declared that if the law wouldn't act he would do so himself. He had Masseria shadowed and, on several occasions, shots were fired; all missed. One afternoon, as Masseria left his apartment on Second Avenue, two Valenti gunmen were waiting across the street. They began firing at Joe the Boss, who ducked into a nearby millinery shop. The gunmen followed him inside, shooting all the time. They broke several mirrors and windows, destroyed some hats and put two bullets through the crown of Masseria's new straw boater. But Joe the Boss lived up to the legend that he could dodge bullets.

With the slugs coming that close, however, Masseria decided it was time to end such skirmishing. He sent emissaries to Valenti, asking for peace and a conference to decide the terms. Valenti agreed and Masseria invited him to an Italian restaurant on East 12th Street to celebrate the end of hostilities. At that dinner, Masseria was his most expansive self, proclaiming Valenti a brother, declaring that thenceforth they would work together in harmony. Then, his arm around Valenti's shoulders, he led his rival out to the sidewalk, stepped aside, raised his hand and a fusillade of bullets ended the challenge of Umberto Valenti.

Once again, Masseria was charged with murder, once again he was freed on bail and once again the charges disappeared somewhere in official files, never to be resurrected.

For a time, Masseria seemed to reign supreme and secure. He tightened his grip on ghetto rackets, expanded his bootlegging business, strengthened his organization. Like his Mafia contemporaries, he considered his world the only world and had no use for anyone who wasn't Sicilian or at least Italian; when the bootleg business forced him to deal with someone outside the clan, he usually turned the negotiations over to one of his trusted aides. He felt no need for outside allies or partners and believed himself strong enough then to turn back any insider who had the audacity to challenge his rule.

One such rival was already emerging, a brighter and more patient man. He was Salvatore Maranzano. Born in Castellammare del Golfo, Maranzano was educated far beyond most of his underworld contemporaries. He had studied for the priesthood before finding his true vocation in the underworld and was a classical scholar, fluent not just in Italian but also in Latin and Greek (though his English was never more than passable). His home was filled with well-read books, many on the life and campaigns of Julius Caesar, to whom he constantly compared himself. To his uncomprehending associates and underlings, he would often quote long extracts from the Latin or Greek to make his point and to demonstrate his own superiority; then, as though suddenly (continued on page 194)Underworld(continued on page 146) noticing the blank looks, he would patronizingly translate into Italian or English.

A tall, ascetic, majestic man--"He looked just like a banker," said Mafia informer Joe Valachi decades later--Maranzano was a natural rival and threat to Joe the Boss. In his native Sicily, he became an important mafioso after abandoning his religious studies. But his undisguised ambitions earned him the animosity of older mafiosi, and when several of his depredations made him also the object of police scrutiny, he decided to seek a cooler climate. At the end of World War One, he emigrated to the United States and almost immediately established his own faction of the honored society. His self-confidence and commanding mien, his polished manners, his obvious learning and intelligence and his undisguised amorality, unscrupulousness and viciousness all combined to win him a devoted following in the Mafia. He moved in on bootlegging, protection, the Italian lottery and a variety of other rackets in the ghetto and, in so doing, cut himself a slice of Masseria's realm. And he organized a lucrative immigration racket that brought him the subservience of a good part of the community: He arranged both legal and illegal emigration from Italy, for which he received not merely a high fee but also usurious interest rates impossible ever to pay. These debts he held over those who had come to him, exacting their loyalty and obedience under the threat of violence or deportation. Maranzano was, perhaps, the prototype of the American Mafia don, giving and taking, generous and penurious, benevolent and cruel.

Between Masseria and Maranzano there were increasing competition and enmity. Each aspired to the supreme rule, capo di tutti capi, "boss of all bosses," in the American Mafia. Masseria was the claimant and Maranzano the pretender. Their personalities clashed so directly that no entente between them was ever possible. Maranzano looked down on Joe the Boss as an uncouth, ignorant peasant. Masseria considered Maranzano a posturing, pompous jackal and, at least initially, no more of a threat than any other challenger.

