Maranzano proved even more power hungry than Masseria. He made a list of people he wanted dead. “Al Capone, Frank Costello, Charley Lucky, Vito Genovese, Vincent Mangano, Joe Adonis, Dutch Schultz,” recounted Joe Valachi. “These are all important names at the time.” They all happened to be former Masseria allies. So much for no reprisals. An FBI electronic bug picked up Steve Magaddino describing how Maranzano “wanted to shoot in the worst way” various men. “I said what are you crazy…there isn't any need to,” recalled Magaddino. The Castellammarese, the vaunted band of brothers, started backbiting over Maranzano.64 Perhaps even more galling, Maranzano began threatening their money, too. There were rumors that Maranzano's men were hijacking booze trucks belonging to fellow mafiosi and dividing the spoils. A new cabal began plotting against the capo di capi.65
Although Charles Luciano was involved again, the roles of Tom Gagliano and Tommy Lucchese of the former Reina Family have been seriously underestimated.66 First, they had motive: Gagliano and Lucchese owned trucking companies in the garment district, an industry Maranzano had been eyeing. Joe Valachi recalled how Tommy Lucchese told him that the capo di capi “had been doing a lot of bad,” and asked if “I knew if Maranzano hijacked trucks of piece goods.”67 Second, they had means: Gagliano and Lucchese had become regulars in his Park Avenue office. Bonanno said he learned Lucchese was funneling intelligence on “Maranzano's office habits and his preoccupations with the IRS.” Gentile likewise suggested there was a mole in his office.68 Third, they had opportunity. Both would be present at the scene of the crime.
3:45 P.M., THURSDAY AFTERNOON, SEPTEMBER 10, 1931, OFFICE OF SALVATORE MARANZANO: KILLING THE BOSS OF BOSSES
On the afternoon of Thursday, September 10, Mr. Maranzano had his secretary, Miss Francis Samuels, keep several men waiting in the anteroom. In his office, Maranzano sat at his wide desk looking over paperwork. The metal fan buzzed next to the wall clock. Around 3:40 p.m., Tom Gagliano and Tommy Lucchese walked into the anteroom. Minutes ticked by….69
At 3:45 p.m. four lawmen burst into the anteroom brandishing badges and guns. Mr. Maranzano had told his men that he'd received a tip that a government raid on his office was imminent. Not to worry, though. His accountants assured him his office records could withstand even the most rigorous examination by the IRS. To avoid a gun charge, Mr. Maranzano instructed his men to stop bringing firearms to the office for the near future. His bodyguard Girolamo Santuccio did not like being unarmed, but he obeyed his boss.70
This must have been the raid everyone was expecting. The four lawmen were dressed properly, they flashed metal badges, and they were Jews not Italians. They ordered everyone to line up against the wall of the anteroom. “Who can we talk to?” demanded an agent. Hearing the commotion, Maranzano poked his head out his office.71
“I am the one responsible for the office,” Maranzano interjected. “You can talk to me.” He was prepared for this harassment by the government. “There does not exist any contraband goods here. This office is a commercial office, in place with the law,” he declared. One of the lawmen held the group in the anteroom at gunpoint, including his unarmed bodyguard Santuccio. The other agents followed Maranzano into his private office.72
The plan was working: they were alone with Maranzano in his inner sanctum. The real names of the lead “agents” were Sam “Red” Levine and Abe “Bo” Weinberg, and they were not IRS agents. They were professional hit men. And they were there to kill Maranzano. Given they were on the ninth floor of a busy office building, their plan was to use stilettos to quietly stab him to death. Except Maranzano figured it out. They started shouting at each other.73
Unarmed and outnumbered, the refined gentleman disappeared. Maranzano fought fiercely. A stiletto pierced his left elbow, causing blood to run down his muscular arm, yet he continued fighting. Noise was no longer the assassin's main concern. They reached for their guns and fired shots into Maranzano's right arm, chest, and abdomen. Riddled with bullets, Maranzano fell back into his chair. The assassins then picked up the stilettos and thrust the sharp points into him. The coup de grâce pierced an artery in his neck.74
3–3: Body of Salvatore Maranzano in his Park Avenue office, September 1931. (Used by permission of the John Binder Collection)
