About The MOB
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Joseph Macheca
c. 1843 to March 14, 1891.
"J.P."
Macheca was among the first to establish a Mafia tradition in the new world. Macheca, born and raised in the Italian-American community in New Orleans, set up his own gang there prior to 1868. The Macheca Mob was not a Mafia group when it began. In fact, it thwarted early efforts by the Sicilian Mafia to gain a foothold in the New Orleans area.
In 1868-1869, Macheca's group battled with and eventually defeated a Mafia organization led by Raffaele Agnello. Macheca reportedly learned a great deal from his encounters with the Agnello gang and adopted its Sicilian Mafia-style hierarchy and old-country connections after the conflict was ended. Macheca fell under the influence of the newly formed Mafia splinter group, the Stuppagghieri, based in Monreale, Sicily.
When Sicilian gang leader Giuseppe Esposito and a few followers entered New Orleans in 1879 (fleeing from Sicilian justice and unhappy with their brief experiences in the Irish- and Jewish-dominated underworld of New York), Macheca welcomed Esposito and allowed him to share leadership of the new New Orleans underworld.
The New Orleans police became aware of the existence of the local Mafia branch the following year, as Esposito lieutenant Joe Provenzano began dominating rackets on the docks. The police, in particular David Hennessey and his cousin Mike, were able to move against Esposito in 1881. The Sicilian fugitive was sent to New York City in July of that year and deported to Italy on Sept. 21.
After Esposito's departure from New Orleans, the mob he left behind split into two factions, one led by Charles and Tony Matranga with Macheca their trusted adviser and the other comprised of the Provenzano family and its supporters.
Through the course of the next six years, the two sides imported numerous Sicilian criminals to enhance their strength, the Provenzano group drawing from Palermo's Mafiosi and the Macheca group drawing from the Stuppagghieri. Hostilities between the two groups increased until war broke out in 1888.
In the meantime, a wave of reform swept through the city government and David Hennessey was appointed police chief. Hennessey attempted to mediate the dispute between the warring Mafiosi but wound up siding with the Provenzano gang.
In April of 1890, Provenzano forces opened fire on some Macheca-Matranga men, seriously wounding two. The Macheca gang apparently disregarded the sacred tradition of omerta and helped the police locate and arrest a number of Provenzano gang members. Those gangsters were convicted of attempted murder charges in July (in the first of three scheduled trials), but perjury was suspected of the state witnesses, and the judge threw out the verdict.
Police Chief Hennessey intended to testify on the Provenzano crew's behalf. The chief corresponded with his counterpart in Rome, Italy, in an effort to get the goods on a number of Stuppagghieri in New Orleans. During his investigations, Hennessy appears to have turned up some damaging information on Joseph Macheca. The formerly cordial relationship between the two men turned hostile.
On Oct. 15, 1890, members of the Matranga mob waited for Hennessey to return home after a late night at work. They ambushed him at the corner of Girod and Basin Streets and mortally wounded the police chief. Hennessey lived long enough to report that his assassination was performed by "the dagoes." The Stuppagghieri leadership, including Macheca, was arrested and charged with the assassination of Hennessey.
Macheca and eight other defendants stood trial. On March 13, the jury announced that it had been unable to reach a verdict on some defendants and it had reached a not-guilty verdict on the rest. The New Orleans public was enraged.
With all of the defendants still held by authorities pending the dismissal of lesser charges relating to the chief's assassination, a mob stormed the prison on March 14. Eleven suspects in the Hennessy assassination - including Macheca - were seized and murdered. The incident, the largest of its kind in American history, has become known as the Crescent City Lynchings.
The list of the lynch mob victims differs significantly from the list of defendants in the Hennessy assassination trial. And there is reason to believe that Macheca's opponents, possibly including the Matrangas themselves, used the lynch mob as a cover to remove his influence from the local underworld.
Stefano Magaddino
Oct. 10, 1891, to July 19, 1974.
Magaddino, born in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, was an established Mafioso when he arrived in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. He and Gaspar Milazzo led a group of Castellammarese Mafiosi in Brooklyn.
