Authors: John Dickie
The first phase of the Castellammarese war came to an end at Scarpato’s restaurant on Coney Island on 15 April 1931. There Joe ‘the Boss’ ate a full lunch with one of his lieutenants, Lucky Luciano, and began to play cards. When Luciano went to the men’s room, a team of killers he had instructed came in and shot Masseria dead. Later a press photographer placed an ace of spades in the victim’s hand to add a wry touch to the scene. Cola Gentile suspected that Capone and Luciano had together decided that Masseria was too weak to bring about the peace that was necessary for business to continue.
Having removed his own capo, Luciano sought peace terms with Maranzano and the Castellammaresi. A meeting to discuss the implications of Maranzano’s victory was hosted by Al Capone. Gentile says little about the meeting other than that there was ‘indescribable confusion’. Maranzano eventually obtained what he wanted: the position of
capo dei capi.
He held a banquet in Chicago to celebrate his election and had tickets printed priced at $6 each. A thousand of them were dispatched to Capone who showed his deference by sending back a cheque for $6,000. Similar gestures were made by other bosses. Further tributes were expected. In the centre of the gaudily decorated table in the banquet room was a large dish in which guests placed bundles of banknotes. Gentile estimated that Maranzano gathered $100,000 from his benefit evening.
A short time later, on 10 September, the newly crowned boss Maranzano was stabbed and shot to death in his Park Avenue office by non-Italian mobsters pretending to be from the Inland Revenue Service. They had been employed by Luciano. The Castellammarese war was over, ended by the murder of both of its leading combatants.
Underworld legend portrays the murder of Maranzano as the moment when Lucky Luciano ‘modernized’ the mafia. Luciano has gone down in some versions of the story as a kind of criminal management consultant, the business brain behind a top-down restructuring of the mafia on new, corporate lines. Some testimonies claim that after Joe ‘the Boss’ was murdered, Maranzano tried to impose himself as a dictator. Luciano’s response was to kill him and institute a more ‘democratic’ form of leadership. He established a governing commission comprising the capos of the New York Families plus one outsider. (Gentile suggests that the five Families already existed by this time.)
Most of the mobsters who later recalled the Castellammarese war also said that within two days of Maranzano’s death, twenty, forty or even ninety Sicilian mafiosi were eliminated across America on Luciano’s orders. This was the famous purge of the ‘greaseballs’ or ‘Moustache Petes’; the modernization of the mafia apparently involved exterminating these superannuated Sicilians. The problem with this theory is that there is no documentary evidence whatsoever of a grand transnational extermination of mafiosi at the time of Maranzano’s murder. The junior mobsters who were told of twenty, forty or ninety Sicilians being killed clearly did not read the newspapers. The oft-repeated tale of the purge of the ‘Moustache Petes’ is mythical.
The idea that the Sicilian mafia was ‘old-fashioned’ is another diehard misconception. Whatever criminal aptitudes Joe ‘the Boss’ had brought with him to New York from Palermo had been modern enough to enable him to build a career lasting more than two decades. Maranzano, the short-term victor in the Castellammarese war, had arrived much more recently. But his astonishingly rapid rise to power in the US is testimony both to the influence that Sicilian affairs still had on the American branch of the mafia, and to the ease with which some ‘Moustache Petes’ were able to adapt to the challenges of the Big Apple. In other words, the template that sets modernizing American gangsters against conservative greaseballs does not fit neatly over the events of 1930–1.
Gentile’s interpretation of the ending of the Castellammarese war is different and more convincing. The idea for a Commission was not Luciano’s; it had already been floated during the ‘indescribable confusion’ of the meeting following Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria’s murder. Gentile does not seem to regard the Commission as a particularly radical innovation; there were clearly consultative meetings of senior mafiosi in the United States before the First World War. Men of honour are forever tinkering with the rules and structures of the association. It is likely that the invention of the Commission was another instance of constitutional tinkering.
