About The MOB
L
Cesare Lamare
June 6, 1887, to Feb. 7, 1931.
Cesare LeMare, "Chester"
Lamare led the Detroit Mafia for a brief period in 1930 at the start of the open fighting of the Castellammarese War.
He excitedly proclaimed himself leader of a predominantly Castellammarese Sicilian group after ordering the assassination of some rival leaders, including his one-time friend and protector Gaspar Milazzo, on May 31, 1930. The assassinations became known as the "fish market" murders, because of their location. Some believe New York crime boss Giuseppe Masseria ok'd the killing of Milazzo.
Milazzo was only one of the powerful Mafia rulers in Detroit, however, and Lamare did not survive long after the hit. He went into hiding from police as well as rivals, as more than a dozen other Detroit gangsters were shot down during 1930 and 1931. Authorities wanted him in connection with the killing of crusading broadcast journalist Gerald E. Buckley. Lamare's opponents tracked him down and reportedly shot him to death in his home on Feb. 7, 1931.
Police, summoned to the location by Lamare's wife, found the gang leader with a bullet hole in his back. They also found a small arsenal in the place, including six revolvers, a tear gas gun, two rifles, 4000 rounds of ammunition and some hand grenades.
Meyer Lansky
Aug. 28, 1900, to Jan. 15, 1983.
Meier Suchowljansky
Lansky was a long-time friend and "business" associate of Charlie Luciano, Benjamin Siegel, Frank Costello and other big-name Prohibition Era gangsters.
He was born in Grodno, Russia, in 1900 or 1902, depending on the source of data. The Jewish community there was besieged and often assaulted by the surrounding Gentile community. The Jewish families armed themselves and often fought back, causing Lansky's earliest memories to be of a state of Jewish versus non-Jewish warfare.
His family brought him and his brother Jake to America in 1911 - Ellis Island processing apparently changed his age from 10 to 8 and shifted his birthday from Aug. 28, 1900, to July 4, 1902.
The family settled in Brooklyn and a few years later moved to Manhattan's Lower East Side, where Lansky met and befriended Benjamin Siegel (called by some "Bugsy," but never to his face). An odd friendship, apparently based on a mutual recognition of toughness, formed between Lansky and young Salvatore Lucania - later known as Charlie Luciano. Luciano, Lansky and Siegel cooperated on some minor criminal enterprises, possibly working for Arnold Rothstein on occasion, and in scuffles with the nearby Irish-dominated gangs.
During Prohibition, the three did a fair share of rum-running and might also have worked at hijacking competitors' liquor shipments. When Luciano was absorbed into the Mafia organization of "Joe the Boss" Masseria, Lansky and Siegel served as his advisors and enforcers.
After 1931, Lansky became a trusted financial adviser to the ruling Commission of the national crime Syndicate. He specialized in setting up gambling facilities in Miami and Cuba and initially supported Siegel's vision of a gambling and entertainment Mecca in Las Vegas (retaining for many years a secret financial interest in the Flamingo).
After World War II, Lansky and his brother Jake ran a gambling house near Miami known as the Colonial Inn, and they branched out with other gaming complexes in Saratoga and Hollywood. Lansky later collaborated with Frank Costello in the opening of the Beverly Club just outside of New Orleans in 1946.
In '48, Florida began to act against casinos, and Lansky sold off Colonial Inn. Pressure by the U.S. government against organized crime was mounting in the late 1940s, and Lansky was called before the Kefauver Committee Oct. 11, 1950.
Lansky's major investment, the Riviera Hotel in Havana, was lost when communist rebel leader Fidel Castro siezed control of the island nation and threw out the gangsters in 1960. The hotel, which cost an estimated $14 million to build, had not be open long enough to recover more than a third of the initial investment.
Lansky's health suffered upon the casino's shutdown. He dealt with ulcers and chest pains and was hospitalized after a heart attack. He eventually recovered but was hounded by federal law enforcement agencies for much of the rest of his life.