Milazzo and Magaddino were sought by police after an apparent vendetta murder of a rival gang leader named Bucellato in 1921. Milazzo fled the city for Detroit, where he established another Mafia family. Magaddino left for Buffalo but maintained close ties to the Brooklyn group.
Cola Schiro served in a leadership position of the Brooklyn Castellammarese clan after Magaddino's departure, but he might have been no more than a puppet ruler for Milazzo and Magaddino.
Magaddino reached the top of the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area underworld shortly after his relocation there and lingered atop the regional Mafia into the 1970s.
At the start of what became known as the Castellammarese War, "Joe the Boss" Masseria, ruler of the New York City underworld, reportedly had Milazzo killed for not supporting his efforts to control events in Chicago. That left Magaddino the senior member of the Castellammarese Mafiosi in the New World.
Schiro vanished and was replaced in the Brooklyn Castellammarese family by Salvatore Maranzano, a Mafia warrior from the Old Country.
In 1931, Charlie Luciano planned the assassinations of both Masseria and Maranzano. He then invited Magaddino and other Castellammarese leaders to halt the gang warfare and to join a Mafia ruling Commission. The Castellammarese and their allies were given a majority of the seats on the Commission and found Luciano's offer irresistible.
Magaddino, a cousin to New York crime boss Joe Bonanno, remained an influential player in American organized crime until his death of natural causes. It is believed that he arranged, at the suggestion of Vito Genovese, the Mafia's convention at Apalachin NY in 1957.
Initially a Bonanno ally, Magaddino and Bonanno developed into rivals. Bonanno insisted that Magaddino was responsible for kidnapping him in the 1960s.
Giuseppe Magliocco
c. 1898 to Dec. 28, 1963.
"Fat Man"
Magliocco was related by blood or by marriage with the bosses of the Bonanno, Magaddino and Profaci crime families. A member of the "conservative" wing of New York Mafiosi, he served the purposes of Profaci and Bonanno.
He was among the attendees at 1957's mob conference in Apalachin, NY. He was one of 19 meeting participants to be convicted of conspiracy after giving authorities ridiculous reasons for the Apalachin gathering. The convictions were later overturned (while the attendees were obviously conspiring, no one could prove that they were doing so for illegal purposes).
He became a target of the rebellious Joey Gallo and was reportedly kidnapped by Gallo in 1960. He served as his brother-in-law Joe Profaci's underboss and stepped to the family leadership upon Profaci's death of cancer in 1962. Magliocco's inability to resolve the conflict with Gallo and his followers was a mark against his leadership ability. Some believe that it caused the Mafia Commission to lose faith in him.
Others report that Magliocco's involvement in an unsuccessful Joe Bonanno plot to assassinate Carlo Gambino and Tommy Lucchese resulted in a sort of trial before the Mafia's ruling Commission. Magliocco's life was spared, but he was removed from his position of authority over the Profaci family (probably what the Gambino-Lucchese wing was hoping for all along). Magliocco was replaced by Gambino ally Joseph Colombo, though some New York journalists believed that Magliocco's protege Sonny Franzese was next in line for the underworld post.
Magliocco died of a heart attack at West Islip's Good Samaritan Hospital late in 1963, shortly after being relieved of power.
Vincent Mangano
1888 to 1951.
Mangano was born in Sicily in 1888. After coming to the U.S., he joined the Brooklyn Mafia organization of Toto D'Aquila. With his brother Philip, and possibly with aid from a transplanted Mafioso named Giuseppe Balsamo, Mangano became a force on the Brooklyn waterfront.
Toto D'Aquila was killed in a feud with Joe "the Boss" Masseria in 1928, and the Mangano brothers served under bosses Al Mineo and Frank Scalise during the Castellammarese War of 1930-1931.
When the smoke cleared following the reorganization of the American Mafia under Charlie Luciano in 1931, Mangano was made boss of the old D'Aquila family. He served on the national Commission from its birth, often opposing the Frank Costello-Tommy Lucchese branch of the Mafia leadership.
Mangano disappeared in 1951, and his family was taken over by Albert Anastasia, a staunch ally of Costello. At the same time, Philip Mangano was found dead in a swamp.
