By Thom L. Jones for Gangsters Inc.
Between November 1928 and May 1932, gangsters were dying in San Francisco with degrees of remarkable separation. It was whack-a-mole with a difference; the difference being the whacked were hoods who not only knew each other, but were killing each other in sequential deliberation. Or something like that. Almost a hundred years after the event, it’s tricky pinning down the who, the why and the what.
Felice Chilanti, the noted reporter for L’Ora, the famous Palermo daily newspaper, that fought the mob in Sicily until the mob won, once claimed, “In the boundless seas of Mafia organization (or disorganization) we feel lost in the vastness of the topic.”
He forgot to mention just how irrational and unpredictable it could also be.
In the City by the Bay, hoodlums (a word coined in San Francisco, according to author Herbert Asbury,) fought for control of their criminal objectives, which essentially involved money and power. And during this four-year period, everything seemed to revolve around booze or the legal lack of it because of Prohibition* which was a dismal failure in that it did not stop people from finding and drinking alcohol, but also acted as a Petrie dish to help grow and develop organized crime across the country.
San Francisco, a Saturnalian city, a place with no boundaries in its early years, (perhaps the only one in America that almost drowned in criminal nihilism generated by a mob of imported ex-cons from Australia who almost burned down the place in the early 1850s,) would seem almost the perfect place to foster criminal gangs hell-bent on killing each other, for whatever reason.
Herb Caen, a columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle wrote a daily column that he called a “love letter to San Francisco” and coined the phrase Baghdad by The Bay in 1949 to reflect San Francisco’s exotic multiculturalism, created especially by those that poured in from Italy.
To Caen, San Francisco was su generis, nothing like it, and once claimed if he went to Heaven, he’d look around and say “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.”
The Mafia of Sicily came to America, embedded in the teeming masses of the great Italian diaspora, of the late 1880s to about 1920, about four million of them. By 1920, San Francisco had a population of 510,000. Census figures for that year, show 24,000 were of Italian origin. A few hundred hardened criminals existed among them, and a small portion formed gangs.
It’s believed that the San Francisco Mafia grew out of the multiple killings that ended in 1932, although this is hard to prove and in some ways, harder to figure out, as the Chronicle and its competitors, The San Francisco Call, and The Oakland Tribune, were reporting crimes involving the Mafia, sometimes spelt Maffia, as early as October 18, 1874.
Considering that Filippo Antonio Gualterio, the prefect of Palermo, first documented the word in Sicily in 1865, it suggests that newspapers in California were reporting on this criminal organization a mere nine years later, showing that the Mafia had already established itself in the criminal underworld of North America.
Although most of the early immigrants came to San Francisco for the gold rush, with over 200 established in the city by 1850 from the northern regions of Italy, it’s not inconceivable that as the numbers increased, Sicilians were among those seeking a new life and perhaps the opportunity to use their criminal skills to good intent. It is important to remember that these people identified themselves according to their region rather than the state because Italy as a country had not yet formed.
By 1860, California had the largest number of Italian immigrants in the U.S.
In the early 1920s, there was a man allegedly the boss of the Mafia of Baghdad by The Bay. According to another man from Sicily. A man called Nicola Gentile.
The Forrest Gump of America’s Italian criminal fraternity, he seemed to be everywhere doing everything, although not all at once. Moving back and forth between Sicily and various parts of North America, he claimed he was a good friend of “the old representante of San Francisco, an able man.” **
Whoever this was, it may not have been Francesco Lanza. Born in 1872 in Castelbuono, a small town to the south-east of the City of Palermo, he had emigrated to America, arriving at New York in July, 1904, and moved to Californian from his home on Coney Island, sometime towards the end of 1920. Lanza’s birth name was Proetto, which he changed to Lanza in June 1926.
In 1921, he would have been only sixteen years older than Gentile.
