About The MOB
T
Ciro Terranova
July 20, 1888, to Feb. 20, 1938.
"Artichoke King," "Whitey"
Terranova was born in Corleone, Sicily, in 1889, half-brother to Giuseppe Morello.
Terranova came to the United States as a boy in the 1890s. His family included brothers Vincent and Nicholas, half-brother Giuseppe and several sisters. After brief stays in Louisiana and Texas, the family settled in New York City.
Terranova grew up in the street gangs of East Harlem and graduated to a position of lieutenant in the organization of local politician and racket king Giosue Gallucci.
Terranova's racket specialty became produce, and he cornered the market on artichokes, earning the nickname "the Artichoke King." He is also believed to have trafficked in narcotics, and some authorities credited him with christening cocaine "the white stuff."
Terranova's usefulness to New York organized crime was based on his ability to create and maintain relationships with corrupt political and law enforcement personalities as well as his influence among the young street hoods in East Harlem. Upon Gallucci's death in 1915, Terranova began organizing his own rackets.
Lower East Side Mafia boss Ignazio Lupo married Ciro's sister Salvatrese, bringing together the Terranova, Morello and Lupo clans of Corleone.
During the long imprisonments of Lupo and Morello for counterfeiting, the Terranovas attempted to maintain order in the New York underworld. They had a difficult time of it. Nicholas Morello was assassinated by the Brooklyn branch of the Neapolitan Camorra in 1916. By the early 1920s, the family was also fighting against other Sicilian Mafiosi. Insecure Brooklyn-based boss of bosses Salvatore D'Aquila decreed that the Morello clan should be wiped out. D'Aquila put prolific underworld gunman Umberto Valente on the job.
While the recently freed Morello and Lupo scrambled to find a diplomatic way to remove the D'Aquila death sentence, Ciro and Vincent Terranova teamed with the ruthless Joe Masseria to battle D'Aquila in New York.
During the gang war, Vincent Terranova was killed. Masseria used some trickery to avenge the death and eliminate Valente.
Ciro Terranova moved himself and his family a safe distance from the city, all the way out to Pelham Manor, and began driving around in an armored limousine. He established a solid working relationship with Arthur "Dutch Schultz" Flegenheimer and took in a share of Schultz's Harlem lottery. The two gang bosses shared some underlings, including Joe "Baker" Catania and Danny Iamascia.
The Masseria-D'Aquila underworld conflict was momentarily resolved in 1928, when Masseria finally caught up with the declining Mafia chief. Upon D'Aquila's death, Masseria took for himself the title of boss of bosses of the American Mafia.
In the following year, Terranova's important alliances with local officials were exposed as the result of a robbery at a dinner honoring City Magistrate Albert Vitale. Police investigation into the holdup (and the unexplained return of stolen items) showed that Terranova and the top men in his organization - all known criminals - were among the guests at the dinner.
At the end of the 20's, a new problem arose - Mafia gangs comprised in large part of immigrants from Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, became convinced that Masseria was determined to annihilate them. They rose up against him in 1930 and 1931 in what became known as the Castellammarese War. Terranova was viewed as a loyal Masseria ally. However, he and his friend Charlie Luciano secretly negotiated a surrender to the Castellammarese side. As a show of good faith, Terranova, Luciano and other turncoats were assassinated Masseria on April 15, 1931.
Immediately after the assassination, Mafia legend indicates that Terranova lost his nerve. Benjamin Siegel says Terranova was serving as driver for the team of assassins but was so nervous he could not get the car in gear. With that rumor, Terranova lost much of his prestige in the underworld.
Soon, Luciano and his aggressive young Mafiosi moved in on Terranova's rackets. By 1935, he might have had nothing more than a trickle of income from his old artichoke racket. That was shut off in December 1935, as Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia briefly outlawed the sale of artichokes until competitive distribution could be arranged.
In his final years, Terranova was declared persona non grata in Manhattan and was arrested for vagrancy whenever seen on the island. Broke, he was forced to surrender his Pelham Manor home in 1937. He moved back into an East Harlem apartment after that. He claimed to be living on borrowed money at the time of his death from a stroke at Columbus Hospital on Feb. 20, 1938.
Vincent Terranova
May 15, 1886, to May 8, 1922.
"Tiger"
Vincent Terranova was born in Corleone, Sicily, one of a group of brothers who dominated New York organized crime for more than three decades.
