The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (43 page)

Valachi thought that he was safe in Sing Sing, but he soon discovered that the influence of the Morello-Terranova clan stretched much further in the 1920s than it had a quarter of a century earlier, when a similar prison sentence had kept Giuseppe Di Priemo safe from Morello’s wrath.

Right after this I was mopping up one day in the dormitory … another guy who was helping to clean up, his name was Angelo, was in the toilet. Just then there was a knock at the door, and a kid by the name of Pete LaTempa said he wanted to get something from under his bed. I didn’t think anything about it. I knew this LaTempa but I never had much to do with him, so I let him in and went about my business with a mop.

All of a sudden I felt a sort of sting—that’s the best I can describe it—under my left arm. I looked behind me, and I saw this LaTempa with a knife in his hand. By now Angelo had come out of the toilet and was standing there, looking at me with his eyes bugging out. … I put my hand down under my arm where he was pointing, and I kind of felt it go right inside me. Then I saw all the blood. Believe me, it was all over the place. So naturally I went after LaTempa, and he started to yell how bad I was cut, hoping I would forget him and worry about myself. But I just kept going, and when I caught him, I let him have a couple of good raps on the mouth. He was smaller than me, and I would have killed him with my bare hands, but by this time my knees were getting weak.

What saved me was that the hospital was only one flight above the dormitory. … When they finished sewing me up, I had thirty-eight stitches running from right under my heart and around to my back. I still got the scar.

Terranova left Valachi alone after that, and his inability to have Valachi killed came as little surprise to many members of the Sicilian underworld. Ciro was feared—his family history, his profitable rackets, and his position as an ally of Masseria all meant that he enjoyed both power and prestige. But the Artichoke King was never held in anything like the same regard as his dead brothers, and for a few irreverent Mafiosi he actually became a figure of fun, a man whose best efforts seemed destined to descend to bitter farce.

The lowest point in Ciro’s criminal career came on December 8, 1929, when he attended a formal dinner in the Bronx in honor of Albert Vitale, a noted magistrate with friends on both sides of the criminal divide. Also in the restaurant that night were a number of eminent New York politicians, several other gangsters, and at least one policeman.

Midway through a raucous evening, the festivities were interrupted by a number of gunmen who burst into the room and held up the assembled dignitaries. The politicians lost their wallets, and—more important, as it transpired—the one policeman was relieved of his revolver. That theft had to be reported, and when it was the whole story of the evening made the press. Vitale was pilloried for his underworld associations, the unfortunate policeman for not putting up a fight. In Mafia circles, though, the Artichoke King was generally believed to have been the most embarrassed guest of all. By allowing himself to get caught up in the Vitale scandal, Terranova had drawn a great deal of unwelcome attention to himself. He had given the newspapers an excuse to dredge up old stories about Italian crime in general and the artichoke racket in particular. However inadvertently, he had interfered with business.

A while later, another story about that evening began to do the rounds. According to this new version of events, Ciro had been much cleverer than it appeared and had in fact been the instigator of events. The holdup, it was said, had been staged by the Terranova clan to recover a wildly incriminating piece of evidence: a written murder contract, signed by Ciro himself, that another of Vitale’s shady guests had been carrying in his pocket.

The story failed to impress Italian Harlem, nonetheless. In the collective opinion of the underworld, any boss foolhardy enough to let such a document fall into unfriendly hands deserved all the criticism that he got.

PUBLICITY OF THE SORT
that attended Ciro Terranova was something that New York’s boss of bosses thoroughly abhorred. Totò D Aquila was obsessively secretive, so much so that, despite a long career as the most influential Mafioso in the country and a criminal record that stretched back to 1906, he remained unknown to the police and press and had never been convicted of a crime. A couple of reports by Flynn aside, practically all that is known of the reclusive Palermitano comes from Nick Gentile. According to Gentile, D Aquila was brutal and authoritarian, a leader who had men condemned to death merely as “a question of power.” He was certainly wary enough of likely rivals to remain wary of Joe Masseria, and with good reason—the most logical explanation for what happened next was that Masseria had decided to remove D Aquila in order to complete his rise to power.

