Pax Luciano
On November 5th, 1930, two more victims were claimed by the conflict --
Steve Ferrigno and Al Mineo -- both shotgunned to death as they left an
apartment building in the Bronx. The main target had been Joe the Boss himself,
but for some reason he had held back as they were leaving the building and he
escaped unharmed.
The War was building rapidly to a climax. Soldiers in both camps were hiding
out and gunning for each other across New York. Business for the mob was slowly
grinding to a halt; the killings and attacks, many in public places, were
calling down a lot of police and even worse, public attention. By the spring of
1931, Luciano and his followers, including Gagliano and Lucchese, had agreed to
back Maranzano. In April of that year, Masseria was murdered while having lunch
with Luciano in a restaurant on Coney Island.
Shortly after this event, Luciano held a meeting with Vincenzo Troia, a
representative of Maranzano. An agreement was reached by the two men under which
Charlie and his friends agreed to amalgamate with the Maranzano faction
It seemed that the War was over. Maranzano had become the undisputed chief of
the Italian underworld in America; but his reign would be short lived.
At a meeting called in the Bronx, Maranzano formally announced his details of
the mergers and realignments that would create five major families in New York.
They in turn would control the world of crime under his authority. They would
each have jurisdiction either in territorial or spheres of operational
activities and would be non-competitive. Each family would be headed by a boss
assisted by an under boss, who would control regimes of front line men
called soldiers, who would answer directly to a captain or capo. He
announced the heads of each of the families. Luciano would take over what was
left of Masseria’s group, and would act as supervisor for the whole
underworld, reporting directly to Maranzano; Tom Gagliano would officially take
over the Reina interests; Joe Bonanno, Joe Profaci and Vincent Mangano would
head up the other three families based on gangs that they had controlled in the
past. Each boss would have an underboss and Tommy Lucchese was named officially
into this position, working under Gagliano.
Throughout the summer and into the fall, the winds of change began to blow
again in the stone canyons of the New York underworld. Subtle manoeuvrings and
loyalty shifts were pointing more and more to another showdown, this time
between Maranzano and Luciano and the people who were close to him. Joseph
Bonanno, himself no slouch when it came to duplicity and venality, observed at
first hand the delicate tap dancing taking place between Stefano Magaddino, his
cousin and the Buffalo boss, and Maranzano over their respective power balances
within the greater criminal underworld. Both men, at different times, tried to
enlist Bonanno in their intrigues against each other. Maranzano was quickly
setting in place a plan to destroy not only Luciano, but also Vito Genovese,
Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Vincent Mangano and other powerful figures, and not
only in New York.
One of the men he trusted and looked to for support would, in fact, help to
kill him. Tommy Lucchese was to play an important and integral role in a classic
underworld double double cross.
On September 10th, 1930, Salvatore Maranzano finished breakfast, kissed his
wife and sons, Angelo, Mario and Dominic, and daughter Antoinette goodbye, and
left his home on Avenue J in Brooklyn. His driver/bodyguard drove him over the
Brooklyn Bridge and up to his office at 230 Park Avenue, mid-town Manhattan. He
had a planned a busy day of murder and mayhem, the start of a purge that would
cleanse his organization of all the problems and irritants that had bedevilled
him since the removal of Masseria. He had arranged an assassination plot to be
orchestrated by Vincent Coll, known as “Mad Dog” and not without reason, who
was to be at his office at 2 pm that afternoon to take care, permanently, of
Charlie Luciano and Vito Genovese. They were to be the first of many in
Maranzano’s master plan to become the putative head of the underworld.
However, unknown to Maranzano, Luciano was one step ahead and already had a
gang of four hired Jewish killers on their way to kill him. The four gunmen,
headed by a tough, professional killer known as Red Levine, entered Maranzano’s
outer office just before 1:45 pm. Tommy Lucchese had already ensured that
Maranzano was in his own and inner office. The strategic weakness in Maranzano’s
plan to kill Luciano and Genovese was that he was in a fixed position, with no
escape, waiting for two men who would never show up. This made him a sitting
duck for his killers when they arrived.
Posing as police detectives, two of them held the five bodyguards and
secretary Grace Samuels under guard in the outer office, as the other two
entered the inner office and shot and stabbed Maranzano to death. As they left
the building, Vincent Coll was making his way up the stairs for his appointment
with his intended victims. One of the bodyguards rushing out of the building
told him what had happened. Coll had already been advanced $25,000 by Maranzano
for the hit, and with no one to refund the money to, he simply turned and left
the building.
The murder of Salvatore Maranzano finally brought to an end the
Castellammarese War. He was laid to rest with a send-off befitting his status,
with the usual ritual long train of limousines, flowers, tears and eulogies. He
and his wife, Elizabetta, who died in 1964, share the same grave in Saint John’s
Cemetery, on Metropolitan Avenue, in Queens. It is indistinguishable from the
other New York cemeteries -- crowded gravestones, a few large mausoleums,
rushing expressways or elevated subway trains adjacent-except in one respect. So
many Godfathers are buried at Saint John’s that the cemetery has come to be
known as the Mafia’s Boot Hill. Here can be found the last remaining places of
such luminaries as Carlo Gambino, Joe Profaci, Carmine Galante, Joe Colombo,
Vito Genovese and the dux of organized crime, Charlie Luciano.
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Maranzano’s coffin on way to the funeral Credit: The Bettmann Archive |
After Maranzano was buried, Charlie Luciano informed everyone that the Don’s
autocratic ideas had been buried with him. The days of an absolute ruler were
over. The Mob would rule itself in the years to come, using a governing body
that they would call the Commission.
It would arbitrate disputes and settle differences without resorting to
violence. As Luciano said in meetings he held with other Mafia leaders “I told
‘em we was in a business that hadda keep moving without explosions every ten
minutes; knocking guys off just because they came from a different part of
Sicily, that kind of crap, was given’ us a bad name and we couldn’t operate
until it stopped. Masseria and Maranzano had been our real enemies, was the way
I put it, not the Law; we could handle the Law, we was doin’ it everywhere.
But how can you handle crazy people?”
The Pax Luciano was in place and would last for the next sixty years. The
various groups that made up the monochromatic landscape of Cosa Nostra in
America would co-exist in relative harmony, while robbing blind the society they
fed off.