In the early 1970s, he attempted to retire to Israel. Under pressure from the U.S., which wanted Lansky back home to face charges of skimming from the Flamingo, the Israeli government refused his request for permanent citizenship in 1971. Late in 1972, the Israeli Supreme Court backed the decision and Lansky was forced to attempt to find refuge elsewhere.
An airplane exodus took him first to Switzerland, then to Rio, then to Buenos Aires and on to Paraguay, where he hoped to set up a quiet life for himself. But U.S. authorities headed him off, and Paraguayan officials refused to let Lansky off the plane. The aircraft continued on with stops in La Paz, Lima and Panama before returning Lansky to Miami and the waiting American officials.
Lansky avoided conviction but three other attempts to go to Israel were blocked. He died in Miami Jan. 15, 1983.
Leo Lauritano
Lauritano was a Brooklyn-based racketeer who ran a saloon at 115 Navy Street and also conducted a lucrative murder-for-hire business.
It was to Lauritano that Bronx boss Ciro Terranova allegedly ran to contract a hit on Joe DiMarco in 1916. A Lauritano gunman was also used just weeks later to perform a hit on Terranova's brother Nicholas, indicating that money, rather than loyalty, determined the targets of Lauritano's men.
According to testimony from hitman Johnny "Lefty" Esposito, Lauritano paid his gunmen a steady salary to keep them on retainer. (Esposito complained that Lauritano lowered his pay as a result of the accidental killing of Lauritano friend Charles Lombardi during the DiMarco hit.)
The Lauritano operation appears to be the earliest of Brooklyn's alleged murder-for-hire groups. In the early 1920s, authorities believed that a young Castellammarese Mafia family was working as hired killers for other underworld organizations. Two decades later, prosecutors discovered a Brooklyn-based gang of professional killers which became known as Murder, Inc.
Nick Licata
Feb. 20, 1897, to Oct, 19, 1974.
Nicolo Licata
Burbank cafe manager Nick Licata earned his stripes in the Los Angeles crime family through his involvement in the murders of Kansas City mafiosi Tony Brancato and Tony Trombino. The Kansas City family was attempting to assert itself in the West.
Licata became a front man for boss Jack Dragna during the later years of Dragna's reign. He served under Frank DeSimone for a decade after Dragna's death and then took control of a deeply divided family.
Law enforcement authorities had learned a great deal about the L.A. family by that time, and Licata was constantly hounded by police and federal agents. He was unable to consolidate his power. A branch of the criminal organization appears to have come under the control of Jack Dragna's son shortly after Licata ascended to the boss position.
Though he had earlier convinced Kansas City mafiosi to stay out of California, boss Licata also had to deal with incursions by the Cleveland mob family.
With his family and his territory in disarray, Licata retained the title of boss - though probably not the power - until his death in fall of 1974.
Pasquale Lolordo
? to Jan. 8, 1929.
"Pasqualino"
Lolordo was one of the unfortunate leaders of the Chicago Unione Siciliana of the late Prohibition Era. He stepped to the Unione presidency upon the death of Antonio Lombardo in September of 1928.
Police initially suspected a Joseph Lolordo - a Lombardo bodyguard - of performing the assassination of Lombardo. Newspapers noted that Joseph Lolordo and Al Capone had the same attorney.
Pasquale Lolordo's dreams of being a second Mike Merlo - and, in fact, his dreams of anything at all - stopped abruptly on Jan. 8, 1929. On that day, he was assassinated by visitors to his home. It is believed that the killing was ordered by the Aiello Mafia clan.
Joseph Guinta, who had begun a Sicilian revolt within the Capone organization, bravely took over the Unione presidency. But he wouldn't survive to see the summer.
Antonio Lombardo
? to Sept. 1928.
Lombardo, a trusted Capone adviser and perhaps his organization's consigliere, was one of the tools used by Capone in his effort to take over Chicago's Unione Siciliana.
