Garden State Gangland

by Scott M. Deitche

  The criminal activities that plagued the Italian immigrant community in the First Ward brought attention from a local advocate, Detective Thomas Adubato, the first Italian detective in Newark. The imposing officer, who “stood well over six feet tall and sported a thick handlebar mustache,”[7] made it his mission to take on the Black Hand gangs. His contemporaries in the Newark PD considered him “by far the best detective in homicide cases Newark has known in years.”[8] Adubato himself was no stranger to confrontation and did not hesitate to use force when necessary. While investigating a case in a saloon in 1909 the saloonkeeper drew a revolver and shot at Adubato five times, hitting the detective in the arm. In turn, the detective drew his revolver and shot the man dead.

  On August 16, 1918, Adubato, home in bed, sick, was visited by fellow officers. A local gangster had shot and killed another man in Newark, and the police officers wanted some advice. Instead Adubato got dressed and joined them. He caught the trail of the suspect and followed him to a tenement on the Lower East Side in New York City. Adubato recruited a fellow New York officer to accompany him into the building to arrest the suspect. Adubato “burst in the door and was about to enter the rooms when a volley of shots rang out.”[9] The suspect shot both Adubato and the New York officer. Despite being hit by bullets, Adubato carried the injured New York officer down five flights of stairs, got the officer into the patrol car, and drove to safety. Unfortunately, Adubato’s wounds proved to be too much for the detective, and he died a few hours later at Bellevue Hospital.[10]

  By the late 1910s the underworld in Newark was a mix of various gangs, mostly street-level. Over the next decade, some of the gangs would merge and grow, while others drifted away. Black Hand activities started to wane after the federal government began cracking down on the mailing of Black Hand letters and punishments for the crimes associated with the threats increased. So, too, as Italians became more comfortable with their new homeland, the fear of going to the police started to abate somewhat, though extortion maintained its place in the mob’s hierarchy of criminal rackets for decades to come.

  Some of the gangs were led by future gambling-syndicate and Mafia leaders. There was a Neapolitan gang in the First Ward and a group in the Jewish Third Ward, and there were independent gangs in the Ironbound. But there were also two nascent Sicilian Mafia groups in the area that were bringing in the organization of the Old World syndicates. One of the early New Jersey Mafia families was based out of Elizabeth and the other a homegrown Newark entity.

  The Elizabeth crew rose to become New Jersey’s only homegrown Mafia family, while the Newark group split apart, sending recruits to Mafia families across the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area. It is this latter family that has largely been a mystery to researchers and historians working to piece together the history of the Mafia in the United States. With scraps of information gleaned from after-the-fact accounts, a picture begins to emerge of this enigmatic crime syndicate. There is very little known for sure about the Newark Mafia family, but one of the early heads of that organization was a Newark businessman, Gaspare D’Amico. Born in Villabate, Palermo, in 1886, D’Amico left Palermo for America in April of 1910, aboard the SS Re d’Italia, an ocean liner that had been launched in 1906 and accommodated over two thousand passengers. He arrived in New York City on April 19, 1910, and was processed through Ellis Island. By the 1920s, D’Amico ran the D’Amico Macaroni Company on Drift Street in the First Ward. He lived just north of the neighborhood in a well-appointed apartment building.

  While D’Amico’s hold on the Newark crime family appeared to be strong, there were rumblings of a challenge from a newcomer to the area, Vincent Troia. He was an interesting mob character. Born in Italy, Troia lived in both Rockford, Illinois, and Madison, Wisconsin, where he was involved in a number of rackets, especially bootlegging. He is listed in some FBI reports as an early member of the Madison crime family, while some researchers peg him as an early boss of the Springfield, Illinois, crime family, where he lived for a short time. Then there is his involvement in the Rockford area, which developed its own independent crime family. Other sources note that Troia was close to Salvatore Maranzano, one of the early heads of the Mafia in New York City, who ascended to power following the assassination of Joe “the Boss” Masseria in Coney Island on April 15, 1931.

