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Authors: John Dickie

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Gentile provides a fascinating picture of the way men of honour from all over the US coordinated their activities in the years before Prohibition. Death sentences on dissident dons would be issued from one
borgata
to all the others in the area. A select ‘council’ comprising only senior bosses made the most important decisions. A bigger ‘general assembly’ would elect capos and debate proposed contracts to kill mafiosi. There could be as many as 150 men at such meetings—bosses and their entourages from all over the USA. Gentile is reluctant to call such meetings courts, and is scathing about the ‘judicial procedures’ followed in the general assembly: ‘It was made up of men who were almost all illiterate. Eloquence was the skill that most impressed the hall. The better someone knew how to talk, the more he was listened to, and the more he was able to drag that mass of yokels the way he wanted.’

New York’s position within the network of
borgate
was dominant. The boss of the mafia in Gotham was almost always boss of bosses too. His lieutenants could often settle any case in advance of big summits, which they would then use merely to broadcast their intentions.

The stresses of the job emerge between the lines of Gentile’s autobiography. Occasional bouts of ill-health and nervous exhaustion would see him return to his homeland to recharge his batteries. Not that the trips were always restful; on one occasion in 1919 he had to go into hiding from the law after a man from a rival political faction was shot. During those months in hiding he received some visitors from America. They were Piddu Morello and other remnants of the gang that Lieutenant Joe Petrosino had believed was responsible for the ‘body in the barrel’ murder back in 1903. They had been sentenced to death by the new boss of New York and were desperate for Gentile’s mediation. Gentile had invested considerable effort and courage in developing a reputation as a roving mediator, a man able to smooth out dangerous disputes. Diplomacy was one of the main reasons for his wanderings across the United States. On this occasion, in the end most of the gang was spared, but only because the New York capo was himself killed and supplanted by the pudgy, neckless mafioso Joe Masseria, who would become known simply as ‘Joe the Boss’.

Stuck in Sicily, Gentile could not take advantage of the whisky he had stockpiled just before the introduction of Prohibition. Nonetheless he was soon able to siphon off his share of the vast cash flows from the drink industry. In Kansas City he ran a company dealing in wholesale supplies for barbers. The business was a front: it gave him access to large quantities of neat alcohol on the pretext that they were destined for aftershave. Gentile also became a dealer in the corn sugar needed to feed illegal stills.

*   *   *

Prohibition meant bootlegging, and bootlegging brought the toughest and brightest of the multi-ethnic youth gang members to the fore. Viewed from a broader perspective than was available to Nick Gentile, Prohibition crime is not exclusively an Italian-American affair. Nevertheless, with the exception of a few veterans, the most famous Italian-American bootleggers and gangsters of the 1920s and early 1930s were young and had been born or brought up in the United States. Their rise coincided with the Italianization and Americanization of the mafia.

Salvatore Lucania hailed from the sulphur town of Lercara Friddi. He left Sicily at the age of nine in 1905. When he grew up he could only speak a few stumbling words of his native dialect. At eighteen he was found guilty of his first serious offence: unlawful possession of narcotics—he was both user and pusher. Prohibition made him into one of the most famous American mobsters of them all. He is better known as Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Both his nickname and the disconcertingly large scars around his neck date from the occasion when he was slashed and left for dead by some early rivals. From the outset Luciano mixed easily with felons from other backgrounds, working very closely with men like Meyer ‘Little Man’ Lansky, for example.

Francesco Castiglia, known as Frank Costello—one of Luciano’s associates—was another example. He was born near Cosenza in the ‘toe’ of mainland Italy in 1891; the mafia in Sicily has never recruited from that region. Costello’s family brought him to East Harlem when he was four. His first brush with the law—for assault and robbery in 1908—did not lead to a conviction because it was his first offence. In 1914, he was sentenced to a year in jail for carrying a concealed weapon. On his release he married a non-Italian and embarked on a criminal career based around cosy relations with politicians. With his business partner Henry Horowitz, he started up the Horowitz Novelty Company to produce kewpie dolls, razor blades—and gambling paraphernalia. He would become the king of New York’s slot machines.