In the chaos following Unione leader Mike Merlo's death in 1924, Samuel Amatuna briefly held the presidency of the Sicilian organization. Amatuna got in the way of some bullets just two days after the first anniversary of Merlo's death, and the Unione leadership was once again vacant.
According to legend, Capone, who had taken over Johnny Torrio's operations in January of that year, used his influence to shove Lombardo into the president's chair. Reportedly many objected to the move but were too fearful of Capone's wrath to oppose it.
The legend is probably inaccurate. Capone's authority within the Chicago underworld was limited at the time. However, it could be the case that Lombardo - a respected figure in the immigrant Sicilian community - took Capone under his wing.
Legend says that, by 1926, Lombardo was preparing the way for a direct takeover of the Unione by Capone. He opened the membership to non-Sicilian Italians, allowing the Neapolitan Capone to become a member. The organization changed its name locally to the Italo-American National Union.
But membership rules of the old Unione seem not to have excluded non-Sicilian Italians. And one account of the organization's name change indicated that it was to remove the false impression that only Sicilians were allowed in. The only membership prohibition seems to have been a rule against admitting those convicted of felonies.
Frankie Yale of Brooklyn, once a strong Capone friend, was apparently angered by the changes. (Some sources say Yale was national president of the Unione Siciliana. It is doubtful that he actually ran the social organization. However, he could have been a presiding officer of the Sicilian underworld network that used Unione as a front.). Yale's relationship with Capone deteriorated.
By 1927, Capone's meddling in the Unione and his aggressiveness in the Chicago rackets had forced the Aiello Brothers into an alliance with the North Side Gang against Capone. In January 1928, Yale reportedly demanded that Lombardo surrender the local Unione presidency to Joe Aiello. That did not happen.
What did happen was the murder of Yale in New York on July 1. Capone is suspected of masterminding the killing of his old friend.
The Sicilian underworld in Chicago took aim at Lombardo and blew him away in early September. Lombardo's funeral was elaborate, in the gangland tradition. Mourners lined the streets, and floral decorations filled his home and spilled out onto the lawn. An enormous floral heart containing the words, "My Pal," was provided by Capone.
After Lombardo, there followed a succession of short-lived presidents of the Chicago Unione, and the Unione itself began to diminish in importance.
Charles and Thomas LoMonte
LaMonti, LoMonti
Charles (Fortunato) and Thomas (Gaetano, Donato or "Joe") LoMonte were horse-feed sellers and lieutenants in the East Harlem gang of Giosue Gallucci beginning around 1909.
Through their close association with Gallucci and their relationship to the Terranova-Morello mob, the LoMontes managed to secure a lucrative monopoly for their feed business at 2103 First Avenue near East 108th Street in Harlem.
When Giuseppe Morello and Ignazio Lupo were sent off to prison in 1910, the LoMontes looked to be the most important chiefs of the East Harlem Sicilian underworld. They rivaled Brooklyn boss of bosses Salvatore D'Aquila in power.
The attractiveness of the downtown rackets drew the attention of a number of Italian Harlem racketeers. It seems the LoMontes were among those who moved to establish a leadership presence on the Lower East Side and among those who paid for ambition with their lives.
Charles was gunned down in a daylight attack, on the morning of Saturday, May 23, 1914, at the corner of East 108th Street and Second Avenue. He was shot three times in the back as he left his business office. He lingered for a while at Harlem Hospital but refused to provide any information to police.
Assassins struck again on Oct. 13, 1915. Thomas, 29, had been visiting his cousin Rose at 312 East 116th Street. He and his cousin stepped out of her building in the evening. They were followed for a short distance before they were both shot from behind at East 116th Street and First Avenue. Thomas died quickly. Rose was alive when she reached Harlem Hospital but later succumbed. A man named Antonio Impoluzzo was arrested for the double-murder. He was found in bed in a nearby house, with his clothes on and hiding a pistol.
