by Tim Newark
“He was a thin man with a full head of black hair and a scarred and pockmarked face,” he recalled. “He walked obliquely, lurching slightly to the side. His Sicilian was scant, but what words he knew he spoke well. He usually expressed himself in American street slang. But he was not a big talker; he liked to get to the point without any flourishes.”
They met at a private house in Brooklyn and Luciano was accompanied by Vito Genovese. The two chief mobsters spoke briefly and without naming Masseria.
“Do you know why you are here?” asked Maranzano.
Luciano nodded.
“Then I don’t have to tell you what has to be done.”
Luciano said he would organize it over the next two weeks and would personally take charge of it.
“Good,” said Maranzano, “I’m looking forward to a peaceful Easter.”
In bright midday sunshine on April 15, 1931, Joe the Boss drove his steel-armored sedan with inch-thick bulletproof windows to Coney Island for lunch with Charlie Luciano and two associates known to both of them. They were meeting at Nuovo Villa Tammaro, a newly built two-story restaurant at 2715 West Fifteenth Street, where the owner’s mother-in-law, Anna Tammaro, cooked excellent Italian seafood. Masseria liked his food and was anticipating a friendly chat about business. He arrived shortly after 1:00 P.M. and ordered spaghetti with red clam sauce and lobster, all washed down with some Tuscan red wine. Luciano picked at his food and marveled at Masseria’s huge appetite; he touched little of the wine. After the meal, Luciano suggested all four men play some cards, but first he had to go to the restroom.
“At 2 o’clock the quiet of the little street near the bay was broken by the roar of gunfire,” said a newspaper report. “Two or three men walked out of the restaurant to an automobile parked at the curb and drove away. When the police got there they found Mrs. Tammaro bending over the body of Joe the Boss. He lay on his back. In his left hand was clutched a brand new ace of diamonds.”
The card was an invented embellishment, based on the fact that a deck of cards was scattered over the floor of the restaurant. On the table were several banknotes and a small amount of silver—about $35 in all. An autopsy showed that Masseria was shot three times in the back and twice in the neck and face, just above the eye, as he turned around to see his killers.
Legend has it that Luciano remained at the scene when the police arrived, looking bewildered. He’d gone for a “long leak” and the next thing he knew his lunch guest was sprawled across the floor dead. He’d seen nothing and neither had the restaurant owner who’d gone out for a long walk. Anna Tammaro had been in the kitchen and not surprisingly the dining room was empty of customers. In truth, none of the contemporary news reports mention Luciano being there, so most likely he left with the assassins.
Four hours later, the getaway car was found abandoned at West First Street in Brooklyn. Three pistols were recovered from the backseat, one fully loaded. Two more pistols were found in the alley alongside the restaurant. In total, four guns had been used. Three abandoned hats and coats were found in the restaurant, presumably belonging to the killers. They all came from Brooklyn shops.
The whole lunch had been a setup. When Luciano glanced at his watch and left the table—more likely 3:30 P.M. than the 2:00 P.M. reported—that was the signal for the gunmen parked across the road. Two of Luciano’s top hit men walked into the restaurant and let loose a storm of shots alongside two other mobsters already inside. The assassins are said to have been Bugsy Siegel, Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia, and Joe Adonis. Five bullets entered Masseria’s body as he dragged the tablecloth with him to the ground. That four key gangsters had been chosen for this job meant that no one gunman could be hunted down. If any of Masseria’s crew wanted vengeance they’d have to come after all of them. It was a clear signal from Luciano to the underworld—this was an end to the fighting.
Luciano was happy to take personal responsibility for the killing of Joe the Boss because he was not merely carrying out a task for Maranzano. Nick Gentile was at Luciano’s home when he heard him make this declaration to a fellow mafioso.
“Tell your compare, Maranzano, we have killed Masseria, not to serve him but for our own personal reasons. Tell him besides that if he should touch even a hair of even a personal enemy of ours, we will wage war to the end.”