The Mafia, being what it is, confusing on a good day, and bewildering on a bad one, the man Gentile referred to, was almost certainly someone else.*** If we believe him, (Gentile,) the Mafia was a fixture long before 1932, and may well have been operating for almost sixty-years when body number six enters this story, rounding off a series of murders that began with the killing of a man in the winter of 1928. whose name sounds like an ice-cream flavour from Vermont-Jerry Ferri.
According to The San Francisco Call, dated April 11, 1905, “The Mafia exists in San Francisco. Indisputable evidence of this is in the hands of the police.”
Six years earlier, Filippo Ferttitta stabbed Joseph Sierro to death outside a house near the city waterfront on February 15, 1899. It was alleged that both men were members of the Mafia. Multiple examples like this seem to confirm that something was going on in Baghdad by The Bay involving Italians and an organized criminal activity which had existed long before the beginning of the 20th Century.
The multivariable nature of things in a chain of events involving people can generate different outcomes.
The first to go down in a murderous contagion effect beginning in 1928, Ferri, who real name is Genero Fieve, aka “Handsome Jerry,” arrives in the city around 1927, inbound from Chicago. He’s referred to as a “crime lord” in many accounts that cover the multiple killings, triggered by a bootlegging war between warring factions. He’s also a bit of a ladies man, and is known the “Don Juan” of North Beach. But was this a Mafia conflict or simple gangster-land killings? As William Shakespeare claimed in Hamlet, “Aye, there’s the rub.”
Most of the dead are from Calabria or Naples, which perhaps points towards a unique set of triggers. Were the killings provoked by greed, a power-grab, maybe even cherchez la femme?
Maybe it was an endless cycle of vendetta, a weapon used so often in the strange, exotic, and alien world of the Italian-American underworld.
Ferri was living with a woman called Carrie Ellsworth, an actress who called herself Naanna Wortova, although on the night of his murder, she had left to stay with her mother in Point Richmond, Contra Costa County. Sometime between 2am and 3am on 29 November, 1928, a gunman broke into Ferri’s apartment on Lombard Street, chased him into the bathroom, and killed him with multiple shots from a pistol. The weapon was later found a few hundred feet away in an alley between Lombard and Greenwich Streets.
The police first suspected a gunsel called Joseph Biagini as the killer, a man who had crossed swords with the dead man, always coming off second best and on one occasion, making a pass at Carrie. He ran a cafe near the Green Street Theatre, where Ellsworth performed.
Then, eight days after the murder, the SFPD announced they were hunting a man called Alfredo Scariso as the slayer, a former New York gangster who partnered with Ferri in his bootlegging, hijacking, and racketeer activities. Police will claim that the two men had fought over something in Ferri’s apartment the day before the murder took place. Was it triggered by a private grudge-a deal gone wrong-or was it somehow connected to Carrie Ellsworth? Investigators found a bloody handprint in Ferri’s apartment and linked it to Scariso.
On December 19, someone murdered Scariso and another man, identified only by a “P” on his belt buckle, and with markings on his clothing which indicate he might be from San Jose, on a track leading off the Fairoaks-Folson highway, to the east of Sacramento. Investigators believed that the two men had been “taken for a ride.” ****
In Scariso’s pocket, police find a photograph of the ubiquitous Miss Ellsworth, but referred to as Elaine Worth, another name she used, in a newspaper article. If Scariso killed Ferri, who killed him? It was clear that gangland was involved in the murders, but they brought no one to trial.
Frank Manuli, employed by rancher Vito Pileggi, eventually identified as the other victim, picked the two men up at Morgan Hill, near San Jose, on Sunday, December 16.
According to Pileggi’s wife, they were travelling to Sacramento. The police investigation showed the dead were victims of at least four other men, based on footprints and cartridge cases found at the scene of the crime and that the killers were part of the Mafia, seeking revenge for the murder of Ferri. Pileggi may well have been collateral damage. He was carrying a pistol, blackjack and dagger, unusual accoutrements for a man alleged to be a rancher. Scariso was travelling unarmed.
READ: Knowing the Way to San Jose.
The previous year, Pileggi’s brother, Dominick, had been arrested as a suspect in the January murder of James Sosennto in San Jose, that investigators claimed was a Mafia killing.