Maranzano waited patiently and plotted coolly and secretly, certain that Masseria's own arrogance and greed would work to his advantage. At his peak in 1928 and 1929, Masseria had the strength and the well-armed troops, nearly 1000 of them; and through his own payoffs and contacts he was politically well protected. And Masseria had more: Because of his strength and his success, he was the acknowledged favorite of the other ruling Mafia capos around the country. Maranzano, as his only challenger, was an outlaw in the underworld, with a small army and little political influence.

There was no shortage of recruits for either army, however. With the advent of the fascist regime in Italy, scores of young mafiosi were scurrying to safety in the United States, driven from home by Mussolini's ruthless campaign against the Sicilian Mafia. As the exiled mafiosi reached America, they became willing and eager soldiers in the ranks of both Masseria and Maranzano, and of Mafia capos in other cities.

What neither Joe the Boss nor Maranzano understood, however, was that many of these younger Italians and Sicilians, particularly those who had grown up in America, had formed friendships and alliances with non-Italian gangsters during Prohibition and secretly despised the Mafia's aging leaders, who clung to the old country and the old ways. These "Mustache Petes," who could not adapt to the new society, would have to be eliminated if the Italian underworld were to become a powerful and perhaps dominating force in American crime. The young were not yet strong enough to accomplish this themselves, but some began to anticipate that the Mustache Petes would eliminate one another.

That such a war was coming Maranzano never doubted, so he prepared for it. In conversations with older mafiosi, he would constantly disparage Joe the Boss, building with eloquence on his sins. And he sounded out any likely recruit for his army, with the only proviso that he be a Sicilian, as the rules of the Mafia then dictated (by late in the decade, though, the collapse of the Mafia's chief rival, the Neapolitan-born Camorra, permitted recruitment among mainland Italians as well as Sicilians). He had no trouble winning the allegiance of a group of recent arrivals from his home town of Castellammare del Golfo. Among them were Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno, rising rapidly in the Brooklyn organization, and Stefano Magaddino, becoming one of the most important mafiosi in Buffalo. Into his ranks, too, he pulled others disenchanted with Masseria, men like Brooklyn mobsters Giuseppe Magliocco and Joseph Profaci, who was already heading his own gang, and the Aiellos of Chicago, who by the end of the decade were throwing in $5000 a week to support the Maranzano cause.

This was the nucleus of the pretending group, but it was by no means powerful enough to take on Masseria. So Maranzano continued his efforts to attract younger hoodlums who showed signs of independence or rebellion. He made a particularly forceful effort to win over Lucky Luciano, who would bring in Frank Costello, with his intelligence, imagination and political connections, and Vito Genovese, a tough and brutal young Neapolitan thug who was number one in Luciano's personal entourage. But all these efforts failed. Luciano politely declined Maranzano's repeated proffers, as during these years he also declined Masseria's. By late in 1927, he had become a major underworld force in his own right through bootlegging, loan-sharking, protection, gambling of all kinds and a host of other rackets that extended far outside the Little Italys dominated by Masseria, Maranzano and other older mafiosi. However, as the pressures on him from both Masseria and Maranzano intensified, Luciano began to feel that unless he merged with one or the other, he would be caught in the cross fire of the developing struggle. At that moment, Joe the Boss was much the stronger and so the more likely victor in the coming war. At the same time, Luciano and his friends reasoned, Masseria's penchant for turning allies into enemies with his arrogance and greed would make him the more vulnerable to later overthrow than Maranzano. So Luciano threw in with Joe the Boss, to help him win the war and then topple him in a palace coup.

At that moment, Masseria appeared invincible. He had his own army, he was backed by Mafia overlords around the country and now he had Luciano and his organization as well.

But this seeming invincibility was an illusion. In his rise to the top, Masseria had left behind a lengthy list of enemies who, though not powerful by themselves, found mutual strength in joining the rising Maranzano rebellion. Also, there were the seeds of rebellion in Masseria's own organization. The young, like Luciano, were secretly working for his overthrow and their own ascension. And Masseria's own policies were turning even some of the older mafiosi against him.

Hostilities commenced with a series of sorties and skirmishes. Maranzano would hijack a Masseria liquor shipment and Masseria would retaliate in kind; a minor Masseria thug would be murdered and reciprocal action would be taken. It was a time of probing for weaknesses, of sporadic and inconclusive action and reaction.

