There is of course a general rule that no killings ever take place on the premises, but sometimes the restrictions are pressed to the limits, especially during periods of mob tensions or warfare. Such was the case when it appeared major bloodletting was about to break out between the Gambinos under Gotti and the Genoveses under Chin Gigante.
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Gotti's men at their Queen's headquarters, the socalled Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, greatly feared an assault by the Gigante people, and into the midst of it all stepped a tragic figure, one William Ciccone, a somewhat retarded young man from the neighborhood. Ciccone took to standing across the street and gaping at the Bergin. Gotti's men immediately concluded that whoever he was, he was up to no good and could well be the advance man in an attack by foes. The men stormed out of the club armed with baseball bats and beat the squealing Ciccone senseless, caring little who might be watching. Ciccone's shattered body was dumped into the back seat of a car. Later he was shot to death and his body placed in the basement of what was described as a mob-owned Staten Island candy store. It was found there by a uniformed policeman before it could be buried the next day. As Howard Blum noted in
Gangland
, "His murder was never solved. But nobody stared into the Bergin anymore."
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After John Gotti took command of the Gambino family's headquarters, the Ravenite, on Manhattan's Mulberry Street, he was determined to discourage snooping by the public or law enforcement. The Ravenite's storefront windows were bricked over leaving only two very small windows and a single door. If the Ravenite, with garbage cans lining the front, lacked the splendor Gotti liked for his personal appearance, the new design cut down on surveillance camera work and perhaps more importantly offered more protection from rival mob bombers.
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Still the Ravenite proved to be a sieve for evidence gathered by the FBI, especially in an upper floor flat the mob thought the agents could not penetrate, and perhaps it was also a fount on the cultural attitudes of mafiosi. As Gene Mustain and Jerry Capeci observed in
Murder Machine
, the mob's most prolific killer, Roy DeMeo, once brought his 12-year-old son to the social club and the boy was asked what he would do if a bully picked on him. "I'd shoot him and cut his fucking head off!" the kid responded.
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"That's my boy!" the elder DeMeo roared, and the rest of the men very nearly rolled on the floor in laughter.
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Magaddino, Stefano (18911974): Buffalo crime family boss
When Stefano (Steve) Magaddino, the longtime godfather of the Buffalo-Niagara Falls crime family, died in July 1974 at the age of 82, one journalist described him as "the grand old man of Cosa Nostra." In many ways Magaddino started much of the aura that clothes Mafia godfathers, at least in the public's perception. An illiterate, Magaddino was by no means a stupid man, instead affecting a rustic simplicity. Even his cousin, Joe Bonanno, who came to hate him and was said to have actively plotted his murder, said "his instinct for selfpreservation was uncanny."
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There is some confusion as to when Magaddino came to this countrysome say in 1903 and others not until the 1920s. Magaddino settled in Brooklyn in a large Castellammare community and was regarded as one of the leaders. The main enemies of the Magaddino family in Sicily had been the Buccellatos, also by then well represented in Brooklyn. One day Magaddino and a friend, Gaspar Milazzo, were shot at as they left a store. Two innocent bystanders were killed. A short time thereafter several Buccellato men were shot to death, and Magaddino and Milazzo thought it wise to leave Brooklyn. Stefano headed for Buffalo and Gaspar to Detroit where each were to remain and found crime families.
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As the
Niagara Falls Gazette
put it, Magaddino was "associated with a string of beverage distributorships here, beginning in 1927." Through bootlegging revenuesNiagara Falls and Buffalo became major illicit gateways for Prohibition liquor from CanadaMagaddino made his family one of the most profitable crime units in the country, heavy into loan-sharking, shakedowns, gambling and labor rackets.
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He also demonstrated his "instinct for selfpreservation" over the years by surviving several attacks on his life. In 1936 his sister was killed in a bomb attack clearly intended for him. The killers had hit the wrong house, Stefano and his sister being nextdoor neighbors. In 1958 a hand grenade was hurled through his kitchen window but failed to explode. In the early 1960s his cousin, Bonanno, put him on a death list in a push to become the main mafioso in the nation, but Magaddino turned the tables on Joe Bananas by having his men kidnap him off New York's Park Avenue. Magaddino held Bonanno prisoner for a time and after a two-year "disappearance" Bonanno finally opted for retirement in Arizona, a refuge dictated by his health in more ways than one.
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If Bonanno could marvel at his older cousin's instinct for survival, the FBI was entitled to the same view. As FBI agent Neil J. Welch, once considered the likely head of the FBI during the Carter administration, has noted, "Magaddino had peacefully coexisted with the FBI for more than three decades." This of course was mainly during the period that J. Edgar Hoover was denying the existence of the Mafia. Magaddino on the other hand
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