The police in San Francisco had detained and arrested Ferri and Scariso on November 2 for carrying weapons and burglar tools. Scariso had a lengthy record as a “bad man.” Both were carrying money and watches, evidence that the killings were revenge, not robbery, according to the investigators.
Two names will emerge as possible killers- Frank Boca and Mario Filippi-the first another of Ferri’s lieutenant, and the other, reported running a brothel in Sacramento. Someone shot Filippi dead in the basement of his restaurant on Sacramento Street on December 23, 1928. They found Boca’s body, full of bullets and stabbed, in a car with the engine running at the junction of 39 and Noriega Streets, Ocean Beach, in July of the next year.
Genaro Broccolo, the man believed to be responsible for their exits, and yet another possible lieutenant in Ferri’s group, meets his end in October 1930. Referred to as the overlord of the North Beach Italian colony,” and sometimes as “Broccolo the Magnificent” he ran an extortion racket through a gang that carried out bombings, shootings, beatings and general mayhem on the Italians who seemingly trembled at the mention of his name.
However, his killing seems more related to a personal dispute with Ralph Esposito over donations for Al Capone’s upcoming visit to the city. According to SFPD sergeant Allen McGinn, head of the homicide squad, Broccolo became the kingpin of the gang after the death of Boca.
Pleading self-defence, a jury finds Esposito not guilty in a courtroom, even though he had shot his victim in the back and then followed up with one to the head. He’s due to appear in the grand finale of the shooting war, which is seventeen months down the road.
As a part of the murder investigation, the police bring Naanna Wortova to headquarters for questioning. It’s difficult to imagine what information she has about the frequent gangland killings but seemed to have a complex relationship with men who were invariably walking on the dark side of their highway to hell.
The last man standing, Luigi Malvese, won’t be after an early evening visit to Columbus Avenue.
Italian born, the 27-year-old gangster, known as “The King of North Beach Crooks,” was involved and charged with extortion, bootlegging, hi-jacking and gunrunning, including a plot to smuggle guns into Folsom Prison to help free three prisoners. In the 1920s, he was one more under Ferri’s leadership. His involvement in the demise of those who came before him might have been linked to his promotion to boss.
It’s possible he knew he was living on borrowed time and had cautioned his girlfriend, Ramona Crawford, that he feared for his life and urged her to “walk straight ahead if anything happened to him.”
Around six in the evening of May 18, Malvese pulls up his car, a Buick sedan, and double-parks on Columbus Avenue in North Beach, the city’s Little Italy district. He’s coming to Del Monte Barbershop at number 720, owned by Nino Intermezzo, for a short-back and sides, and to die. Maybe his hairdresser will be Ralph Esposito, on duty that evening, the same man who the previous year had gunned down Genaro Broccolo.
The side walks are packed with throngs coming home from a hard day’s work this Wednesday evening. A street car, filled with people heading home, stops behind the Buick. Ralph Ravelli, a passenger in the Buick, leaves the car and enters the shop. It has been suggested another man was also in the car and went into the shop. He’ll turn up in the story thirteen days later.
Ralph Richards, living on Judah Street across near Ocean Beach, witnessed the killing while on the bus. He informed the police that he saw three men arguing in front of the barbershop. One of them then approached the car, stepped on the running board and started shooting into it.
He unloaded a full clip from an automatic pistol, hitting the car twice and blowing out the side window. However, he only hit his target three times, in the hip, shoulder, and chest, despite being inches away. The shooter then ran through the barbershop, disappearing into a back lane called Via Bufano.
Edwards gave the police a detailed description of the three men. After being named in The Chronicle, along with his address, he fled the city and never appeared to give evidence. The patrons in the packed barbershop saw nothing.
Esposito’s presence at the crime scene lead to speculation that he may have “set up” the hit, although the next news was that the police had captured a key suspect in the murder, a man called Anelle Scoguanello, after a “vigorous” chase across the rooftops of seven building on Hyde Street, starting at his apartment on the corner of California Street just north of Nob Hill, in the early afternoon of May 31. The authorities never developed just who and what he was. Police referred to him “The king of all Mafia Society and a member of two others.”
