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2024-03-29T10:51:29Z
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Louis Two-Gun: A Headline Gangster
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/louis-two-gun-a-headline-gangster
2024-03-23T06:27:47.000Z
2024-03-23T06:27:47.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
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<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/12403600475?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>He was a most outlandish man.</p>
<p>Perhaps in the final moments, he had a fleeting glimpse of the horse he murdered, the men he had killed, his glorious days on the dude ranches in Colorado as he played at being a cowboy. The money, the jewels, the raucous lifestyle.</p>
<p>Maybe it was just the gathering darkness, the dull ache of end of life, and then it was all gone.</p>
<p>Born in California, he dies in Chicago, a city filled with a miasma of violence, lingering over the lake and across the avenues and streets, a storm always in wait. He’s there in the boom-town years, when boom literally means the sound of gun-fire and the noise of falling bodies.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403601672,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403601672?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="222" /></a>Alphonse Capone (right) and the gathering of gangsters, a cosmopolitan brocade of Polish and Irish and Italian and Jewish gunmen, all searching for their piece of the Windy City’s blanket of opportunity. For Louis Alterie in the gloaming of a confoundable life, Chi-Town will only bring the wrong comforter, heavy with noise and deadly with rhythm.</p>
<p>Before anything else, he was a headline gangster.</p>
<p>A man with so many nicknames it’s hard to keep up: Jack Verain, Diamond Jack, Two-Gun Louis, Clyde Hayes, State and Madison Alterie, Frank Ray, Lew Alteries, are some of them listed in documents and newspaper reports.</p>
<p>Leland Varaine, sometimes called Lee, maybe always yearned to be a cowboy. He was born in August 1886, (his death certificate claims August 1885 and the 1900 census 1891) to one, Charles W. allegedly of European descent, French, maybe a bit of Spanish, and a distant relative of Napoleon Bonaparte. His mother, Mary Lincoln Brown, of Irish descent, had nine other children with her husband who ranched in Hell Hollow, a valley in Mariposa County in Northern California.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403600864,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403600864?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="220" /></a>Leland attends schooling in Lodi and his early years are mostly a mystery. He’s a rodeo rider then he takes up boxing, having grown into a six-footer at about 200 pounds and adopts the name Louis Alterie (left) as his ring-name, although some sources claim he also boxed as ‘Kid Hayes.’ He’s a man growing into the casual use of violence, which will govern so much of his future actions.</p>
<p>Boxing on the California coast and sometimes in Hawaii, he then moves west to Denver, where he meets and marries a socialite, Mabel ‘Mamie’ Hayes, in 1920. They move back to Los Angeles, where his mother, divorced from Charles, had re-married and settled in Santa Monica.</p>
<p>There’s a lot of mystery about his period of his life as he allegedly joins the Venice police department and rises through the ranks to the position of lieutenant, before leaving it in 1916. It’s something his criminal pals will joke about in the years ahead. A small town south of Santa Monica, once independent, now absorbed by Los Angeles. With incorporation, records vanish, memories fade, leaving uncertainty.</p>
<p>In 1921, he’s heading east to a place becoming so unreflectively violent it was almost ingrained in its local constitution. According to Alva Johnson in <em>The New Yorker Magazine</em>, Chicago is the imperial city of the gang world.</p>
<p>Prohibition had arrived in 1920, a year after a bloody race riot involving black workers which overlapped the Alderman’s War between local politicians in the city’s Little Italy district. The worst was still ahead, but the rewards were incredibly enticing.</p>
<p>In 1926, Al Capone, the gangster of all Chicago gangsters, generated $70 million (about 1.5 billion in today’s money) through brewing, gambling, vice and distilling operations, according to Edward A. Olsen, U.S. District Attorney.</p>
<p>Alterie was thirty-five when he breezed into the winds of Chicago. Heading north into middle age, he was on the older side to be a hoodlum, but the city, to him, was a universe where cruelty and terror were the way people expressed themselves and this was an environment he knew. His time as a boxer had taught him that. Guns and murder seemed as normal as bacon and eggs.</p>
<p>Guilt was never a luxury he had time for in the years ahead.</p>
<p>One legend that clings to Varaine aka Alterie is that he introduced the Tommy Gun into Chicago’s underworld arsenal. Ranchers in the west had traditionally used them to control wolves, a constant hazard to stock breeding in places like Colorado where he had spent some time working and socializing with cowboys before moving east. The. 45 calibre Thompson sub-machine gun would become a lethal equalizer among the gangs fighting each other over the next ten years, generating a new craze in orchestrated murder. It became known to criminals and police as “The Chicago Typewriter.”</p>
<p>Another story about him that lingers like the scent of garlic is the one about murdering a horse.</p>
<p>For someone obsessed by the romance of the old west, killing the animal that epitomizes it more than almost anything, suggests that Louis was indeed “flaky,” a reputation that will haunt him through his years in Chicago’s gangland. His confrontation with the frisky young colt, called “Morvich” may or may not have happened, but it makes good reading.</p>
<p>The way news reports and writers have anthropomorphised the event suggests this is perhaps more fable than substance.</p>
<p>It’s supposed to take place two years after his arrival and then induction into the hierarchy of Chicago’s North Side that leads us into the murky world of Dashiell Hammett type memes- gangsters, crooked cops, speakeasies, bent politicians and perilous thugs.</p>
<p>Louis is first involved with a west-side mob under the leadership of Terry Druggan along with Frankie Lake, and then somehow ends up working with Dion O’Bannion, the leader of a gang on Chicago's North Side. He becomes so close to the boss, his pals refer to him as “Man Friday.”</p>
<p>One of its members is Samuel “Nails” Morton, a Jewish mobster who had served in World War One with distinction, returning to his Chicago neighbourhood a hero.</p>
<p>When he visited Colorado and socialized with Alterie, he was introduced to horses and became somewhat addicted to the animal upon returning to Chicago.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403601466,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403601466?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="132" /></a>On a Sunday in January 1923, Morton and a group are riding their horses in Lincoln Park. “Morvich,” apparently a skittish horse, throws Morton and one of the lashing hooves catches the gangster on the head, killing him instantly. The story then goes that Alterie and a group, including Earl Weiss and George Moran (right), other members of the North Side, had kidnapped the horse from its stables on North Clark Street, lead it to the scene of the crime, and shot it dead.</p>
<p>Or did they?</p>
<p>And maybe it wasn’t the first time a gunman in Slab Town killed a nag.</p>
<p>There’s another story featuring Salvatore “Samoots” Amatuna, a gunsel, perhaps more than that, in the gang lead by the terrible Genna Brothers, who operated west of the city's’ Loop, in Little Italy. Allegedly having having a beef with the Chinaman who did his laundry and scorched one of his silk shirts, when getting nowhere with a man who didn't speak English “Samoots” went outside the shop and in a fit of rage, shot dead the laundryman’s horse tethered to the delivery cart.</p>
<p>True or fiction, or simply a legend of Chicago’s great “Roaring Twenties?” When facts go astray, fantasy blooms. In the splendid garden of make-believe, the seeds of deception always flourish.</p>
<p>Chicago gangs waged constant war against each other and the law. In 1924, noted author Herbert Asbury claimed there were 15 of them scattered across a population of close to 3 million people in America’s second biggest city.</p>
<p>However, a sociologist at The University of Chicago, one Frederic M. Thrasher, claimed, with a detailed map to support his thesis, that between 1923 and 1926, the gangs numbered 1313, comprising over 25000 members. A lot of gangsters.</p>
<p>Louis Alterie (right), as one of them, was, in thirteen years, following his arrival in Chicago, involved in an impressive series of violent confrontations and discord in his life in Illinois and Colorado.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403600493,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403600493?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="285" /></a>A year after he arrives, drunk and obstreperous, after a night of heavy boozing, he gets into a scuffle with Charles Strauss at a nightclub and shoots him in the face. Arrested and taken to Stanton Street police station, he is soon free when Strauss, learning of Alterie’s connections, quickly drops any charges against his attacker. It’s the first of many arrests, but very few convictions, which will hassle him both in Chicago and in Colorado after he moves back and forward to the Denver area.</p>
<p>Six months later, in June 1922, the authorities arrested him, his wife, and Druggan in connection with a $25,000 jewellery robbery at Green Mill Gardens, a restaurant and nightclub at 4806 North Broadway. Subsequently, the law decides not to prosecute them.</p>
<p>In 1924, he is the president of Local 25 of the Chicago office of the Theatre and Amusement Janitor’s Union, a position he will hold on to until his death. It’s the same year he nearly kills a lawyer and his wife in an auto accident in Lincoln Park. He flees the scene but traced by his plate number. Everything goes away. As usual.</p>
<p>In August 1924, Alterie and a group of drunken friends, shoot up a bar on Broadway and Devon and try to kidnap two police officers called to the scene. Scared off by another police officer who is there in plain clothes and who kills one of the gang, the rest disperse. After years of legal disputes and witness amnesia, Louis walks away once again.</p>
<p>He’s involved the same year along with Johnny Torrio, Dion O’Bannion and other gangsters in aF scam at the Siebens Brewery on The Near North Side.* O’Bannion, a part owner, knew from his contacts in the Chicago Police Force that the brewery was soon to be raided. Knowing Torrio had a previous conviction for breaking the Prohibition Law, O’Bannion sells off his shareholding to him before the cops arrive on May 19. Police arrest Torrio and he goes to prison for nine months, paying a $5000 fine in addition. It was this act of treachery that almost certainly will cost O’Bannion his life.</p>
<p>A grand jury in Chicago indicts Alterie for his role in a kidnapping ring. He’s part of a plot that involves a former Cook County state’s attorney to embezzle half a million dollars.</p>
<p>On February 22, 1925, during another drunken display at The Midnight Frolics on Wabash Avenue, detectives arrested him. He seems to have spent a lot of his time, wherever he was, drunk and dangerous. Following bail arrangements, he leaves Chicago and sets up shop at his ranch in Sweetwater, west of Denver. It’s time to going back to being a cowboy.</p>
<p>He gets divorced from Mabel and remarries Ermina, the daughter of Denver underworld king, Mike Rossi. They wed in Philadelphia. In 1927, the same year, during a drunken argument on his ranch, his brother, Bert, blasts him with a shotgun. Louis recovers and refuses to press charges.</p>
<p>On November 7, 1932, in a drunken rage, he shoots, and injures two men, and beats up a third in The Hotel Denver, in Glenwood Springs.. Tried and convicted, Judge Shumate, instead of sending his to prison, exiles him from Colorado. Louis and his wife leave the state on February 1, 1933, presumably, never to return.</p>
<p>Towards the end of 1924, a gangland killing marks a milestone in the underworld conflicts raging in Chicago, the murder of Dion O’Bannion. It will set in motion events that change everything for Louis Alterie.</p>
<p>In retrospect, we can see that the murder played a pivotal role in the gangland history of Chicago during this period. Like almost all mob hits, it will go unsolved and his departure will shepherd leadership changes that will lead, almost inescapably, to a garage on North Clark Street and a mass murder of unbelievable proportion in a city seemingly immune to violence.**</p>