It was a straight challenge to the wily old Sicilian, but for the moment he chose to ignore it and there were celebrations among the Castellammaresi. They had won the war. Maranzano marked his victory by calling a meeting of all his Mafia family henchmen—some five hundred in all—in a big hall in the Bronx. Such a public display violated everything Luciano had learned from Rothstein about keeping in the shadows and did not bode well for the reign of the Castellammarese clan. But Maranzano wanted everyone to know about his victory, and he strutted before his gangster minions like a politician. The room was hung with Christian icons and a massive crucifix hung over the end of the hall where Maranzano sat. If any unwelcome visitor entered, they were supposed to think it was a religious meeting.
Maranzano had a grand vision for organized crime in New York and he wanted to lay it out so everyone knew where they stood. Joseph Valachi was witness to it.
“I didn’t know until later that he was a nut about Julius Caesar,” said Valachi, “and even had a room in his house full of nothing but books about him. That’s where he got the idea of the new organization.”
Maranzano addressed the hall in Italian and declared himself Capo di tutti Capi—“Boss of all Bosses.” From now on, every one of New York’s major Sicilian gangs would be organized into five families. Each family or borgata would be headed by a boss with an underboss. They would be advised by a consigliere. Beneath them were ranked lieutenants and they would command the ordinary gunmen known as “soldiers.”
The bosses of the five recognized families were Charlie Luciano, taking over from Masseria, Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, Tom Gagliano, and Vincent Mangano. Vito Genovese was named as Luciano’s underboss.
“Whatever happened in the past is over,” said Maranzano.
“There is to be no more ill feeling among us. If you lost someone in the past war of ours, you must forgive and forget. If your own brother was killed, don’t try to find out who did it to get even. If you do, you pay with your life.”
Maranzano’s rules stated that no member of a family could touch a member of another family without first clearing it at a meeting of the heads of the families. Senior members of the Cosa Nostra—“our thing”—were untouchable.
A separate celebration was organized by Maranzano on August 1, 1931, at the same Coney Island restaurant where Masseria was killed. It turned into a three-day banquet to which all the top mafiosi from around the country were invited.
“On a costly and sumptuously decorated immense table towered a majestic tray,” recalled Nick Gentile, “in which, those who came, placed handfuls of dollars. A group of highspirited boys provided to receive guests greeted them with ‘Long live our Capo’ and conducted the guests to the tray, watching the offering. Many of them, trying to look like noblemen, did not make offerings of less than $500. On that night, Maranzano picked up $100,000.”
Gentile was careful to listen to Marazano’s conversation to a fellow Mob chief. “This victory has intoxicated me,” said Maranzano. “I feel like I am in a ball of fire. I wish I were going to Germany to be more secure.”
It was an odd statement to make—only fully explained by later revelations. Gentile interpreted it as a sign of weakness from someone positioning himself as capo over everyone else. At the end of the feast, the donated sum of $100,000 was supposed to have been distributed to relatives of victims of the gang war, but Maranzano pocketed it all.
As far as Luciano was concerned, the assassination of Masseria had been very good for him. It placed him among the top six gangsters in New York, but having risen so high in organized crime, he was very tempted to press on and eliminate Maranzano to become boss of bosses. The mo
mentum that had begun with the killing of Masseria was hard to stop. Maranzano might be good at speeches, but it was Luciano’s gunmen who ended Masseria’s rule. The setup was too attractive—just one more slaying and Luciano would be top of the pile.
On a personal level, Luciano had never liked the posturing Maranzano. He was too imperious and had brought old-world manners to New York City. Among these was a Sicilian prejudice against Jews. Lansky had warned Luciano of this attitude, and when Maranzano invited Luciano to accompany him on a trip to visit Al Capone in Chicago to explain the new regime, Luciano asked him if Lansky could come along, too.
“All right,” said Maranzano, “but he can’t be in the room with us when we meet.”
This profoundly irritated Luciano. Not only was Lansky an old friend from the Lower East Side, but he was also a much valued criminal ally and financial partner. There was no room for this nonsense in Luciano’s modern world of crime.
This personal animosity was not lost on Maranzano, who revealed his own anxiety to Valachi.
“I can’t get along with those guys,” he said of Luciano and Genovese. “We got to get rid of them before we can control anything.”
He also added Frank Costello, Willie Moretti, Joe Adonis, Dutch Schultz, even Al Capone, to his list of undesirables.