The most famous gangster of them all, Al Capone, was also a case in point. Born in Williamsburg of Neapolitan parents, he was a member of the Five Points gang—as Luciano had been—before he moved to Chicago as a gunman, rising to the summit of the city’s underworld in the mid-1920s. His Chicago syndicate contained Italians but also men like Murray ‘the Camel’ Humphreys and Sam ‘Golf Bag’ Hunt. (The American underworld may not be as darkly fascinating as the Sicilian version, but it does produce quirkier nicknames.) Capone’s womanizing and greed for publicity would have been anathema to mafiosi back in Sicily.

As a businessman, Capone was more of a networker than the ‘managing director’ of crime imagined by many feature films about his life. His method was to make case-by-case 50/50 deals with men like truck dealer Louis Lipschultz, for liquor distribution. Or with Frankie Pope to manage the Hawthorne Smoke Shop gambling den. Or with Louis Consentino to run the Harlem Inn, a two-storey whorehouse in Stickney.

Capone is perhaps best known for ordering the St Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929, although his involvement was never proved. Seven members of a rival gang were slaughtered in their garage headquarters at 2122 North Clark Street, Chicago. Capone hoodlums, dressed as policemen, faked a raid and made them line up against a wall. Four more men with machine-guns then arrived to perform the execution. Of the seven victims (one was a dentist who just got a thrill from the company of gangsters) and six presumed trigger men, none was Italian.

It was men like Luciano, Costello, and Capone, with strong ties outside the Sicilian and Italian communities, who would accelerate the Americanization process within the mafia organization as Prohibition drew to an end. Cola Gentile, once more, provides a perceptive explanation of how it happened.

But like all autobiographies by men of honour, Gentile’s needs to be treated cautiously. Most of a mafioso’s life is spent trying to make sense of the fragments of information that come his way from within the association. Bosses often exercise control simply by being inscrutable, by the careful way they control who gets to know what. For that reason, no mafioso ever has a completely reliable map of any given situation. Gentile’s memoir is bound to suffer at points from this play of silence and second-guessing. Gentile was also deliberately selective about some aspects of his story—he gives very little information about Sicilian-based men of honour and their contacts with the US, for example.

For all his travelling, Gentile continued to move in a very Sicilian world. For that reason he was not always able to guess the power of mafiosi in the bigger world of organized crime. For example, Anthony D’Andrea was Chicago mafia capo at the time Prohibition came in. Nick Gentile knew him and describes him as being feared across America. Yet D’Andrea lost a tussle with an Irish machine boss for control of the city’s Nineteenth Ward. By the end of the First World War the ward had become 70 per cent Italian, having previously been dominated by Germans and Irish. Despite this numerical dominance, in an election campaign punctuated by beatings and bombings in 1921, the Irish boss emerged victorious by 3,984 votes to 3,603. D’Andrea was shot dead three months later by one of his own men. Gentile’s only measure of power was internal to the mafia, yet Sicilian bosses like D’Andrea were by no means guaranteed to come out on top in struggles between gangs.

Gentile also suffers from a slightly distorted perspective when looking back at Sicily. Palermo, which dominated the Sicilian mafia, is less important to him than Agrigento or the tiny coastal town of Castellammare del Golfo. Mafiosi who travelled to make their fortune in North America tended to come from minor, poorer centres like these; the powerful Palermitani would have had less incentive to move.

Despite all of these limitations, and the fact that many of the details of his narrative cannot be independently confirmed, it is Gentile’s general line of interpretation of a crucial period in mafia history that is significant. He understands the laws of motion of the mafia in America because his survival and success depended on that understanding. Above all, more than many historians, Gentile has a sophisticated grasp of the way the mafia is constantly drawing and redrawing a simple but important boundary. As an institution, the mafia depends on a line separating ‘us’ the men of honour from ‘them’ the ordinary, lesser folk.

Gentile’s perspective is particularly telling when it comes to a moment in the history of the mafia that has now entered American folklore, the Castellammarese war of 1930–1—so called because one side was dominated by mafiosi who originated from Castellammare del Golfo. Much of what is known about the leadership of the mafia in the last years of Prohibition comes from accounts of this war by Valachi and other American gangsters, but many aspects of it still remain obscure.