Then events outside the clannish circle of the Mafia intervened, bringing all-out war. In the fall of 1929, Wall Street crashed and the nation turned from an era of unparalleled prosperity to deepening depression. With business, including bootlegging and the other underworld rackets, in a sudden and sharp contraction, competition that might once have been ignored could no longer be tolerated. Joe the Boss began to put pressure on subordinates and allies for a bigger cut of their rackets, for a tighter accounting. Such demands, to which some acceded and others resisted, only increased the bitterness he had already engendered.

Greater income from his own organization was only one of Masseria's goals. He also determined to stamp out all competitors, particularly those like Maranzano, who had combined competition with threats. The first move took place far from New York. A native of Castellammare named Gaspare Milazzo had settled in Detroit, risen to Mafia capo and become a leading Midwestern advocate of the Maranzano cause. Masseria gunmen tracked him down and killed him. If the murder was supposed to be a threat, it served merely to drive other Castellammarese tighter into the Maranzano network. So Masseria responded by declaring open season on any and all natives of that Sicilian town, ordering his gunmen to shoot them on sight. And, with the support of many national Mafia dons, he issued a death warrant on Maranzano personally.

Now outlawed and his life in jeopardy, the still-weaker Maranzano stepped up his attempts to court segments of Masseria's army and pull them into his own orbit. His initial target was Luciano, who had become Masseria's right hand as soon as he joined Joe the Boss's outfit and who more and more was becoming the most important figure next to Masseria in that group. Luciano's reputation and the awe he was inspiring among the underworld's common soldiers were enhanced when, in mid-October of 1929, he became the only gangster ever known to have returned alive from a one-way ride.

In the early-morning hours of October 17, a passing police car discovered Luciano, savagely beaten, slashed and bound, lying on the pavement of Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island. He was taken to the hospital, where 55 stitches were needed to sew him up. When he emerged, with permanent scars and a sinister drooping eyelid whose muscles had been severed, he was viewed with considerable respect and fear. He had told the police only that he would not say who had beaten him, that "I'll take care of this in my own way." Frustrated, the authorities charged him with grand larceny, for theft of a car. Luciano laughed and the charges were promptly dismissed.

The rumors about the ride were many: that he had been waylaid and kidnaped by some masked men who had beaten him and tossed him out of their car when he promised to pay them $10,000; that he had been picked up and kidnaped by a rival gang at the corner of 50th Street and Broadway and then beaten as a warning to stay away from their territory, and then dumped on Staten Island; that he had been seized by Maranzano's men at that Broadway corner and rescued at the Staten Island ferry by Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, who found him badly beaten and then drove him to Staten Island to create a mystery; that he had been beaten by Federal agents who found him on a Staten Island pier, waiting for a shipment of whiskey or narcotics; that he had been beaten by a policeman, the father of a girl he had gotten pregnant. Luciano himself refused to give a satisfactory explanation, permitting the rumors to grow and, with them, his reputation as "Lucky" Luciano.

Though Luciano, in concert with his close friends Costello, Genovese, Lansky and others, had long been determined to dispose of both Maranzano and Masseria (preferably in that order) and take over himself, the Staten Island episode convinced him that the project was becoming urgent. Events of the next weeks would also persuade him to reverse his priorities and strike at Masseria first.

For, if the bid to Luciano had failed, Maranzano was making progress elsewhere, particularly in his approaches to Gaetano Reina. An educated and cultured man, Reina had less in common personally with his ally Masseria than with his supposed enemy, Maranzano, with whom he occasionally dined and enjoyed long talks about books, music and other common interests. Moreover, Masseria's demand for a bigger cut of Reina's rackets was becoming more insistent, so the course of conversations between Maranzano and Reina began to take a different tack. Secretly, they agreed that Reina would sever his ties with Joe the Boss and throw in with Maranzano. Such a move would start a flood of desertions from the Masseria cause and turn the battle to Maranzano.