The assassination of Totò D’Aquila, which took place at dusk on October 10, 1928, went almost unnoticed at the time. In retrospect, however, it plainly marked the end of an era: a period of continuity stretching all the way back to the formation of the Morello gang itself and of the precariously maintained peace among New York’s increasingly powerful Mafia families. While D’Aquila ruled in New York, Sicilian criminals still preyed almost exclusively on the Sicilian community. Under his successors, Italian crime became increasingly indistinguishable from New York crime as a whole.

D’Aquila had been boss of bosses for nearly eighteen years when he died, and his killing was thoroughly professional. It had been planned by someone with a good knowledge of his movements; D’Aquila was ambushed on the corner of 13th Street and Avenue A after driving down from his home in the Bronx to keep a regular appointment with his doctor. Leaving the man’s office “just as the lamps were being lit,” he was shot nine times by three assassins who took good care to harm neither the boss’s wife nor any of the four children who had accompanied him downtown. The killers had ensured that their victim would be unable to escape by tampering with the engine of his car. Stranded on the roadside and without a bodyguard, D’Aquila made a vulnerable target. He was hit by a fusillade of bullets fired from point-blank range and died almost instantly.

Morello’s stern successor had drawn a cloak of anonymity around himself so tightly that none of the newsmen who reported his murder seems to have had the least idea of its significance; the story was buried on page 48 of the next day’s
New York Times
, where the victim was described as a “cheese importer.” But someone made it their business to let the single witness to the shooting know exactly who the dead man was. When Louis Realbuto, the owner of a nearby drugstore, first spoke to the police, he admitted to watching the killing and described what happened in considerable detail. The next day, upon mature reflection, the unfortunate pharmacist hurried to change his story. He had not even been in his shop when the murder happened, he now insisted, and he knew nothing whatsoever of the case.

WITH TOTÒ D’AQUILA DEAD
, his likely killer, Masseria, succeeded him as boss of bosses by general acclamation.

Masseria was an ambitious and ruthless man who boasted almost all the qualities demanded of a successful Mafioso. He was strong and cunning, violent, and possessed in full measure the ability to terrify opponents that had made Morello such a formidable presence. Perhaps most tellingly of all, in the treacherous world of organized crime, Masseria was noted for his willingness to strike the first, most telling, blow. He had acted decisively in disposing of D’Aquila. None of the city’s other Mafia bosses relished the prospect of challenging his accession.

The truth was that they had all gone soft: bloated and sated by the profits of Prohibition, wearied by age, worn down by the strains of gangster life. Masseria was considerably younger than the man he had replaced—forty-one years old to D’Aquila’s fifty—and still new enough to leadership to relish it. The leaders of New York’s remaining families were mostly closer to D’Aquila’s age. Cola Schiro was fifty-six, apparently, and had led the Brooklyn game that bore his name for more than two decades. Manfredi Mineo was fifty and had been a power in the same borough for almost as long. Neither man wanted conflict, and both chose to ally themselves with Masseria. The bosses of two smaller families were younger; Joe Profaci—a thief and rapist from Villabate, Sicily, who emerged late in 1928 as leader of his own family—was a mere stripling of thirty, and Tom Reina, who led the fifth of New York’s Mafia gangs from his base in the Bronx, was thirty-eight. Profaci, who had burgeoning interests that extended as far as Staten Island, was less willing than Mineo and Schiro to prostrate himself but just as eager to keep the peace. Only Reina, Masseria’s closest contemporary, presented any sort of threat. One well-informed observer, Joe Bonanno—then a rising member of the Schiro gang—thought that “Reina had to be careful not to offend him, and he generally toed the Masseria line. But it was a relationship based on convenience rather than on likemindedness.”

The one trait that Joe Masseria fatally lacked was a talent for diplomacy. Tact and the willingness to compromise—to set limited goals and accept something other than unconditional surrender—had long been valued by the Mafia, but Masseria’s lack of flexibility surpassed even D’Aquila’s, and his authoritarian aggressiveness soon proved to be a crucial weakness. He seems to have reveled in the nickname “Joe the Boss,” and as Bonanno was swift to point out, the eagerness with which he embraced the name was highly significant.