Gentile’s account, where it has not been ignored, has been seriously undervalued. He sensed that the key to the devious machinations of the Castellammarese war was the way in which the line separating the mafia from the world outside was manipulated. Just like the other articles in the mafia rule-book, the crucial boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is never absolute, and always tactical. The same principles applied in Sicily, but one important reason why things were different in America is that outside the boundary were other gangsters, men from different ethnic backgrounds but with comparably powerful organizations behind them. What follows is Gentile’s particularly Sicilian view of how the Castellammarese war unfolded.

The military leader of the Castellammaresi was Salvatore Maranzano who had arrived in New York only in 1927, a mafia refugee from the Fascist crackdown. The other side was led by Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria, thought at that time to have been boss of bosses. One of the early victims of the war between the two was a mafioso of the previous generation, Piddu Morello—the one-fingered leader of the ‘body in the barrel’ gang; he was shot dead in August 1930 in his East Harlem office. Gentile, who arrived back from one of his more prolonged visits to Sicily only the following month, is unable or unwilling to shed any light on the reasons for Morello’s murder. Its motives remain unknown.

Cola Gentile relates that, on his return to the States, he was chosen by a mafia general assembly held in Boston to lead a deputation to Castellammarese leader Maranzano. The same general assembly deposed Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria, Maranzano’s opponent, and put in his place an interim leader as boss of bosses. The aim was to stop the conflict destabilizing the whole association.

In mafia wars, in the short term, superior military power often wins out against political protection and status within the honoured society. But syndicates based on force alone do not last. Maranzano was gambling that he would be able to stabilize his authority after achieving military victory. He refused to see Gentile’s deputation, probably for the simple reason that he was winning not only the war but perhaps even the political battle too. As the killings continued, and civilians were caught in the crossfire, great political pressure was brought down on Joe ‘the Boss’. According to Gentile, the Chief of Police explicitly told him to stop the bloodshed or face losing support.

Eventually Maranzano agreed to meet Gentile’s peace delegation and ordered the group to be brought to a villa 135 kilometres from New York. When Maranzano greeted them, he was surrounded by heavily armed men and had two pistols tucked in his belt—a sign that he considered himself a military leader rather than a businessman. Gentile thought he looked like Pancho Villa and referred to the Castellammaresi as the ‘exiles’ or ‘bandits’, but not because they had come from Sicily or resembled Mexican guerrillas. It was because they were an alliance of mafiosi who were recruited from across the structure of the different
borgate
of New York. Maranzano’s tactics were to make allies out of Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria’s enemies wherever he could.

The peace delegation was kept at Maranzano’s retreat for four days and nights. Gentile was not even sure whether he would be allowed to leave alive. But while under guard he became convinced that other members of his negotiating team had gone over to the Castellammarese camp. It was a sign that the mafia as a whole was moving from a position of neutrality to one of support for Maranzano. All that the Castellammarese leader had to do was delay. The peace delegation was eventually allowed to leave without resolving the conflict.

Maranzano’s military offensive was accompanied all the way by a propaganda campaign. He protested that Joe ‘the Boss’ was a dictator who had condemned all the Castellammaresi to death. As in Sicily, mafiosi often strenuously claim that their actions are compatible with the mafia’s own customs. The honoured society has its own laws, but everyone in it is a barrack-room lawyer, eager to interpret the rules in his own favour. Maranzano also berated Masseria for admitting Al Capone—a non-Sicilian stained by pimping—to the mafia.

The role played by Capone in the climax of the Castellammarese war is crucial in Gentile’s version. ‘Scarface Al’ was not actually a member of the mafia until the mid-1920s, claims Gentile. Joe ‘the Boss’ admitted him as part of an attempt to destabilize the authority of the then capo of the Chicago honoured society. Capone, loyal to Masseria in New York rather than to the Chicago boss, was authorized to use his own crew to make a bid for leadership in the city. Gentile does not speculate about the exact extent of Al Capone’s power in Chicago relative to the rest of the city’s extensive, multi-ethnic underworld. What concerns Gentile, as always, is the map of power
within
the honoured society. Once Scarface Al’s status in Chicago was secure, he started to exercise influence within the mafia back in New York. Gradually, during the course of the Castellammarese war, it became apparent to Capone that Joe ‘the Boss’ had been so decisively outfought and outmanoeuvred in New York that even his own lieutenants were becoming restless.

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