The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (42 page)

Nothing like it had ever happened before. An entire industry—one of the most important in the country—had been gifted by the government to gangsters.

FOR MOST ORDINARY CRIMINALS
, the most striking thing about the liquor business was not so much the money that it generated but the way in which it eroded existing boundaries within the underworld itself. Crime, before 1919, had been largely a neighborhood affair. Gangs struggled for control over small areas of large cities, as the Morellos had done in Harlem and Little Italy, and the gangs themselves were almost always tightly knit. Jewish syndicates fought over the Jewish districts of the Lower East Side; Sicilians and Neapolitans disputed the Italian quarter of Manhattan. Prohibition broke down many of those barriers. The vastly influential, Jewish-run Reinfeld Syndicate included several leaders who had American backgrounds; Waxey Gordon and Dutch Schultz, two of the best-known bootleggers of the 1920s, came from Jewish and German families respectively, and Schultz (whose criminal empire was rumored to turn over $20 million a year) had many allies in the Italian community, including Ciro Terranova, with whom he split the Harlem lottery racket. Some Mafia families even began to admit Neapolitans, a development made considerably more palatable by the demise of the Camorra in New York. Vito Genovese, who became one of the most feared Mafiosi in the city, was the first Naples man to rise to real power in this way. Genovese certainly had Camorra links—according to Sing Sing prison records, he was one of the last men to visit Tony “the Shoemaker” Paretti before his execution for the murder of Nick Terranova. But he was also an ally of Charlie Luciano, who came from Lercara Friddi in Sicily and whose star was rising swiftly in the Mafia.

An influx of new, younger blood certainly helped Sicilian criminals to profit from the opportunities on offer. “Prohibition,” said Joe Bonanno, whose own successful Mafia career owed a good deal to the ban on alcohol, “was too good to be true. I didn’t consider it wrong. It seemed fairly safe in that the police did not bother you. There was plenty of business for everyone, [and] the profits were tremendous.” But, to begin with, little changed. In the early 1920s the bootlegging of alcohol was as much of a neighborhood business as the racketeering that preceded it, and the bootleggers themselves were very often the same gangsters who had infested their local communities for years. North of Central Park, the remnants of the old Morello family seized gratefully on these new opportunities. They were led on this occasion by Vincenzo Terranova, who proved to be so fearsome a competitor that he now acquired the nickname of the Harlem Tiger. He and his brother-in-law Vincenzo Salemi formed a partnership with another bootlegger by the name of Diamond Joe Viserti—a flashy Neapolitan involved in several of the killings at the Murder Stable. Viserti was renowned for his gaudy taste in jewelry and flashed a ten-thousand-dollar stickpin. His links with the Morello family went at least as far back as 1913.

Terranova, Salemi, and Viserti were strong enough to control most of the liquor trade in Harlem, but their influence seems to have run no further south than 106th Street. Further downtown, rival gangs fought over the enclave of Little Italy and the new Italian colonies on the East Side. One was led by the Morellos’ old friend and new enemy, Umberto Valenti. Another, even more important, was controlled by yet another influential Mafioso. He was a small, combative, and frighteningly ambitious man who had come to New York from the town of Marsala, on the west coast of Sicily, and had a criminal record that stretched back nearly twenty years. In time, he would prove to be the most important Mafia figure of the Prohibition era. His name was Giuseppe Masseria, but he was better known as Joe the Boss.

Masseria had got his start in crime before the war. His police rap sheet noted arrests on suspicion of kidnapping, sending Black Hand letters, and theft from numerous premises around the Bowery. He and a companion named Lima were convicted of burglary in 1907 (Marie Morello, the Clutch Hand’s sister, had married a man called Gioacchino Lima, which hints at one possible connection between Masseria and the Morello family). Then, a few years later, Masseria was caught again, this time breaking into a pawnshop with the assistance of a barman from the Lomonte brothers’ Harlem bar. He served four and a half years for this second offense, enough to keep him in prison until late in 1917.