The press of the time identified the LoMontes as "cousins" of Ciro Terranova.
Charles and Thomas LoMonte might have been dispatched as part of the Mafia-Camorra wars of the period. They might also have been murdered by nervous and greedy Brooklyn-based boss of bosses Salvatore D'Aquila. Mafioso Nick Gentile pointed a finger at D'Aquila in his autobiography, indicating that D'Aquila ordered Umberto Valente to carry out the LoMonte killings.
Author David Chandler offered another view, writing that Charles LoMonte was a loyal soldier in a Morello-Terranova outfit who was gunned down by rebellious forces under Giuseppe Masseria. Frankly, there is little evidence for any Masseria rebellion (Masseria looks to have been the champion of the pro-Morello and anti-D'Aquila faction), and Chandler himself seems to have a hard time reconciling his argument with known facts and later occurrences.
Another explanation could be a falling out between the LoMontes and Gallucci. Gallucci's odd - for the time - combination of Sicilian and Neapolitan gangsters eventually fell apart. Gallucci lost his life around the same time as the LoMonte brothers.
Joe Lonardo
? to Oct. 13, 1927.
"Big Joe"
Lonardo was a Mafia bigshot in Cleveland during the Prohibition Era and a strong supporter of New Yorker Toto D'Aquila's claim to the Mafia boss of bosses title.
Lonardo's source of income appears to have been a monopoly on the corn sugar used in midwest moonshine operations during the Prohibition Era.
According to legend, the Porrello Brothers began moving in on Lonardo's rackets in the mid-1920s. The Porrellos were generally blamed as Lonardo was killed in their Cleveland barbership on Oct. 13, 1927.
It is more likely, however, that the Porrellos were important figures within the Lonardo Mafia and had nothing to do with the Lonardo assassination.
Joe Porrello became the boss of the Cleveland underworld.
Antonio Luongo
Luongo appears to have briefly led the Lucchese crime family in New York dring 1986. Organization leader Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo was sent off to prison in that year. Luongo emerged as a leading contender for the boss position but rivals murdered him.
Charlie Luciano
Nov. 24, 1897, to Jan. 26, 1962.
Salvatore Lucania, "Charlie Lucky," "Charles Ross"
Luciano siezed control of the Italian-American underworld in 1931, reorganizing and stabilizing the Mafia and joining it in a Syndicate with non-Italian gangs.
According to legend, Luciano acquired his "Lucky" nickname by surviving an assassination attempt. That legend is false. A newspaper account of the Luciano's brush with death noted that he was already known in underworld circles as "Lucky." Another legend attributes the nickname to Luciano's success in gambling.
It seems more likely that the monicker was merely a play on Luciano's family name, Lucania. During a childhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side, young Salvatore Lucania (pronounced "loo-kah-NEE-ah") mainly socialized with non-Italians, kids who would have had a difficult time pronouncing Lucania properly through their combination of non-Romance New York, eastern European and Irish accents. His acquaintances must have found it much easier to pronounce the name "LUCK-ah-NEE-ah," and that, in time (probably long before he began associating with Sicilian and Italian Mafiosi), turned into "Lucky." This hypothesis also explains why Luciano's nickname was "Charlie Lucky" and never "Lucky Charlie."
Luciano is widely regarded as a Mafia revolutionary. In truth, the changes adopted by American organized crime with Luciano at the helm in 1931 were evolutionary rather than revolutionary and consisted mainly of making national decisions through a panel rather than one Mafia tsar (there actually was precedent for this change dating back to the old days in Sicily) and of cooperating with criminal organizations comprised of non-Italians. Both of these changes helped to ensure the survival of the young Syndicate, but they had been in the works for many years before 1931. Luciano's predecessor, Giuseppe Masseria, had welcomed non-Sicilians, including Neapolitan Al Capone, into his Mafia clan.