  Troia was indicted in Rockford in the mid-1930s for the illicit production of liquor, but by that time he had moved to Newark. The reasons for his relocation are not known. It’s not clear whether he was brought there by other Mafia figures, like Maranzano, or he went of his own accord to avoid law-enforcement pressure in Illinois. What is known is that once he was in Newark, Troia quickly moved into illegal gambling and the local numbers rackets. FBI files indicate he was the “operator of the Two Eagles Italian Lottery, one of four such lotteries operating in the City of Newark.”[11] He moved to the Roseville neighborhood, just west of Branch Brook Park.

  Troia began to make moves against D’Amico with the intent of taking control of the Newark family. Here too, it’s unclear whether he had the backing of one of the New York families or he was acting alone. He did have a small crew of men under him, so he was not operating in a vacuum, and his emergence on the scene certainly did not go unnoticed by D’Amico. And D’Amico was certainly hearing chatter that Troia was gunning for him. But the wily D’Amico decided to make the first move, to head off a major war.

  On the morning of August 22, 1935, Vincent Troia and one of his men, Frank Longo, were at a candy store at 317 South Sixth Street in Newark. Longo was from Springfield, Illinois—where, recall, Troia also had lived for a short time—and had moved to the nearby town of Bloomfield, New Jersey. Four other men, including Jerome Bevinetto and Antonio Sunsara, who had been left in charge of the candy store while the owner was visiting Italy, and Vincent’s stepson, Joseph Troia, were playing cards at a table in the middle of the one-story building. It was believed that the location was one of the headquarters for Troia’s lottery operations.

  Just before 11 a.m. a black sedan pulled up on the curb outside the store, which sat at the northwest corner of Sixth Street and Fifteenth Avenue, just west of downtown. Three men got out. According to reports, “one man held two revolvers, two others one each. They stood in the doorway and sprayed twenty shots into the small store.”[12] Vincent Troia was hit in the upper back and killed instantly, as was Longo. Joseph Troia and the other card players were hit at the table; two of them managed to crawl away.

  The gunmen got back into the black sedan—which was registered to a man in Union City, New Jersey, who had reported it stolen back in March—and sped away. Police later recovered the car not too far from the scene with the murder weapons still inside. People who lived around the candy store were out in force to see what the commotion was all about. As the newspaper described it, the neighborhood, “inhabited principally by Italians, was thrown into an uproar.”[13]

  Back at the candy store, the initial thought was that it had been an argument over the card game, as the place was a mess of cards all over the floor. But police also found lottery slips and quickly took a view that this had been a gangland killing. Police held the two survivors, Nicholas “Big Nick” Calliachi and Charles Barraco, as material witnesses, hoping to glean any information they could as to why the shooting had occurred. Authorities also stepped across state lines to arrest Leonardo Cippoli, a Brooklyn resident about whom police received a tip. After witnesses failed to place him at the scene, he was released.

  At the hospital Joseph Troia was falling in and out of consciousness, awakening long enough to see two detectives glowering over him. They repeatedly asked Joseph who the assailants were, but he refused to give them any information and fell back under. Within a few days, Joseph Troia succumbed to his injuries. Police were no closer to finding the killer.

  It’s unclear who ordered the hit on Troia, but it’s likely that D’Amico took the opportunity to strike first against Troia’s incursions. Some sources suggest that T
roia had slapped D’Amico in front of his men, enraging the leader. Or it could have been internal wrangling over lottery operations in the Troia faction. Immediately after the shooting, police believed that “the men were shot by gunmen hired by proprietors of a rival lottery.”[14] That could have, of course, included D’Amico and his men.

  Regardless of the reason for the Troia shooting, with his rival out of the way, D’Amico retained leadership of the Newark family. But that time at the top would not last long. Around 11:30 a.m. on February 22, 1937, Gaspare and his father, Domenico, were packing macaroni on the ground floor of their factory. A few employees were working on the second floor, but most of the staff had the day off. A lone hit man, armed with a revolver, walked into the factory—without anyone giving him a second glance—and started shooting. Gunshots erupted through the factory, hitting Gaspare and his father. The employees upstairs came running down, while the gunman dropped his revolver and took off in a waiting car. Gaspare and his father lay on the ground bleeding.