Salvatore Maranzano
1886 to Sept. 10, 1931.
"Don Turridru"
Maranzano was regarded as a Mafia hero in Sicily before coming to the United States in 1925 (D.L.Chandler says it was in 1927) and was probably descended from a Sicilian noble family.
Born near Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, in 1886, Maranzano was near 40 when he showed up in New York City. He was immediately welcomed by the predominantly Castellammarese Mafia group run by Cola Schiro in Brooklyn. Maranzano settled into bootlegging and into smuggling Sicilians into the country. Some say that Maranzano was deliberately sent to New York by Sicilian boss of bosses Vito Cascio Ferro to prepare for Cascio Ferro to transplant his entire organization to the New World.
Cascio Ferro was jailed in Sicily by the Fascists shortly after Maranzano's arrival in the U.S., so, if such a plan existed, it was almost immediately scrapped.
For whatever reason, a number of Mafia leaders across the country appear to have quickly allied themselves with the newcomer Maranzano. Some of those might have been loyalists of former boss of bosses Salvatore D'Aquila, who was murdered by Giuseppe Masseria in 1928.
In 1930, Maranzano mobilized forces opposed to Masseria, who had begun excessively meddling in the internal affairs of Mafia groups across the country. The Castellammarese War resulted. Maranzano gradually won the support of a number of key Masseria subordinates and benefited from the 1930 deaths of Masseria allies Al Mineo, Steve Ferrigno and Giuseppe Morello.
In 1931, Masseria lieutenant Charlie Luciano secretly arranged with Maranzano to assassinate Masseria. That was accomplished on April 15. Maranzano took the opportunity to declare himself king of the Sicilian-Italian underworld in the U.S. At two meetings, one for New York Mafiosi in the Bronx and another entertaining the criminal societies leaders from around the country in Chicago, Maranzano accepted cash tribute and spoke as the supreme ruler of the American Mafia.
Luciano and his allies, including non-Italian gangsters, were too independent-minded to follow Maranzano for long. The new boss understood that and targeted Luciano for assassination. Luciano beat him to the punch, however, having Maranzano stabbed and shot to death in his Manhattan offices on Sept. 10, 1931.
Carlos Marcello
Feb. 6, 1910, to March 3, 1993.
Calogero Minacore
Marcello was born in 1910 to Sicilian immigrants in French-governed Tunisia. His family took him to New Orleans the following October but neither the parents nor Carlos himself ever took the steps to make him a citizen.
When he was 19, then the oldest of nine siblings, he was convicted of burglarizing a grocery store. In 1930 he received a sentence of 9-12 years. He served four years and was then pardoned. Upon his release in the early 1930s Marcello was welcomed into the New Orleans Mafia family, then headed by Sam Carolla.
Marcello operated within a crew commanded by Frank Tedaro and eventually married Tedaro's daughter in 1936. Marcello might have missed out on the lucrative bootlegging operations of the 1920s but he "arrived" just in time to grab a share of gambling rackets that were flooding the New Orleans area in the later 30s and 1940s. Early on, he specialized in pinball (a gambling game in those days) and jukeboxes. Supplementing his income with drug trafficking, Marcello was arrested for the sale of marijuana in 1938 and served another nine months behind bars.
When the U.S. entered the Second World War in 1941, Marcello found money-making opportunities in the black market. Within a few years, Carolla designated Marcello as his representative overseeing the operation of casinos, particularly the Beverly Club, in cooperation with New York crime boss Frank Costello (for whom gaming machines - particularly slots - were a fixation) and financial wiz Meyer Lansky.
Marcello quickly became the most visible member of the Carolla mob, as the Kefauver Committee focused on him as the local New Orleans big shot. One source indicates that Kefauver was premature. That source says another unidentified Mafioso ran the New Orleans family from the end of the Carolla regime - anywhere between 1947 and 1950 - until a natural death in 1963, when Marcello officially took the family reins. That may be correct, but Marcello had a great deal of personal power and political pull beginning in the 1950s.