Gangs from the Five Points, near where Luciano was raised, had long been recruiting members across ethnic barriers. The Seven Group bootlegging alliance of the 1920s, of which Luciano was a member but probably not the founder or chief executive, was a national cooperative that did not distinguish between ethnic groups.
There is no reason to assume that Luciano sired the ruling Syndicate Commission idea either. A host of big-name hoodlums, including Nicola Gentile, Frank Costello and others, could easily stake a claim to that concept. But Luciano was there - the most highly regarded boss of his time - when it all happened. While he might not deserve credit for the changes, he at least did nothing to stand in their way (as his predecessor Salvatore Maranzano attempted to).
One other legend relating to Charlie Lucky has been proven untrue. It is often said that upon reaching the pinnacle of his chosen profession in 1931, Luciano had 40 (or more) old-line Mafia "Mustache Petes" killed all across the country. There has never been any confirmation that any noticeable number of mob hits were performed in connection with Luciano's rise to power. In fact, Luciano did not even clear the Mustache Petes out of his own city. Two men who surely represented the old line Mafiosi - Ciro Terranova and Ignazio Lupo - were unmolested.
Luciano often met with and spoke with Terranova, either to pick his brain or win his cooperation on Bronx and Harlem ventures. And the dethroned old capo di tutti capi Lupo was left to work his bakery union racket in Brooklyn. The "Sicilian Vespers" of 1931 is a myth with no relation to actual events.
Luciano was born in the mining town of Lecara Friddi, Sicily, Nov. 24, 1897. His parents brought him to America in 1907. They settled near First Avenue and Fourteenth Street, outside of Little Italy in an area mainly populated by Jews and eastern European immigrants. In childhood, he befriended Jewish gangsters Meyer Lansky and Benjamin Siegel and was influenced by Arnold Rothstein.
Luciano gravitated toward the easy buck and at an early age was imprisoned for half a year for narcotics trafficking. Upon his release, he moved through the Five Points outfit and into Little Italy's Mafia.
In the early 1920s, he found himself working within "Joe the Boss" Masseria's gang while also teaming with Lansky, Siegel and others on outside ventures. Before the end of that decade, he was Masseria's chief lieutenant, supervising bootlegging and other rackets within Manhattan and forging alliances with non-Mafia groups, including the gangs of Legs Diamond, Dutch Schultz.
When civil war came to the Mafia in 1930, Luciano outwardly remained loyal to Joe the Boss but secretly sided with rival Salvatore Maranzano. Luciano arranged the assassination of Masseria on April 15, 1931, at Coney Island's Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant. He next set up the murder of his new boss, Maranzano, on Sept. 10 of that year. (Maranzano's post-war popularity plummeted after a series of meetings in which his Napoleon-complex was evident.)
Luciano was welcomed in 1931 as the head man. He would reign atop American organized crime until 1936 (and perhaps long after) when he was jailed on largely trumped-up charges relating to a prostitution ring.
In 1943, he was released from prison and deported to Italy. Legend says that was payment for rendering some sort of wartime assistance to the Allied landing in Sicily.
Luciano kept in touch with his old associates and met with them occasionally outside of the U.S. Rumors indicated that he was welcomed into the Sicilian Mafia by Calo Vizzini and fine-tuned the narcotics trade among Asian sources, Sicilian suppliers and U.S. pushers. The result, some say, was the establishment of an international crime Syndicate.
Luciano died Jan. 26, 1962, of natural causes.
Ignazio Lupo
March 19, 1877, to Jan. 13, 1947.
"Ignazio Saietta," "The Wolf"
Lupo is credited - probably wrongly - with being the first to organize Mafia activity in New York under a single leader. His bases of operations were Little Italy in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in Brooklyn. But he ruled the Mafia alongside the Morello Mob of Italian Harlem and Ciro Terranova's organization in the Bronx.
Born in Corleone, Sicily, on March 19, 1877, Lupo fled to the United States in 1899 after killing a man named Salvatore Morello. In New York, he controlled much of the underworld activity in New York's Little Sicilies.