One of these may have been The Black Hand. More on that later.
Immigration officers were part of the chase and capture, which could show other areas of criminality were involved.
Law enforcement soon announced the hit-man as Genaro Campanello, aka Onorino Caprano, who, naturally, went on the lam. Although the police cast a massive dragnet and almost caught him in a house in San Jose in February 1933, he was gone with the wind. The alleged killer, at 27, was the same age as his victim.
Captain Arthur Layne, head of the Central Police District, and Sergeant McGinn, promoted to captain, started rounding up the usual suspects. The number soon exceeded 1000, including gangsters, crooks, known villains, and undesirables. They also apprehended Louis Dinato, a recent arrival in the city, and the tailor to Alphonse Capone, who was building his own reputation as a crime lord in Chicago. The city’s Hall of Justice soon became clogged and a huge bottleneck that took weeks to clear.
READ: Louis Two-Gun: A Headline Gangster
Despite the police’s failure to bring the killers to justice, they employed a tactic to put pressure on the underworld. This aimed to create economic dislocation, forcing wiser heads to rein in the firebrand element. And it worked. Malvese was the last man down in the multiple murders that may have linked each other across four years.
McGinn had confided in a reporter with The Oakland Tribune that he believed Scariso killed Ferri, Boca bumped off Scariso, and maybe Broccolo murdered Boca.
A columnist for The San Francois Examiner accused Francesco Lanza of being the killer that evening outside the barbershop in North Beach. However, there is no evidence to support this claim. At 60 years of age, he may have been too old to be the gunman.
Following the murder of Malvese, the accepted theory is Lanza assumed control of the Italian underworld in the city, although his tenure was brief, dying in 1937 of aplastic anaemia, that should have been cured by blood transfusions, and, according to author, Christina Ann-Marie DiEdoardo, “made him the only mob boss around during the Booze Wars who died because his blood stayed in his body.”
No one has constructed the role that the men killed in the four-year struggle played in the city’s Mafia. Bill Feather, who hosts Mafia Membership Charts, on-line, does not show any of them as members of the organization, although listing Lanza as the boss from 1910 until 1930s.
One Wiki source claims that there were three gangs operating in the city during this period. One, run by Ferri a second by Scariso and the third under Lanza.
The other Italian criminal enterprise that operated in San Francisco for many years, before and after the turn of the century, was the Black Hand, Mano Nera.
Hundreds of small gangs composed the Black Hand criminal society, possessing common tactics and rituals, and operating in cities across America that attracted a high Italian immigrant population. It was not a single organization, rather a fragmented collection of criminal opportunists, and victims paid the extortionists because they were convinced that American law and order failed to understand the criminal phenomenon and could not, or sometimes, would not help the victims.
For many years, both Black Hand and Mafia were interchangeable in the eyes of the population and the forces of law. It plagued San Francisco and was the trigger in many murders, kidnappings, bombings, and general mayhem within the Italian population.
The Evening Telegraph, a newspaper for the Italian American community in New York City, printed an editorial on March 13, 1909 covering the assassination of Detective Joe Petrosino in Palermo, Sicily, which read in part, “The assassination of Petrosino is an evil day for the Italians of America, and none of us can any longer deny that there is a Black Hand Society in the United States.”
In reality, the police officer was a victim of the Mafia, who collaborated in both New York and Palermo to track down and kill a man who was getting too close to their operations in both cities.
READ: A Killer Revealed: Who Killed Joe Petrosino?
The only thing we know with certainty is that men were killing each other across the streets of San Francisco, and they were all of Italian origin. Maybe, just maybe, the Mafia had a connection to it and they were searching for a new monarch. To replace just who is the question.
