Honor Thy Father (24 page)

Leaving France, Bonanno and his young friends sailed first to Cuba, where they were met by
amici
and provided with a small boat and a pilot who took them at night to the western shore of Florida, slipping them in through a private dock in Tampa. Tampa was a smuggler’s paradise during Prohibition, with its many inlets offering a variety of entrances and its low-hung tropical foliage and abundant trees providing excellent concealment as swift motorboats arrived to deliver whiskey or people. Waiting to greet Bonanno and the others at the dock was a man named Willie Moretti, the Florida representative of the Jewish gangster who controlled the rackets in New Jersey, Abner (Longy) Zwillman.

It was not uncommon in the twenties for mafiosi to be working in organizations controlled by Jews; the Mafia was not yet the homogeneous syndicate it would become, and mobsters of Irish, Jewish, and other origins were still big names in organized crime. Dutch Schultz controlled the numbers rackets in Harlem and the distribution of beer. Louis Lepke and Jake Shapiro were top labor extortionists, and they had trucks transporting stolen or contraband merchandise around the nation, and their enforcement gangs were under Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky. There were other figures such as Arnold Rothstein in New York, Charles (King) Solomon in Boston, and Frank Erickson in Florida. Erickson worked closely with Frank Costello, who was one of the first Italo-American gangsters to make a fortune during Prohibition. Costello, who had immigrated to the United States from southern Italy at the age of four with his parents, was a prominent rumrunner in 1923 under Bill Dwyer, who commanded a fleet of twelve steel-plated speedboats, armed with machine guns, that carried whiskey from Canada to the eastern seaboard and Chicago.

It was perhaps in Chicago that the mafiosi were making their strongest impact at the time of Joseph Bonanno’s arrival in the United States. The gang of Johnny Torrio, composed of several Sicilians like himself, was beginning to overpower the Irish gangs that had been preeminent for years. Torrio’s chief assistant was Al Capone, a Neapolitan, and it was said that they were each earning about $50,000 a week during the early period of Prohibition, although it was a risky business with street murders almost daily. After the Torrio—Capone men killed Dion O’Banion in November 1924, O’Banion’s backers retaliated and came close to killing Torrio. Although he recovered from gunshot wounds in the hospital, he decided to abdicate the leadership to Capone. This decision was received unenthusiastically by some Sicilians in the outfit, who would have preferred to work under one of their own, but since there was no Sicilian to match Capone’s organizational ability, his political connections throughout Illinois, and his personal acquaintanceship with mobsters around the country, there was no choice. And during the next five years, despite the almost constant warfare with lesser rivals, the Capone gang prospered as had few gangs before it, earning about $50 million a year from bootlegging, according to tax agents, about $25 million from gambling, and close to $10 million each from prostitution and narcotics. Capone’s operating expenses were also high; they included an estimated $15 million a year in contributions to the Chicago police and to other city and state officials.

In New York City at this time, the top Mafia figure was a short, squat old-style southern Italian with a moustache named Joe Masseria, who was known as Joe the Boss. Though he did not possess Capone’s talent for organization, Masseria was shrewd and fearless, and in his gang were several ambitious young men who would achieve great notoriety in the future. Among them was his chief aide, Lucky Luciano, twenty-seven, who had come to the United States at nine from a town east of Palermo, Lercara Friddi, where his father had labored in the sulfur pits. There was also the twenty-seven-year-old Vito Genovese, another laborer’s son, who had immigrated at fifteen from the village of Nola, near Naples.

Joseph Bonanno, who was nineteen when he arrived, did not immediately associate himself with Luciano, Genovese, or other followers of Masseria who gathered in certain hangouts in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Bonanno instead went directly to the Brooklyn neighborhood where he had lived as a boy with his parents more than thirteen years ago, and he was pleased and surprised at how many people from Castellammare were now clustered within the teeming blocks of Roebling and Havemeyer Streets, Grand Street and Metropolitan Avenue, North Fourth and Fifth Streets. During his first few weeks in Brooklyn, as the entire neighborhood welcomed him, he heard again the familiar accent of western Sicily, recognized the surnames, saw in their faces a resemblance to relatives still in Castellammare. He also had relatives of his own living in Brooklyn at this time, as did his young traveling companions, all of whom found lodging in the neighborhood except for Peter Magaddino, who had made previous arrangements to join his cousin Stefano and the other Magaddinos who had settled in Buffalo.

