Part 10 (2/2)

A while later, another story about that evening began to do the rounds. According to this new version of events, Ciro had been much cleverer than it appeared and had in fact been the instigator of events. The holdup, it was said, had been staged by the Terranova clan to recover a wildly incriminating piece of evidence: a written murder contract, signed by Ciro himself, that another of Vitale's shady guests had been carrying in his pocket.

The story failed to impress Italian Harlem, nonetheless. In the collective opinion of the underworld, any boss foolhardy enough to let such a doc.u.ment fall into unfriendly hands deserved all the criticism that he got.

PUBLICITY OF THE SORT that attended Ciro Terranova was something that New York's boss of bosses thoroughly abhorred. Tot D Aquila was obsessively secretive, so much so that, despite a long career as the most influential Mafioso in the country and a criminal record that stretched back to 1906, he remained unknown to the police and press and had never been convicted of a crime. A couple of reports by Flynn aside, practically all that is known of the reclusive Palermitano comes from Nick Gentile. According to Gentile, D Aquila was brutal and authoritarian, a leader who had men condemned to death merely as ”a question of power.” He was certainly wary enough of likely rivals to remain wary of Joe Ma.s.seria, and with good reason-the most logical explanation for what happened next was that Ma.s.seria had decided to remove D Aquila in order to complete his rise to power. that attended Ciro Terranova was something that New York's boss of bosses thoroughly abhorred. Tot D Aquila was obsessively secretive, so much so that, despite a long career as the most influential Mafioso in the country and a criminal record that stretched back to 1906, he remained unknown to the police and press and had never been convicted of a crime. A couple of reports by Flynn aside, practically all that is known of the reclusive Palermitano comes from Nick Gentile. According to Gentile, D Aquila was brutal and authoritarian, a leader who had men condemned to death merely as ”a question of power.” He was certainly wary enough of likely rivals to remain wary of Joe Ma.s.seria, and with good reason-the most logical explanation for what happened next was that Ma.s.seria had decided to remove D Aquila in order to complete his rise to power.

The a.s.sa.s.sination of Tot D'Aquila, which took place at dusk on October 10, 1928, went almost unnoticed at the time. In retrospect, however, it plainly marked the end of an era: a period of continuity stretching all the way back to the formation of the Morello gang itself and of the precariously maintained peace among New York's increasingly powerful Mafia families. While D'Aquila ruled in New York, Sicilian criminals still preyed almost exclusively on the Sicilian community. Under his successors, Italian crime became increasingly indistinguishable from New York crime as a whole.

D'Aquila had been boss of bosses for nearly eighteen years when he died, and his killing was thoroughly professional. It had been planned by someone with a good knowledge of his movements; D'Aquila was ambushed on the corner of 13th Street and Avenue A after driving down from his home in the Bronx to keep a regular appointment with his doctor. Leaving the man's office ”just as the lamps were being lit,” he was shot nine times by three a.s.sa.s.sins who took good care to harm neither the boss's wife nor any of the four children who had accompanied him downtown. The killers had ensured that their victim would be unable to escape by tampering with the engine of his car. Stranded on the roadside and without a bodyguard, D'Aquila made a vulnerable target. He was. .h.i.t by a fusillade of bullets fired from point-blank range and died almost instantly.

Morello's stern successor had drawn a cloak of anonymity around himself so tightly that none of the newsmen who reported his murder seems to have had the least idea of its significance; the story was buried on page 48 of the next day's New York Times New York Times, where the victim was described as a ”cheese importer.” But someone made it their business to let the single witness to the shooting know exactly who the dead man was. When Louis Realbuto, the owner of a nearby drugstore, first spoke to the police, he admitted to watching the killing and described what happened in considerable detail. The next day, upon mature reflection, the unfortunate pharmacist hurried to change his story. He had not even been in his shop when the murder happened, he now insisted, and he knew nothing whatsoever of the case.

WITH TOT D'AQUILA DEAD, his likely killer, Ma.s.seria, succeeded him as boss of bosses by general acclamation.