In Gentile’s eyes, Masseria and Maranzano were neither more nor less dictatorial or old-fashioned than previous senior bosses. In Sicily, mafia capos are usually smeared before and after they are eliminated; they die because they are variously too greedy, too authoritarian, too weak, too old-fashioned. Or so their killers say. Some justification has to be fabricated for executions that are, in reality, almost always driven by the same old motives of power and fear. The victors in mafia warfare also love to present their rise to power as the coming of a new era. It seems that this was also the case in New York in 1931.
Nick Gentile was too astute to believe this kind of internal propaganda. He claims that it was only after murdering Maranzano that Luciano actually entered the mafia hierarchy as such, becoming one of the members of the Commission. Luciano was obviously already a powerful man long before this, and a key element in Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria’s power base. Thus, as Capone had been earlier, Luciano was an external force enlisted to tip the balance in a struggle for power within the relatively narrow confines of the honoured society. Lucky’s contacts with the much larger universe of Jewish and Irish organized crime were the key resource that he brought to bear
within
the mafia.
Maranzano’s death can be taken, all the same, as marking the point when the mafia in the United States became an Italian-American organization rather than a Sicilian one. And for that reason, the American mafia will appear henceforth in these pages only when its affairs impinge upon events in Sicily. But, for all that, the Americanization of the mafia was not a dramatic transformation, a once-and-for-all break with the traditional ways of the Old World. The mafia’s ethnic make-up became slightly more mixed as Neapolitans and other southern Italians were absorbed. The two organizations gradually separated, although the Americans always recognized the prestige due to the original mafia, and there continued to be strong family and business links across the Atlantic. The core of the American honoured society’s membership remained ethnically Sicilian after 1931. In some places there was no challenge to Sicilian dominance. In Buffalo, for example, Stefano Magaddino from Castellammare del Golfo had an astonishingly long reign; he was capo from the 1920s until his death in 1974. Sicilian methods would characterize the American mafia long after the young guns of the Prohibition era—Luciano, Capone, and their like—were gone.
Above all, mafiosi in both Sicily and the US continued to think of themselves as a breed apart from other human beings and even other criminals. American or Sicilian, to be a man of honour means to operate beyond society’s measures of right and wrong.
* * *
When Prohibition was finally abolished, America was four years into the great Depression. Organized crime survived these changes thanks in no small measure to the gaming industry. Nick Gentile entered the new boom: he became a partner in a gambling house in Manhattan’s Little Italy.
But the end of Prohibition also saw the national mood harden against organized crime. Whether in America or in Sicily, the mafia would not exist without links to the political domain. At the Democratic Party national convention in Chicago in 1932, Frank Costello shared a suite at the plush Drake Hotel with the leader of the 11th assembly district in Manhattan. Lucky Luciano shared another with the Democratic leader of New York’s 2nd assembly district. But unlike Italy before the Second World War, the United States was a democracy. The competition for power in America was more open, making it almost as easy to build political careers out of crusades
against
crime as it was to use the vote-gathering powers of mobsters. The Hollywood movies of the early 1930s accurately track a switch in public attitudes and political tactics as Prohibition ended. Instead of the gangster movies of the early 1930s, like
Little Caesar
(1931) and
Scarface
(1932), Hollywood began to make films lauding the deeds of law enforcement officers. James Cagney, who had played a hood in
Public Enemy
(1931), was recruited to the FBI for
‘G’Men
(1935). In New York, Fiorello La Guardia was elected mayor in 1933. He proceeded to drive Frank Costello’s illegal fruit machines from the city. (Costello was not unduly perturbed; he moved them to New Orleans where Senator Huey Long invited him to come and share his gambling income around.)
The appointment in 1935 of Thomas E. Dewey as New York special prosecutor was a still more worrying development for organized crime in the city. Dewey would run twice (unsuccessfully) as Republican candidate for the Presidency on the strength of his much-hyped successes against the hoodlums. In 1941 he did manage to become Governor of New York.