This was scarcely the record of an important Mafioso, and the future boss was still barely more than a petty crook, living in a single room above a bar, when Prohibition came in and changed everything. Without the ban on alcohol, Masseria might never have been heard of. As it was, however, he benefited more than most from the new laws. His territory on Kenmare Street in Little Italy chanced to include an important stretch of sidewalk known as the Curb Exchange—a place where liquor dealers from across New York met informally to buy and sell. Control of the Curb Exchange meant a small slice of a large portion of the city’s liquor sales, and within a few months Masseria had reinvented himself as the boss of an influential syndicate. By 1921, allied by now with several other Italian gangs from Brooklyn and Manhattan, he was second in influence only to Totò D’Aquila. His lieutenants included several men destined to be the leaders of a coming generation, among them Joe Adonis, Frank Costello, and Charles “Lucky” Luciano.

Whatever it was that drew men of such undoubted ability to flock around the rising boss, it had little to do with his habits or appearance. Masseria was a glutton who ate far too much. Standing not much more than five feet five, he was squat and chubby, and though (like the great majority of bootleggers) he dressed well, in silk shirts and tailored suits, he lacked the poise to impress even his fellow criminals. Joe Bonanno, a fastidious dresser, found him sloppy in his personal appearance: “His belly protruded from under his half-opened vest,” Bonanno wrote after one meeting. “His collar was unbuttoned and his tie loosened. One of his shirt sleeves was buttoned on the wrong holes.” Another enemy nicknamed him “the Chinese,” because, he said, of his “bloated cheeks, which made his eyes seem like narrow oriental slits.” Masseria was neither eloquent nor intelligent. He spoke both English and Sicilian poorly. And, notoriously, he was a messy eater. “He attacked a plate of spaghetti as if he were a drooling mastiff. He had the table manners of a Hun,” recorded Bonanno, who professed himself to be repulsed by the mere sight of the new boss at the table. “[He] was vulgar, and puffy … the nervous type of eater, an incomplete man inside—the glutton in him compelled him to feed his belly as the bully in him was compelled to feed his ego.”

What Masseria did have, though, was something more important than appearance: a reputation for ruthlessness and a long run of good fortune. Chancing to control the territory around the Curb Exchange was only one example of his luck. The fat Sicilian was also famous in the New York underworld for his preternatural ability to dodge trouble and even bullets, and on at least two occasions in the early 1920s, rival gangsters cornered Masseria in ambushes from which the boss emerged miraculously unscathed. These encounters entered underworld legend and leant luster to the gangster’s reputation.

From the Morello family’s perspective, Joe the Boss had suddenly become a man worth courting. He was, by now, the only Mafioso in Manhattan strong enough to face down Totò D’Aquila, and it was this strength, almost certainly, that attracted Morello himself into Masseria’s orbit. Spared, however grudgingly, from his Mafia death sentence, the Clutch Hand still had every reason to fear that the implacable D’Aquila would come after him again. In 1921 he abruptly reemerged as Joe the Boss’s right hand man.

It was an alliance that made every kind of sense. The Clutch Hand traded independence for protection, while Masseria benefited hugely from Morello’s contacts and his long years of experience. The Terranova brothers also entered the equation. By aligning his fast-rising new syndicate with the remnants of the old Morello family, Joe the Boss expanded his influence to Harlem and gained an important outlet for his alcohol. He also added to his strength in the event of any power struggle.

D’Aquila wasted little time in fighting back against the new alliance. The Masseria-Morello pact was far from welcome to the boss of bosses, and in the fall of 1921 he struck back hard at what remained of the Morello gang. Diamond Joe Viserti was the first to go, shot twice in the back in Little Italy on October 13, but his death was followed a few months later by none other than that of the Harlem Tiger. Vincenzo Terranova fell on May 8, 1922, ambushed as he was walking past an ice cream parlor on East 116th Street, in the heart of the Morello territory. The end was swift; a touring car with its top down sidled up behind the eldest of the Terranovas and pulled up to the curb; two men armed with sawed-off shotguns leaned out and fired buckshot charges, hitting their man repeatedly in the shoulder, back, and lungs. Vincenzo collapsed to the ground, where he had just sufficient strength to raise himself on one arm, draw a revolver from inside his coat, and discharge several hopeless rounds after the disappearing car. Then he fell back to the ground and died, the third member of his family to lose his life to a gang war. He was only thirty-six.