While the meetings and the arrangements were clandestine, word of them soon leaked out to other young rebels in the underworld. Word also got back to Masseria. Such treachery, combined with Reina's adamant resistance to the dictates of the leader, threw Joe the Boss into one of his uncontrollable rages. He ordered Reina killed. On February 26, 1930, just after eight in the evening, Reina left the home of a friend in the Bronx. Waiting for him on the sidewalk was the Masseria killer, a shotgun in his arms. The assassin called to Reina and, as the older man turned, his head was blown off. As befitting a man of stature in the underworld, Reina had been shot from the front.

Masseria moved quickly to exploit the dispatch of the traitor Reina and assumed full control of his organization. Without consulting Reina's lieutenants, he appointed one Joseph Pinzolo--a personal lackey and an obese man whose appetite and gross behavior rivaled Masseria's--as the new boss of the Reina gang. Tom Gagliano, Dominick "The Gap" Petrilli and Tommy "Three-Finger Brown" Lucchese refused to accept this dictate. They resumed the secret negotiations with Maranzano that Reina had begun and they plotted Pinzolo's overthrow. In September, the moment arrived. Lucchese invited Pinzolo to a meeting at his office, a legitimate front called the California Dry Fruit Importers, in the Brokaw Building on Broadway. Pinzolo walked into the office but not out. A stretcher bearing his body with two bullets in it carried him to the morgue. Lucchese was indicted for the murder, but, not unexpectedly, the charges were dismissed. (According to Valachi, the real killer was a former prize fighter turned gunman named Girolamo Santucci, who went under the name of Bobby Doyle; Lucchese, Valachi said, was not even present.)

With Pinzolo gone, Gagliano took control of the Reina gang, with Lucchese and Petrilli his chief aides. Then Gagliano secretly and successfully concluded the negotiations with Maranzano. Masseria, for the moment, was not aware of the treachery and desertions, though the younger members of the hierarchy--Luciano, Costello, Genovese and others--not only knew about it but had supported the moves as advantageous to their own longterm schemes.

It was apparent to these younger mobsters, and to some of the older ones as well, that the Castellammarese war, as it came to be called, would not end until at least one of the main antagonists was killed. Joe the Boss, apparently still confident of his own invincibility, made few overt moves against Maranzano. In the fall of 1930, he managed to dry up one source of Maranzano's income by encouraging Chicago's Al Capone to rub out Joe Aiello--which he did in the grand Chicago manner. One October evening, Aiello stepped outside his expensive West Side apartment building and into the cross fire from two Thompson submachine guns and a sawed-off shotgun and died from 59 bullet wounds. But, for the most part, Masseria seemed content to pick off isolated and lower-ranking Castellammarese, to hijack Maranzano trucks and otherwise only nettle his rival.

Maranzano, the balance now tipping toward him, was less restrained. An ex-Capone gunman known only as Buster from Chicago had been imported to cut down Masseria's chief bodyguard and executioner, Pietro "The Clutching Hand" Morello and other Masseria associates. Years later, Valachi would describe how he, Buster, Profaci, Doyle, Nick "The Thief" Capuzzi and several other Maranzano gunmen rented an apartment in the Bronx directly across from that of Masseria underling Steve Ferrigno and for several weeks lay in wait for the mobster. During that watch, they missed an opportunity to get Masseria himself, when he showed up for a meeting, but on November 5, 1930, they nailed Ferrigno and Al Mineo when they emerged from the apartment; three shotgun blasts ended their careers.

There would be estimates later that more than 60 hoodlums were gunned down during the Castellammarese war, the casualties occurring not only in New York but also around the country, wherever supporters of Masseria and Maranzano met head on. By the early months of 1931, neither side had emerged victorious, but the bloodletting was bringing unwanted publicity and heat. In New York, Masseria's friends in the upper reaches of the police department called him in and ordered him to put an end to the killings, or the department's cops would be turned loose. Joe the Boss complied to the extent of ordering most of his gunmen to shoot only when shot at, though he still had some top guns out looking for Maranzano.