His power, which stretched from Central and South American farming, Southeastern U.S. fishing and into Texas and California, brought him into open conflict with the Kennedy Administration. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had him deported to Guatemala (Marcello had fraudulently obtained a Guatamalan birth certificate as protection against deportation to Tunisia) in 1961.
Marcello was back in the country within weeks (his legal fight against deportation continued for many years) and appears to have held a grudge against the Kennedys. He is believed by conspiracy theorists to be one of the Mafia bosses involved with plotting the 1963 assassination of President John Kennedy. Some attempt to involve him in the 1968 murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy as well.
In 1981, Marcello was found guilty of RICO violations in one court and of bribing a judge in another court. He began a 17-year prison sentence in 1983. In 1989, he began suffering strokes and was released that summer in poor health. He died March 3, 1993.
Charles Matranga
November 1857 to Oct. 28, 1943.
"Millionaire Charlie"
Charles Matranga and his older brother Antonio (born in 1856) were key members of a Mafia group that took root in New Orleans in the 1870s.
Charles Matranga, born in Sicily in 1857 and taken to the United States as an infant, eventually became the leader of the New Orleans Stuppaghieri Mafia group co-founded by his father Salvador and Salvatore Marino.
In the 1880s, the Matranga Brothers began moving in on the dock rackets of rival Giardinieri Mafia leader Joe Provenzano. By 1888, authorities estimated that a Matranga-Macheca gang had strengthened itself by importing 320 members of the Monreale, Sicily, Stuppagghieri.
War between the Matranga and Provenzano factions began within a year. New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessey actively supported the Provenzano side.
Charles Matranga was among those charged with conspiracy in connection with the assassination of Hennessey in 1890. No convictions were obtained for any of the 19 defendants in the murder case (only nine stood trial), and the public apparently took matters into its own hands.
Joseph P. Macheca was one of 11 suspects shot and hanged to death by vigilantes who stormed the prison on March 14, 1891.
Matranga was left unharmed, though he was widely known to be the chief of the local Mafia. He remained a power in the local underworld (quickly incorporating the remainder of the Provenzano mob) until the 1920s, when he moved aside for Sylvestro "Sam" Carolla.
The Matranga family appears to have been connected with Mafia organizations southern California and western Florida. Connections in the American Midwest are also possible.
Charles Matranga died of natural causes on Oct. 28, 1943.
Giuseppe Masseria
c. 1886 to April 15, 1931.
"Joe the Boss"
Masseria was the undisputed head of the American Mafia at the end of the 1920s, but his meddling in the affairs of other crime families prompted a large gang war and resulted in his own assassination.
Born in Sicily in 1886 or 1887, Masseria became a Sicilian Mafia enforcer before taking off for the New World in 1903 as a young adult.
Upon his arrival in New York, he appears to have gone to work with Ciro Terranova's outfit in Italian Harlem. He was arrested in 1907 and convicted of burglary and extortion, but the sentence was suspended. Upon the 1910 imprisonment of boss of bosses Giuseppe Morello, a power vaccuum existed in the Mafia of lower Manhattan's Little Sicily. Masseria was one of the racketeers who moved in.
His plans were set back a bit when he was sentenced to four and a half years for a failed burglary attempt at a Bowery pawn shop. By the time he was released, the Sicilian Mafia groups in New York were having a rough time. A war with a Brooklyn Camorra group had cost the Mafia some of its top members. And reigning boss of bosses Salvatore D'Aquila, based in Brooklyn, had passed a death sentence against the old Morello mob.
Umberto Valente was initially targeted by D'Aquila. But the boss of bosses removed the death sentence when Valente agreed to help wipe out the Morello group.
With Terranova's approval, Masseria became the Morello champion. During the early years of Prohibition, Masseria worked to defeat and incorporate the Brooklyn Camorra. His assassination of rival bootlegger Salvatore Mauro on Manhattan's Chrystie Street in 1920 enhanced his prestige among city Mafiosi.
Masseria and Valenti turned their guns on each other beginning in 1922.