Sicilian to the tip of his trigger finger, a traditionalist, a romantic, and a liar even to himself, Bonanno held fast to the notion of the boss as a benevolent “father” whose job it was to shepherd the members of his family. Masseria was not a father of this sort. His English nickname, Bonanno said,

was something new, and, in hindsight, it reflected the subtle changes already transforming our Tradition in America. The title “boss” represented a corruption of the title “Father.” It’s regrettable that in America the term “boss” became the more popular of the two. The terms are not interchangeable. … “Boss” connotes a relationship between a master and his servants or his workers. The growing use of the word “boss” when referring to “Father” was one of the earliest indications that in America relationships between a leader and his followers had more of a business than a kinship base. The word “boss” represented a new reality.

Joe the Boss’s greatest sin, at least so far as his fellow Mafiosi were concerned, was his attempt to expand the powers of the boss of bosses. In Giuseppe Morello’s time, the fragmentary evidence suggests, the boss had been more than anything an adviser and conciliator. D’Aquila had been far more authoritarian, but Masseria took things further still, seizing as much power as possible for himself and demanding more than mere obedience from New York’s five families. Joe the Boss, it became clear, wanted to share in all the profits from the city’s rackets. In February 1930, a year and a half into his reign, he felt strong enough to press Tom Reina into ceding him a stake in the lucrative Bronx ice racket. When Reina resisted, he was murdered, and perhaps as a result, Masseria’s subsequent attempts to grab a substantial share of Manhattan’s clothing racket met with little resistance. Soon the boss of bosses began making demands of families as far away as Chicago and Detroit—a privilege that, so far as is known, no New York Mafiosi had ever claimed before. It is scarcely surprising that Masseria’s brutal attempts to garner power led first to protests, then to covert opposition, and finally to outright violence on an unprecedented scale.

It would come to be known as the Castellammare War—”Castellammare” because resistance to Masseria was strongest among the Mafia of Brooklyn and led by Brooklyn Mafiosi who had been born in Castellammare del Golfo. The Castellammaresi had a reputation even among other Sicilians as men “renowned for their refusal to take guff from anyone,” and Bonanno, who had been born in the town, liked to portray the resistance to Joe the Boss as something that sprang up naturally among the proud Mafiosi of that district: a noble crusade against unjust rule. The truth was rather more complex than that; Masseria was more than a mere autocrat—he was able to persuade the Mafia’s general assembly to back him, which suggests the boss was not merely indulging in a personal vendetta. A good number of Masseria’s opponents, moreover, came from other parts of Sicily, and men from the same town often supported different sides. Tommaso Gagliano, who succeeded Tom Reina as leader of the Bronx family, had been born in Corleone and so was well known to Morello, who remained loyal to Joe the Boss. It certainly is true, however, that many of Masseria’s most determined opponents were drawn from among the Castellammaresi who filled the ranks of Schiro’s family—men whom the boss himself saw as “unruly and thick-skulled.”

The Castellammare War was an important turning point in Mafia history: the greatest convulsion that the fraternity had known. It was a conflict long remembered by all those who took part in it, and it was Morello, in his role as Masseria’s chief strategist, who fired its opening shots and dictated the course of the first six months of hostilities, a period that saw his boss’s forces victorious on every front.

According to the Castellammaresi themselves, it was thanks almost entirely to Morello that Masseria scored so much success: “Mr. Joe,” Bonanno said, was smug and stupid, and it was the Clutch Hand who was Masseria’s “brains trust.” The first months of the war were marked by several murderous, clever moves aimed at asserting the Masseria faction’s dominance and crippling resistance to his rule. Morello began by sowing dissent between two of the most important families west of New York: the Detroit Mafia gang led by Gaspare Milazzo of Castellammare and the Chicago family of Milazzo’s close friend Joe Aiello. Next he kept Aiello busy, playing him off against Chicago’s most notorious Italian gangster, Al Capone, while Milazzo was disposed of. On May 31, 1930, gunmen dispatched by the Clutch Hand hunted down and killed the Detroit boss in the back room of a fish restaurant.