Ma.s.seria was an ambitious and ruthless man who boasted almost all the qualities demanded of a successful Mafioso. He was strong and cunning, violent, and possessed in full measure the ability to terrify opponents that had made Morello such a formidable presence. Perhaps most tellingly of all, in the treacherous world of organized crime, Ma.s.seria was noted for his willingness to strike the first, most telling, blow. He had acted decisively in disposing of D'Aquila. None of the city's other Mafia bosses relished the prospect of challenging his accession.

The truth was that they had all gone soft: bloated and sated by the profits of Prohibition, wearied by age, worn down by the strains of gangster life. Ma.s.seria was considerably younger than the man he had replaced-forty-one years old to D'Aquila's fifty-and still new enough to leaders.h.i.+p to relish it. The leaders of New York's remaining families were mostly closer to D'Aquila's age. Cola Schiro was fifty-six, apparently, and had led the Brooklyn game that bore his name for more than two decades. Manfredi Mineo was fifty and had been a power in the same borough for almost as long. Neither man wanted conflict, and both chose to ally themselves with Ma.s.seria. The bosses of two smaller families were younger; Joe Profaci-a thief and rapist from Villabate, Sicily, who emerged late in 1928 as leader of his own family-was a mere stripling of thirty, and Tom Reina, who led the fifth of New York's Mafia gangs from his base in the Bronx, was thirty-eight. Profaci, who had burgeoning interests that extended as far as Staten Island, was less willing than Mineo and Schiro to prostrate himself but just as eager to keep the peace. Only Reina, Ma.s.seria's closest contemporary, presented any sort of threat. One well-informed observer, Joe Bonanno-then a rising member of the Schiro gang-thought that ”Reina had to be careful not to offend him, and he generally toed the Ma.s.seria line. But it was a relations.h.i.+p based on convenience rather than on likemindedness.”

The one trait that Joe Ma.s.seria fatally lacked was a talent for diplomacy. Tact and the willingness to compromise-to set limited goals and accept something other than unconditional surrender-had long been valued by the Mafia, but Ma.s.seria's lack of flexibility surpa.s.sed even D'Aquila's, and his authoritarian aggressiveness soon proved to be a crucial weakness. He seems to have reveled in the nickname ”Joe the Boss,” and as Bonanno was swift to point out, the eagerness with which he embraced the name was highly significant.

Sicilian to the tip of his trigger finger, a traditionalist, a romantic, and a liar even to himself, Bonanno held fast to the notion of the boss as a benevolent ”father” whose job it was to shepherd the members of his family. Ma.s.seria was not a father of this sort. His English nickname, Bonanno said, was something new, and, in hindsight, it reflected the subtle changes already transforming our Tradition in America. The t.i.tle ”boss” represented a corruption of the t.i.tle ”Father.” It's regrettable that in America the term ”boss” became the more popular of the two. The terms are not interchangeable. ... ”Boss” connotes a relations.h.i.+p between a master and his servants or his workers. The growing use of the word ”boss” when referring to ”Father” was one of the earliest indications that in America relations.h.i.+ps between a leader and his followers had more of a business than a kins.h.i.+p base. The word ”boss” represented a new reality.

Joe the Boss's greatest sin, at least so far as his fellow Mafiosi were concerned, was his attempt to expand the powers of the boss of bosses. In Giuseppe Morello's time, the fragmentary evidence suggests, the boss had been more than anything an adviser and conciliator. D'Aquila had been far more authoritarian, but Ma.s.seria took things further still, seizing as much power as possible for himself and demanding more than mere obedience from New York's five families. Joe the Boss, it became clear, wanted to share in all the profits from the city's rackets. In February 1930, a year and a half into his reign, he felt strong enough to press Tom Reina into ceding him a stake in the lucrative Bronx ice racket. When Reina resisted, he was murdered, and perhaps as a result, Ma.s.seria's subsequent attempts to grab a substantial share of Manhattan's clothing racket met with little resistance. Soon the boss of bosses began making demands of families as far away as Chicago and Detroit-a privilege that, so far as is known, no New York Mafiosi had ever claimed before. It is scarcely surprising that Ma.s.seria's brutal attempts to garner power led first to protests, then to covert opposition, and finally to outright violence on an unprecedented scale.