Newspapers charged that Valente had been responsible for more slayings than any other man in the city. Valente or his associates were believed responsible for the murder of Ciro Terranova's brother Vincent in May of 1922. Masseria immediately responded by gunning down Valente lieutenant Silva Tagliagamba at the Manhattan Liquor Exchange. Joe the Boss was charged with the murder, but the case never went to trial.
Masseria narrowly escaped an ambush as he left his home on the Lower East Side on Aug. 9, 1922, and Joe the Boss established a reputation as a man who could dodge bullets. Masseria apparently slipped out of the way of his would-be assassin's close-range shots. After his escape, the Boss announced his retirement and called a peace conference with Valente.
Valente met with Masseria associates at a restaurant on East 12th Street. After the meeting, he was shot down in the street - apparently Masseria was not yet willing to retire. Some sources indicate the killer was a young Charlie Luciano, just emerging as a force within the Masseria organization.
While D'Aquila retained the "capo dei capi" title as far as the outside world was concerned, Joe Masseria became the de facto boss of the Italian-Sicilian underworld in New York beginning in the summer of 1922. In 1928, he bumped off D'Aquila and handed the old boss's organization to ally Al Mineo.
By that time, Luciano had risen within the Masseria organization's leadership and was overseeing operations within Manhattan. Frank Yale had been managing affairs across the river in Brooklyn, and, when he was murdered in 1928, Anthony Carfano performed that duty.
Behind the boss's back, Luciano established relationships with various gang leaders inside of and outside of the Mafia society across the United States. He participated in the Seven Group, a bootlegging cooperative, and planned with Frank Costello for the illicit enterprises the underworld might enter into once Prohibition ended. Luciano maintained contact with Jewish mobsters and childhood companions Meyer Lansky and Benjamin Siegel and established a relationship with Dutch Shultz.
Masseria had grown drunk with power by 1929 and began meddling in the internal affairs of Mafia groups around the country. He sensed that the Mafiosi transplanted from Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, were combining against him and against his ally Al Capone in Chicago.
To suppress the rebellion and weaken the anti-Capone Aiello Family, Masseria encouraged the assassination of Detroit Mafia leader Gaspare Milazzo, the senior Castellammarese leader in the country. Observing that Bronx mob leader Gaetano Reina of the Bronx was quietly siding with a rebellious Castellammarese clan in Brooklyn, Masseria had Reina killed as well. The boss installed his own allies as bosses of the Detroit and Bronx families. He then attempted to do the same with the troublesome Brooklyn group.
He forced a cash tribute payment from the gang's leader Cola Schiro. Schiro then disappeared. Masseria endorsed his own friend Joe Parrino for leadership of the group, but the organization followed famed Castellammarese Mafia warrior Salvatore Maranzano instead.
In 1930, the leaders appointed by Masseria were gradually overthrown by their underlings, and a solid Castellammarese alliance of Detroit, Brooklyn, Bronx and Buffalo opposed Joe the Boss. Masseria's meddling cost him a great deal of his earlier support - even Ciro Terranova began conspiring against him.
As a last ditch attempt to preserve order, Masseria named old Morello mob boss Giuseppe Morello as boss of bosses. Masseria had hoped to convince the underworld once again that he was ready for retirement. No one bought it this time. Morello was assassinated. Shortly thereafter, the Castellammarese eliminated Al Mineo.
In 1931, Luciano, Terranova and some other key figures in the Masseria organization went over to the other side. They set up Masseria for assassination on April 15, 1931, at Coney Island's Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant.
A grateful Maranzano handed the Masseria Family to Luciano. But friction between the two leaders grew until Luciano turned on Maranzano as well and became the supreme leader in the American underworld.
Salvatore Mauro
? to 1920.
Mauro was one of the many little-known gangsters of the Prohibition Era. He was certainly involved in bootlegging. Some sources indicate that he organized a network of home wineries/distilleries in the days before Prohibition and jealously guarded that resource when Prohibition began.
He might have been a member of one of the Neapolitan Camorra groups in Brooklyn. At least two sources (but one may have drawn from the other) state that Mauro was a part-owner of a speakeasy with Umberto Valente, a big shot in the early Prohibition Manhattan Mafia and a gunman often used by Mafia boss of bosses Salvatore D'Aquila.