<p>At noon, on November 10, 1924, that is an abstract probability and far away. On this chill, overcast day, coloured like sea-gulls, there will be only one victim, but he will find out that death was a neighborhood with lots of well-known faces.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403601271,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403601271?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="159" /></a>At thirty-two, he was five years past the prime by gangland standards. Some wondered how he had lived that long. Charles Dean O’Bannion (right) had graduated from singing waiter, to petty theft, to hi-jacking and labor slugging in newspaper wars across the city, to the big-time hoodlum with the dawn of Prohibition.</p>
<p>It’s claimed he allegedly staged the city’s first liquor hijacking on December 19, 1921, stealing at gunpoint a truck loaded with Gromes and Ullrich whiskey waiting at a stop sign in The Loop, Chicago’s business district.</p>
<p>In his prime, it’s claimed he was earning one million dollars a year from his bootlegging activities and supplementing this with added revenue by hijacking other gangs’ booze shipments. Like his friend and bodyguard, Alterie, he carried three pistols in specially designed pockets of his clothing.</p>
<p>On this day, four men arrive in a blue Jewett sedan. Leaving the driver in the car, three of them walk into his business, Schofield's Flower shop, at 738 North State Street. They had come for wreaths for a funeral being held for Mike Merlo, who had recently died.</p>
<p>As head of the Unione Siciliana, a fraternal organization that may have been a front for a criminal cartel of extraordinary size and reach, he had, unusually, died a death of natural causes, cancer, two days earlier. Lots of people coming into the city to attend his committal. Lots of them known criminals. O’Bannion made lot’s of money selling flowers to gangsters. Earlier in the year, he had supplied wreaths and arrangements estimated to have cost north of $20,000 for the funeral of Frank Capone, brother of Al, shot dead by the police in April during a municipal election affray. It’s also been suggested that he created a serious side-line, killing gangsters and then looking after the flower department at their funerals.</p>
<p>O’Bannion greets the visitors as friends, and as one shakes his hands, the other two prove otherwise, drawing pistols from their belts they shoot the Irishman in the head and body, and one gunman carries out the traditional coup de grâce with a shot into the brain. Close enough to scorch the skin.</p>
<p>The Cook County coroner noted in the court's margin record:</p>
<p>“Slayers not apprehended. John Scalice, Albert Anselmi and Frank Yale suspected, but never brought to trial.” ***</p>
<p>Reports stated that 10,000 people either watched the O’Bannion cortège or attended his funeral, with all the trimmings: a casket costing $7500, a funeral bill totalling $10,000, and the exact number of tens of thousands spent on floral tributes remains unknown. Allegedly 40,000 had viewed his body, laid out in state at Sharbaro & Co funeral parlor at 708 North Wells Street. Louis Alterie is one of six men who were coffin-bearers. Five Municipal Court judges and at least one alderman attended his wake. There are 24 cortège cars, each stuffed with massively expensive wreaths and flowers. 124 funeral cars, leads literally, blocks of private cars bringing mourners to the church and funeral ceremony.</p>
<p>The killing of O’Bannion features a bunch of characters that seem to be everything, everywhere, all at once. And maybe, just maybe, one of them is Louis Alterie.</p>
<p>He will claim he was not at the shop that morning, but at home, recovering from a hangover. Which, for a man who seemed to spend half his life in an alcoholic haze, sounded like a reasonable excuse. Yet the killers knew he wouldn’t be there. Obviously, they had no concerns about walking into the shop ready to kill, having a plan, not worried about interference. From anybody.</p>
<p>Although Alterie makes threats against the murderers, raging like Lear on his blasted heath, offering to meet them with pistols for a show-down at State and Madison Streets, it’s perhaps smoke and mirrors rather than true intent. Is his outcry sprouting retribution or an act by a conspiratorial player in a complex charade?</p>
<p>On November 17, Alterie and George Moran have a meeting at The Friars Inn, a nightclub on Van Buren Street, and the next day Louis leaves town, by train. But not to Colorado, as some sources claim. His destination is New York. That same evening, Johnny Torrio also heads for New York by train. As they attempted to leave on another train headed for The Big Apple, the police arrested Frank Yale and another New York mobster, Saverio “Sam” Pollaccio.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><strong><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403601076,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403601076?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="271" /></a></strong><em><strong>Photo: Yale and Pollaccio.</strong></em></p>
<p>Pollaccio is the<em> consigliere </em>or counsellor for New York’s big Mafia boss, Giuseppe Masseria, and Yale is a <em>capo </em>or crew boss in the same family, based in Brooklyn. With strong ties to Chicago through Torrio and others, Yale is also a suspect in the murder of James Colosimo, who founded the Capone group as early as 1910 when Al was an eleven-year-old kid street thug.</p>
<p>Masseria and Capone have some sort of alliance; it’s even claimed Masseria promoted Capone into his New York Mafia family, making him a <em>capo</em>, which presumably was an honorary title as Al never operated in New York. As a young man, he had worked for Yale at The Harvard Inn, a speak-easy come nightclub the mobster owned on Coney Island. Mob politics power events and create relationships way beyond the scope of traditional parliamentarians.</p>
<p>The Italian gangs of Chicago come out of Calabria and Naples, not Sicily. Its members linked more by geography than kinship. They expand into multi-ethnic groups, and there are no traditional ceremonies or induction rites. No swearing of Omenta-silence or death. The only commonality between Italian-American gangs in New York and Chicago is that they are criminals.</p>
<p>We don’t know what, if anything, was taking place in New York, and how it features in the murder of O’Bannion. It’s just part of the never-ending mystery of Chicago’s gangland.</p>
<p>Early in 1925, Louis Alterie will leave Chicago, moving back to Colorado. His flaky actions following the murder of O’Bannion were causing concern among the North Side. It’s believed Moran urges “Two-Gun,” taking a break from business was advisable. His departure was in the same month as that of Torrio. Shot and seriously wounded, he retires from the Chicago mob and moves to New York, taking up with another one there, headed by a man called Charles Luciano.</p>
<p>Whether by design or good fortune, he will miss out on all the dramatic years to follow as Capone and The North Side Gang fight each other to the death culminating in that dark moment on North Clark Street.</p>
<p>His years in Colorado are eventful, often centred on his appetite for booze and his unstable temper. Previously known as “Two-Gun Louis” because of his propensity for carrying duel revolvers, (like O’Bannion, he actually mostly hefted three,) his new nickname became “Diamond-Jack” as he allegedly wore $15-$20,000 worth of them on belt-buckle, watch and chain and the many rings he wore. Which always came in useful when he was using his fists.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403601099,RESIZE_584x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403601099?profile=RESIZE_584x" width="406" /></a>He wore $100 Stetsons that were so big they imaged miniature dirigibles, drove a cream colored Cadillac sporting Longhorn Cattle horns on the hood, and flashed a roll of cash that looked like a beached whale.</p>
<p>Alterie sells his first ranch at Jarre Canyon, Moonridge, and buys the second, in April, 1926, at Sweetwater, near Glenwood Springs, two hundred miles west of Denver. In 1930 he’s arrested for shooting at men fishing on Sweetwater Lake, and is a suspect in several kidnapping cases in Colorado and Illinois, including the famous Lindbergh baby case which happens in New Jersey, far from his normal stomping grounds. Getting drunk in night clubs, shooting at people, breaking the law. It’s what he does.</p>
<p>A man for all seasons, except his behaviour is, if ever, appropriate, for any occasion.</p>
<p>He travels back and forth between Colorado and Chicago, although he keeps clear of The Northside. His main source of income seems to be the union he presides over, and it’s suggested he was showing too much interest in another, The Moving Picture Operators Union, which is controlled by Capone’s mob, although by the end of 1934, Al was spending his days in Alcatraz Prison, San Francisco after having been sentenced in 1931 to eleven years for tax evasion. He will die in 1947 at his home in Florida.</p>
<p>Police raid Alterie’s office on Wabash Avenue in October 1933 and arrest him, charging him with fraudulent labor malpractice, basically taking money off people looking for jobs, promising them, and never delivering.</p>
<p>The new boss of the South Side was Francesco Nitto aka Frank Nitti, cousin to Al, and the man who controlled the money flow when Capone ruled the roost. His early nickname, “The Enforcer,” earned him a place in the early days as a bodyguard to the boss.</p>
<p>Alterie, in his longing to expand his business empire, is tempting fate. And fate gets impatient.</p>
<p>We all know our birthday, but few of us know our death day. It’s always there, waiting. If life is the tenant of the room, death is the ruffian on the stair.****</p>
<p>On July 18, 1935, Alterie and his wife are living in a suite on the 6th floor of Eastwood Towers, an apartment building on the avenue of the same name in Uptown Chicago, on the North Side, having moved there on April 1.</p>
<p>On July 9, his killers are already setting up shop across the street at a boarding house directly opposite the front entrance of The Towers. They move there, renting a room by a man called “Sullivan”, on the first floor and start a stake-out. They are, in fact, following a procedure which became known as “The Rented Ambush,” and which may have been created ironically, or at least perfected by Alterie and Hymie West, another North Side gangster.*****</p>
<p>A stake-out crew would go through local newspapers and boarding houses and buildings looking to rent rooms in a location near the target’s home or place they frequent. Once the rooms were booked, gunmen would move in and essentially turn it into a sniper's nest. The assassins would wait patiently, possibly working in teams until they could get the perfect shot of their target, giving no warning and leaving enough time to escape before the police were arriving.</p>
<p>Some days earlier, it’s alleged Ermina received a telephone call, and a voice said, “The Angel of Death will call on you unless you get out. The Syndicate wants the union.” Whether this was a tip-off, some kind of veiled threat, or what, has never been established. It begs the question why Capone’s mob would show consideration to a man who almost certainly killed many of its members.</p>
<p>At about 8.30 am on a sunny Thursday morning, Alterie and his wife come down to the entrance of the building. Someone brought his car from the apartment building garage and parked it outside. As Ermina walks towards it, she would drive him to the union office, down town, and Louis leaves the entrance stepping to the car, gunshots boom across the street from the building opposite.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403812486,RESIZE_584x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="522" alt="12403812486?profile=RESIZE_584x" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Place of the ambush.</strong></em></p>
<p>According to witnesses, Alterie spins around, flapping his arms crazily around his head as though swatting at bees, and collapses on the street. Rushed to Lakeview Hospital, he dies on the operating table at 9.45 am without regaining consciousness, although some news reports claim his last words to his wife, as she held him in her arms, were, “Honey, I guess I’m through.” His fatal wounds were nine shotgun pellets to the head, along with six to his left shoulder.</p>
<p>When the hospital nurses empty his pockets, he’s carrying $23 and change. And no guns.</p>
<p>His killers leave their nest, escaping through their apartment building into the back alley and a getaway car. They leave behind a shotgun and an unfired. 351 Winchester rifle on the bed and the usual mystery, who were they?</p>
<p>We will never know.</p>
<p><em><strong><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403601865,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403601865?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="625" /></a></strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><em><strong>Photo: Murder scene today and the room killer’s used across street.</strong></em></p>
