by Bruno, Joe
The three masked men hurried from the restaurant and into the waiting getaway car.
According to witnesses outside the restaurant, the car sped up Knickerbocker Avenue to Flushing Avenue, and then disappeared around the corner. Bonventre and Amato, who were both wearing leather jackets despite the stifling heat, soon followed the three gunmen out of the restaurant. They calmly walked down the block, got into a blue Lincoln and then drove away, like they hadn’t a care in the world.
Galante’s body was laid out in the Provenzano-Lanza Funeral Home at 43 Second Avenue on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The crowds that usually accompany a Mafia wake of this kind were notably absent.
Galante was buried on July 17 at Saint John’s Cemetery in Queens. With the Feds doing the counting, only 59 people attended Galante's funeral mass and burial. The Feds also reported that not one Mafia made man was captured on surveillance cameras, either at the wake or at the funeral.
One Fed, commenting at the sparse turnout, said, “Galante was so bad, people didn’t want to see him, even when he was dead.”
Even though the newspapers played up the killing with gruesome front page photos, the general public seemed impervious to the magnitude of the event. A young boy strolled up to a police officer standing guard at the wake.
“Was he an actor?” the kid asked the cop.
The cop replied, “No, he was a gangster.”
Gambino, Carlo
He was a quiet man who dressed inconspicuously and was known to never lose his temper. But there is no doubt Carlo Gambino, with his huge hawk nose and enigmatic Mona Lisa-smile, was one of the most powerful Mafia bosses of all time.
Gambino was born in Palermo, Sicily on August 24, 1902. The area of Palermo, called Caccamo in which Gambino grew up, had such an intense Mafia presence the police and even the military were afraid to enter into its domain. That left the Mafioso to rule the area with impunity, knowing whatever crimes they committed would not be reported to the police; if the police even cared what happened in the first place.
Carlo's mother's maiden name was Castellano, and she used her influence with her family, who were Mafiosos, to introduce Gambino to “Men of Respect” when Gambino was barely a teenager. Gambino, only 5-foot-7 and slight of build, quietly impressed his superiors with his calmness, his intellect and his ability to do whatever was necessary, even if it meant whacking someone whom his bosses said needed to be erased.
In 1921, right before his 20th birthday, Gambino was rewarded for his good work by being inducted into the Mafia, or what was known in Italy as the “Honored Society.” However, because of Benito Mussolini's vendetta against the Mafia (Mussolini had arrested numerous Mafioso, including top Mafia boss Don Vito Cascio Ferro who was sentenced to life in prison), many Mafioso, including Gambino, decided that Sicily was too dangerous for them to exist in the manner in which they had been accustomed. As a result, there was a huge exodus of Mafioso to the mountain of gold across the Atlantic Ocean called America.
In late 1921, Gambino left Sicily on the freighter SS Vincenzo Florio, which was headed for America. For the entire trip, Gambino subsisted on nothing but wine and anchovies, which besides olive oil were the only food substances on the ship.
The SS Vincenzo Florio docked in Norfolk, Virginia, on December 23, 1921, and Gambino disembarked as an illegal immigrant. Wearing a natty three-piece suit and a black fedora, Gambino walked down the gangplank looking for a car, with flashing lights at the end of the dock, he was told would be waiting for him when he landed in America.
Gambino spotted the car, and when he reached the vehicle, he saw a Castellano cousin sitting behind the wheel. The two men embraced, and in seconds they were headed to New York City.
When Gambino arrived in New York City, he discovered that his Castellano cousins had already rented him an apartment on Navy Street in Brooklyn, near the waterfront. They also put Gambino to work in a trucking company owned by his first cousins, Peter and Paul Castellano. Soon, Gambino segued into the illegal bootlegging business, run by his Palermo pal, Tommy Lucchese.
Prohibition was instituted by the passing of the Volstead Act in 1919, which banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors, but not the consumption. One thing led to another, and soon Gambino was a main cog in the crew of Joe “The Boss” Masseria, the most powerful Mafioso in America.