Whoever he was in life, in death Mauro became a stepping stone for the advancement of "Joe the Boss" Masseria. Masseria shot him dead in a gun battle on Chrystie Street in 1920. The killing resulted in the arrest of Masseria, but there was no trial. "Joe the Boss's" reputation and power were enhanced by the event.
Mike Merlo
? to Nov. 8, 1924.
Merlo is regarded as the greatest leader the Chicago Unione Siciliana ever had. He also happened to be a Mafia visionary who inspired Johnny Torrio and Al Capone.
During his long reign, Merlo negotiated disputes among the various gangs of Chicago while transforming the Unione Siciliana fraternal organization into a front for the nation's Mafiosi.
Little is known of Merlo's early life, but he appears to have immigrated into the United States through New Orleans. He later traveled to the Midwest, settling in Chicago.
Merlo died of cancer on Nov. 8, 1924, and was given one of the most spectacular funerals ever seen in his adopted hometown. Upon his death, Chicago burst into gang warfare which did not subside until Alphonse Capone emerged as the supreme local boss in 1931.
Gaspar Milazzo
April 25, 1887, to May 31, 1930.
Milazzo, who entered the U.S. about 1911, appears to have shared in the leadership of a Brooklyn Mafia criminal organization comprised of immigrants from Sicily's Castellammare del Golfo region during the pre-Prohibition years.
(Strangely, Joseph Bonanno, whose autobiography contains much information on Castellammarese Mafiosi, had little to say about Milazzo.)
Milazzo and Stefano Magaddino ruled their Brooklyn gang until police pursuit and a Bucellato mob vendetta over their involvement in a New Jersey murder forced both to flee.
Magaddino traveled to Buffalo and became a key figure in the DiCarlo-Palmeri Mafia there. Milazzo set himself up as a big shot in Detroit. It appears he worked closely with local crime boss Sam Catalonotte (the Mike Merlo of Detroit). Milazzo was widely respected in the fragmented and competitive Detroit underworld.
It appears that Milazzo graduated to Mafia crime family boss in Detroit by 1930 (according to some sources, he was a chief lieutenant in the East Side Gang led by Angelo Meli, Bill Tocco and Joe Zerilli). He immediately showed support for Chicago's Joe Aiello (a Sicilian) against Alphonse Capone (a Neapolitan).
New York's Joe Masseria, a Capone ally and Unione Siciliana opponent beginning about 1928, tried to convince Milazzo to cease his support of Aiello. When he failed in that effort, Masseria backed Cesare "Chester" LaMare as boss of the Detroit Mafia.
LaMare had Milazzo and his bodyguard Sasa "Sam" Parrina killed at a supposed peace conference at the Vernor Highway Fish Market on May 31, 1930. Some believe LaMare was ordered by Masseria to eliminate Milazzo. Others say the killing was the accidental result of an attempt on the life of Angelo Meli, which would have eliminated the most prestigious Detroit Mafioso.
Milazzo's death was cited as evidence by Castellammarese Mafiosi in Detroit (they would soon have additional evidence), Buffalo and Brooklyn and conservative Sicilian gangsters in Chicago that Masseria and Capone were at war with them.
Some historians mark the start of the Castellammarese War at the slaying of Milazzo.
Al Mineo
? to Nov. 5, 1930.
Al Manfré, Al Manfredi
A loyal supporter of "Joe the Boss" Masseria, Mineo was given control of the Toto D'Aquila crime family in 1928 after Masseria disposed of D'Aquila.
D'Aquila had been boss of bosses of the American Mafia, and his family had considerable strength. Mineo, therefore, was a powerful ally for Masseria as the Castellammarese War began.
The forces of Masseria archrival Salvatore Maranzano, staking out known Masseria safehouses, reportedly stumbled upon a Bronx meeting of the top Masseria men in November of 1930. Maranzano gunmen waited for Masseria to emerge from the building but feared that he had escaped through another unwatched exit. The gunmen pounced when they saw Mineo and his lieutenant, Steve Ferrigno (Fannuzzo), leave the building. Both were gunned down on the sidewalk.