<p>Five days later, his body shipped west, family and friends gather for Alterie’s funeral service and burial at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Unlike some of the ostentatious ones in Chicago’s gangland, his is low key, only 39 attend of whom 16 are women. His eighty-six-year-old father is there, but not his mother, who apparently is too distressed by his sudden death. They bury him in an unmarked plot as Leland Deveraigne, another name in death, to add to the litany that accompanied him in life, leaving the usual mystery of who and why.</p>
<p>According to newspaper headlines in Chicago, a fight over control of the two unions is claimed to have triggered his murder. The one he commanded and the other he was allegedly lustring after. “They are rich properties for men who can handle them” claimed The Chicago Tribune in its edition on July 19, 1935. Although no one knew for certain what lay behind his killing, senior detectives in the police and state attorney’s office all claimed Alterie was “long overdue for the tragedy.”</p>
<p>Some believe his murder was in revenge for his testimony in 1931 in the IRD against Ralph Capone, brother of Al, although that had taken place years before. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, although this length of time suggests atrophia rather than retribution.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12403602652,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12403602652?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="273" /></a>There was a third, if somewhat tenuous, option:</p>
<p>Someone killed Alterie because he had become a government witness after trying to muscle in on the Denver rackets. Involving a man called Harry Schechtel, a broker under indictment for bond fraud along with 23 other suspects, who it’s alleged receives a telephone call the night before the shooting on Eastwood Avenue, and warned the same fate would befall him unless he could get the investigation squashed. There’s big money involved over $500,000, and the rumour floating that “Two-Gun” had squealed to the Feds to help him get rid of some of his competitors.</p>
<p>A trifecta of options, although a gambling man would lay odds on Frank Nitti and his thugs as prime suspects in the murder of Louis Alterie.</p>
<p>I leave it to Clement Quirk Lane, reporter and editor of Chicago newspapers, to have the last words:</p>
<p><em>“This is the story of ‘Two-Gun Louis’ Alterie (left), one-time pugilist, one-time policeman, one-time robber, one-time lieutenant of Dean O’Bannion. Erstwhile rancher and union business agent, and today the subject of a coroner's inquest as to who shot him and why not sooner.”</em></p>
<p> Clem Lane. Chicago Daily News. 1935.</p>
<p>* John Torrio, born near Naples, came with his mother to America at the age of two. Following a life of crime in New York, he moved to Chicago to work with his uncle, Giacomo Colosimo (some sources claim they were not related and met through a common interest in boxing,) who it’s been alleged he had murdered in 1920, taking over control of the rackets. Through his friend Frankie Yale in New York, he meets Capone who moves to Chicago and joins him, and the rest is history.</p>
<p>** The Valentine Day Massacre refers to the mass murder in a garage on North Clark Street on February 14, 1929. Seven members or associates of the North Side gang are lined up against a wall around 10.30 am and shot dead by four men, two dressed as police officers. Their obvious target, boss George Moran, arriving late for a meeting, due apparently to a severe cold, spots the fake police car outside the garage and beats a quick retreat. The garage was Moran’s headquarters, also used as a depot for storing and then distributing illegal alcohol.</p>
<p>*** Scalice and Anselmi were killers in the Capone organization who, in due course, will go the way of all gangsters who lead lives of quiet desperation. Their dead, mutilated bodies, turn up in a field on the outskirts of Chicago in May 1929.</p>
<p>**** With acknowledgment to the poem Madam’s Life a piece in Bloom by W. E. Hanley.</p>
<p>*****O’Bannion was assassinated on November 10, 1924. Hymie Weiss replaced him and was murdered on October 11, 1926. Vincent Drucci succeeded Weiss and was killed by police on April 4, 1927. George Moran assumed leadership of the gang, but after the 1929 massacre, he drifted away from Chicago and ended up dying of lung cancer in prison in 1957.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>Sources:</strong></span></p>
<p>booktryst.com</p>
<p>Asbury, Herbert. <em>The Gangs of Chicago</em>. Hippo Books, Hammond, IN, U.S.A. 2002.</p>
<p>Thrasher, Frederick Milton. <em>The Gang</em>. The University of Chicago. Chicago, 1936.</p>
<p>Schoenberg, Robert J. <em>Mr Capone</em>. William Morrow & Co. New York, 1993.</p>
<p><a href="https://homocide.northwestern.edu">https://homocide.northwestern.edu>ICS.20</a></p>
<p>Keefe, Rose. <em>Guns and Roses. </em>Turner Publishing Co. 2003.</p>
<p><em>Hopewell Herald</em>. 24 August, 1932.</p>
<p><em>Urbana Daily Courier.</em> 18 July 1935.</p>
<p><em>Globe Gazette, Iowa</em>. 18 July, 1935.</p>
<p><em>North America Review.</em> 228. No. 3 (1929).</p>
<p>Los Angels Times. 24 July, 1935.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.uptownupdate.com/2009/02/more-notorious-uptown.htm">https://www.uptownupdate.com/2009/02/more-notorious-uptown.htm</a></p>
<p><em>Chicago Tribune.</em> 10 February, 1929.</p>
<p><em>San Bernardino Count</em>y. Sun. July 24, 1935.</p>
<p><a href="https://allthatsinteresting.com/frank-nitti">https://allthatsinteresting.com/frank-nitti</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.foundagrave.com/grave/louis-alterie/">https://www.foundagrave.com/grave/louis-alterie/</a></p>
<p><em>Chicago Tribune</em>. 13 May, 1935.</p>
<p><em>Chicago Tribune.</em> 12 June, 1935.</p>
<p><em>Chicago Tribune</em>. 19 July, 1935.</p>
<p>Chicago Tribune. 29 November, 1936.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.myalcaponemuseum.com/id204.htm">https://www.myalcaponemuseum.com/id204.htm</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/theirishmob/posts/6281157894307">https://www.facebook.com/theirishmob/posts/6281157894307</a></p>
<p><em>The Daily Sentinel.</em> March 5, 2024.</p>
<p><em>Chicago Jewish History.</em> Volume 13, No 1. October 1989.</p>
<p><a href="https://jonshistory.com/the-chicago-outfit-north-side-gang-war/">https://jonshistory.com/the-chicago-outfit-north-side-gang-war/</a></p>
<p>Andrews, Harold. <em>X-Marks The Spot</em>. Michael Dunkley (January 1, 1930).</p>
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Vanni Sacco: The Mafia and the Politics of Power
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/vanni-sacco-the-mafia-and-the-politics-of-power
2024-03-03T07:37:30.000Z
2024-03-03T07:37:30.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/12393115694?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for Gangsters Inc.</p>
<p>Camporeale is a mediocre town in a landscape filled with the emptiness of broken dreams. It lies twenty-two miles to the south and west of the city of Palermo.</p>
<p>On the island of Sicily, a place of endless despair on the edge of Italy, that makes you angry, in silence but never in peace, it’s a way-station en route to destination nowhere.</p>
<p>Tomasi di Lampedusa, perhaps Sicily’s most famous author, described a setting that typifies the scene:</p>
<p>“Boundless countryside of feudal Sicily: desolate, without a breath of air, oppressed by the leaden sun.”</p>
<p>In the 1950s, about 8000 people lived in Camporeale, their daily existence controlled and governed by poverty and a devil’s triangle of church, state and the Mafia.</p>
<p>Less than one percent of the population, this criminal cancer were the worst of the worst and terrorized the town and surrounding countryside as they had for generations.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12393115090,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12393115090?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="134" /></a>Giovanni Sacco (right) better known as Don Vanni, led the clan, Although an elderly man in his eighties, he is dangerous, menacing and above all, terrifying. A true <em>pezzo da Novanta</em>, a mighty boss. Always around, showing himself as the lord and master he is. Presence is power for a Mafia leader.</p>
<p>The adjective-terrify-means causing great fear or dread, according to Oxford Languages, the world’s leading dictionary publisher. Almost every reference, calls Sacco terrifying, and yet, compared to other Mafia leaders before and after him, how bad was he?</p>
<p>This man who is described as “being dry as an anchovy, with his black Coppola (cap) and dark clothing to match his feelings, taciturn, and sordid as a grudge.”</p>
<p>How did he compare to Michele Navarra, the medical doctor, Mafioso, and boss, who killed or had killed countless people and controlled almost everything that touched the lives of those who lived in the town of Corleone?</p>
<p>Calogero Vizzini, one of the most influential and legendary Mafia bosses of Sicily after World War II until his death in Villalba, Caltanissetta, in 1954.</p>
<p>His successor, Giuseppe Genco Russo.</p>
<p>The mysterious Ernesto Marasà of Boccadifalco.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/when-the-music-changed-destroying-the-sicilian-mafia-again" target="_blank">When The Music Changed.</a><br /> </strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Salvatore Riina, Bernardo Provenzano and Leoluca Bagarella, three of the worst ever killer kings to emerge from the slums of Corleone. The mad dogs that controlled some of the most fearsome families in the city of Palermo: Men like Michele Cavataio and Filippo Marchese, and the brothers, Giuseppe and Filippo Graviano.</p>
<p>Nitto Santapaolo, the ferocious boss of Catania province.</p>
<p>Giovanni Brusca, of San Giuseppe Jato, known as” The Christian Killer”, who murdered so many, he lost count of the bodies left in his wake.</p>
<p>And of course, Vito Cascioferro, who did not become the Sun King of the Mafia without creating death and destruction as he carved his own path into criminal history.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-sun-king-of-the-mafia" target="_blank">The Sun King of The Mafia.</a><br /> </strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Vanni Sacco goes down in the history books because of his alleged involvement in the killing of two trade unionists, one in 1948 and the other, nine years later. Whatever other evils he perpetuated, these two murders are his trademark, forever protecting his intellectual property, defining his place in Mafia biographies.</p>
<p>The Mafia boss builds his power on a system of relationships with business leaders, administrators, entrepreneurs, important institutional figures, and above all, politicians. A Mafia boss could not chair public tenders or influence civil institutions. They needed others to help them lever the wealth they sought. One way to this end was the control or direction of politicians.</p>
<p>Letizia Battaglia, who spent almost her whole working life photographing and recording the images of the Mafia, said:</p>
<p>“The Mafia are prisoners of rules, prisoners of false myths, of pagan gods that are money, naturally, but also certain rules within society. And politics has legitimized these principles, making them their own. Before, the Mafia supported the politicians to manage the contracts, to have protection. Then the Mafiosi didn't trust them any more, and they became politicians themselves.”</p>
<p>Salvatore Riina, perhaps the most powerful Mafia figure in the last forty years, did this, almost as an art.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/a-kiss-is-just-a-kiss" target="_blank">A Kiss is Just a Kiss.</a><br /> </strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Sacco, who may have taken control of the Camporeale mafia family following the purge by Cesare Mori* knew a thing or two about politics, both national and at mob level.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12393115655,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12393115655?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="172" /></a>Bernardo Mattarella (right) had an excellent relationship with the Mafia.</p>
<p>Problem was, he was the undersecretary to the Minister of Transport in the Christian Democrat Party which had ruled Italy since 1946. Born in Castellammare del Golfo in the Province of Trapani, he became an elected deputy in the party for this western area of Palermo.</p>
<p>A lawyer by profession, he was, according to government informant Francesco Di Carlo, the ex boss of Altofonto, not only close to <em>gli amici,</em> as the Mafia referred to itself, but one of them, made into the family of Castellammare del Golfo. His wife Maria Buccellato came from a family imbedded into the mob, for centuries in the province of Trapani.</p>