It would come to be known as the Castellammare War-”Castellammare” because resistance to Ma.s.seria was strongest among the Mafia of Brooklyn and led by Brooklyn Mafiosi who had been born in Castellammare del Golfo. The Castellammaresi had a reputation even among other Sicilians as men ”renowned for their refusal to take guff from anyone,” and Bonanno, who had been born in the town, liked to portray the resistance to Joe the Boss as something that sprang up naturally among the proud Mafiosi of that district: a n.o.ble crusade against unjust rule. The truth was rather more complex than that; Ma.s.seria was more than a mere autocrat-he was able to persuade the Mafia's general a.s.sembly to back him, which suggests the boss was not merely indulging in a personal vendetta. A good number of Ma.s.seria's opponents, moreover, came from other parts of Sicily, and men from the same town often supported different sides. Tommaso Gagliano, who succeeded Tom Reina as leader of the Bronx family, had been born in Corleone and so was well known to Morello, who remained loyal to Joe the Boss. It certainly is true, however, that many of Ma.s.seria's most determined opponents were drawn from among the Castellammaresi who filled the ranks of Schiro's family-men whom the boss himself saw as ”unruly and thick-skulled.”

The Castellammare War was an important turning point in Mafia history: the greatest convulsion that the fraternity had known. It was a conflict long remembered by all those who took part in it, and it was Morello, in his role as Ma.s.seria's chief strategist, who fired its opening shots and dictated the course of the first six months of hostilities, a period that saw his boss's forces victorious on every front.

According to the Castellammaresi themselves, it was thanks almost entirely to Morello that Ma.s.seria scored so much success: ”Mr. Joe,” Bonanno said, was smug and stupid, and it was the Clutch Hand who was Ma.s.seria's ”brains trust.” The first months of the war were marked by several murderous, clever moves aimed at a.s.serting the Ma.s.seria faction's dominance and crippling resistance to his rule. Morello began by sowing dissent between two of the most important families west of New York: the Detroit Mafia gang led by Gaspare Milazzo of Castellammare and the Chicago family of Milazzo's close friend Joe Aiello. Next he kept Aiello busy, playing him off against Chicago's most notorious Italian gangster, Al Capone, while Milazzo was disposed of. On May 31, 1930, gunmen dispatched by the Clutch Hand hunted down and killed the Detroit boss in the back room of a fish restaurant.

Ma.s.seria followed up this murder with some deft maneuvering in New York. The boss of bosses demanded and received ten thousand dollars of tribute from Cola Schiro's family, then arranged for the murder of Vito Bonventre, one of the richest of the Castellammare faction. Both incidents, Bonanno thought, bore witness to Morello's touch. ”If Ma.s.seria had killed Schiro, his Family would surely have sought revenge. However, by intimidating Schiro, a timid man, Ma.s.seria stood to domineer us all.” And by murdering Bonventre, the Clutch Hand had denied his boss's enemies much of the cash that they would need to fight a war.

New York's Italian underworld, Bonanno thought, resembled a volcanic chamber packed with magma: molten, seething, perpetually ready to erupt. Now, with Schiro humbled and humiliated and Joe the Boss's opponents in disorganized retreat, ”a sense of foreboding gripped the Castellammaresi in the city.” Ma.s.seria had more money, more support, and more men than his enemies. No real attempt had yet been made to coordinate resistance. Yet the situation was now acutely dangerous. Morello and his master had done more than merely declare war on the Castellammaresi-or so the Brooklyn Mafia believed: They had condemned them all to death. Joe the Boss himself had threatened to ”eat them like a sandwich.” Something had to be done about the situation, quickly.

Cola Schiro, plainly, was too old and far too indecisive to make a decent leader in the coming war, but the Brooklyn boss, mindful, apparently, of Tom Reina's fate, solved this problem by disappearing from the city shortly afterward. Schiro was next heard of back in Italy, and in his place the Castellammaresi chose a younger and more warlike man. Their new leader, Salvatore Maranzano, was forty-two years old and unusually well educated for a Mafioso; he was reputed to speak seven languages and had at one time trained to be a priest. The theft of a number of his family's valuable cattle soon drove him to renounce his vows, however, and with a mother who was the daughter of a powerful boss from the province of Trapani, Maranzano soon found himself initiated into the Mafia. Arriving in the United States sometime before 1926, he became a bootlegger with extensive connections in the north of New York State and rapidly built up a flouris.h.i.+ng business, manufacturing alcohol in his own illegal stills and moving quant.i.ties of liquor across the border with Canada. ”In his own way,” Bonanno said, ”his was a cla.s.sic American success story.”