The first Mafiosi into Baghdad by The Bay, may have drifted here from New Orleans, where the earliest mention of the organization is recorded as 1868 or 1869, according to one expert. The gang under leader, Rosario Meli, operated until their boss was arrested in 1878, charged with murdering one of their extortion victims, and deported back to Sicily in 1880. He escaped en route and vanished. According to The New York Times, Meli was “an Italian brigand and reputed chief of the dreaded Society La Maffia.”
The San Francisco Examiner shouted out, “He was one of the most desperate cut-throats the police officials were ever called upon to cope with.”
Another Italian gangster, Giuseppe Bona. lead a gang of extortionists, maybe the Mafia, maybe Black Hand, perhaps just hoodlums, in the period 1880 until 1890, and by 1910, names like Alioto, Lazio, Maita, Sabella, La Fata and Pedone were surfacing in police reports and breathless newspaper reports about Mafia, Black Hand and gangsters running amok in the city by the bay.
Over the coming years, these suspects will feature in police investigations and headline news as they kill each other with regular monotony.
Lorenzo Lazio who may have been the boss or underboss of the San Francisco Mafia, until his murder in 1919, was married to Angela Ardizzone, a cousin of Joe Ardizzone, the Mafia chief of Los Angeles.
READ: Those Who Go By Night: Dominic Di Ciolla and the Los Angeles Mafia
Intermarriage between biological families was often the glue that strengthened not just kinship ties but criminal conspiracies, sometimes within finite areas, but often, across the continental United States. Educating generations of future Mafiosi in the culture of omerta (silence at all costs), encouraging familial development into the organization and perpetuating the endless cycle of father to son social networking made sure the Mafia moved, endlessly and effortlessly, with the times.
As Romany gypsies would have said, ban, ban, kaliban-have a new master, get a new man-and in 1932, he’s Francesco Lanza, and that, according to almost every source, is the start of San Francisco’s Mafia family.
Except, of course, for the ones that came before it.
Live in New York, but leave before you get too hard. Live in San Francisco, but leave before you get too soft,”
Mary Schmich.
* Prohibition was a nationwide ban on the sale and import of alcoholic beverages in The United States that lasted from 1920 to 1933.
** In Mafia clans, they sometimes refer to the headman as representante, or capo, or capo di famgila or patri ranni.
*** The English newspaper, The Times, on June 21, 1875, defined the Mafia as “a feeling of sympathy which induces the idle, vicious and discontented to make common cause for their mutual advantage against law, order and morality.”
**** Taken for a ride was a term used in the 1920s and 1930s and according to a headline in The New York Times dated August 18, 1929: Gangland’s Newest Method of Settling Its Feuds By Murder in a Fast Car Has Exact Technique And Is Hard to Stop.
Sources:
Dovizio, Ciro. Felice Chilanti, L’Ora” and the origins of mafia journalism. Intrasformazione.
San Francisco Call. 26 February, 1899.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Act Two. Scene One. 1599-1601.
Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of San Francisco. Arrow Book. London. 2004.
Journal of the History of Ideas. 2019.
http://www.lipizzan.com/Italian-Immigration.html
DiEdoardo, Christina Ann-Marie. Lanza’s Mob: The Mafia and San Francisco. Praegar. 2016.
Oakland Tribune. December 2, 1928.
San Francisco Examiner. December 28, 1928.
Oakland Tribune. December 20, 1928.
Oakland Tribune. December 22, 1928.
The California. May 21, 1932.
Oakland Tribune. October 15, 1930.
James Daily Review. 17 October, 1930.
Springfield Leader and Press. 19 October 1930.
https//www.foundsf.org
GangsterBB.NET.html
http://www.lipizzan.com/Turturici-Cancilla.html
http://mafiamembershipcharts.blogspot.com
The Evening Telegraph. 13 March, 1909.
https://www.sfgate.com June 2, 2002.
Murken, Kevin. Dangerous Strangers. Springer, New York. 2005.
Wikipedia.org/wiki/Famiglia_di_San_Francisco
Kurtz, Michael L Organized Crime in Louisiana History: Myth and Reality. Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol.24 No 4 (Autumn 1983), pp 355-376
The New York Times. September 1, 1880.
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