<p>Di Carlo had visited them at their home on Via Segesta off Piazza Virgilio in Palermo City in the early 1960s, and membered it well. The Anti-Mafia Commission considered Di Carlo one of the more reliable <em>pentito,</em> a repentant offering intelligence on the Sicilian underworld in return for perhaps a lighter sentence, or better conditions, while serving a prison term.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/five-minutes-to-midnight-the-sicilian-and-new-york-mafias-the-cat" target="_blank">Five Minutes to Midnight.</a></strong></li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12393115098,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12393115098?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="166" /></a>In the years following the end of the war, there was chaos of the highest order across the north and west of Sicily. A lot of it because of Salvatore Giuliano (right).** One problem involved transportation.</p>
<p>In August 1947, a group of men gathered at the Campo Cafe on Piazza 4 Novembre in Alcamo, 20 kilometers to the north-west of Camporeale.</p>
<p>Mattarella, the politician and a bunch of Mafia bosses including, Peppino Cottone, the local capo, although now retired and living in Palermo City, his right hand-man, Vincenzo Rimi, Vanni Sacco, Domenico Albano the boss of Borgetto, and a bunch of other mob chiefs from the region, that included Plaja and Magaddino and Buccellato, Muna, Vitale, Mancini, Bonventre, the Gallo brothers and Stefano Leale.</p>
<p>All of them dangerous criminals with long-playing records, who would lie like Persian carpets without blinking an eye. The one who wasn’t there was Santo Fleres, boss of Partinico.</p>
<p>They were there to sort out the trouble involving Giuliano, who came under the protection of Fleres.</p>
<p>They were a powerful, ambitious group. Rimi, along with Salvatore Zizzo, boss of Salemi, would become the undisputed rulers of the Mafia in Trapani province.</p>
<p>However, Vanni Sacco was primus inter paras with no doubt. The first among equals.</p>
<p>Segesta Transport Company of Alcamo ran a bus service between the town and Partinico en route to Palermo. The bandit and his gang were preventing its journeys and making passengers return without completing their destination. It was creating not only an inconvenience for the public, but costing the bus company dearly. They called in Mattarella, who naturally sought the help of his contacts within the Mafia to resolve the problem.</p>
<p>The morning following the meeting, a bus left the town, its passengers, the politician and a threatening of Mafia chiefs. It travelled without a problem to its destination and from that day on the road was open forever. Here was a classic example of Mafia and politics working together to solve an issue and creating beneficial results.</p>
<p>A year later, another problem was to be solved, but this one came loaded with terror and grief.</p>
<p>It was April Fools’ Day, but it was no joke.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12393115484,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12393115484?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="139" /></a>On the first day of the fourth month of 1948, Calogero Cangelosi (left) would breathe his last breath, late at night on a dark and miserable street. He was 41 years old when he died. A Sicilian trade unionist and politician, Secretary of the Chamber of Labor and the local Socialist Party, he dedicated his life to justice, working on behalf of peasants reduced to poverty and exploited by the large estates, most often owned by absent landowners.</p>
<p>Don Serafino Sciortino, a <em>lorsignori</em>, master of his fiefdom, owned one of the largest and the man he called on for help was Vanni Sacco. He was the <em>gabello</em> (manager) of the Parrino fiefdom (estate) of 3200 hectares on the banks of the Belice River, then in Trapani until the borders changed and it became part of Palermo Province in January, 1956. Because of the influential political trading by Sacco and his contacts in the big city.</p>
<p>Sacco, who was the most prominent Mafia leader in the interior of western Sicily, generated his early wealth from his control and manipulation of the estate’s taxes.</p>
<p>Cangelosi was a share-cropper on Sciortino’s estate and caused problems with his demand that the local landowner meet his legal obligations in terms of wealth sharing.</p>
<p>Fausto Gullo, the Italian minister of agriculture, had issued a series of decrees from July 1944 that attempted to shift the balance of class forces in the Southern countryside. The decrees issued by Gullo encouraged peasants to form co-operatives and take over poorly cultivated land. Agrarian contracts were to be reformed so that the peasants’ share of the crop would be at least 50%. The CGIL–Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro—the second largest trade union in Europe—was pushing for new laws that would regulate and improve the terms of labor hiring.</p>
<p>Sciortino having first tried to bribe Cangelosi with a free one-way trip to America for him and his family, which failed, then having him kidnapped on March 28 by Sacco and his men, a plan that went wrong when the unionist was rescued by a pack of farm laborers armed with shotguns, the outcome was almost inevitable.</p>
<p>There had been a labor meeting that day, and afterwards, everyone gathered in the main square. After ten in the evening, Cangelosi decided to return to his home on Via Perosi, about 500 meters north of the square, all uphill. Because of his conflict with Sacco, four friends, member of his union, decide to accompany him on his journey and the group left the office of The Chamber of Labor which was on the square. Waiting at the house was his wife, Francesca Serafino, and their four children. For the rest of her life, she will keep the tie her husband was wearing this night, infused with bullet holes, and stained, forever, with his blood.</p>
<p>Their primary route was up Via Minghetti, and as they reached its junctions with Perosi, a group of killers waiting in the shadows ambushed the men. Two of the union men, Vito Di Salvo and 18-year-old Vincenzo Liotta, are injured. Two somehow survive the hail of bullets raining down on them, but Cangelosi receives multiple hits in the head and body, resulting in instant death.</p>
<p>Investigators have never established how the killers knew when and where Cangelosi would be. Forty-four years before mobile phones became available, the only logical solution is that someone was tracking his movements that night, and was quick to get between the target and the shooters.</p>
<p>They never bring anyone to trial. The town knows who the killers are, but finding evidence and proving guilt is, as almost always the case in Mafia murders, an elusive dream.</p>
<p>A month before the murder of Calogero Cangelosi, another young, determined union organizer met his death at the hands of Mafia killers in the small town of Corleone. Placido Rizzotto is perhaps the most famous martyr in the troubled history of Sicilian labor relations that were a constant source of irritation and frustration for Mafia clans across the island. His kidnapping and then murder by Luciano Leggio, a <em>piciotti,</em> or young thug making his bones in the local Mafia clan, was a message from the evil side of town that there was only one master in Corleone, and he was Dr. Navarra.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of" target="_blank">La Primula Rossa.</a><br /> </strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Standing in the flow of history without being flattened by it, Vanni Sacco networked his Mafia connections across Sicily, developing friendships not only with political allies but with other mob bosses. He was close to Michele Navarra. They were, in fact, related. Both men had a common interest in preventing the construction of the proposed Belice River dam.</p>
<p>Controlling the distribution of water was one of the rural Mafia’s principal source of revenue and they guarded it fiercely. Leggio’s determination to profit through control of construction and transportation requirements partly triggered the war in Corleone between warring factions of Navarra’s clan because of the strong desire of Navarra to prevent the development of the project. They completed the dam's construction in 1968, ten years after the good doctor died in a hailstorm of lead on a lonely road in the middle of nowhere. The killing of Navarra also, according to some sources, ended the pactum sceleris between the State and the Mafia.***</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-two-doctors-of-corleone" target="_blank">The Two Doctors of Corleone.</a><br /> </strong></li>
</ul>
<p>Sacco was also tight with Calogero Vizzini and Giuseppe Genco Russo, two of the most powerful Mafiosi in the pre and post-war years. A Parliamentary investigation in 1971 called Russo, “a bloody criminal capable of any atrocity.”</p>
<p>Although the two men headed clans in small towns, Villalba and Mussomeli, in the province of Caltanissetta, their power and strength came from the way they controlled their political connections at provincial, state and national level.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12393115491,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12393115491?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="144" /></a>In 1957, Vanni Sacco knew just how important this was, so he killed another socialist trade unionist, Pasquale Almerico, whose story is linked to Maria Saladino (left), a young woman from Camporeale. Despite her father being a part of the Mafia, Maria Saladino fights against them all her adult life. Her father would walk away from the criminal underworld at thirty, and although legend tells us, no one does that and lives, he would die, peacefully, at the age of ninety-seven.</p>
<p>Maria, born in 1920, would claim that she grew up in a town where the streets were stained red with blood and someone committed a murder almost every day. She would become a teacher at the local school, where Almerico also taught children who were often so hungry they cried. She became a Mother Teresa of the town, although not so much healing bodies as souls. The poor had to stay that way and were always in debt to the Mafia. Control of territory and everyone in it is a basic Mafia doctrine.</p>
<p>Almerico was 43 years old when he died. Born and raised in the town, he became a schoolteacher, elected mayor of the town for three years and then, secretary in 1950, of the local branch of the Christian Democratic Party. (CD.) It was this position that lead to his death at the hands of a man who was his cousin.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12393155654,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12393155654?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="137" /></a>Sometime early in 1955, Vanni Sacco switched his allegiance from the Liberal Party to the Christian Democrats. He approached Almerico (right), requesting membership, claiming he could bring with him 300 members, all almost certainly either in, or associated with Mafia clans across Palermo and Trapani provinces. He was denied membership and from that point on, Almerico was the traditional dead man walking. There are threats, accusations, political machinations at state level as the CD Party in Sicily, under provincial secretary, Giovanni Gioia, struggles to justify using Mafia votes to maintain its power in Rome. In his last months, he likely felt isolated and must have become aware of impending danger.</p>
<p>Sacco ordered no one should speak to Almerico, not even a look or a nod of the head. The Mafiosi spread lies and slander. They said: “Almerico is against honorable people because he is mad; he is crazy because he carries in his blood, from birth, something that makes you crazy; they heard him swear, they saw him get angry and hit his head against the wall of the town hall.”</p>
<p>It’s an orchestrated campaign to discredit an honourable man. The thing the Mafia does with their eyes shut. The enemy at the gate was waiting for Almerico. It would not be long.</p>
<p>On March 2, someone ambushed and shot his uncle in Camporeale. Pasquale confides to a friend, Brigadier Berlingieri of the local carabinieri unit, the instigators and perpetrators are Vanni Sacco, his son, and also Benedetto and Calogero Misuraca, a family long embedded in Sacco’s mob. In fact, two brothers, Gaspare and Vincenzo Scardino, are arrested and held on bail awaiting charges for this attempted murder.</p>
<p>Almerico attended the Circolo Italiano social club on the evening of March 25. After watching television coverage of the signing of the Treaty of The European Common Market, he and his brother Liborio are walking home towards Via Minghetti (the same street that had featured in the killing of Calogero Cangelosi nine years before,) when someone guns them down in the town square. Conflicting reports suggest multiple killers and the number of bullets fired into Almerico.</p>