However, another Mafioso had escaped Mussolini's wrath and arrived in America in the mid-1920s. His name was Salvatore Maranzano, second in command to Don Vito Cascio Ferro in Sicily. Maranzano figured the Sicilian Mafioso were much superior to those in America, so it was only natural that he should become the top Mafia boss in America. This did not sit well with Masseria, and the result was the Castellammarese War, which flooded the streets of New York City with scores of dead bodies from 1929-31.
Masseria's crew was soon joined by top Mafia men such as Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Albert Anastasia, and Vito Genovese, who were well-connected to Jewish gangsters Meyer Lansky, Louie “Lepke” Buchalter, and Bugsy Siegel. However, since Masseria did not like his men doing business with non-Sicilians , Luciano, Costello, Anastasia, and Genovese bided their time, hoping that maybe both Masseria and Maranzano would knock each other off so that the younger men could take control of all their operations.
However, it was Gambino who made the first move in rectifying this situation. Sensing that he was on the losing side of the battle, Gambino secretly approached Maranzano, and he offered to jump to Maranzano's side. Maranzano readily agreed, and soon Luciano, Costello, Anastasia, and Genovese, also wanted to join Maranzano's forces. Maranzano accepted their offer, with the stipulation they do away with Masseria, once and for all.
That task was accomplished on April 15, 1931, when Luciano lured Masseria to the Nuova Villa Tammaro Restaurant in Coney Island. While Luciano was taking a bathroom break, Siegel, Genovese, Anastasia, and Jewish killer Red Levine burst through the front door and filled Masseria with lead, rendering him quite dead and ending the Castellammarese War.
Maranzano immediately called for a meeting of all the top Mafioso in the city (reportedly over 500 men) in a warehouse in the Bronx.
At this meeting Maranzano said, “Whatever happened in the past is over. There is to be no more hatred between us. Those who lost someone in the war must forgive and forget.”
Maranzano then proceeded to form five families, each with a boss and an underboss. Under the two top men each family would have capiregimes, or captains, who would rule over the rest of the family, soldatos, or soldiers.
The five bosses were Joe Bonanno, Joe Profaci, Lucky Luciano, Tommy Lucchese, and Vincent Mangano. Albert Anastasia became Mangano's underboss, and Carlo Gambino became a captain in Mangano's family.
Of course, Maranzano made himself “Boss of All Bosses” (Capo di Tutti Capi), which did not sit well with the rest of the young Mafioso.
Despite all the nice talk about “no more hatred between us,” Maranzano had a secret plan to kill Luciano, Genovese, and Costello - men Maranzano thought to be ambitious and a threat to his rule. Maranzano called on vicious Irish killer Vincent “Mad Dog” Cole to eliminate his perceived competition. Maranzano paid Cole $25,000 on the spot, with another $25,000 forthcoming when the dirty deed was done. To set the trap, Maranzano invited Luciano, Genovese, and Costello to his office in Midtown Manhattan.
However, Luciano caught wind of the plot through an informer close to Maranzano, believed to be Tommy Lucchese. Instead of showing up at Maranzano's office, Luciano sent four Jewish killers to the proposed meeting, led by Red Levine, one of the men who had offed Masseria.
The four men, posing as detectives, bulldozed their way past Maranzano's bodyguards in the outer office. Then they blasted into Maranzano's office where they stabbed and shot him to death. On the way out of the building, the four killers ran into “Mad Dog” Cole. They told him not to bother - that Maranzano was already dead and the police were on the way. Cole did an about face, whistling
a happy tune, having made a $25,000 payday without firing a single shot.
Luciano soon called the bosses of the other four Mafia families, and he told them the title of “Boss of All Bosses” was eliminated with Maranzano. Luciano then formed a National Crime Commission, which included Jewish mobsters Meyer Lansky, Louie “Lepke” Buchalter, Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, Bugsy Siegel, and Dutch Schultz.
Gambino, now firmly entrenched as a captain in the Mangano family, became the biggest moneymaker in all the New York Mafia. And in the Mafia, making money brings prestige.
In 1932, his pockets bursting with cash, Gambino married his first cousin, Catherine Castellano. Carlo and Catherine Gambino eventually raised three sons and a daughter. Marrying a first cousin was common in Italy, and not frowned upon in the United States as it is today. In fact, marrying a first cousin is now illegal in most, but not all, states. (Author’s note: My grandparents on my father's side were first cousins, and married in Sicily in the early 1900s.)