Maranzano, however, with a kingdom to win, would agree to no truce and kept his troops on the offensive. Other Mafia leaders around the country began to worry, became impatient for a conclusion to the battle. As Capone's indiscriminate bloodletting in Chicago had brought unwelcomed heat on the whole underworld, so the Castellammarese blood bath was bringing official reaction against the Italian element. The elder dons tried to mediate. At a council just outside New York in the first months of 1931, they demanded an end to the battle. Masseria did not attend, sending word that he was already trying to do just that and that his men were killing only in self-defense. Maranzano, however, surrounded by bodyguards, did show up, made an eloquent assault on Masseria as a disgrace to the Mafia and a man who had committed uncounted crimes against everyone in the underworld. Then he demanded the revocation of the death sentence against him and its replacement by a death sentence against Masseria. The council agreed to the former but would not go so far as to order the death of one of its major rulers.

The situation, inconclusive and enervating, was ideal for Luciano and the younger gangsters. Only someone close to Masseria, a Judas, would be able to kill him, and Luciano and his followers were in that position. They put their plan into operation by striking a bargain with Maranzano. Luciano would see to it that Masseria was killed; in return, Maranzano would ensure that Luciano took over as leader of the Masseria organization, that no reprisals would be exacted against those who had fought the Castellammarese and that peace and cooperation would be the rule in the Mafia thenceforth.

On April 15, 1931, after a hard morning's work at Masseria's fortress headquarters on Second Avenue in Lower Manhattan, Luciano invited Joe the Boss to lunch, suggesting that they take a long, leisurely drive out to Coney Island and dine at a favorite restaurant of the underworld, the Nuova Villa Tammaro, owned by a friend of gangsters, Gerardo Scarpato. A table was set for them in the center of the main dining room and Masseria ate with his usual gluttony, gorging himself on antipasto, spaghetti with white clam sauce, lobster fra diavolo and cream-filled pastries, and downing nearly a quart of chianti and a pot of black Italian coffee. Luciano, a modest diner, ate sparingly and sipped a glass of wine. By the time Masseria had finished his meal, the restaurant had emptied of the other diners. Luciano suggested a game of cards. Masseria agreed, though he said they should play for only an hour or so and then get back to the office for more work. Scarpato brought them a new pinochle deck and then left the restaurant for a quiet afternoon stroll along the beach.

For about 45 minutes, Luciano and Masseria played vigorously. Just before 3:30, Luciano excused himself, rose from the table and walked to the men's room. He had hardly closed the door when the front door of the restaurant opened and into the room walked Genovese, Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia and one of Luciano's oldest and closest friends in the non-Italian underworld, Bugsy Siegel. They had come, according to the story, at the bidding of Luciano, had parked outside the Nuova Villa Tammaro and waited for a signal. When it came, they left their car and walked inside, leaving the motor running and Ciro Terranova behind the wheel, prepared for a quick getaway.

Once inside the restaurant, the four pulled out revolvers and began shooting; more than 20 slugs ricocheted around the room, six finding a target inside the body of Giuseppe Masseria. He slumped forward, face down on the suddenly bloodsoaked white tablecloth, his right hand brushing the floor, dangling from it the ace of diamonds. As soon as they were certain Masseria was dead, the four killers raced out of the restaurant. But outside, a shaken and suddenly fear-ridden Terranova was frozen at the wheel of the car. Siegel pushed him aside, got behind the wheel himself and drove rapidly back to Manhattan.

When the echoes of the last shots and the fleeing footsteps had passed, Luciano strolled out of the washroom, studied the carnage in front of him and then telephoned the police. He waited for their arrival and explained to them that he had heard noises while in the toilet and "As soon as I finished drying my hands, I hurried out and walked back to see what it was all about." No, he said, he had not seen the killers and he had no idea why anyone would want to harm Joe the Boss.

Masseria's murder did not end the Castellammarese war; it only provided an interlude of truce. The end could not come until Maranzano had gone the same way. But in the weeks and months after Joe the Boss had been given the traditional gala send-off to the cemetery, Maranzano moved quickly and decisively to establish his supremacy in the Mafia. He proclaimed himself capo di tutti capi, and the title was formally bestowed, though not without some reluctance, at a conclave in Chicago at which more national Mafia rulers were absent than present. Then Maranzano held a formal coronation. There was a banquet in Brooklyn that lasted for days. All mafiosi, leaders and soldiers, in the New York area were invited to pay homage, and so, too, were mafiosi from around the country; those who couldn't attend sent substitutes. Maranzano, like the Caesar he had become, sat at the head table and to him ceremoniously came a parade of gangland overlords and underlords bearing gifts, envelopes stuffed with cash. Valachi would later claim that more than $100,000 was handed to Maranzano that night; others, higher in the honored society, would put the total at closer to $1,000,000.