<p>Accounts range from 2 killers, on foot, to five on horseback. The number of machine-gun bullets hitting Almerico is 52, 104, 111, 114 or 140. The one thing that is constant is that one killer, then shot the bullet-riddled body seven times, with a pistol. Somehow, he clings to life for minutes, at least.</p>
<p>When the medical examiner conducted an autopsy on his body the next day in the post-mortem room at the town cemetery, bullets fell out of the body like beads off a broken rosary.</p>
<p>Maria Saladino remembers Almerico: “Pasquale and I were colleagues. I also taught like him, and I loved him very much. I respected him, we got along well, we often worked together. The most extraordinary thing about him was the incredible love he had for children and schoolchildren. In addition to being mayor of Camporeale, he was also president of the ECA, a welfare body, and finally he personally took care of the school meals."</p>
<p>“That evening I met him on the street, kind as always, but almost overcome by a strange anxiety. I knew what was happening to him and I didn't dare ask him any questions. I went to a friend's house.</p>
<p>At seven in the evening, we heard an endless series of shots. At that time, as there was no telephone, shooting in the air was used to call for help as quickly as possible in cases of danger, let's say a fire or the collapse of a house, or any other type of disaster. For this reason we immediately thought of a fire. Then suddenly the light went out throughout the town and we remained in the typical helplessness of the sudden darkness for a few minutes.</p>
<p>Suddenly someone began to knock violently on the door and a voice shouted that they had killed Professor Almerico. I rushed onto the street screaming in terror...</p>
<p>I ran towards the corner of the square. They had already loaded Pasqualino into a car because they wanted to take him to the hospital in Palermo. No one yet understood that that poor body had been wounded by hundreds of bullets, that his life was irreparably destroyed by hundreds of wounds. I managed to stick my head in the window: he was very pale and had blood all over him. Pasqualino, I told him, pray with me: My Jesus, mercy, my Jesus, mercy. I heard him repeat those words. Then he said nothing more. I grabbed his hand, he probably died at that moment. They took him away."</p>
<p>The attack seriously wounded Liborio Almerico. One of many stray bullets kill Nino Pollaci, a tractor driver walking by. A 17-year-old boy, a young girl of 4 and a 58-year-old man are injured in the hail of lead that fills the street like frenzied bees.</p>
<p>The law decided Vanni Sacco had orchestrated the killing of Pasquale Almerico. The law arrested him and held him in Ucciardone Prison in Palermo. Eventually, authorities sent him into exile for five years to Veneto in Northern Italy. His health deteriorated and his doctors had him transferred to Filiciuzza Hospital, in Palermo, often referred to as “The Grande Hotel” by the mobsters who wrangle their way in.</p>
<p>Along with Sacco, authorities took into custody three of his men—Calogero Benedetto, Giovanni Misuraca, and Vincenzo Scardina—and held them on suspicion.</p>
<p>On 21 July 1958, the Court of Appeals in Palermo acquitted Vanni Sacco of all charges because of insufficient evidence. He died in his own bed, at 2 am, in his home in Palermo on April 4, 1960.</p>
<p><em>Lúnita</em>, a major Italian newspaper, reports, “Vanni Sacco, an old mafia boss, died yesterday in Palermo.”</p>
<p>His family would not be so lucky. The killer king of Corleone, Salvatore Riina, triggered a vendetta that resulted in the murder of two of his sons. He and his Corleonesi will wipe out the leaders of Camporeale’s Mafia and have them replaced by ones they favour.****</p>
<p>Calogero, who had taken over the clan after his father’s death, is the first to go. On July 5, 1983, he and an associate, Vincenzo Amato, visit a building site in the city and disappear. The Mafia call it “white shotgun,” when they make someone vanish. The politics of murder with a corpse present versus murder with nobody to show are as complex as the reasons for the killing.</p>
<p>A year later, almost to the day, it’s the turn of Giovanni, aged 68, the new boss, at least until early on the morning of July 7, as he leaves his home on Via Umberto in Camporeale. He’s greeted by two gunmen who blast him in the head and chest, killing him.</p>
<p>In a state where even the land cried out for justice, it is easy to relate to the words of Bertold Brecht when he said, “Simplicity is very difficult.”</p>
<p>The Mafia, as a criminal entity, was everywhere in Sicily. A simple fact. Why could the government never destroy it? Why does it still exists, decades after these events? Difficult, very difficult. The mafia has across time proven to be polymorphic and entrepreneurial and has sewn itself into and out of different political parties, social classes and economic sectors.</p>
<p>If we look, maybe we see the entire unfolding of history in a story.</p>
<p>Vanni Sacco was one of dozens who spent their lives changing the balance of power in Sicily by terror, Machiavellian cunning and, above all, the manipulation and control of political forces. Like all Mafia chieftains, his strength lay in his ability to manipulate the dynamism that linked statecraft to maintaining social order. As early as 1920, Don Silvestro Gristina, the Mafia boss of Prizzi, was killing union activists like Nicola Along and Giovanni Orcel to maintain the same domination.</p>
<p>Following the murders near the town square in 1957, the Christian Democratic Party will invite Sacco and his acolytes, all 300 of them, to join as members. The city council will rename that same square to commemorate Calogero Cangelosi on April 2, 1998. In the sometimes weird, ironic nature of context displacement that links Mafia events, running south from the square, an artery pumping people and traffic, rather than blood, is a street called Via Sacco.</p>
<p>Sacco, the Mafia boss, understood above all, that a political party or the head of a criminal fraternity cannot live only on ideals, on moral revolutions, on fancy aims, but above all, needs power.</p>
<p>He would get his the easiest way. By killing people.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> <em>Nothing is Mafia if everything becomes Mafia</em>.</p>
<p> Michele Pantalone.</p>
<p>* Cesare Mori was appointed by Benito Mussolini to destabilise the Mafia in Sicily. Between 1924 and 1929, he conducted mass arrests, besieged entire towns, arrested and took hostages while destroying property and livestock in order to track down criminals. His campaign of terror resulted in the arrests of hundreds of innocent people, along with the guilty. In retrospect, using the operation to eliminate many of his own political opponents, the fascist government simply replaced the Mafia by acting as the new enforcers for the Sicilian landowning class.</p>
<p>When fascism collapsed, following the end of World War II, the Mafia quietly re-emerged from the woodwork and carried on, carrying on.</p>
<p>** Salvatore Giuliano, born and raised in Montelepre, was a Sicilian bandit who, after the war, became an important player in Sicily's guerilla independence movement. Sometimes referred to as Sicily’s Robin Hood, he was dead at 28, allegedly shot by the police, in a courtyard of a house in Castelvetrano, a town ruled by another savage Mafia boss, Francesco Messina Denaro. His son, Matteo, would become one of the most famous wanted Mafiosi of the twenty-first century, on the run for over thirty years, until his capture in Palermo and then death by cancer in 2023.</p>
<p>*** pactum sceleris is the agreement between different powers aimed at committing illegal acts.</p>
<p>**** The conflict between Riina and his Corleone Family and Camporeale begins with the murders of Stefano Loria and Ignazio Mule, whose bullet-riddled bodies are discovered in a burnt-out car on February 1, 1981. It concludes with the removal of the Sacco's Mafia control and the promotion of Biagio Montalbano as the new boss.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>Sources:</strong></span></p>
<p>Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe.<em> Il Gattopardo.</em> Feltrinelli. Milano. 1958.</p>
<p>Santino, Umberto. <em>Studying Mafias in Sicily</em>. Il Mulino-Rivisteweb. Doi: 10.2383/35872. 2011.</p>
<p>Mafia e Politica tra fascismo e postfascismo. Guistina Manica. 2010.</p>
<p><em>La Repubblica</em>. Veneto. The Great Mafia Invasion. September 30, 2017. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.wikiwand.com/it/Vanni_Sacco">https://www.wikiwand.com/it/Vanni_Sacco</a>.</p>
<p><em>L’Astrolabio</em>. 10 September, 1967.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.vittimemafia.it/25-marzo-1957-camporeale-pa-uccisi-pasquale-almerico-sindaco-dc-e-antonio-pollari-un-passante/">https://www.vittimemafia.it/25-marzo-1957-camporeale-pa-uccisi-pasquale-almerico-sindaco-dc-e-antonio-pollari-un-passante/</a></p>
<p><em>New York Times</em>. March 19, 1976.</p>
<p>19luglio1992.com.html 4 January, 2018.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.italyflash.it/category/primo-piano/March">https://www.italyflash.it/category/primo-piano/March</a> 6, 2020.</p>
<p>Quattrocentosedicibis.html</p>
<p><a href="https://www.cittanuove-corleone.net">https://www.cittanuove-corleone.net</a> March 26, 2019.</p>
<p><a href="https://reportagesicilia.blogspot.com/search?q=Almerico">https://reportagesicilia.blogspot.com/search?q=Almerico</a></p>
<p><a href="https://iverieroi.blogspot.com/">https://iverieroi.blogspot.com/</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.isiciliani.it/apertura/13">https://www.isiciliani.it/apertura/13</a> May, 2023.</p>
<p><a href="https://iverieroi.blogspot.com/2011/03/onorevole-fanfani-la-informo-che-saro.html">https://iverieroi.blogspot.com/2011/03/onorevole-fanfani-la-informo-che-saro.html</a></p>
<p>Iazzi-Pickering, Robin. <em>Mafia and Outlaw Storie</em>s. Toronto Press. 2008.</p>
<p><em>Lóra</em>. 23 October, 1958.</p>
<p>Pantalone, Michele. <em>The Mafia and Politics. </em>London. Chatto & Windus. 1961.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.instoria.it/home/index.htm">http://www.instoria.it/home/index.htm</a> Before Piersanti. February, 2015.</p>
<p><a href="https://air.unimi.it">https://air.unimi.it</a> › retrieve › phd_unimi_R11821PDF</p>
<p><a href="https://www.wordnews.it/gli-omicidi-di-sindacalisti-e-uomini-politici">https://www.wordnews.it/gli-omicidi-di-sindacalisti-e-uomini-politici</a></p>
<p>Bibiloteca del Senato memoriale preperato dal PCI di Trapani per la commissione antimafia. VI legislatura, P. 783.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.antimafiaduemila.com/19">https://www.antimafiaduemila.com/19</a> July, 1992.</p>
<p>Senato delle Repubblica. l’Astrolabio. September 10, 1967. </p>
<p><em>Lúnita</em>. July 1, 1973.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.ritaatria.it/chi-siamo/A">https://www.ritaatria.it/chi-siamo/A</a> Sicilian Story.</p>
<p>Marino, Giuseppe Carlo. <em>Historia de la mafia: un poder en las sombras</em>. Ediciones. Barcelona.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core">https://www.cambridge.org/core</a>. Hands over the City. 16 June, 1992.</p>
<p> And I Padrini. Newton & Compton. Roma. 2001.</p>
<p>Dolci, Danilo. <em>The Man Who Plays Alone</em>. London, McGibbon & Key. 1968.</p>
<p><em>I Siciliana</em>. January 1984.</p>
<p>Parliamentary Committee 20 Dec, 1962, N1720 of enquiry on the Mafia phenomenon in Sicily.</p>
<p><em>Ulisee</em>. April 1969. Il banditisimo in Italia.</p>
<p>Casarrubea, Giuseppe.<em> Secret History of Italy</em>. Milan. Bompiani. 2007.</p>
<p>Zullino, Pietro. <em>Guida Al Misterie e Piacerie di Palermo</em>. Milano. SUGARcoEdizione. 1973.</p>
<p><a href="https://madonielive.com720185/04/05">https://madonielive.com720185/04/05</a></p>
<p>Monica, Guistina. <em>Mafia e Policia fra Politica fra Fasicismo e Postfascimo 1924-1948.</em> Mandora, Bari-Roma. 2010.</p>
<p><em>La Repubblica.</em> The Last Heir. 7 August, 1984.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/thom-l-jones-mob-corner">Thom L. Jones' Mob Corner</a> or the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview">Sicilian Mafia section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
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</ul>
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The Plugging of Jewish Gangster Plug Shuman
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-plugging-of-jewish-gangster-plug-shuman
2024-02-07T13:16:43.000Z
2024-02-07T13:16:43.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/12374680888?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>Someone once claimed Plug Shuman said, “Shoot ‘em twice in the back of the neck and they won’t wiggle.” The guy who killed him remembered and faithfully followed the dictum. To the bullet.</p>