When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Gambino was already set to cash in on the now-legal booze business, but he did so in an illegal way. While Prohibition was booming in illegal sales for the Mafia, Gambino planned for the days when he knew Prohibition would end. To achieve his goals, Gambino scooped up as many illegal stills that he could: in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even as far as Maryland. When Prohibition ended and the price of alcohol blasted through the roof, Gambino had the largest liquor distribution system on the East Coast of America. And since he was producing the booze himself and not paying any government taxes, Gambino could undercut the legal distributors, thereby making him and the Mangano family a small fortune all through the mid-to-late 1930s.
The start of World War II gave Gambino another opportunity to make even more illegal cash through his wartime rations stamp racket. With war imminent against Germany and Japan, on August 28, 1941, the United States government created the Office of Price Administration (OPA), whose job it was to print and distribute ration stamps to the American public. Without these stamps, people could not buy gasoline, tires, shoes, nylon, sugar, fuel oil, coffee, meats, and processed foods. Gambino figured the only way he could get his hands on ration stamps to sell on the black market was to steal them outright.
Gambino sent his best safe-crackers and second-story men to the vaults inside the Office of Price Administration, and they emerged with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of ration stamps. When certain low-level employees of the OPA realized the ration stamps were being stolen by the mob, they decided to cut themselves in on the deal by stealing the ration stamps themselves and selling them to Gambino and his boys, of course, at bargain-basement prices. Gambino figured why take a chance of stealing the ration stamps with the possibility of getting caught. So he took the crooked OPA employees’ offer, and he started buying the ration stamps from them in droves.
The beauty of this scheme was that Gambino already had a ready-made distribution network in place: his network of illegal booze suppliers. In October 1963, Mafia informant Joe Valachi testified before Arkansas Senator John L. McClellan's Investigative Subcommittee on Government Operations that in one rations stamp deal alone, Gambino made a profit of over $1 million.
Being a savvy businessman, Gambino knew he could not live the high-life without reporting substantial income to the government. So Gambino invested the money he had made from his illegal operations, estimated to be several millions of dollars, in legal businesses such as meat markets, pizza parlors, olive and cheese importers, carting companies, dress factories, bakeries, and restaurants.
By 1951, the Mangano family, thanks to Gambino's incredible ability to generate income, was one of the most prosperous in the Mafia. The problem was Mangano did not get along with his underboss Albert Anastasia. Mangano was jealous of Anastasia's closeness with the other bosses, including Frank Costello, and Lucky Luciano who was in exile in Italy; a stipulation of the pardon agreement he received from the United States government after serving nine years in jail on a trumped-up prostitution charge. Several times Mangano physically attacked Anastasia, a silly move since the younger and stronger Anastasia easily beat his boss in a man-to-man fight.
With rumors abounding that Mangano was plotting to kill him, Anastasia, with the blessing of crime boss Frank Costello, decided to strike first.
On April 19, 1951, the body of Phil Mangano, the brother of Vincent Mangano, was found in the marshes near Sheepshead Bay. He was shot five times in the head. When the police investigating the murder tried to contact Vincent Mangano about his brother's death, they could find no trace of him.
Vincent Mangano's body was never found.
Within days, Anastasia sat down with the other bosses, and he explained to them that he killed Mangano before Mangano could kill him. With the backing of Costello, Anastasia was bumped up to the boss of the Mangano Family, and the name was changed to the Anastasia family. Anastasia made Frank Scalise and Joe Adonis his underbosses, and he gave his capo, Carlo Gambino, more men and more power within the organization.
However, Anastasia's reign lasted less than seven years.
Anastasia continually butted heads with vicious crime boss Vito Genovese, who was looking to take over all the rackets in New York City, even if it meant killing the other bosses one by one. Anastasia received a terrible blow when his underboss, Joe Adonis, was deported to Italy as an undesirable alien. Anastasia knew his days were numbered, when in early 1956 Frank Costello was shot in the head by Genovese henchman Vincent “The Chin” Gigante. Costello survived the shooting, and at Gigante's trial, Costello, true to the Mafia code of “omerta,” refused to name Gigante as his assailant.