Vincent rose to the leadership of a gang located on East 107th Street around 1900. He cooperated in rackets with the downtown-based Mafia organization of half-brother Giuseppe Morello and brother-in-law Ignazio Lupo.
When Morello and Lupo went off to serve prison sentences for counterfeiting, Terranova was welcomed as a group commander in the East Harlem organization of Giosue Gallucci.
In the 1920s, Terranova became wealthy as a bootlegger. But he also became embroiled in an underworld feud with then-boss of bosses Salvatore D'Aquila.
In May 1922, Vincent was shot to death from a car passing his home at 116th Street and Second Avenue.
Johnny Torrio
1882 to April 16, 1957.
"Fox"
Torrio is credited with being one of the organizers of the national crime Syndicate.
Torrio, believed to have been a nephew of Big Jim Colosimo of Chicago and the son of a widowed mother, grew up in New York and was a member of Five Points gangs until heading across the river to a leadership position alongside gangster Frank Yale. Torrio had established himself as a big shot in Brooklyn by 1909, when his uncle called him west to help out with a Black Hand problem. (The call to Chicago might have been as late as 1916.)
Colosimo was NOT a Mafioso. He served local political interests while running a string of brothels and entertainment establishments. As a wealthy Italian, he was victimized by extortionists. Torrio set about the tasks of eliminating the Black Hand threat and forming a gang to support the illicit operations of Uncle Jim.
By 1919, Torrio was Colosimo's right hand man. The new Torrio gang needed a ruthless enforcer. When one Torrio's old underlings from Brooklyn, Alphonse Capone, was wanted on murder charges in New York, Torrio decided that he should have a change of scenery. Capone was put to work as a bouncer in Colosimo's establishments and an enforcer for Torrio.
Colosimo was killed on May 11, 1920. Underworld legend says that Torrio and Capone were responsible because Colosimo hesitated to step on local gangsters' toes by going into the bootlegging business. But many others would have wanted Colosimo dead.
If Torrio and Capone were involved, it is likely that their old Brooklyn friend Frank Yale was imported to Chicago to take care of the murder. Yale was in town when Dion O'Banion was killed and is often said to be responsible for that death as well.
However, Colosimo had also recently left his wife to marry another woman. The wife and her family would have had reason to go after Colosimo. The birth of a Colosimo gang would have offended the existing gangs in the region, including the Sicilian Genna Family and the Irish-Jewish conglomeration on Chicago's North Side. The Black Hand extortionists put out of business by Colosimo's call to Torrio would also have had a score to settle with him.
Torrio took over the Colosimo operations and attempted to make peace with his neighbors. He tried diplomatically to establish zones of influence for the various gangs within the city and its suburbs. In 1923, the Torrio gang's move into Cicero required careful negotiations with the mobsters and politicians already in that community.
The peace in Chicago was an uneasy one and was broken in 1924 when Torrio was betrayed by North Siders who sold him the Sieben Brewery and then had police raid the establishment shortly thereafter. Torrio was sentenced to a prison term, but before he was sent away, rival gangsters decided to try to send him to the morgue. He was shot and severely wounded at his home Jan. 24, 1925. As he lay in the hospital, he reportedly turned command of his organization over to Capone and officially retired.
Torrio would no longer directly participate in the Chicago underworld, but he would still be an influential character on the national (and perhaps international) scene. After recovering from his injuries and serving his prison sentence, Torrio headed out on the road. He repeatedly visited New York and also went abroad. In New York, he worked closely with the likes of Charlie Luciano and Frank Costello and may have been one of the architects of the cooperative bootlegging organization known as the Seven Group.
It is believed that Torrio played an elder statesman's advisory role as organized crime units from around the country assembled into a national Syndicate in the early 1930s.
Torrio was once again jailed in 1939 when he was convicted of income tax fraud. After his release in 1941, he led a quiet life in Brooklyn.
He died of a heart attack in a Brooklyn hospital at the age of 75. His passing and burial were handled so quietly, that newspapers did not become aware that he had died until three weeks later.
Santo Trafficante Jr.
Nov. 15, 1914, to March 17, 1987.
"Louis Santos," "Sam Balto"
Trafficante transformed the Tampa, Florida, Mafia into an international force during his three decades as its boss.
Born to a Sicilian-American family in Tampa on Nov. 15, 1914, Trafficante took the leadership of the Tampa organization upon his father's (Santo Sr.) death in 1954. At that time, he had already established working arrangements with gambling facilities in Cuba and was running a numbers game ("bolita") within the Cuban and African-American communities in Florida. Authorities believe he also engaged in drug trafficking.