<p>Albert Shuman was thirty-four when he died and, according to Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century British scientist and philosopher, fulfilled all the criteria for a miserable life lived to the full.</p>
<p>A Jewish gangster, Shuman found crime to be one of the queer ladders of social mobility in the American way of life. For many men in the early part of the 20th century, it was the only way to drag themselves out of an endless cycle of unemployment and lost opportunities in America’s biggest city. Although most sources spell his name with the C, court documents refer to him as Albert Shuman.</p>
<p>New York had plenty of hoodlums who emerged from the endless inflow of immigrants flooding the city: Italian, Irish, Eastern Europeans and Jews. Lots of Jews. The group that became famous or realistically infamous was The Combination, mislabelled by newspapers as Murder Inc.</p>
<p>In a 1958 monograph about the history and activities (and, indeed, the existence) of the Mafia, the FBI also said that:</p>
<p>“......witnesses revealed the existence of a vast criminal syndicate which the underworld referred to as ‘The Combination,’ and to which the press gave the appellation ‘Murder Inc.’”</p>
<p>Harry Feeney of the New York World Telegram is the reporter who allegedly coined the phrase. Sounds a lot more exciting than The Combination.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/yidfellas-the-kosher-nostra" target="_blank">Yidfellas: The Kosher Nostra.</a><br /></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>From about 1930 until 1940, people claim that this gang, or group of gangs, killed hundreds, maybe up to a thousand, in New York and across the country. New York had gangs, and they almost had the city. “Crime is a social, economic and political phenomenon,” according to writer Robert Weldon Whalen.</p>
<p>It’s also a bit of a bother for the men, and occasionally women, who inhabit its neighbourhood.</p>
<p>Life expectancy can be as short as the last conversation, or an insult lost in the wind. It’s not only no place for old men, the young ones often have short, hesitant but inevitable terminal habitation of the streets and bars and cafes they frequented as their social stamping grounds.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12374678675,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="164" alt="12374678675?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>Albert Shuman (right) is one of these.</p>
<p>A rum-runner during the days of prohibition, a robber who specialized in jewellery outlets and an alleged hit-man for the Jewish gangs, we know little about his background. His claim to criminal fame is more about his death than his sentient existence, and the implications that arose from his murder.</p>
<p>It goes something like this:</p>
<p>Jewish criminals congregated in Brownsville and adjacent Ocean Hill to the north of Canarsie in New York’s most densely populated borough, Brooklyn.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12374679083,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="132" alt="12374679083?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>A man called Louis Capone (left, no relation to the other one in Chicago) owned a pasticceria, a cafe serving coffee and pastries in Ocean Hill which around 1928, became the meeting place of Abe Reles, a kind of founding member of The Combination, and a bunch of young thugs eager for jobs and money.</p>
<p>Capone formed a relationship with a man called Albert Anastasia, the underboss of the Mangano Mafia crime family, based in Brooklyn, who was a frequent visitor to the cafe, and who at some stage, became a kind of patron to Reles, and the gang he had gathered.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/a-funeral-in-brooklyn" target="_blank">A Funeral in Brooklyn.</a><br /></strong></li>
</ul>
<p>From then on, it was all barking mad, almost cockamamie gangsterism as Reles and his ever-expanding troop carried out robberies, extortions, and murders, lots of murders for their mob boss, or bosses, and gradually developed into their own self-perpetuating killer organism. And then, they crossed paths with another power syndicate headed by Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter.</p>
<p>He’s a major force in New York’s garment industry. Along with his associates, he dominated the field of criminal labour relations until the end of the 1930s. In the summer of 1937, for various reasons and under many pressures, indicted on federal narcotic charges and especially from the hard-hitting New York District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey, appointed special prosecutor investigating organized crime, who wanted him for murder and racketeering, Buchalter goes into hiding, using initially accommodation at a restaurant owned by Capone at 2780 Stillwell Avenue on Coney Island, and then an apartment on Foster Avenue in Flatbush, nine miles away where he posed as the paralysed husband of his landlady.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12374679470,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="142" alt="12374679470?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>“Lepke (right) was probably the greatest criminal in the nation’s history, a tycoon who bossed a veritable General Motors of crime,” according to writer and columnist, Andrew F. Tully in a piece he wrote in 1958, claiming his illegal enterprises in the fur, baking and garment industries enable him to extort $50 million, and that his narcotic smuggling generated $10 million between October 1935 and February 1937.</p>
<p>Even if we quarter that based on journalistic hyperbole, Buchalter was still a very serious and successful gangster.</p>
<p>By the dawn of 1939 he is enduring one crisis after another and exacerbating things, is under pressure from his gangland peers to hand himself in to the authorities to take the heat off them.</p>
<p>He’s part of this story as the man who points the finger at Plug Shuman, using Reles to organize the hit through third-party killers.</p>
<p>According to court testimony in an appeal judgement in 1941, “Upon the first trial one Abraham Reles, a self-confessed accomplice in the killing of Shuman, testified in effect that his ‘business’ was murder in Brooklyn, that he was told by one of his bosses in such business that Shuman was giving the police information about him and that Shuman must be killed; that the witness then enlisted the services of this defendant as an aide in the killing; and that, pursuant to a prearranged plan, the defendant shot and killed Shuman.</p>
<p>Two other men who were members of the same gang conducting the ‘business’ of murder, and who were accomplices in the killing, also testified against the defendant. The defendant denied their story and testified that he had no connection with the gang and was not acquainted with any of the men who, according to the testimony of their accomplices, were members of the gang.”</p>
<p>That’s it in a nutshell. Plug was a squealer. Ergo Plug needed to be plugged. One of the bosses was Buchalter.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12374679100,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="152" alt="12374679100?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>In the December 1938, Reles (right) and another gang member, Mendy Weiss, had visited Buchalter at Foster Avenue where Mendy "told Buchalter that Pug Shuman was speaking to Inspector McDermott, giving him information against him." Lepke said, "If he is giving information against me, go out and take him.”</p>
<p>Dorothy Walker, who acted as Buchalter’s housekeeper while he lived in the apartment, was also a witness to this conversation among the gangsters.</p>
<p>McDermott, head of detectives at Brooklyn police headquarters, had confirmed that at least on three occasions during the fall of 1938, Shuman had approached him seeking “a job”. In cop-speak, being a stool pigeon.</p>
<p>The stage was set. The actors were assembled. Everything was go.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12374679675,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="155" alt="12374679675?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>The killers were to be Albert Tannenbaum (left), designate driver, and Irving Nitzberg, the shooter. They selected him as he was a friend. He knew the guy. Reles would confirm in due course, “Whenever they got kill somebody, they tell a guy from The Bronx or the East Side or Brooklyn, whoever knows the guy. Nitzberg got the contract. He knew him. If I knew him, I would have got the contract. That is how it worked.”</p>
<p>The Yiddish expression, “Man Plans and God laughs” was the perfect idiomatic expression to illustrate the ultimate futility of the murder of Shuman, which in the end, achieved nothing, but brought down even more heat on everyone involved.</p>
<p>Tannenbaum, nickname “Tick-tock” because of his constant nervous clock-like banter, was a protégé of Buchalter and a proficient killer, with at least six hits under his belt. Nitzberg, a Bronx-based pool hall owner and gun for hire. Knadles, his Yiddish nickname, referred presumably to his love of the Matzah balls beloved by so many Jewish people.</p>
<p>Late on the evening of January 9, 1939, Shuman gets picked up in Ocean Hill by the two men driving a Black Buick that had been stolen the previous year from a garage in Long Island carrying plates looted from another car later. Plug had been promised a part in a robbery, and he believed he was being taken to an apartment in Brooklyn to set up the heist. Tannenbaum drives down Buffalo Avenue, across Eastern Parkway, then down Rockaway, passing the Bethell Hospital and then pulling into East 95th Street. Tailing them is Reles, ready to collect the killers when the job is done.</p>
<p>When the driver gives the signal, Knadles, in the back seat, leans forward and shoots Plug twice in the neck. Powder burns on the victim’s skin show the gun’s muzzle was less than three inches away. As Schulman sumps to the right, “Tick-tock” pulls the car over and parks opposite a vacant lot at number 628. The two gunmen leave the car and join Reles, who drives off into the night.</p>
<p>Murder Inc. turned their potential energy into kinetic force through their willingness to murder on command. The morally ambivalent hit-men-for hire could earn a retainer between jobs, and receive substantial fees for the one carried out. And there were plenty of them as Lepke directed a purge, killing off anyone he deemed a threat to his security.</p>
<p>As the 1930s come to a close, there are bodies falling everywhere- vacant lots, ditches, backseats of auto's, street corners- nowhere is safe. At least a dozen men are murdered in the months leading up to 1940 as part of Murder Inc’s busy itinerary</p>
<p>Early on the morning of January 10th, two New York Police, officers Reardon and Eifler discover the well-plugged body of Plug Shuman slumped over to his right against the passenger-side window, buttoned up in a big overcoat and gloves and still wearing his fedora.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12374679889,RESIZE_192X{{/staticFileLink}}" width="192" alt="12374679889?profile=RESIZE_192X" /></a>The murder scene, a block from Linden Boulevard that linked into Grand Central Parkway and the Triboro Bridge with quick and easy access into upper Manhattan and The Bronx, was in an area often used by the gang to dispose of their victims. At least ten had been dumped over the years within a half a mile radius of the abandoned Buick. According to the head of the Brooklyn Detective Division.</p>
<p>Albert Shuman was a gangster of little consequence in a dark world filled with heavyweights, operating in a social environment consumed by complexities, uncertainties and lots of terror. His death cements his place in mob history, which in due course, will help trigger events that bring down, not his killer, but the hierarchies that help create him.</p>
<p>Investigators finally broke the ring in 1940, when they arrested Abe Reles for the murder of Alexander Alpert, a minor hoodlum aged nineteen, in 1933. Reles, who was concerned by the very strong possibility of a death sentence after his arrest on several murders, volunteered to become a state witness against virtually anyone he could incriminate. He admitted to eleven murders, and helped to resolve many more, dozens, some the police did not even know about. Opening a box to reveal not Schrödinger's cat, but an entire underworld filled with more thuggery and sudden death than Cape Flats in Cape Town.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12374679682,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="120" alt="12374679682?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>He fingers Nitzberg (right) as Shuman’s killer.</p>
<p>In due course, other gangsters talked as well, including trigger-man Tannenbaum, Joe Liberto, and Angelo Catalano, who were relatively minor players in the Combination along with Max Rubin who was an important associate and close confidant of Buchalter. The Kings County District Attorney kept the witnesses under twenty-four-hour police guard at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island.</p>