The man responsible for Terranova’s death was Umberto Valenti. The Ghost—so it was widely thought—had proved his loyalty to D’Aquila by bringing down an enemy, and that afternoon he struck again, downtown this time, at Masseria. No fewer than five Sicilians were involved in this battle—Joe the Boss and two of his men on one side and two Valenti gunmen on the other. Neither side, it seems, shot straight; five minutes of intermittent gunfire wounded half a dozen passing garment workers, but Masseria escaped unscathed. Valenti tried again a few months later, sending four more men to Joe the Boss’s house early in August. This time Masseria spotted them as he came down his front steps; he fled into a nearby shop, dodging one bullet that came crashing through a glass window and two more, fired at close range, that came within inches of killing him. Joe’s famous luck was with him once again that day—two bullets had torn holes in his straw hat—but his enemy the Ghost’s had finally deserted him. Three days later, on August 11, Valenti was ambushed entering a restaurant at Twelfth Street and Second Avenue. He made a run for a nearby taxi, but a small group of Masseria’s men shot him as he leapt onto the running boards.

Valenti died in hospital an hour later, and though his boss, D’Aquila, did not call a truce for several months, his attempt to curb Masseria’s power was thenceforth all but over. There was one further important casualty on the Morellos’ side—Lina Morello’s brother, Vincenzo Salemi, died on East 108th Street early in 1923, hit four times in the back by bullets fired from a passing car—but the shooting petered out that spring. With his closest ally gone, D’Aquila was forced to admit that Joe the Boss had come to stay. In turn, the balance of power in the Sicilian districts altered irrevocably.

Masseria took the credit, but he owed a great deal to another man. Without Giuseppe Morello, Joe the Boss had lacked the brains to rival Totò D’Aquila, much less to best the boss of bosses so decisively. With Morello as adviser and chief strategist—as counselor, or
consigliere
in the language of the Mafia—he was a better leader. Together, the two men would dominate Manhattan for the next half-decade.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
is known only in broad outline; the war of 1922 was the last the New York public heard of the Mafia for half a dozen years. Conflict and murder were bad for business, and either D’Aquila or Masseria, or both, decreed that business should again be the priority.

The remainder of the Roaring Twenties passed in a blur of illicit bootleg deals punctuated by occasional murders. The killings, as always, made the press, while the day-to-day rivalries of the various gangs that preyed on the city did not. The FBI, which would eventually claim jurisdiction over many aspects of organized crime, was still a decade away from full effectiveness—not until the mid-1930s did the organization acquire real competence in such investigations—and in the absence of some figure of the stature of Flynn or Petrosino, the New York Police Department lacked both the will and the ability to secure evidence against the powerful, elusive leaders responsible for most Italian American crime. Far less is known of the Mafia’s operations in the 1920s and 1930s than was ever discovered about the activities of the Morello family.

A glimpse of the one surviving Terranova brother’s place in this criminal firmament comes from the memoirs, unremittingly hostile to the Morello family, of a low-level Mafioso by the name of Joe Valachi. Valachi was no more than a street thug: almost illiterate, and a mere burglar with five arrests and a short spell in Sing Sing to his name when he first encountered Ciro, then “the big man on 116th Street,” sometime in 1925. On that occasion, the Artichoke King brokered a truce between the members of Valachi’s former gang of burglars—who happened to be Italian—and a group of Irish thieves with whom he had gone to work on his release from prison. Keeping the peace was an important part of a boss’s job, and the fact that Terranova ruled in favor of a predominantly Irish gang over the angry protests of Italians suggests that he was forward-looking for the day. The next time that Valachi encountered him, however, Ciro appeared in a very different light. The burglar was back in Sing Sing, serving a nearly four-year sentence, when he heard from another prisoner that a friend, a fellow housebreaker by the name of Frank LaPluma, had been killed. “They shot him sitting on a stoop one morning,” Valachi said. “The way I made it out, it didn’t make no sense. Well, all I could do is wonder what was going on.”

It took a prisoner who understood East Harlem to explain the situation to Valachi. Ciro Terranova, the burglar was shocked to hear, had sentenced him to death.

“They sold you out,” he said. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. “I mean they made peace,” he said, “on condition that you and Frank must die. Ciro Terranova fixed the whole thing.” Then [he] told me to watch myself. He said that if they got one, they’ll get the other—meaning me.