In the 1950s, Trafficante was arrested several times in connection with his gambling ventures, but he managed to be acquitted every time. His one conviction of that period occurred in 1954 on bribery charges. He appealed the verdict and had it overturned by the state Supreme Court.
The Tampa mobster reportedly had close relations with gambling big shot Meyer Lansky, New York Mafioso Albert Anastasia and New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello. His friendships with Lansky and Anastasia might have resulted in a conflict of interest in 1957, as Anastasia began negotiations with Cuban authorities to open his own gambling establishment. That appears to have sealed Anastasia's fate. He was already despised by New York's Vito Genovese (held in check by a Frank Costello-Anastasia alliance) and Carlo Gambino (who wanted to take his place as a family boss). With Lansky and Trafficante swinging over to the Genovese-Gambino side, Anastasia had little/no support left in the national crime Syndicate.
Trafficante was reportedly one of the last people to see Anastasia alive. Author Scott M. Deitche ("Cigar City Mafia") indicates that Trafficante met with Anastasia accompanied by Cuban gangster Robert "Chili" Mendoza. Perhaps Trafficante visited his old friend in New York in the hope of talking him out of a Havana business venture. (Though the established Havana gambling interests had eliminated one challenger, they would soon face a much stronger foe.)
Trafficante was among the many Mafiosi nabbed as police crashed the party at Apalachin in 1957. When brought up on charges stemming from that gathering, Trafficante skipped out to the safe haven - at the moment - of Cuba.
The triumph of Fidel Castro's communist revolution in Cuba was profoundly costly for Trafficante and the other mobsters who invested in Havana casinos. It was also humiliating for a number of them. Trafficante was jailed during the summer of 1959 in Havana along with Jake Lansky (Meyer's brother and business partner) and some other underworld investors. At the end of the summer, he was released and returned to Tampa.
There he stood trial for tax evasion but was acquitted. At about that time, Trafficante, Chicago's Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli (an important mafioso in Illinois and Florida) and other underworld elements became involved with the CIA in plotting to overthrow Castro. According to testimony before congressional investigators, the conspirators eventually settled on the idea of dropping a poison pill into a soft drink given to the Cuban dictator. It is unknown if the pill was ever delivered. Trafficante visited Cuba once more in 1960, but found the situation there to be hopeless.
Conspiracy theorists believe Trafficante subsequently joined with Cuban exiles and American Mafiosi in a plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. Trafficante was no fan of Kennedy's, but he vehemently denied involvement in the assassination. One informant insisted to federal investigators that Trafficante predicted the Kennedy assassination six months before it occurred. The mob boss was known to have a connection to Dallas's Jack Ruby, who shot and killed alleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald before a hearing could be held. Trafficante was under government surveillance for most of the next two decades and frequently was called to testify before investigatory panels.
Some sources suggest that Trafficante was later involved in the Iran-Contra affair of the Reagan Administration. His connections in Latin America and his continuing relationship with the American intelligence agencies make that seem possible.
In the final years of his life while suffering with a kidney condition, the law appeared to be catching up with Trafficante. Federal investigators brought racketeering and conspiracy charges against him in summer of 1986. Those were linked to illegal gambling operations. The case ended in a mistrial. Just before his death, the government charged him with taking kickbacks skimmed from the International Laborers Union dental and eye health care plans.
Trafficante died March 17, 1987, three hours after undergoing a triple-bypass at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston.
Carmine Tramunti
Oct. 1, 1910, to Oct. 15, 1978.
"Gribbs"
Tramunti led the Lucchese Crime Family in New York in the late 1960s and possibly also in the early 1970s.
Boss Tommy Lucchese died of natural causes in July 1967. With Family bigshot Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo behind bars at that time for bribing New York City Water Commissioner James L. Marcus, Tramunti was selected as Lucchese's successor.
Just a few years later, Tramunti was charged with involvement in the "French Connection" heroin distribution ring. He was convicted of helping to finance the ring, which smuggled heroin from Turkey through Corsica to the U.S. On May 7, 1974, Tramunti was sentenced to serve 15 years in prison. He was also found guilty of perjury.
Tramunti died of natural causes in prison in 1978.
Just when Corallo took over the leadership of the Lucchese clan remains in doubt. It appears that, after coming out of prison, Corallo allowed Tramunti to continue to serve as a front man for the Lucchese operation until the time of his imprisonment.