<p>Somehow, even with these precautions, in November 1941 Reles fell to his death from the sixth-floor window of the hotel. Despite the incident suggesting that Reles had tried to escape from his locked-down sixth floor room, suspicions immediately arose that someone had "assisted" him out the window to prevent his testimony against Albert Anastasia and others.</p>
<p>Reles' testimony forms the basis for indicting and trying Irving Nitzberg for the murder of Shuman, not once, but twice, and he gets acquitted both times.</p>
<p>The authorities executed Buchalter, Capone, and four other members of the mob at Sing Sing Prison in up state New York between June 1941 and August 1944. Lepke goes down in American mob history as the first and so far, only boss ever to be legally executed.</p>
<p>Murder Inc, the Combination, the Brownsville Troop, whatever name appeals, vanished, absorbed by the frenzy of New York’s endless social upheaval as new or more dominant criminal syndicates emerged.</p>
<p>By the 1950s, areas of Brooklyn slowly started to vanish. Blocks would pack up and move to Long Island, or Jersey, even to Florida. In 1957 even the Dodgers left Brooklyn. All the way to California.</p>
<p>Their baseball ground became a housing project, the ultimate testaments to the ultimate change.</p>
<p>The tough Jews were gone, replaced by street gangs, and drug cartels, with the odd Mafioso lurking in the shadows. Murder as the informal method of conflict resolution remains the pillar that supports all criminal endeavours in Brooklyn and across America’s biggest city. The good old days are long gone, and yet.</p>
<p>William Faulkner claimed “the past isn't dead, it isn't even past.”</p>
<p><em> The life of a man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short</em></p>
<p> Thomas Hobbes.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>Sources:</strong></span></p>
<p>Joselit, Jenna Wiseman. <em>Our Gang: Jewish Crime and the New York Jewish Community 1900-1940. </em>Bloomington. Indiana University Press. 1983.</p>
<p>Whalen, Robert Weldon. <em>Murder Inc and the Moral Life</em>. Fordham University Press. 2016.</p>
<p>Block, Alan. <em>East Side-West Side.</em> University College, Cardiff. 1980.</p>
<p>Tyler, Gus.<em> Organized Crime in America.</em> The University of Michigan Press. 1962.</p>
<p>Cohen, Rich. Tough Jews. Random House, London. 1998.</p>
<p>People v. Nitzberg. 289 N.Y. 523, 530-531</p>
<p><em>The Brooklyn Daily Eagle</em>. January 11, 1939.</p>
<p><em>Daily News.</em> January 11, 1939.</p>
<p><em>The New York Times</em>. November 13, 1941.</p>
<p><em>New York Times.</em> January 4, 1951.</p>
<p><em>Time Magazine.</em> April 4, 1940.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/thom-l-jones-mob-corner">Thom L. Jones' Mob Corner</a> or the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/organized-crime-in">Organized Crime in North America section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
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</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Thom L. Jones & Gangsters Inc.</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p></div>
Murder in a Small Town: The Mafia in Pittston
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/murder-in-a-small-town
2024-01-13T14:01:24.000Z
2024-01-13T14:01:24.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/12357547485?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>“Europe ends at Naples and ends badly,” said French poet August Creuzé de Lesser in 1806. “Calabria, Sicily, and all the rest belong to Africa.”</p>
<p>Antonio Gramsci, in 1926, was even more forthright in his declaration:</p>
<p>“Southerners are biologically inferior beings, either semi-barbarians or out-and-out barbarians by natural destiny; if the South is underdeveloped, it is not the fault of the capitalist system, or any other historical cause, but of the nature that has made Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric.”</p>
<p>They were looked upon as <em>terroni.</em> dirt people.</p>
<p>In at least one part of Pennsylvania, the confirmation of this racialization occurs as thousands of Italian immigrants move into the area between 1889 and 1914. They are part of the over 4 million who migrate to America seeking work, with most men working as miners to harvest the anthracite coal that sprouts everywhere in the Wyoming Valley and hinterland.</p>
<p>In 1908, a bicameral government report called the Dillingham Commission helped dehumanize these people, claiming, “the Southern Italian race as the least desirable and most dangerous.”</p>
<p>“Blacker than Africans,” is how New York City reporter Henry Rood described anthracite miners in 1898, and just to rub it in, “domesticated animals.”</p>
<p>Among this madding crowd packing into the small towns that string along the rivers and hills 130 miles north-west of New York City, were gangsters, many coming from an area in the Sicilian province of Caltanissetta, a small town called Montedoro, a place famous for its sulphur mines.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12357544877,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12357544877?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="141" /></a>Some of them, members of the Mafia, bringing with them their heritage of violence and intimidation. One of these villains is Salvatore Lucchino (right), who somehow became a cop and then died violently at the hands of other villains.</p>
<p>A narrative filled with spirals but propelled in straight lines, the story of Lucchino is almost as improbable as it is predictable, with a theme of conflict resolution that inevitably leads to only one solution.</p>
<p>“Few remember Lucchino, a Montedoro-born Mafioso who turned on the mob to go undercover with the Secret Service in New York City and later as a cop in Pittston. Claiming he had ‘some ancient wrong to right,’ Lucchino survived four attempts on his life before being gunned down in 1920. Over 6,000 people marched in his funeral, which was one of the largest in Pittston’s history, with “what seemed to be the entire Italian population of Pittston and surrounding towns present,” according to a local newspaper report.</p>
<p>A Sicilian-born Mafioso with a crisis of conscience who turns on the mob in hard coal country?”</p>
<p>At least according to Vinnie Rotondaro in his article at Current Affairs.</p>
<p>Salvatore “Sam Locking” Lucchino came to America in 1903 at the age of eighteen and moved to Pittston. Four years later, he was one of thirteen defendants in a Black Hand gang known as The Committee of the Iron Hand Society,* headed by Calogero Buffalino. Found guilty, they sentenced him to a year in prison on charges of extortion.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12357545653,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12357545653?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="97" /></a>There is no evidence that supports the claim he was a Mafioso, although just who was doing what and why and where is open to debate. His definite link to the Mafia was through familial ties, as his sister Rosina married Stefano La Torre (right), another man from Montedoro who arrived in Pittston the same year as Lucchino, and he formed the Mafia family that would dominate the Wyoming Valley for years to come. It is, perhaps, the second known Mafia clan to emerge officially in the United States after the Morello gang of New York.</p>
<p>A hundred years after the events, searching for the truth in these matters is like trying to find the haystack rather than the needle.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, across that 130 miles to the south-east, there was plenty of criminal activity taking place in New York City. Among the many gangs operating here, was one run by two men who would play a major role in the Italian-American underworld. One is born in central Sicily, in Corleone, a town that was a Petri Dish for the growth and nurturing of the Mafia. The other in Palermo. Both of them to be linked by marriage. And at least one of them will find a place in the history of crime as being, perhaps, the first Mafia boss of New York.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12357545664,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12357545664?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="118" /></a>Corleone born Giuseppe Morello (left) used a saloon and cheap restaurant at 8 Prince Street as one of his bases of operation, while Ignazio Lupo operated a grocery wholesale venture at 210 Mott Street, two minutes to the west in Lower Manhattan’s Little Italy district. In 1903, he marries Salvatrice Terranova, the half-sister of Morello. He’s now blood in the Morello family, biological and Mafia. These two men play interchangeable roles in the growth of their gang, with Morello being perhaps the dominant one, as he was already made into the Mafia back in Corleone. Giuseppe Battaglia, his uncle, was the boss of the local branch of the Stuppagghiari brotherhood, as they were known.</p>
<p>Morello, who becomes known to agents of the Secret Service, as “One-Finger-Jack,” arrives in America in 1892, although this date is not set in stone, and Lupo arrives six years later. Both men apparently flee from the consequences of homicide charges. Morello had been involved in counterfeiting activities in Sicily, and carried on with this illegal operation from time to time after he founded his original mob on 107 Street in Harlem. It was this that would grow into his Mafia family, which exists to this day as the Genovese.</p>
<p>This is back-story to the narrative of Sam Lucchino. He gets drawn into the Morello and Lupo web through James P. Price, the head of the Pittston police department who arranged an introduction between Lucchino and William J. Flynn, an agent in charge of the Eastern Division of the Secret Service, who was tracking the Morello gang and their counterfeiting associates across the Tri-state area.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12357547864,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12357547864?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="151" /></a>Flynn discovers Lucchino is associated with Giuseppe Boscarino (right), one of Morello’s gang and a significant part of the counterfeit ring. He was also very close to Vito Cascioferro, a major Mafioso visiting America from Sicily.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-sun-king-of-the-mafia" target="_blank"><strong>The Sun King of the Mafia.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Just what was driving Lucchino has never been explained, although Flynn claimed the Italian had told him he had an ancient wrong to right, without ever explaining what his grievance against the Black Hand organization was. Having been a part of it and spending jail time for his sins must have figured in there somewhere.</p>
<p>Following the arrests, trial and conviction of Morello and his counterfeiting gang in early 1910, Sam Lucchino is back in Pittston, where in the spring of 1911 (some sources claim later, in 1915) he joins the police department as a “special officer.” Subsequently promoted to detective, he will serve the department on a salary of $20 per week. Lurking in the background is a man called Ferdinand Rombola, who serves time for his part in the counterfeit case and never forgets that it was Lucchino who helped to send him to prison. He will come back to haunt Sam years down the track.</p>
<p>And there is another, a man of Iago proportions, who will cross paths with the detective and perhaps be the stone that finally breaks the camel’s back. This one is a contractor called Calogero “Charles” Consagra who will feature in many significant events taking place in the area involving labour disputes, strike-breaking activities at mines and murders, lots of murders.</p>
<p>He is part of the Mafia clan based in this area, along with his brother Luigi, both of them serving as soldiers working under the boss, Santo Volpe, who had taken over the reins from La Torre.</p>
<p>Consagra is tied into the subcontracting system, which was built around a small group of southern Italian immigrants, mainly Sicilians, who hired their compatriots and drove them with “pushers” and “hustlers.” Known, organized criminals were among the leading subcontractors, a reality that the mines ignored publicly but encouraged privately. It seems company bosses knew they were dealing with well-known organized mobsters, but turned a blind eye. The Wyoming Valley was part of the largest urban mining region in America. As always, everywhere, profit was the driving force behind all business activities in Pittston, just as it was across America.</p>
<p>On February 6, 1911, about three months before he joined the police department, two men ambushed and shot Sam Lucchino shortly after he returned to the town from his activities in New York, where he had been working with The Secret Service and testifying in court against the Morello gang. Although wounded in the neck and head, he recovered. Despite being arrested, the prosecution failed to prove the case against the assailants.</p>