Joseph Bonanno lived in the home of his mother’s oldest brother, Peter Bonventre, who owned a barbershop. Peter Bonventre was a generous and kindly man who was earning an honest if unimpressive livelihood from barbering. Like the majority of immigrants from Sicily and Italy, Bonventre was a law-abiding, humble man to whom the journey to the New World was the highpoint of his life, the fulfillment of a dream, and he was willing to begin at the bottom and work his way slowly upward. He saw his life as a step in a new direction that would hopefully be followed and improved upon by the next generation, but he was not driven by any desire to achieve for himself great wealth, power, or prestige. He had a younger brother who was smitten by these things, and this brother was now a member of the neighborhood mafiosi. Peter Bonventre wondered whether his nephew would also become a member of whether he could work within the law; and after Joseph Bonanno had been in Brooklyn for a while, Bonventre asked him if he would possibly consider a career as a barber, perhaps one day acquiring a shop of his own. Bonanno smiled and thanked his uncle for his concern, saying that he would give it some thought. But privately Bonanno was surprised by his uncle’s lack of insight—not in a thousand years would Bonanno become a barber or anything of the sort. He did not sail thousands of miles across the sea, and slip through the dragnet of American security, to devote himself to the trimming of other men’s hair. Even at nineteen, though he had no specific goal in mind, Bonanno envisioned himself a leader of men, an individual destined to face great challenges, to assert himself, to prosper and become a man of respect in a new land. While he was quite certain that he could not attain the respect he sought within the legal confines of an American society that was dominated by Anglo-Saxons, that was governed by men whose grandfathers had muscled their way to the top and had rigged the rules to their own advantage and had learned all the loopholes, he did believe that the ruling classes in America as in Sicily had great respect for two things—power and money—and he was determined to get both in one way or another. The perfect time to do so, of course, was right now, when possibly most of the nation’s citizens were breaking the law and making the bootleggers rich. So in his first year in Brooklyn, Bonanno affiliated himself with the neighborhood mafiosi, who were obviously doing very well; they were driving new cars and wearing finer clothes than their humble countrymen who got up each day at dawn to toil in factories or work in construction gangs.

The mafiosi, who slept late in the morning, usually met each afternoon in their private storefront club on Roebling Street, and they would sit drinking black coffee or playing cards. A few doors away from their club was a large bakery that was also a front for a bootlegging business, and after dark the bakery trucks would travel through the city delivering pastries and bread, whiskey and wine, to certain speakeasies and restaurants. The trucks sometimes also drove to freight yards or piers with boxloads of machine guns to be shipped to Al Capone to help fight his rivals in Chicago.

Within a remarkably short period of time, Bonanno was regarded by the other men in Brooklyn as a potential leader. They had initially accepted him because of his name, but soon they recognized his precocious talent for organization and his quick instinct for seizing opportunities. He greatly expanded their whiskey business after having personally visited the owners of speakeasies, and he did this without resorting to threats or pressure; his polished manner and pleasant appearance were assets and he extended easy credit to those speakeasies raided by the police. He expanded the Italian lottery to other areas of Brooklyn, and he invested the money that he earned in several businesses—clothing factories, cheese shops, a funeral parlor—and he covered his total earnings so adroitly that he would never be convicted of tax evasion.

His name and maneuverings soon became known to Joe Masseria in Manhattan, who was becoming increasingly suspicious of the growing number of Castellammarese in Brooklyn. Masseria sensed that the Castellammarese were gradually disassociating themselves from his overall leadership, and in 1928 he demanded higher tribute as a test of their loyalty. When they did not agree to his terms, Masseria had one of their men shot to death on a Brooklyn street and another was captured and held in a hangman’s noose until the prisoner’s friends raised $10,000 in ransom.