Word of this hit list got to Luciano, and he prepared his response with a degree of irony. If Maranzano so undervalued the importance of Jewish gangsters, then it was they who could deal with him. Luciano recruited a crew of Jewish gunmen from out of town led by Samuel “Red” Levine. An observant Jew from Toledo, Ohio, Levine saw no conflict between his faith and his job, and if he had to carry out a hit on the Sabbath he would simply wear a yarmulke under his hat.
In the meantime, says Gentile, whenever Luciano visited Maranzano he always made sure he was accompanied by five bodyguards, and if Maranzano asked him for his home address, Luciano said he did not have a permanent residence.
While Lansky oversaw the instruction of Levine and his team in the Bronx, Maranzano also went outside the Sicilian community to hire an Irish gunman—Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll. When Luciano and Genovese got the call to see Maranzano at his smart new office suite above Grand Central Station at 270 Park Avenue in September 1931, Luciano activated his own assassination plot.
Just after lunch, on September 10, four men arrived at Maranzano’s office and identified themselves as Internal Revenue Service agents. Maranzano had been having trouble with his tax records, and Tommy Lucchese, an associate of both Maranzano and Luciano, had passed this information on to Luciano. Expecting a call from the IRS, Maranzano’s bodyguards let in the men. The guards were unarmed because their boss had told them to leave their guns at home in case of just such a surprise audit. It was a fatal mistake.
“When I arrived at the Park Avenue office,” said gang member James Alascia, “I found Maranzano and others lined up with their faces against the wall. I was told to face the wall.”
Maranzano was asked to step into an office by himself, which he did, still considering the men to be IRS agents. With the door closed behind them, Levine and a second hit man pulled out knives to kill him quietly, but Maranzano was strong for his age and fought back. Alongside six stab wounds, the Jewish assassins had to shoot him four times before he fell. They then cut his throat to make sure he was dead.
A stenographer who worked for Maranzano told a slightly different story to the police. She was in the office suite at the time and said she saw three men pin him against the wall—“one of the trio slashed him with knife. Then the three backed away and fired five shots at him.”
The assassins left the building with no one daring to stop them. A little later the same day, Vincent Coll arrived at the Park Avenue offices to see Maranzano but was told he was dead. He shrugged his shoulders and quickly departed, keeping the cash advance he had been given to kill Luciano. Five months later, Coll was shot dead by Bugsy Siegel in a telephone booth.
In the subsequent police investigation, it was discovered that a main source of Maranzano’s wealth was not the usual business of the Mafia but the smuggling of illegal immigrants into the country on a massive scale. The majority of documents in his Park Avenue office revealed a ring of corrupt officials and human traffickers that led all the way to Germany—finally explaining his earlier statement about feeling safer in that country. Several associated gangsters were arrested there. They were responsible for easing the entry of eight thousand illegal aliens into the United States at a total price of $20,000,000. It was a staggering sum and with this money Maranzano had been able to bribe judges and immigration officials in Washington as well as provide counterfeit documents.
Alongside Luciano’s transatlantic drug network, this people-trafficking business was an indication of the global stretch of organized crime in New York in the early 1930s. The pot of gold available to ambitious mobsters was growing by the day. It also put the lie to the perception that Maranzano was an old-fashioned gangster. His many rackets were a vast and sophisticated operation. In the end, it just came down to a face-off between two distinctly different criminal characters.
Even Joseph Bonanno, who had been so impressed by Maranzano when he first arrived in America, agreed that his personal attitude did not suit New York in 1931. “Maranzano represented a style that often clashed with that of the Americanized men who surrounded him,” said Bonanno, who shortly after the man’s death made his own peace with Luciano.
The night after Maranzano’s death, according to Mafia legend, several gangsters closely associated with him were also slaughtered. This has subsequently been dubbed “The Night of the Sicilian Vespers,” after a notorious massacre in medieval Sicily. Although the number of killings has been estimated at forty, just a handful of murders have been actually identified, and it appears that few underlings had to be eliminated to ensure peace. Maranzano’s henchmen were more than happy to escape death and join the enterprise of their new boss, and that included gunmen like Joe Valachi.