However, this greatly diminished Costello's power in the Mafia, and at the insistence of Genovese, Costello was booted out as one of the five bosses on the Mafia Commission. This left Anastasia without his closest ally, and put Anastasia in a vulnerable position. Soon after, Anastasia’s other underboss, Frank Scalise, was gunned down while shopping for fruits and vegetables on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.
The final shoe dropped on October 25, 1957, when Anastasia was shot to death while sitting in a barber chair in the Park Sheridan Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.
With Anastasia now dead, Genovese called for a sit-down with the other bosses, and he proposed that Carlo Gambino, whom he had let in on his plot to kill Anastasia, should take over Anastasia's family. The commission agreed and they renamed the family the Gambino Family.
The greedy Genovese called for a meeting of all the crime bosses, underbosses, captains, and respected Mafia men in America, which was to take place in the sleepy town of Apalachin, New York, at the home of Joseph Barbara, a capo in the crime family of Buffalo crime boss Stephano Magaddino. There were several items on Genovese's agenda, but the prime one was that Genovese would announce himself as the “ Capo di Tutti Capi,” or “Boss of All Bosses,” a title that had been vacant since the death of Salvatore Maranzano.
On November 17, 1957, scores of mobsters made their way to Barbara's home. Included in the group were crime bosses John Scalish from Cleveland; Sam Giancana from Chicago; Frank DeSimone from California; Santo Trafficante from Florida; Gerardo Catena and Frank Majuri from New Jersey; and Carlo Gambino, Joe Profaci, Tommy Luchesse, and Vito Genovese, all from New York City.
However, before the festivities got under way, state Sergeant Edgar Roswell, along with a dozen state troopers, stormed the house. Roswell later said that he became suspicious when he saw Joseph Barbara Jr. make hotel reservations for a dozen or so out-of-towners. Roswell said he then drove by the Barbara residence, and he saw dozens of parked luxury cars in and around Barbara's estate. Roswell called for heavy backup and when his troopers arrived, they made their move.
A rumor later circulated that it was Meyer Lansky himself, no big fan of Vito Genovese, who had tipped off the state troopers about the impending Mafia convention.
Be that as it may, when the troopers stormed the house, Mafioso, like in a Chinese
fire drill, scattered in all directions. Men in expensive suits jumped though open windows, and if they could not make it to their cars, they hightailed it on foot through the woods, ruining their patent-leather shoes.
Sam Giancana safely escaped by fleeing through the woods, as did Bonanno underboss Carmine Galante. But both men were a mess, their suits destroyed by thorny bushes. Some cars made it off the property before a roadblock was put in place, but most didn't. When the dust cleared 58 members of the Mafia were detained, and they were told to empty out their pockets. A total of $300,000 in cash was found on the 58 men, making the state police all the more suspicious about the meeting.
What was notable about the meeting was the men who chose not to attend. Besides Lansky, those absent were Frank Costello, Carlo Marcello from New Orleans, and Lansky's pal Joseph “Doc” Stracher.
Of the 58 men detained, 27 were indicted on obstruction of justice, 20 of whom were convicted of refusing to answer questions about the purpose of the meeting. One of the men convicted was Gambino's cousin Paul Castellano, who wound up doing a year in the slammer as a result.
The aborted meeting, more than anything else, led to the downfall of Vito Genovese. Not only did he not get the exalted title of “Boss of All Bosses,” but he became a pariah in the Mafia; ridiculed as being stupid and greedy for calling so many important men to the same place at the same time for his own purposes.
The day after the raid, the entire nation's newspapers ran front page stories about the incident. No longer could Mafia members claim that the Mafia did not exist. The police and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had for years denied the existence of the Mafia, went on a rampage, putting extreme pressure on the Mafia's operations.
Although , Carlo Gambino first seemed to be a victim of circumstances, the wily mob veteran plotted to turn the incident to his advantage. In fact, there was speculation that Gambino knew about the raid in advance, and went there purposely so that no would suspect him of being in on the treachery; which would make sense in light of future developments.