Red Levine ran into the anteroom and told everyone to leave. The hit men ran to the stairs, followed by Tom Gagliano, Tommy Lucchese, and the rest of the waiting men. In a bizarre coincidence, on their way out the departing hit men ran into the Irish hit man Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll, who was on his way to discuss a contract with Maranzano.75 When Lucchese was questioned as to why he left without checking to see whether Maranzano was still alive, he said lamely, “Nobody likes to stay in a place when something happens.” In truth, Lucchese had helped set the trap: his men spent the day distracting Maranzano's soldiers, keeping them from stopping by the office. Everyone had abandoned Maranzano save for two: his loyal bodyguard Girolamo Santuccio and his devoted secretary Miss Samuels, who found their boss dead in his office.76
THE PURGE THAT WASN'T
In the aftermath of Maranzano's murder, there were stories that his assassination was coordinated with a nationwide purge of all his loyalists. These rumors gained credence when Richard “Dixie” Davis, a disbarred mob lawyer, claimed in a 1939 Collier's article that hit man Bo Weinberg said there was “about ninety guineas knocked off all over the country” simultaneously in a purge that “Americanized the mobs.” Less noticed was Davis's admission that he had “never been able to check up the accuracy of Bo's assertion” of a simultaneous mass murder.77
When historians looked for evidence of this alleged purge, they could not substantiate it. Poring over newspapers from across the country, they could find only a handful of gangland hits even conceivably connected to the Maranzano assassination.78 Nevertheless, the “purge myth” abides. John H. Davis's Mafia Dynasty asserts that Luciano “ordered a purge of the old guard” in which “sixty Maranzano loyalists” were killed.79
The myth is too compelling; it is an archetype of the human mind. The imagery can be traced to the legendary Night of the Sicilian Vespers, when after the Easter evening prayers of March 30, 1282, Sicilians rose up and overnight massacred their French foreign rulers. Giuseppe Verdi immortalized it in his 1861 opera I Vespri Siciliani. Director Francis Ford Coppola and writer Mario Puzo were playing on this imagery in their 1972 masterpiece The Godfather. In the penultimate sequence, Michael Corleone is shown sponsoring his niece's Roman Catholic baptism as his men simultaneously assassinate his enemies in bloody hits. They are compelling images, but they are just images.80
“CASTELLAMMARESE WAR” OR GANG FIGHT?
This leads to a larger point about Joe Bonanno's romantic account. Painting these events as a “war” in service of a mob myth diminishes the gravity of the word war. The total number of casualties nationwide in the “Castellammarese War of 1930–1931” was under twenty mafioso.81 To put it in perspective, recall that more than a thousand Prohibition-era bootleggers were killed in New York City between 1920 and 1930—an average of seventy-seven men a year.82
Although he occasionally drifts into war language, Nicola Gentile calls the conflict “The Fight between the Gangs.” This is a more accurate description. In New York, outside of a small group of men around Masseria and Maranzano, most wiseguys went about their business. Giuseppe Morello and others were not even armed for much of the “war.” After the police warned Masseria to stop the fighting, Masseria ordered his men to disarm. He was apparently more worried about a police crackdown.83
Joe Bonanno's breathless talk of Maranzano's “wartime staff” and vast supplies of “money, arms, ammunition and manpower” is just hyperbole.84 Although Joe Valachi heard stories of war chests, he saw little money put into the fight. Valachi testified that Maranzano's four main hit men together were paid the paltry sum of “$25 a week” (about $350 in current dollars). As it was “kind of rough” to survive on his $6 split, Valachi moonlighted as a burglar to m
ake ends meet during the “war.”85 An FBI electronic bug picked up Steve Magaddino mocking Maranzano's meager funding of the hit men. “He didn't give them anything. He only would give them sandwiches,” laughed Steve Magaddino.86
THE “MOUSTACHE PETES”
Another myth is that the conflict was about a younger generation of “Americanized” mobsters purging the older, tradition-bound “Moustache Petes.” In his book Five Families, journalist Selwyn Raab claims that “Luciano had become increasingly frustrated by Masseria's refusal to adopt his ideas for modernizing…by cooperating with other Italian and non-Italian gangs” and that he “referred disparagingly to Masseria and his ilk as ‘Moustache Petes’ and ‘greasers.’”87
Labeling Joe Masseria a “Moustache Pete” renders the term meaningless: Joe the Boss enthusiastically created the first pan-Italian “Americanized” mob. There is also no sign that Masseria barred his men from working with others. The Masseria Family's members collaborated with Irish and Jewish gangsters on the docks, in the garment district, and elsewhere. Indeed, in March 1930, Masseria was arrested in a gambling resort in Miami Beach in the company of Jewish gangsters Harry Brown and Harry “Nig” Rosen.88