But these incidents did not achieve Masseria’s desired results—the Castellammarese became hostile and more clannish—and finally Masseria lost his patience and decided to annihilate the entire group. His campaign started slowly with the destruction of alcohol trucks and with sniper’s bullets fired from cars moving fast through the Brooklyn neighborhood, and by 1930 there were a number of murders committed by both sides, and the “Castellammarese War” became a national issue in the underworld as top gangsters in other cities either supported or opposed Masseria’s plan to destroy the Castellammarese. Some gang leaders sent money or guns to the faction they were backing, others sent cars and men. Joe Masseria had, in addition to Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese, such underlings and advisers as Joe Adonis and Carlo Gambino, Albert Anastasia and Frank Costello. Even though Al Capone was having battles of his own in Chicago, he was sympathetic to Masseria’s cause; and in 1930 Capone’s men were credited with killing a Chicago boss named Joseph Aiello who had been sending $5,000 a week to the Castellammarese in Brooklyn.

The boss of the Castellammarese during the war was not Joseph Bonanno, who was twenty-five, but an older man of forty—Salvatore Maranzano, a lean, tall, pensive Sicilian with a receding hairline and severe almost ascetic features. Maranzano had been a close friend in Sicily of Joseph Bonanno’s father; and, like Bonanno
père
, and Bonanno
fils
, he was an avid student of ancient history. Maranzano was particularly interested in the Roman Empire under Julius Caesar, and Maranzano’s apartment in Brooklyn contained many volumes about Caesar’s wars and tactics. Maranzano’s chief aides in 1930 included Bonanno and Joseph Profaci, Thomas Lucchese, and Joseph Magliocco. Maranzano also had an important ally in Gaetano Gagliano, who had been an officer in another gang whose leader Masseria had eliminated; Gagliano not only shifted his men to Maranzano’s side but Gagliano himself contributed several thousand dollars to the fight against Masseria. Another powerful force behind Maranzano were the Castellammarese in Buffalo, led by Stefano Magaddino, who was sending Maranzano $5,000 a week as well as supplies and vehicles.

It became apparent by 1931 that the momentum had shifted against Joe Masseria, who had lost approximately fifty men during the first year of the fighting and whose followers were slowly realizing that their cause was hopeless and unnecessary. The Castellammarese were better organized, more unified than Masseria’s people, and they also had a force of approximately 400 men, which was larger than Masseria’s group, some of whom were now defecting. Masseria’s advisers, Luciano and Genovese, angry because their profitable bootlegging business and other enterprises had declined during the prolonged feud, began to urge Masseria to make peace with Maranzano—or, if not peace, to at least apply more pressure on Maranzano by enlisting the aid of Jewish gangs and other ethnic organizations. But Masseria, a victim of his own pride, stubbornly refused.

As more of Masseria’s men were injured or killed during the winter of 1931 and as more alcohol trucks were stolen by Maranzano’s hijackers, Luciano and Genovese and three of their colleagues secretly visited Maranzano and made a deal. They would have Masseria murdered if Maranzano would guarantee their safety and status in the underworld after the deed was done. Maranzano agreed. And so on the afternoon of April 15, 1931, at Scarpato’s Restaurant on Coney Island, after Lucky Luciano excused himself from the table at which he had lunched with Masseria and walked into the men’s room, gunmen entered the restaurant and blasted bullets at Masseria, hitting him in the back and the head. Masseria fell heavily to the floor and died instantly. When the police arrived, Luciano told them that he had seen nothing, having only heard the noise; and the restaurant employees, confirming that Luciano had indeed been in the men’s room at the time of the shooting, were unable to identify the killers.

After Masseria’s funeral, Maranzano presided at a meeting attended by 500 people in a hired hall in the Bronx and explained that the days of shooting were over and that a period of harmony was about to begin. He then presented them with his plan of reorganization, one loosely based on Caesar’s military command—the individual gangs each would be commanded by a
capo
, or boss, under whom would be a
sottocapo
, underboss, and beneath the underboss would be
caporegimi
, lieutenants, who would supervise the squads of soldiers. Each unit would be known as a family and would operate within prescribed territorial areas. Over all the family bosses would be a
capo di tutti capi
, a boss of all bosses, and it was this title that Maranzano bequeathed to himself.