Maranzano also gathered the members of the New York society in a Bronx meeting hall festooned with crosses, religious pictures, icons and other religious symbols. These were a cover in case some uninvited guest should appear, but they also reflected Maranzano's very deep and real religious convictions; he had, after all, once studied for the priesthood. More than 500 mafiosi attended. On a platform at one end of the room sat Maranzano, flanked by those who would be the princes in this new kingdom of the Italian underworld--Luciano, Gagliano, Profaci, Vincent Mangano and Bonanno.

Speaking in Italian, with an occasional lapse into Latin, Maranzano informed the hoodlums ranked before him that the chaos and the warring were over. From that moment on, the underworld (by which he meant the Italian-Sicilian underworld, for Maranzano gave little thought to any other segment) would be reorganized under his rule as capo di tutti capi. But, like the Caesar he imagined himself to be, he would thenceforth be above the battle; he would rule no separate gang but the whole thing. (From this eventually came the phrase Valachi would use in reference to the organization: Cosa Nostra, "Our Thing." The term acquired the status of a name probably because the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its director, J. Edgar Hoover, had for years insisted that organized crime was a figment of the imagination of crime writers, that the Mafia did not exist. In order to get Hoover off the hook, a new name had to be created, hence Cosa Nostra, though it bears about as much relevance to the organization as "doing your own thing.") Maranzano declared he would collect a share of everything reaped by all the mobs; later, he would tell the leaders how large a share, but it would be one befitting his stature as supreme ruler.

The Italian underworld, Maranzano said, would now undergo mergers and new alignments, out of which would come five New York "families"--a euphemism he coined to replace gangs or mobs. The families would control the world of crime under his authority; they would have noncompeting jurisdictions, both in territories and in spheres of operation, and each member at the meeting would belong to one of the families, each of which would be led by one of the five men ranked alongside him. Under each of these leaders, or capos, there would be an underboss, and under him would be several lieutenants, called caporegimi (according to Valachi), in charge of Mafia soldiers. Each man in the chain would be responsible to the leader a step above, who would himself be responsible for the actions of those below him. Rigid discipline would be the rule; every man, from bosses to soldiers, would obey the orders promulgated by Maranzano or suffer penalties, in some cases death. As for internal regulations, no man must ever, on pain of death, talk about the organization or his own family, even to his wife: he must never lust after the wife of another member: he must obey without question the orders of the leader above him: he must never strike another member, no matter the provocation. And Maranzano would be the supreme arbiter of all disputes, as he would be supreme in everything.

For the ordinary Mafia soldiers like Valachi, this was all stirring and somewhat frightening. But for those near the throne, it was considerably less than aweinspiring. They had not fought a war, had not sacrificed troops, money, time and energy and conspired in the murder of a leader to relinquish all their power and independence. Maranzano imagined himself a Caesar and, like Caesar, he was surrounded by Brutus, Cassius, Casca and other plotters.

Those who ruled the families under Maranzano were all relatively young men who had a great deal more in common with one another than with him. They were men too, who understood, as Maranzano did not, that the Mafia was only one element in the national underworld, and that its success required working closely and harmoniously with those other elements, the Jews, the Irish, even the WASPs where they held a major claim. Thus, rather than look to Maranzano, they began to look to Luciano for leadership, to him as the man who could lead them in a world that, as the Depression deepened and Repeal threatened, was radically changing.