According to legend, Lupo owned a Harlem property known as the Murder Stables. There numerous rivals for power were said to have been killed, allowing Lupo to sieze control of the New York branch of the Unione Siciliana and designate himself the new world's Mafia boss of bosses. There seems little truth to the legend. In that era, stables were found everywhere, and a number of them were known as hangouts for criminals. There is no evidence that the organization known as the Unione Siciliana ever operated in New York (although the same name might have been used to refer to the U.S. Mafia network). And Lupo seems never to have been recognized as boss of bosses.
Lupo did work as a management partner (with Giuseppe Morello) in New York rackets. Their organization was active in Black Hand extortion and protection rackets. It also worked with Sicily's boss of bosses Vito Cascio Ferro - who reportedly spent some of his childhood years in New York before returning to the old country - on an operation circulating counterfeit American currency. The rackets of Morello and Lupo became fairly sophisticated, eventually involving corporate scams and fraudulent real estate deals.
Lupo, who sometimes used his mother's maiden name "Saietta" as an alias, married into the Morello-Terranova clan, taking Ciro Terranova's sister Salvatrice as his wife. Their son Rocco was born in 1900, and the family lived in an upscale home at 261 Avenue P in Brooklyn. The property was purchased for them by Terranova.
Lupo had run-ins with New York supercop Joseph Petrosino and is believed to have had a part in setting up Petrosino's 1909 murder in Sicily.
Lupo and Morello were arrested for counterfeiting in 1909 and began lengthy prison sentences in 1910. Lupo was sentenced to 30 years and Morello to 25 years.
Nicholas and Ciro Terranova looked after Mafia business in the Harlem and Bronx areas after Lupo and Giuseppe Morello were locked away, but the Italian/Sicilian communities in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side began generating their own Mafia leaders. Perhaps due to the power vacuum, the Morello Mob found itself at war with Neapolitan Camorrists in Brooklyn.
Lupo was released on parole from Atlanta prison on June 30, 1920. Later that year, he informed authorities that he wished to travel to Sicily to deal with some family business arising from the recent death of his father. Such a trip could not be allowed under parole rules. In 1921, President Harding granted a conditional commutation of the remainder of Lupo's counterfeiting sentence.
Upon the Wolf's return to the United States in May 1922, he was detained several weeks at Ellis Island. Authorities prepared to deport him. Surprisingly, the federal government ordered that Lupo be allowed to enter the country. The underworld was a far more complicated and more populous place in 1922 than it had been when he dropped out of the scene in 1910.
Mob bosses looked the other way as Lupo worked a bakery extortion racket, but The Wolf was excluded from Mafia leadership and from bootlegging operations. Law enforcement agencies discovered that he was meeting with mob enforcer Anthony Forti to create an Italian bakers' "union" in December 1935. Lupo's son Rocco also appeared to be involved.
Though his previous partners Giuseppe Morello and Ciro Terranova figured prominently in the Castellammarese War of 1930-1931, Lupo kept a relatively low profile. He was arrested in 1931 for allegedly killing a man named Roger Consiglio a year earlier, but nothing came of the charge.
Lupo was nabbed again in July 1935 when his bakery extortion racket was exposed. A year later, July 10, 1936, FDR's Administration decided that Lupo had violated the conditions of his "keep-yer-nose-clean" sentence commutation and threw him back behind bars to finish the remaining years of his original 30-year sentence.
While in prison, Lupo learned of the death of his brother-in-law, Terranova.
After significant bureaucratic discussion, authorities decided on Dec. 21, 1946, that Lupo's prison term - subtracting his good behavior time - had expired. He was released, senile and weak, to spend a final Christmas with his family. Upon his death of natural causes on Jan. 13, 1947, he was buried in the in the Terranova family plot in Brooklyn's Calvary Cemetery beside Ciro.