The loss of Mineo and Ferrigno was damaging to the Joe the Boss's war effort.
George Moran
? to 1957.
"Bugs"
Moran became leader of Chicago's North Side "Irish" gang after Dion O'Bannion's 1924 death.
Moran allied himself with Chicago's Sicilian Mafia against the Neapolitan newcomer Al Capone. Capone destroyed much of Moran's mob (and nearly Moran himself) in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929.
Moran dropped out of the Chicago underworld. He died in prison of natural causes in 1957.
Pellegrino Morano
Morano served as leader of the Brooklyn Camorra in the early 1900s. He engineered the murders of Nicholas Morello and Charles Unbriaco - lured to a Mafia-Camorra peace conference in Brooklyn - in 1916. Morano and aide Alessandro Vollero were both convicted of the killings and sentenced to long jail terms. Already depleted by police Lt. Joe Petrosino's pre-1909 assaults, in Morano's absence the Camorra in Brooklyn was absorbed into the New York Mafia.
Giuseppe Morello
May 2, 1867, to Aug. 15, 1930.
"Piddu," "Clutch Hand," "Peter"
Morello was perhaps the most powerful boss in the early New York City Mafia. He served in the boss of bosses role twice and had influence over Mafia organizations as far off as Chicago and New Orleans.
Born in Corleone, Sicily, in 1867, Morello and his Morello-Terranova family moved to the U.S. near the turn of the 20th Century. After finding Louisiana and Texas not to their liking, the relatives settled in New York City. In Italian Harlem, around East 107th Street, they established the Morello Mob (sometimes referred to as the 107th Street Gang). Morello also did some traveling to New Orleans and Chicago and corresponded with Mafiosi in both communities.
Morello teamed with New York's downtown (Little Italy) Mafioso Ignazio Lupo. The two became related when Lupo married Morello's half-sister.
The Morello-Lupo gang specialized in protection, Black Hand extortion rackets and counterfeiting. Morello's experience with counterfeiting extends back to an apparent conviction for the crime as a young man in Sicily.
Violence was commonly a part of their business, and the gang is said to have murdered dozens on a property near Italian Harlem that became known as the Murder Stable. (This appears to be largely the stuff of legend.)
Morello and Lupo cooperated with Sicilian boss of bosses Vito Cascio Ferro on the importing of Sicilian-manufactured counterfeit American currency through the Brooklyn docks. The Secret Service was quickly on their trail, but the two gang leaders were well-insulated from the street level pushers of phony bills. The arrest of gang associates led to the murder of Benedetto Madonia - an incident that became known as the "barrel murder." The earlier murder of Brooklyn's Joe "the Grocer" Catania also appears to have been related to the counterfeiting operation.
The Morello-Lupo luck ran out after a real estate investment racket lost a ton of money. The gang leaders needed to produce home-made cash to pay off investors. The Secret Service nabbed them in 1909, and Morello and Lupo began lengthy prison sentences the following year.
During the decade Morello and Lupo were in prison, their Mafia organization lost ground to rivals in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. Morello lost a beloved son to street violence. Morello's half-brother Nicholas was gunned down in 1916.
By 1920, Giuseppe Morello was back in New York. One source claims that he opposed and fought against rising Mafia star Joe Masseria. That claim makes little sense, and its only known proponent is forced to suggest that Morello surrendered to Masseria TWO times in succession in order to explain some of the violence he says occurred during the Mafia civil strife. He also is at a loss to explain the extremely close relationship between Masseria and Morello just a few years later or the ongoing close relationship between Masseria and Morello's half-brother Ciro Terranova.
Morello was clearly in Masseria's camp when Joe the Boss eliminated boss of bosses Toto D'Aquila in 1928. Masseria decided that a conservative Sicilian element in the new world Mafia was becoming rebellious, and he attempted to quiet the rebels by announcing that well respected Morello was the new boss of all bosses.
The 1930 assassination of Morello in his New York offices initiated a purge of Masseria puppet rulers in the New York Mafia. That became the Castellammarese War.