It was Nick Gentile who claimed to have devised what should happen next to avoid any further bloodshed among the Italian Mob. Instead of conferring the title of boss of bosses on one man, “who might become inflated with importance and therefore commit unjustified atrocities,” he recommended the setting up of a commission of seven top mafiosi. These included the heads of the Five Families—Luciano, Mangano, Profaci, Bonanno, and Gagliano—plus Capone in Chicago and Ciccio Milano of Cleveland.
“With the administration of the Commission,” said Gentile, “a more confident air was breathed. Peace returned and everybody could peacefully perform their individual labors. Everybody remained satisfied because justice had been done. The administration or governing body, so composed, gave assurances of confidence because each person was able to turn to them without being coerced as to their own ideas and free to be able to ask for their proper rights.”
It all sounded like the League of Nations, but Luciano was not that interested in such lofty ideals. He always hated the pretensions of the traditional Sicilian mafiosi and was more interested in exploiting his business connections among the wider underworld community.
The Castellammarese War and Luciano’s triumph is usually portrayed as the victory of a modernizing American Mob over the Mustache Petes. Yet many of the traditional Sicilian mafiosi, such as Bonanno and Profaci, remained in charge of their families for decades afterward. Luciano had not and did not seek to remove all these old-style Sicilian mafiosi from New York. He simply wished to stop them interfering with his own criminal enterprises. In that he succeeded spectacularly. No one would mess with Luciano for the next five years. He was in his thirties and it was time for him to enjoy his success.
As for Nick Gentile, he was cut out of the new order, ending up as a narcotics smuggler.
“The men of importance of the Mafia, old foxes of New York,” he lamented, “had monopolized and cornered the positions that were most profitable. These men had forgotten me, whom they had used to re
solve many risky situations, and risking my life especially during the struggle against Maranzano, during which I had played an important role and for which I was threatened with death many times … Oh ingratitude of humanity!”
That was just the kind of flamboyant Sicilian statement that irritated Luciano.
6
TOP OF THE PILE
Charlie Luciano was a multimillionaire, but unlike his teenage friend Al Capone, he chose not to live in a palatial mansion protected by an army of bodyguards. He preferred the luxurious anonymity of plush hotels. In the early 1930s, Luciano lived first at the Barbizon-Plaza and then at the Waldorf Towers, part of the Waldorf-Astoria. Possibly the finest hotel in the world at that time, the new Waldorf-Astoria was the height of luxury living and was the tallest and largest hotel in the country. Replacing the old Belle Epoch building—which had been demolished to make way for the Empire State Building—the hotel opened at 301 Park Avenue in October 1931. When the Waldorf-Astoria first opened its doors, President Herbert Hoover delivered the welcome address. Its interiors included entire rooms taken from English country houses and refashioned into private clubs and dining suites. The Starlight Roof supper club had a retractable roof so you could dance under the stars, while the grand ballroom was the only four-story dance floor in the city—but it was the modernity of its Art Deco interiors that marked it as something extra special.
When Luciano stepped out from suite 39C in the Waldorf Towers, he would descend to the ground floor of the Waldorf-Astoria in a wood-paneled elevator fronted with nickel-plated doors portraying ancient Greek muses. He then strolled across a golden yellow Wheel of Life mosaic floor, past palm trees and giant silver urns, into the Park Avenue lobby adorned with French neoclassical murals portraying heroic men hunting animals and hauling in fish. It was a long way from the tenement blocks of the Lower East Side.
Sometimes, however, rich hotel living bored Luciano and he yearned for simpler pleasures, like home cooking. Peter Ross was in charge of room service at the Barbizon-Plaza between 1934 and 1935 and on one occasion noted that Luciano had ordered a table, dishes, and silverware to be sent to his room but, unusually, no food. Puzzled and wanting to ensure first-class service for his guest, Ross knocked on the door of the room. When Luciano answered, the two spoke in Italian, as Ross was a Florentine Jew. As he stepped in the room, he could see Luciano was entertaining two friends and in the middle of the table was a large dish of Italian spaghetti. Luciano explained that the pasta had been brought over by one of his guests, whose mother had cooked it in Brooklyn for them.