There were some eminent victims of the new anti-gangster campaign. Arthur ‘Dutch Schultz’ Flegenheimer, one of Luciano’s lieutenants and the king of numbers rackets in Harlem, came under pressure from all sides. He faced increased legal bills, defending himself from Dewey’s tax-dodging charges. His political protectors needed more money to respond to the challenge from reforming candidates. He was steadily losing his grip on the people who ran the numbers games on the street when he was shot dead in the Palace Chop House in Newark in October 1935. Dewey then cornered Lucky Luciano himself; he was sentenced to thirty to fifty years on prostitution charges (on which more in the next chapter). Brooklyn district attorney—and future mayor of New York City—William O’Dwyer even sent Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter, the garment industry extortionist, to the electric chair; he was the first eminent gangster to be executed by the state.
A new drive to combat the narcotics business put an end to Cola Gentile’s career in America. In 1937, he was arrested by federal agents in New Orleans for his part in organizing a drug-dealing syndicate that stretched from Texas to New York. His version is that, after consulting his capo in Brooklyn, he jumped bail and fled back to Sicily, never to return. But there may well be a great deal more to the story. A mafioso who turned state’s evidence in the 1980s claimed that the Palermo bosses asked his own Catania Family to assassinate Gentile as a favour to the Americans, and added in passing that Gentile had fled from America after talking to the police. Nobody acted on the request. ‘They left the poor old man alone. He had fallen so low at the end of his life that he only survived because of charity from neighbours who gave him the odd plate of pasta.’ Whether it really was pity that saved Cola Gentile’s life will probably never be known.
The Second World War brought respite for American mobsters after the troubles of the mid to late 1930s. It drew press attention away from crime and created profiteering opportunities; Americans were particularly resistant to petrol rationing. In a much more dramatic way, the war also proved to be the salvation of the mafia back in Sicily.
DON CALÒ AND THE REBIRTH OF THE HONOURED SOCIETY
It is said that on the morning of 14 July 1943, an American fighter plane flew low over Villalba. It naturally drew the people out into the streets. When it roared down to rooftop level they could see, attached to its fuselage, a golden-yellow flag with a large L in the centre. As it passed over the house belonging to the parish priest, Monsignor Giovanni Vizzini, the pilot dropped a small package. But it was intercepted by an Italian soldier and passed on to the commander of the local
carabinieri.
Four days earlier ‘Operation Husky’ had been launched when 160,000 Allied troops landed along a broad section of the south-eastern coast of Sicily; 300,000 more American and British fighting men followed. This huge force was now fanning out across the island. The British headed north-east towards Catania, Messina, and the mainland. The Americans advanced north and west. It was the first time the Allies had invaded the territory of an Axis power.
Villalba, in the very centre of Sicily, was hardly a major strategic objective. It was not much more than a collection of peasant hovels known principally for its lentils—an important component of the diet of the poor. The town’s sloping grid of narrow, dirt-track streets had grown in the eighteenth century to provide farmhands for the giant Miccichè estate that stretched out in all directions below. Life in Villalba revolved around the tiny Piazza Madrice where there were two bars, a branch of the Bank of Sicily, and a church.
Yet the fighter plane returned the following day, still bearing its unusual banner. Another package was dropped, and this time it found its way to the right person. Its nylon wrapping bore the Sicilian words ‘zu Calò’—’Uncle Calò’—who was mafia boss Don Calogero Vizzini, the priest’s older brother. It was picked up by the Vizzinis’ butler who took it to his master. It was found to contain a golden-yellow silk handkerchief with a large black L in the centre.
That very evening, the story goes, a rider left Villalba with a message for a certain ‘zu Peppi’ in Mussomeli. The message read as follows: ‘On Tuesday 20th Turi will leave for the fair at Cerda with the calves. I will set off the same day with the cows, the oxen, and the bull. Prepare the kindling for the fruit and organize pens for the animals. Tell the other overseers to get ready.’
The letter was in a code that had an Old-World simplicity. The addressee, ‘zu Peppi’, was ‘uncle’ Giuseppe Genco Russo, boss of Mussomeli. He was being informed that Turi (another mafioso) would lead the American motorized divisions (calves) as far as Cerda. Don Calogero Vizzini meanwhile would set off the same day with the bulk of the troops (the cows), the tanks (oxen), and the commander-in-chief (the bull). The mafiosi under Genco Russo’s command were to prepare the battleground (kindling) and provide cover for the infantry (pens).