Surrounded by bodyguards and ensconced in protected offices in the Grand Central Building at 46th Street and Park Avenue in New York, where he operated under a legitimate realestate front called The Eagle Building Corporation, Maranzano, like Masseria before him, thought himself secure. He was not. Luciano, working closely with Lansky, was surreptitiously sounding out those other underworld leaders of his generation, seeking their support for a plan to kill Maranzano and escape retribution. Messages crisscrossed the country and secret meetings were held, including a major one in Cleveland early in the summer of 1931. From these conversations among the younger gang leaders came the decision that not only Maranzano must go but all the old Mustache Petes aligned with him, who were logs in the road to progress.

With this widespread support, a devious plan was worked out to penetrate Maranzano's elaborate defenses. It was Lansky who came up with the solution. The only people outside his own blindly loyal circle who might be able to get close to Maranzano, and get him alone, would be Federal agents seeking to question him about taxes, bootlegging, immigration or one of his other rackets. He would have no reason to fear them. So a crew of Jewish gunmen, unknown to Maranzano or his close guards, would be imported, trained to look and act like Federal agents and then sent to Maranzano's office. Their guise would gain them entrance and, once inside, they could do what they had come for and escape into anonymity.

On the surface, Maranzano seemed unaware of the cabal. His suspicions were apparently not even raised when, during the Cleveland meeting, Luciano, Lansky, Michele "Mike" Miranda--a Luciano triggerman at the time--their Cleveland hosts and several other visiting gangsters were picked up at a prize fight and booked as suspicious characters. Maranzano accepted Luciano's explanation that he had gone to Cleveland for the sole purpose of seeing the fights; after all, he was an avid fight fan who often traveled long distances for that purpose.

But if on the surface Maranzano was calm, underneath he was very concerned, indeed. He told Valachi and other confidants that he did not trust Luciano and his friends and that as long as they were alive, he was not safe. So he set in motion a counterplot to eliminate them. He drew up a list of those he considered his prime enemies--Luciano, Genovese, Costello, Adonis, Willie Moretti, Dutch Schultz, who was Luciano's close friend in non-Italian circles, and a number of others--and marked them for execution. And then, like those plotting against him, he searched for an outside gunman and hired the notorious young killer Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll to be the executioner.

It became a race to see who would kill whom first. But Maranzano was acting only on his suspicions. Late in the summer, Luciano had facts. He was tipped by a friend to exactly what Maranzano planned. He was even told that he and Genovese would be invited to Maranzano's office for an important conference and when they arrived, Coll would be waiting with his guns. The invitation, then, would be the bell that set Luciano's own plot in motion.

It rang on September 10, 1931. Luciano and Genovese were requested to appear at Maranzano's office at two in the afternoon. Just before two, Maranzano waited for their arrival with his secretary, five armed bodyguards and Luciano's close friend, Tommy Lucchese, the underboss in the Gagliano family, who had dropped in unexpectedly. Lucchese had barely arrived when the door burst open and four men stormed in. They identified themselves as Federal agents and demanded a conference with Maranzano in private.

Maranzano readily identified himself; he had never seen the men before and had no suspicion that they were anything but what they said, for his lawyers had warned him that he ought to expect agents to come calling one day. Maranzano's own identification was confirmed by Lucchese--who was there, as it happened, as the finger man in case of trouble.

The four "agents" pulled out revolvers and lined everyone up against the office wall, shaking down the men and relieving them of their guns. Two of the agents then shoved their guns into Maranzano's back and ordered him into his private office for questioning. Once inside, they set upon him, first trying to strangle him, then pulling knives to stab him to death, trying to commit murder with as little furor as possible. But Maranzano was stronger than he looked and fought back relentlessly; the killers had no choice; they pulled out their guns and blasted away. Maranzano collapsed with six stab wounds, his throat cut and four bullets in his head and body.

The two killers rushed out and, joined by the two who had remained guarding those in the outer office, fled the scene. As they disappeared, Maranzano's bodyguards fled, too, in fear of their own lives and to avoid being found in the office with the corpse. As they raced down the stairs, one of them collided with Mad Dog Coll, on his way up to keep his appointment. He was told what had happened. With Maranzano's money in his pocket, no contract to fulfill and no one to accept a refund, Coll simply turned and walked away.