  Domenico was shot in the chest and leg, while Gaspare was hit in the abdomen and leg. Ambulances arrived and took the elder D’Amico to City Hospital and Gaspare to St. Michael’s. The newspapers described his father’s condition as critical immediately after the shooting, and the elder D’Amico did succumb to his wounds.[15] Gaspare recovered but was shaken by what had transpired.

  After the shooting it was clear to Gaspare that his days in Newark were numbered, so he left the city and the crime family.[16] Theories about the attempted assassination of D’Amico center on a falling-out he had with Joe Profaci, once his biggest supporter in the underworld. With D’Amico out of the picture, the Commission—the Mafia’s governing body—reportedly disbanded the Newark family, spreading the members around the New York families.

  The demise of the Newark Mafia family also allowed the expansion of another small family operating less than ten miles to the south of Newark, in the city of Elizabeth. This industrial town was less than a third of the size of Newark but had a small Mafia family already operating there, which would come to be known in later years as the DeCavalcante family. Lore, and some mobsters, says that it is one of the oldest operating mob families in the country, but its formative years are murky, as are its ties to the Newark family.

  A name that has been floated by some researchers over the years as the original boss of the family was Newark-based mobster Stefano Badami. Originally from Sicily, by the 1920s Badami was an influential member of the Newark family, though his official role is up for debate. Regardless, after the disbanding of the Newark family following D’Amico’s hasty retreat from Newark, Badami was alleged to have stepped in to oversee the Elizabeth faction. But the available evidence doesn’t necessarily back this up.

  Per records, Badami never lived in Elizabeth. In 1942 Badami lived in Orange, a town to the west of Newark. And while the proximity of the two cities doesn’t necessarily mean that Badami could have run the family from a distance (as latter bosses did), the early years of the Elizabeth family were very neighborhood-centric and comprised primarily of immigrants from the Ribera area of Sicily, which Badami was not (he was from Corleone, Sicily). There is also the absence of Badami’s name in wiretaps from the 1960s of Elizabeth crime family members, where they discuss the history of the crime family.

  More compelling evidence comes from famed Mafia turncoat Joe Valachi. In his 1963 testimony to the McClellan Commission, Valachi talks about the formative years of the Mafia in the New York City area, including New Jersey. Valachi refers to Badami (mistyped in the commission transcripts as Padami) as “Don Steven” and asserts that he was actually the boss of the Newark family by 1930 and that Sam Monaco was his underboss. Monaco was described by police at the time as a “high type racketeer and alcohol trader.”[17]

  While Badami stayed out of the limelight for the most part, Sam Monaco was gaining a higher profile in the underworld, mainly due to his loyalty to the new powerhouse in the New York Mafia, Salvatore Maranzano. After solidifying his powerful role in the early New York Mafia following the murder of Joe “The Boss” Masseria in April of 1931, Maranzano utilized a cadre of up-and-coming young mobsters to position himself for a long reign at the top of the mob. But his arrogance and hunger for power led to his downfall, less than five months after Masseria.

  Salvatore Maranzano was killed at 2 p.m. on the afternoon of September 10, 1931, at the New York Central Building at 230 Park Avenue in New York City. The self-appointed boss of bosses was visited by four gangsters recruited by Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. The hit men were dressed as police. Maranzano was unaware the police were gangsters and let them into his back office. As he walked them back in, they shot and stabbed him, leaving the mob boss to die on the floor.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Maranzano killing, an urban legend was born. Termed the Night of the Sicilian Vespers, it postulated that dozens of old-school mafiosi were killed at the hands of the younger, Americanized mobsters under the wing of Lucky Luciano. In reality there is little evidence to suggest that a large-scale mob purge occurred. However, there were some Maranzano loyalists who fell as a result of Luciano’s move against Maranzano.

  Just four days after the brazen killing of Salvatore Maranzano, two bodies were discovered in the Passaic River near Harrison, New Jersey, just up from the river’s mouth in Newark Bay. The first body was identified as Sam Monaco, Badami’s underboss. When police fished Monaco’s body out of Newark Bay, they found his head and jaws beaten in, his body tied with a clothesline, weighted down by four sash weights. Harrison police also discovered the body of another New Jersey mobster, Louis “Babe Ruth” Russo. His body also showed the same signs of head trauma, though he was weighted down by a large rock. Russo had lived in Passaic, New Jersey. Russo’s main source of income had been shaking down other racketeers, a particularly dangerous profession.