Neither did the two other mafiosi pointed to as “Moustache Petes” fit the stereotype of tradition-bound, ethnically isolated Sicilians. Giuseppe Morello was a mustachioed Sicilian, his whiskers drooping down over his gaunt face. Yet when he was boss of his Morello Family, he partnered with Irish counterfeiters Jack Gleason, Tom Smith, and Henry Thompson.89 Even Salvatore Maranzano had in his inner circle a convicted drug trafficker in James Alescia and a Neapolitan in Joe Valachi. And it was Maranzano who ultimately validated Al Capone and his Chicago Outfit.90
LATE SEPTEMBER 1931: THE CREATION OF THE COMMISSION
After Maranzano, there would never again be an all-powerful boss of bosses. Between 1928 and 1931, the Cosa Nostra saw the murders of three sitting capo di capi: Salvatore D'Aquila in October 1928, Joe Masseria in April 1931, and Salvatore Maranzano in September 1931. All three overreached and were violently deposed. Former capo di capi Giuseppe Morello was killed in August 1930 as well. The general assembly concluded that giving such a title “to just one, could swell the head of the elected person and induce him to commit unjustifiable atrocities.”91
As we will see, new technologies and rackets were expanding opportunities for more dispersed crews of wiseguys as well. Their sophisticated operations would stretch across states and multistate regions. No dictatorial boss would be able to control everything. Although the Mafia family structure would be essential to their success, the money operations would be run by the caporegimes (captains) and street soldiers.
In the fall of 1931, the general assembly of the Mafia abolished the capo di capi title. They replaced it with a power-sharing commission. This was not the invention of Charles Luciano. Rather, it was the very same idea that the general assembly of the Mafia nearly adopted back in May 1931. It would serve as a forum to discuss major decisions and arbitrate disputes. As Nicola Gentile explained, “With the administration of this commission one could begin to breathe a more trustworthy air,” and men could return to “the best positions from which they could gain large profits.”92
The Commission, as it came to be called, had seven charter members. Given Gotham's importance, each of the five bosses of the New York families received a seat. These included the incumbent bosses Charles Luciano, Tom Gagliano, and Joseph Profaci, and two new bosses from Brooklyn: Vincent Mangano (who replaced a Maranzano loyalist) and Joseph Bonanno (who replaced Maranzano himself). Steve Magaddino of Buffalo got the sixth seat as an influential Castellammarese with surprising strength in upstate New York. Al Capone held the seventh seat for Chicago, which also represented by proxy the smaller western clans.93
Capone's seat on the Commission would be short-lived. On October 6, 1931, the trial of United States v. Alphonse Capone commenced in federal court in Chicago. Twelve days later, on October 18, 1931, the federal jury found him guilty of income tax evasion for failing to pay taxes on illegal revenues. Paul “The Waiter” Ricca of Chicago (who stands on the far left of the cover of this book) would take Capone's seat on the Commission. Maranzano's fear of the taxman was not so crazy after all.94
THE COMMISSION: FOUNDING MEMBERS, 1931
3–4: Tomasso Gagliano, boss of the Gagliano Family. (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)
3–5: Charles Luciano, boss of the Luciano Family. (Courtesy of the New York Police Department)
3–6: Vincent Mangano, boss of the Mangano Family. (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)
3–7: Joseph Bonanno, boss of the Bonanno Family. (Used by permission of the NYC Municipal Archives)
3–8: Joseph Profaci, boss of the Profaci Family. (Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration)
3–9: Al Capone, boss of the Chicago Outfit (© Bettman/CORBIS)
3–10: Steve Magaddino, boss of the Buffalo Arm. (Photo by Walter Albertin, courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection)
Although Joe Bonanno and others have portrayed the “Castellammarese War of 1930–1931” as a defense of the honor of the Castellammarese clan, the facts show it to be something less romantic. Rather, the Mafia Rebellion of 1928–1931 was mostly about money and power. But the rise of the modern Mafia was more than just the result of high-level intrigue among mob bosses. Our next chapter looks at how the Mafia's soldiers gained footholds in the labor unions.
