Anti-Fascist, anti-Communist editor Carlo Tresca was shot clown on New York's Fifth Avenue in 1943, a hit ordered by Fugitive Vito Genovese as a Favor to Benito Mussolini.
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have Tresca taken care of. Genovese got the contract back to New York to his aides Mike Miranda and Tony Bender who passed it on to a then minor Brooklyn hoodlum named Carmine Galante, who would in the 1970s rise to become the boss of the Bonanno Family.
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On the evening of January 11, 1943, Tresca was walking on Fifth Avenue near 15th Street with a friend, attorney Giuseppe Calabi, also a political exile from Italy. As they crossed 15th Street on the west side of the avenue, it was quite dark since the wartime dimout was in effect. The men paid no particular attention to a figure standing on the corner. As they approached him, the loiterer reached in his pocket. He came up with a .38-caliber pistol and started shooting. One bullet crashed through Tresca's right cheek and lodged at the base of his skull. Another hit him in the back and lodged in his left lung. Tresca died in the gutter where he fell. The killer escaped by car.
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Calabi and other witnesses were able to record the license number: 1C-9272. That number meant something to the law. About two hours before the killing, Galante, out of prison on parole, had made his weekly report to his parole officer in downtown Manhattan. It was standard procedure for parole officers to trail parolees out of the office in the hope of seeing them consorting with other criminals, a violation of the terms of their release. Galante had entered a car and driven off. A parole officer had not tried to follow Galante but had recorded the license number of the car: 1C-9272.
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Picked up as a suspect in the Tresca assassination, Galante denied all. He had not gotten in any car. He'd gone uptown by subway and seen a Broadway movie, Casablanca , with Humphrey Bogart. Questioned about the plot of the film, Galante was remarkably and suspiciously vague. He did not appear to even remember the phrase, "You must remember this...." It was suspicious but hardly an indictable offense, especially since none of the witnesses to the murder could identify the killer because of the dimout.
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Galante had to be released, and when Genovese returned to the United States after the war, he had nothing to fear from any further investigation of the Tresca assassination.
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Police kept Galante under a phone tap for four and a half years, hoping he would make some slip about the case. A police detective who worked on the investigation later recalled, "He was real cagey, that guy. Someone would call him and say, 'Hello,' and all he'd say back was 'Humm' and the other guy would say 'Meet you at 1 P.M. ,' and he would say 'Humm.' That's all he ever said on the phone."
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See also: Galante, Carmine; Genovese, Vito .
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Twenties Group: Mafioso leadership migration In the 1920s, shortly after his rise to power in Italy, Benito Mussolini declared war on the Sicilian Mafia, ordering his number one enforcer, Cesare Mori, prefect of Palermo, to wipe out the criminal gangs. Mori conducted a brutal campaign of terror and torture and forced many mafiosi to flee. Many of these headed for the United States in what came to be known as the "Mussolini Shuttle."
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The mafiosi so forced to come to America became powers in the underworld and did much to mold the forces of organized crime. Known as the "Twenties Group," they included Carlo Gambino, who passed through customs on December 23, 1921, a pre-Mussolini refugee but one already feeling official heat in Sicily. Within the next several years, Gambino was followed by Joe Bonanno, Antonio Magaddino and Stefano Magaddino in 1924; Joe Profaci, Mike Coppola and Joe Magliocco in 1926; and Salvatore Maranzano in 1927. All these men would rise to be the bosses or underbosses in various crime families. All came more or less as representatives of Don Vito Cascio Ferroif not the so-called boss of bosses of the Mafia in Sicily, then certainly the most powerful and colorful chieftain.
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Ferro clearly had designs on expanding his influence in America, and so great was his power and influence that all his proteges moved into positions of power in America with startling speed. The Twenties Group found a great many allies already in the United States, mafiosi like Joe Aiello, the leading Mafia leader in Chicago who would eventually fall under the guns of non-mafioso Al Capone; Joe Zerilli, a power in the Detroit family; and
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