  Police managed to piece together the movements of the two men. A few days prior, on the afternoon of September 10, just after hearing about the murder of Maranzano, both Monaco and Russo had taken off together from Newark in Monaco’s car. A few hours later, Monaco’s car was found on West Forty-Seventh Street in Manhattan around the corner from Maranzano’s headquarters.

  Initial reports tied the Monaco and Russo murders to the November 3, 1930, slaying of Dominic “the Ape” Passelli, a Newark gangster with a long list of enemies. But another theory suggests that Russo and Monaco were Maranzano loyalists and were killed as part of the Maranzano slaying, to pull power away from the established boss and his faction, into Luciano’s sphere of influence. Bringing things back around, twenty-four years later, Sam Monaco’s brother Frank was held as a material witness in a gangland killing of his brother’s old partner in the dress business and one-time Newark crime-family member. The victim of the murder was Stefano Badami.

  While it’s very likely that Stefano Badami was not the first, or even any, boss of the Elizabeth crime family, establishing who exactly was the first boss, it’s necessary to set the scene for the neighborhood from which the crime group emerged. For decades, immigrants from the small village of Ribera, in the province of Agrigento, had been arriving in Elizabeth, congregating primarily in the Peterstown section of town, known to locals as “the Burg.” Peterstown is located between First Avenue and the Arthur Kill. The Elizabeth River, a small tributary of the kill, runs along the southwest border of the neighborhood. The close-knit community continues to thrive to the present. And though many of the latter generations have moved to other areas, they still come back to the neighborhood for weddings, events, and church functions and to eat and shop in the cluster of Italian restaurants and markets.

  It was from this close-knit community that the Elizabeth family emerged. One of the family’s strengths was that so many of the members were from, or had ties to, Ribera, and this connection allowed the crime family to keep outsiders, and the prying eyes of law enforcement, away from its operations, at least in the early years. The Ribera core group that form
ed this early Mafia family was bound by a shared heritage, making the group somewhat insular for much of its existence. And Badami did not come from Ribera or live in the neighborhood.

  The Elizabeth family is also considered among one of the oldest crime families in the United States, though that sentiment is believed more by their own members rather than researchers who point to crime families in New Orleans and New York as being around for as long, if not longer. Charles “Beeps” Stango, an Elizabeth mobster arrested in 2015, was caught on a wiretap talking about the crime family, specifically a member named “Milk,”[18] whose family “started the whole thing. See his uncle the underboss of consiglieres since the beginning of time. They come right from Sicily to here . . . This is sii . . . okay this proves he’s the oldest crew in the country. They start, they originated the Five Families. Okay?”[19] Another crime family member, Anthony Rotondo, testifying in 2005 was asked if the Elizabeth family was a proud crime family:

  (Rotondo) Answer: Yes

  Q: Well, they were the oldest Mafia family in the country, yes?

  A: Yes.[20]

  So, while the original boss is not definitively known, one of the earliest bosses in the Elizabeth area was definitely Phil Amari. He was born in Ribera and arrived in Elizabeth in the early 1920s via New York. When Amari made the move to Elizabeth, “other individuals who were originally from Ribera, Sicily, moved to Elizabeth from the New York area,”[21] joining the small existing Ribera community there. An informant later disclosed to the FBI that Amari, in his opinion, was “the one-time boss of the Mafia in the Elizabeth area.”[22]

  Amari’s legitimate job was in the finance industry, as a loan officer, but his income stream diversified to include a variety of rackets including gambling, narcotics, and labor racketeering. Amari recruited from the neighborhood and stocked the crime family with members whose names carried the family’s mantle, and leadership, through the ensuing decades. Soldiers and capos like Louis Larasso, Frank Majuri, and Emmanuel Riggi came up under Phil Amari. And under Amari’s leadership, the Elizabeth crime family became a permanent part of the Jersey gangland scene.