Q. You don't call a Chinaman or an Italian a white man? No, sir; an Italian is a Dago.
—Testimony of construction superintendent in Congressional hearings (1890)
The thefts and pocket pickings now pale into insignificance when compared to the achievements of the racketeers…the rackets in connection with liquor, dope, food, milk, the building trades…the use of gangsters in labor troubles.
—Testimony of criminologist in Congressional hearings (1934)
In the 1950s, Giovanni “Johnny Dio” Dioguardi was a national expert on the art of labor racketeering. He had come a long way from his childhood in Little Italy.1 When he was twenty years old in 1934, Dioguardi represented the Allied Truckmen's Mutual Association in a dispute with Local 816 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.2 A labor mercenary, Dioguardi later created “paper locals” of the Teamsters for his ally Jimmy Hoffa. Dioguardi forged himself into a “labor consultant” by applying select mayhem at weak points in a union.3
But Johnny Dio had also been riding a wave of social forces for decades. He came of age as the labor movement was taking off in the 1930s, and he dealt with unions comprised of southern Italian immigrants. This chapter reveals why and how the Cosa Nostra captured so many union locals in Gotham. Demographics and the labor movement converged in the 1930s to fuel the Mafia's takeover of unions.
“ETHNIC SUCCESSION IN CRIME”: AN INCOMPLETE EXPLANATION FOR ORGANIZED CRIME
In 1960, the sociologist Daniel Bell argued that organized crime was one of the “ladders of social mobility in America” for new immigrant groups.4 Building on Bell's idea, Francis Ianni argued in his 1974 book Black Mafia: Ethnic Succession in Organized Crime that there was a process of “ethnic succession” in crime: as immigrant groups assimilated they were replaced by newer groups. As Ianni put it, “the Irish were succeeded in organized crime by the Jews…Italians came next…[and] they are being replaced by…blacks.”5
Later writers have pointed out that the ethnic succession model is too one-dimensional. Immigrant groups were treated differently, and their respective crime syndicates emerged at different times.6 Therefore, to understand why the Mafia became the dominant labor racketeers during the New Deal, we need to compare the Irish, Black, Jewish, and Italian gangsters against the backdrop of New York history.
THE EARLY GANGSTERS: WHY THE IRISH RACKETEERS GRADUALLY DISAPPEARED
The Irish
immigrated first and assimilated earlier. The Irish Potato Famine of 1845–1852 caused hundreds of thousands of Irish to leave for New York by the Civil War. In Gotham, they endured anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry, urban squalor, and poverty.7
By the end of the century though, the Irish were assimilating rapidly. Irish politicians were elected mayor in 1881 and 1893, and Irish voters were filling government patronage jobs.8 By 1930, an astounding 52 percent of the City of New York's public-sector employees were Irish. As historian Jay Dolan put it, “Where once the refrain was ‘No Irish need apply,’ it now may as well have been ‘Only Irish need apply’!”9 Meanwhile, about 21 percent of New York's Irish were married to a non-Irish spouse, a rate three times higher than Jews and southern Italians.10
The Irish underworld was affected by these social forces. The assimilation of Irish immigrants reduced Irish laborers in racketeer-prone industries. “We want somebody to do the dirty work; the Irish are not doing it any longer,” said a police official bluntly in 1895. “We can't get along without the Italians.”11 As Irish enclaves disappeared, so too did the Irish street gangs. When the Five Points slum was Irish, it was the home territory for Irish gangs like the Roche Guard. By the 1890s the Five Points was Italian and the Irish gangs were gone. The Hudson Dusters and the Gopher Gang were confined to the Irish West Side of Manhattan.12
The Irish gangsters of South Brooklyn had a sorry ending. On December 26, 1925, Richard “Pegleg” Lonergan and five men of his White Hand gang got drunk and had a bad idea. They took taxicabs over to the Adonis Social Club, an Italian mob hangout in Brooklyn. Staggering into the hall, one boasted that his brother could “lick the whole bunch single-handed.” Unfortunately, Al Capone was sitting in the club, fresh from Chicago, where he had been fighting Irish bootleggers. A hail of bullets killed “Pegleg” Lonergan and two compatriots.13
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