Most of those who encountered Maranzano seem to have found him thoroughly impressive. To Bonanno, he was handsome, smartly dressed, and straightforward: ”a fine example of the Sicilian male ... a bold man and a ready fighter, an apostle of the old Tradition.” His voice was said to be particularly striking; it had ”an entrancing quality,” Bonanno said: ”When Maranzano used his voice a.s.sertively, to give a command, he was the bell knocker and you were the bell.” However, Joe Valachi, a far less intelligent man who was recruited to the Mafia in Brooklyn at the outbreak of the war and soon found himself appointed one of Maranzano's bodyguards, was more struck by other aspects of his personality. For Valachi, the new boss was shrewd, well educated, and a first-rate planner, a man who seemingly had little in common with the coa.r.s.e and poorly educated ”soldiers” he was asked to lead: ”Gee, he looked just like a banker. You'd never guess in a million years that he was a racketeer.”

Morello, too, held his new opponent in high regard. The two men had met in Palermo in 1921, and even before Maranzano properly succeeded Schiro, the Clutch Hand had been anxious to neutralize his threat. ”No one,” Joe Bonanno would recall, as yet knew that Maranzano had committed himself to war against Ma.s.seria, not even the people in our family in Brooklyn. People in Ma.s.seria's camp, meanwhile, were trying to persuade Maranzano to remain neutral. The other side had already singled out those Castellammaresi who might give them special trouble. As a result, Maranzano was invited to a friendly meeting with Ma.s.seria himself.

It was a dangerous suggestion. ”Tete-a-tetes with 'Joe the Boss' had a history of ending badly,” Bonanno said, and Morello had a well-deserved reputation of his own for savagery. But Maranzano needed more time to prepare for war-to build up his strength and organize his finances-and, if only to delay matters, he agreed to go. The meeting was to take place in a private house ”in uptown Manhattan”-probably one of the Clutch Hand's many strongholds. Ma.s.seria would be accompanied by his chief adviser, whom the Castellammaresi knew as Peter Morello, ”Don Petru,” an alias he had adopted after leaving prison. For his part, Maranzano asked Joe Bonanno to attend. The date, apparently, was sometime in June 1930.

The others looked at me with a mixture of admiration and sorrow, as if to say,-What a lucky b.a.s.t.a.r.d! What a dead stiff!The following day, the day of the meeting, I picked up Maranzano at his home, being extra sure I was on time. Maranzano always harped on about punctuality. He didn't say anything to me in the house. I was starting the car when he finally spoke:-Andiamo e ritorniamo.-Let's go and let's return.

Once at the meeting place, Bonanno wrote, Ma.s.seria and Maranzano exchanged greetings in the Sicilian manner: cheek-to-cheek, one eye looking at the man and the other looking over the man's shoulder. They and Morello sat at a table by themselves, while I and a couple of Ma.s.seria's bodyguards sat to the side. Espresso coffee was served, the steam spiralling out of the demita.s.se cups. As for the finer points of the discussion, Ma.s.seria said,-Let Don Petru talk for me.Ma.s.seria sat back, yielding the floor to his second, Peter Morello. This Morello had a deformed right hand, from which he got his nickname, ”the Clutch Hand.” There was nothing of the buffoon about Morello. He had a parched, gaunt voice, a stone face and a claw. It was probably Morello who had advised Ma.s.seria to try to neutralize Maranzano.-Thank you, Mr. Joe, Morello said, nodding slightly at Ma.s.seria, who grinned smugly.Morello congratulated Maranzano, first of all, on his success in America. These repeated references to Maranzano's success were intended to point out that continued success would depend on whether Maranzano had the right friends. Then Morello said he wanted to clarify some recent events which Maranzano, being a Castellammarese, no doubt must be concerned about.-The Milazzo slaying, Morello admitted, was from our part. We can't deny it.But Morello accused Milazzo and Aiello of plotting to kill ”Mr. Joe.” And since Stefano Maggadino [Bonanno's uncle, another Castellammarese and the head of Buffalo's Mafia family] had refused to talk with Ma.s.seria, Morello continued, there was every reason to suppose Don Stefano didn't like Mr. Joe either.-Perhaps you, Morello told Maranzano, can go to Don Stefano and put in a good word for Mr. Joe. Tell him to come see Mr. Joe. We just want to clarify everything, that's all.Maranzano gave no indication of what he really thought of the suggestion.-I'll see what I can do, Maranzano said coyly. But really, Don Petru, I'm just a soldier in the House of Cola Schiro, as you know. I have no authority.-Try, try, Ma.s.seria bellowed out of a cloud of smoke.-Do try, Don Turridru, Morello reiterated.-It can't hurt to try, Maranzano said. But I can't promise anything.-If something isn't done, Morello said, there might be bloodshed. And if there is fighting, I think the wisest course for an intelligent man such as yourself would be neutrality. On that we can all agree.-We understand each other, Maranzano said.The two had been treating each other gingerly and tactfully. Suddenly, Morello leaned closer to Maranzano and, dropping his voice to a lower pitch, said:-If you're fooling us, your fight will be against me. In Sicily you have never fought against anyone like Petru Morello.Maranzano replied quickly in a calm, level voice:-And you have never fought against anyone like Turridru Maranzano.They stared at each other for an instant and then tried to smile, to make it appear they had only been kidding.-What a bunch of comedians, you two, Ma.s.seria declared.