Through the early afternoon, Luciano, Genovese, Lansky and the other conspirators waited anxiously for the news and then proceeded according to plan. In later years, the rumors of what had happened on that night, which came to be called the Night of the Sicilian Vespers, multiplied: Supposedly, Luciano's killers began a purge of Maranzano followers in New York and Luciano's allies followed suit all over the country, with more than 40 mafiosi falling before dawn. But no one has ever been able to compile a list, and the only clearly established victim of that purge was Scarpato, owner of the Coney Island restaurant where Masseria had met his end.

The death of Maranzano brought to an end the old ways and gave birth to crime as a fledgling national organization in which the Italian Mafia worked not alone but in concert with other elements in the underworld. Within weeks of the murder, a new criminal conclave was called, this time in Chicago. Despite his own mounting tax troubles, Capone was a generous host, providing accommodations, food, girls, entertainment and plenty of police protection at the Congress Hotel. Though it was essentially an Italian-dominated conference to proclaim Luciano's arrival as the most powerful Italian boss in the nation, there were observers and participants from the non-Italian underworld.

Those who went to that meeting went prepared to attend the coronation of Luciano as the new capo di tutti capi. The efficiency and dispatch with which he had handled the Masseria and Maranzano affairs, his ideas and outlook, his ambition and manner had brought him both fame and the respect of his underworld peers. But Luciano would have none of it. Knowing the fate of others who aspired to supreme rule and who publicly boasted of their new position, he categorically rejected the title and its implicit powers. He rejected, too, the envelopes stuffed with bills that were offered to him as the new ruler. What Luciano recognized was that in spurning the title publicly, in showing himself modest, just one of the boys, the power and the position would devolve upon him in fact. His demeanor would win him more than a formal title.

Luciano had discussed beforehand with Lansky and Costello just what he would do at the meeting, and now he outlined his ideas for the future--a nationwide gambling Syndicate, legal liquor when Prohibition ended--ideas that were accepted with hardly a dissenting voice. There would be no more internecine warfare and, too, the days of total independence of one Italian mob from others and from the rest of the underworld were over. Everyone had better understand that cooperation and consolidation, a sense of order and business that emulated the great corporations were the orders of the day. This national combination would be ruled by a national commission on which the leaders of the major mobs would sit and at which all major policy decisions would be discussed and passed on. All members of the commission would be equals. Charlie Lucky would be the chairman (this decided by unanimous vote), but he emphasized that his voice and his vote would count for no more than anyone else's. While voting membership in the commission would be restricted to Italians, it was time to start bringing the Italian underworld into closer relationship with other groups, so some non-Italians--Lansky and Moe Dalitz, in particular--should sit at the meetings, have a voice although no vote. This was agreeable to Lansky and Dalitz, for they knew they could still guide policy and yet escape the heat; the Italians would be in the light, right out in front, and the over-world would soon forget that anyone but an Italian was a major factor in organized crime.

The make-up of the new ruling commission revealed the importance that the Italians, and organized crime in general, placed on New York. There were five New York members, the leaders of the five local Mafia families: Luciano, Mangano, Profaci, Bonanno and Gagliano. The two others were outlanders, Frankie Milano from Cleveland (where he worked closely with Dalitz) and Capone from Chicago. Capone's membership was brief; he was soon in prison and replacing him on the council was Paul "The Waiter" Ricca, who himself would later be succeeded by Tony Accardo.

That Chicago meeting at the Congress Hotel in the autumn of 1931 was a crucial one in the history of organized crime in America. Until then, the Mafia, or whatever one wants to call it, had been narrow and suspicious, operating on its own as a world unto itself. Now, under the prodding of Luciano and his youthful peers, it was emerging at last from the ghettos, from the Little Italys. It was not yet ready to take its place as an equal with the other ethnic and/or heterogeneous groups in the criminal structure. Integration was by no means complete. But under Luciano, this could and would take place and the Mafia would enter the modern world. Within three years, it would finally join forces with the other outfits to form a truly national Syndicate that cut across all racial, sectional, ethnic and factional lines.

After the Chicago meeting, Luciano was at the top, boss, in fact, of the Italian underworld. He had changed it, modernized it and made it ready for the heady new times that were arriving, times when the nation was in despair but the underworld was in flower.

This is the fourth in a series of articles on organized crime in the United States.