for the unions seeking to recruit new members or terrorize strikebreakers. Sometimes Dopey Benny worked for both sides in the same dispute, an arrangement that impressed Little Augie.
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By 1915, police action put Dopey Benny out of business, and labor slugging was virtually nonexistent over the next four years. But in 1919, Little Augie made a comeback in the labor slugging racket, and union activities picked up. He organized his own gang, called the Little Augies, and contended with the forces of the much larger Kid Dropper organization, then in control of most of the slugging rackets. By 1923, Little Augie numbered among his troops the young Louis Lepke, Lepke's gorilla-like sidekick, Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro, and another rising gangster, Jack "Legs" Diamond.
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When Little Augie masterminded Kid Dropper's murder, he became top dog in the labor slugging field. Unfortunately, the field became less lucrative because of police enforcement and because many more-sophisticated labor leaders switched away from violence to achieve their ends. Lepke, advised by Rothstein, explained to Little Augie that they should drop the slugging tactics and instead penetrate the local unions and take control of them. Then, besides skimming the local treasuries, they could extort money from employers who wanted labor peace.
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The take from such a setup would be much greater than what they got out of simple slugging assignments, but Little Augie was not convinced. He wanted an immediate return for his criminal time. He insisted on sticking with the old ways and switching part of the operations to bootlegging. Taking the long view, Lepke realized Prohibition could not last forever, and he was interested in building a permanent empire. Little Augie now stood in his way.
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In October 1927 Little Augie was walking along a street on the Lower East Side with Legs Diamond, his personal bodyguard. A black touring car pulled up. There were four men inside. Gurrah Shapiro jumped out, firing a gun. Louis Lepke from behind the wheel also opened up. Diamond was shot several times but survived. Little Augie fell dead with a bullet in the head.
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Little Augie was buried by his father, a highly religious Jew, who ordered that the coffin nameplate read:
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Age 25 Years
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Little Augie was really 33, but his family had considered him dead since 1919 when he had returned to a life of crime and organized the Little Augies.
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Lepke and Shapiro went on to organize the labor extortion field.
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See also:
Diamond, Jack "Legs"; Lepke, Louis; Shapiro, Jacob "Gurrah
."
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Ottumvo, Vincenzo (?1889): Early Mafia victim
Although his personal history is mostly a mystery, Vincenzo Ottumvo has the distinction of being regarded as the first recorded Mafia victim in the United States. (He almost certainly was not.) A Neapolitan, Ottumvo was killed by Sicilian criminals in New Orleans on January 24, 1889, during a card game. The crime resulted not from a gambling dispute, but rather from the first shot in an Italian gang war that was to be waged in the city between Neapolitan and Sicilian gangsters.
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Apparently, Ottumvo was a member of a Neapolitan "Camorra" faction vying with the Sicilian Mafia for control of the lucrative New Orleans waterfront racketsat least, that seems to have been the case. However, it is not inconceivable he was a Sicilian mafioso. An almost total lack of knowledge of the ins-and-outs of Italian criminality, together with a high degree of venality, on the part of the New Orleans police guaranteed that the Ottumvo murder, along with several others that followed in ensuing months, would remain forever in the unsolved file.
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There is little reason to believe that Ottumvo was truly the first victim of the American Mafia. The Sicilian underworld had existed in New Orleans since the time of the Civil War, and, indeed, the first Black Hand extortion murder may have occurred as early as 1855. (Not all Black Hand murders were the work of mafiosi, but it would be most remarkable if none were.)
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