MARANZANO MADE READY to strike back. to strike back.

The members of the old Schiro family, he said, must be an army now. The Brooklyn Mafiosi were divided into squads and placed under the command of handpicked leaders. ”Only these group leaders knew who the other group leaders were and their whereabouts.” Intelligence would be supplied by an intricate network of informants, many of them cab-drivers from the Italian quarter who could identify the leading members of Ma.s.seria's gang by sight. Conscious of what had happened to Milazzo and Reina, Maranzano was determined never to be caught unaware by his enemies.

The new boss's own strategy was straightforward: strike at the leaders of Joe the Boss's gang. ”Now we are all one,” Valachi was told.

We're only a few here, but in a month we'll be four or five hundred. We have to work hard. The odds are against us. The other side has a lot of money. ... You will all be placed in different apartments around the city. We will have spotters out on the street. These spotters will have the telephone number of main headquarters. When a call comes in from the Bronx, for instance, that somebody has been spotted, the apartment we have in the Bronx will get a call. And when that call comes, you will have to respond as fast as you can. Of course, you have been given a picture of Ma.s.seria. He's the most important one.We must concentrate on getting their main bosses, and we must get Ma.s.seria himself. There will be no deal made with Joe Ma.s.seria. The war will go on for ten years if we don't get him.

Every effort was made to give the Castellammare forces a chance against the well-armed opposition. Supplies were brought in and organized: food, equipment, ammunition. Several safe houses were set up, some in New York, others in Yonkers and Long Island, and Maranzano and his bodyguards shuttled among them to evade possible ambushes by Ma.s.seria's forces. The new boss had used his contacts in Detroit to equip himself with two armored limousines, with ”special metal plates on the side and bullet proof windows,” and he rarely moved anywhere without them. The cars traveled in convoy, to make them difficult to ambush, and according to Bonanno, Maranzano himself sat in the backseat ”with a machine gun mounted on a swivel between his legs. He also packed a Luger and a Colt, as well as his omnipresent dagger behind his back.”

Bonanno, impressed as ever by his soldierly bearing, found Maranzano's meticulous attention to detail both an inspiration and a comfort during long days and nights spent shuttling around New York. But it was the new boss's cool determination that impressed him most: I watched Maranzano loading shotgun cartridges. I watched him weigh the black gunpowder on a small scale and fill the cartridges with pellets. Maranzano eschewed store-bought shotgun cartridges-he liked to prepare them himself. He did this last thing every night, before turning in.He performed the loading of the shotgun sh.e.l.ls as if it were a sacred ritual, with great precision, even elegance. ... Then, without looking up at me, he began a hushed monologue.-To kill a rabbit, to kill a deer, to kill even a bear is simple.You aim steady and you shoot. But man is the hardest animal to kill. When you aim at a man, your heart flutters, your mind interferes. Man is the hardest animal to kill. If possible you should always touch the body with your gun to make sure the man is dead. Man is the hardest animal to kill. If he gets away, he will come back to kill you.

ONE DECISION THAT Maranzano made at about this time would have a decisive effect on the outcome of the war. Maranzano made at about this time would have a decisive effect on the outcome of the war.

The opposing sides were evenly matched in one respect: Each knew the other very well. Mafiosi on both sides easily recognized their enemies, and there were a number of incidents in which the members of one faction spotted a rival from a car or on the street and were able to give chase to him. On several occasions, scouts noticed leading members of one side or the other disappearing into buildings, and-as Maranzano had foretold-elaborate ambushes were organized to catch the men as they emerged.

The Castellammaresi had a neat solution to this problem, one that simultaneously addressed their lack of manpower: Maranzano initiated a number of new Mafiosi into the ranks of Schiro's family and brought in several gunmen from outside New York. Most of these men had been born in Castellammare del Golfo, though Ma.s.seria's threat was far too pressing for this to be a formal requirement; Valachi, a Neapolitan, was one of a number who found himself admitted to the Schiro family in this way. The best were already experienced killers, rendered all the more lethal by their utter anonymity. Among their number was a young gangster from Benton Harbor, Michigan, a ”sharpshooter,” Valachi said, who had left his home after several relatives fell victim to the local bootleg wars. His name was Sebastiano Domingo, though to the Mafiosi of Brooklyn, with their love of nicknames, he was always known as ”Buster from Chicago.”

Buster was only twenty-two years old when he came to New York, but he was already heavily scarred by violence. His sister-in-law, Mary, had been ”mutilated almost beyond recognition” by a car bomb that detonated as she drove home in September 1927. His brother, Tony, was murdered two years later, shot nine times as he ate at a cafe, then blown nearly in half by a shotgun placed against his back. Buster himself, remarked Valachi, ”looked like a college boy” but was deadly with any sort of weapon. He was, as Joe Bonanno recalled, ”the quickest to set up and the best shot among us. He could shoot from any angle and from any direction. His speciality was the machine gun, with which he was a virtuoso.”

For Maranzano, Buster from Chicago was a dream come true: deadly, dependable, a loyal Castellammarese, and, best of all, unknown to anyone on Ma.s.seria's side. Domingo, he realized, could pa.s.s unnoticed anywhere in the city and get close enough to any of Joe the Boss's men to kill before they realized the danger they were in. So far as Maranzano was concerned, one potential target was more important than all the others put together. He would use Buster to remove the brains of Ma.s.seria's operation. His new gunman would be dispatched to kill Morello.

”MARANZANO USED TO SAY that if we hoped to win the war we should get at Morello before the old fox stopped following his daily routine,” Joe Bonanno would recall. ”Once Morello went undercover, Maranzano would say, the old man could exist forever on hard bread, cheese and onions.” Then they would have no hope of finding him. that if we hoped to win the war we should get at Morello before the old fox stopped following his daily routine,” Joe Bonanno would recall. ”Once Morello went undercover, Maranzano would say, the old man could exist forever on hard bread, cheese and onions.” Then they would have no hope of finding him.

Morello never got the chance to change his diet. At 3:45 P.M P.M. on August 15, 1930, two and a half months after the first shots in the Castellammare War were fired, two killers drove up to the office he maintained in the heart of Italian Harlem. It occupied the second floor of a four-story brownstone at 352 East 116th Street, just seven doors down from the old headquarters of the Ignatz Florio Co-Operative. One of the Castellammarese gunmen was Sebastiano Domingo; the other has never been identified. They were armed with .32-and .38-caliber revolvers.

Maranzano had gotten his timing right. Satisfied with the havoc he had unleashed on his enemies and convinced they were in full retreat, Morello had grown overconfident. There was no security inside the building and no guards. The a.s.sa.s.sins climbed the stairs and reached the office without being stopped or seen.

Buster found three men at work inside the room. Two of them, Morello and Gaspare Pollaro, were leading members of the Ma.s.seria faction. The third man was Pollaro's nephew, Joseph Perranio, a twenty-six-year-old with a conviction for larceny. According to Pollaro, who lived just long enough to tell a policeman what had happened, the three men had been discussing building contracts when they heard a knock. None of them had felt any sort of sense of danger, and

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