<p>This was the first, in a series of attacks he would endure as well as a personal tragedy. Six months later, his father, Tranquillo, seventy years old, a retired miner, suffering serious health issues from “miner’s asthma,” commits suicide at the home he shares with Sam and his family on Jenkins Alley, on the south side of Pittston. He shoots himself in the head twice and dies in the hospital.</p>
<p>In 1915, gunmen fire shots at Sam’s home on Railway Street striking around his bedroom window. Attacks like this happen again, and on one occasion as he was walking down the street, two men ambush him at a lonely spot, although he fights them off with his own revolver.</p>
<p>It has never been explained who was trying to kill Sam. Was it disgruntled Black Handers? Was it the Mafia under Steven La Torre and the men he gathered around him from Montedoro, or was it Consagra and his allies within the mining industry? We will never know.</p>
<p>Although Sam Lucchino has another back story that might show the fact that making enemies was, to him, the easiest of endeavours.</p>
<p>Evidence presented in the Black Hand Trial of April 1907, claimed Lucchino and Calogero Consagra had visited one Giuseppe Guitanno and Lucchino threatened him with death for being a police spy, somewhat ironic in view of later events that will unfold, telling the unfortunate victim that they would cut off his head and use it as a football, before murdering his family.</p>
<p>They accused him of bombing a victim’s home after shooting at it with a machine gun</p>
<p>In May 1911, authorities charge him, his brother Peter, and Steve La Torre with the murder of Peter Savaglio on June 2, 1910. Angelo Manero supplies the evidence, triggering the arrest, just a few days after his release from prison, awaiting charges of shooting at Sam Lucchino. The press refers to Sam Lucchino, his brother, and La Torre as "The Lucchino Faction" actively providing information and evidence against The Black Hand in the area.</p>
<p>The contradiction of an alleged Mafia boss like La Torre embarking on these kinds of endeavours is perhaps in some ways explained by the comments of Giuseppe Morello, the supposed Boss of All Bosses in the American Mafia. In 1911, when imprisoned in Atlanta Penitentiary, it’s alleged he claimed it was the privilege of a king for a Mafia boss to ignore the rules whenever it suited him.</p>
<p>Pittston is a dangerous town.</p>
<p>Eight years after the events in this story, gunmen in another vehicle ambushed and blasted to death two mining union executives, Peter Reilly and Alex Campbell, as they forced their car to a stop at the corner of East Railway Street and Vine.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/deep-in-the-heart-of-texas-the-rise-of-the-italian-mafia-in-the-l" target="_blank">Deep in The Heart Of Texas.</a><br /> </strong></li>
</ul>
<p>In 1920, there were 91 bars, one for every 180 residents. Robberies, attacks and murders were a standard pattern of daily life. Almost every other man carried a gun, a knife or some other weapon as self-defence or for criminal intent. Life is not so much cheap as seemingly irrelevant in certain circumstances. Those men who worked the mines knew their daily existence, often hung by a thread of chance.</p>
<p>The police officers earned their $20 week's pay, probably by the end of their first working day.There would have been an endless supply of potential killers willing to gun down a police officer.</p>
<p>On the 21 July 1920, they did.</p>
<p>The sequence of events that unfold this Wednesday are complex, and there are many conflicting accounts of the events that occur. Sam Lucchino is working the “middle shift” on this day, his tour of duty beginning at 12.01 pm and due to end at 10 pm.</p>
<p>By midday it would have been hot, mid-high 80s and cloudy with some precipitation based on yearly averages. Without access to logs or police reports, we don’t know what went on during the day, and how often Lucchino was in and out of Police Headquarters, based in City Hall, on Water Street.</p>
<p>At around seven in the evening, Sam confers with his boss, Sergeant Anthony Reddington, about “strangers” in town. Although Pittston had a significant Italian population, Lucchino apparently knew them all, and strangers rang alarm bells. Reddington made enquiries and confirmed that there were two strange men sighted in Pittston. He passed this on to his detective, who went off in search of them, agreeing with Reddington to meet up again at ten. After their meeting, Lucchino heads off for home on East Railway Street.</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12357545695,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12357545695?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a></strong>Just before eleven this night, while Sam was opening the gate to his property front yard, someone ambushed him and shot him multiple times. Two nearby police officers, Hessian and McManus, alerted by the gunfire, rush to his help and they took him to the hospital. Newspaper reports claim Lucchino had wounds near his chest, stomach, lower back and left shoulder. Here is where it gets confusing.</p>
<p>The doctor who carried out the postmortem claimed there were two wounds on the body, not four.</p>
<p>Some reports claim the detective never regained consciousness and died close to eleven. Others, that he was awake and told the police chief Leo Tierney “strangers shot me,” before he died. Yet more claim the statement was made to Officer McManus. Were these the men he had been tracking that day?</p>
<p>A witness to the murder, Mrs John Curran who lives opposite the Lucchinos, testified after hearing the first shot she rushed to her front window and saw a man in a grey suit and straw hat, firing at the detective as he struggled to regain his feet, following the ambush. She claimed that the gunman then strolled away, down the street.</p>
<p>As Lucchino lay mortally injured in the hospital, the hunt for his killers was under way.</p>
<p>The following morning, a young boy, Isaac Dupont, finds a gun on the berm of the main highway running between Brownstone and Dupont. It’s over half a mile from the scene of the crime. The revolver, a calibre.45, matches the bullets removed from the body of Lucchino.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12357545876,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12357545876?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="152" /></a>The same morning, Sergeant Reddington arrests a man called Peter Enrico (right). He is one of the “strangers” in town. He’s living at a house on the corner of Vine and John Street, along with another man called Tony Puntariro. The house belongs to Sam, brother of Ferdinand Rombola, who also lives here. The same man who went to prison for five years in the Morello-linked counterfeiting investigation.</p>
<p>Following the arrest of Enrico, evidence emerges that Rombola had sent a telegram to two men inviting them to Pittston on “urgent business”. Rombola claims this was simply a matter of family affairs. The police had a different take. They claimed they hired the men for a fee of $3500 to kill Lucchino. Police soon arrest Puntariro.</p>
<p>It further transpires that the money was being offered by Charles Consagra, who wanted the detective removed because he was getting too close to the truth in Consagra’s shady mining and contacting business. They arrest him on August 13, although he’s released after the prosecutor in the case decides the evidence against him is too weak to stand up in court.</p>
<p>Consagra, who was about 50 in 1920, had a long record of committing crimes and then avoiding the consequences. He was a suspect in the 1911 shooting of Lucchino. In 1910, they connected him to the Salvaglio murder, which was one of the more lurid crimes of the period. The suspect committed the gruesome act of decapitating the victim and then disposed of the head by throwing it down a mine air-vent shaft. Back in 1905, police had named him as the killer in the murder of Giuseppe Castelina, and then in 1917, the shotgun killing of Charles Attardo on Vine Street.</p>
<p>The trial of the suspects in the murder of Sam Lucchino begins on November 8 1920 in Wilkes-Barre City Courtroom. The presentation of evidence reveals a Pandora's Box of fascinating trivia.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12357546070,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12357546070?profile=RESIZE_180x180" width="142" /></a>The alleged murder weapon is found 4200 feet from the scene of the crime. Nellie Lucchino, the grieving widow, positively identifies Puntariro (left) as her husband's killer, claiming that Enrico was there also, in the background. Sebastiano Rombola, cousin of Ferdinand who it’s claimed sent the telegram that summoned the killers, is illiterate and can neither read nor write. Enrico and Puntariro claim they don’t know each other yet are living in the same house in Pittston when arrested. Many witnesses, including Lucchino’s sister, testify they have seen them together. A tavern-owner in Trenton, New Jersey, confirms they were regulars at his bar. They both have police records. Which surprises no one.</p>
<p>The men have separate trials. Puntariro first. The prosecution’s strategy is to convince the jury he is the man who fired the shots that killed the police officer. Enrico will be legal collateral damage. He was part of the conspiracy, therefore just as guilty as the trigger-man.</p>
<p>It was a foregone conclusion. After deliberating for 90 minutes, on October 5, the jury found Puntariro guilty of murder in the first degree. On November 16, they find the same verdict against Enrico. They sentenced the two men to death on March 8, 1921.</p>
<p>On Sept. 25, 1922, Enrico, 29, and Puntariro, 32, faced execution at the Western Penitentiary in Rockview. No one claimed their bodies, and they were buried outside the prison walls, in Western State Penitentiary Cemetery, Bellefonte. They came and went like moths in the night. Leaving nothing behind but the man they murdered, his family broken, and the enduring mystery of why.</p>
<p>Consagra, the mysterious figure in the background who haunted much of Sam’s life, disappears in 1924. It’s reported they found his clothing and personal effects on the shore of Lake Erie, about 300 miles to the north and west of Pittston. There is a theory that he was killed by friends or relatives of the two men executed in 1922. He certainly vanished. About a year later, his wife Onofrio and her family moved from their Pittston home on East Railway Street to 100 Cottage Street in Carbondale, about thirty miles to the north-east, from where she died in 1951, as a widow.</p>
<p>Lucchino’s funeral was held at Our Lady of Carmel Church on the morning of July 25, and they buried him at St John’s Cemetery. They claimed in the press, it was one of the largest ever held in Pittston, with over 4,000 miner attending and apparently almost the entire Italian population of the town.</p>
<p>Sam Lucchino’s story is all about violence. If you want power, you do violence. If you want money illegally, you do violence. If you want to be somebody, you do violence. And if you want revenge, most of all, you do violence.</p>
<p>It ends up as murder in a small town.</p>
<p><em>* Black Hand was an Italian-based criminal phenomenon that existed in America for perhaps thirty to forty years, targeting Italians almost exclusively, using violence, bombing, fire-attacks on homes and commercial buildings, kidnapping and extortion to bleed money from its victims. Just what the relationship was between it and the Mafia, if any, has never been fully determined.</em></p>
<p><strong><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Sources:</span></strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/which-italian-america">https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/which-italian-america</a></p>
<p><a href="https://ebin.pub/storytelling-sociology-narrative-as-social-inquiry-9781685854157.html">https://ebin.pub/storytelling-sociology-narrative-as-social-inquiry-9781685854157.html</a></p>
<p>Officer Down Memorial Page.</p>
<p>Mele, Andrew Paul. The Italian Squad. McFarland & Co. New York, 2020.</p>
<p>Flynn, William. The Barrell Mystery. 1919. Thanks to Tom Hunt at The American Mafia website for converting this historic book and making it available online.</p>
<p>Press coverage in:</p>
<p><em>Pittston Gazette</em> editions: May 24, 1911, February 13, 1917, August 28, 1917, November 4 1917,September 29, 1920, October 21, 1920, September 15, 1920.</p>
<p><em>The Tribune, Scranton</em>, editions: November 24, 1917, July 22, 1920, July 26, 1920, August 29, 1920.</p>
<p><em>The Times Leader, Wilkes-Barre</em>, editions: November 10, 1920, September 30, 1930, February 4, 2019.</p>
<p><em>Sunday Dispatch, Pittston</em>, June 13, 1993.</p>
<ul>
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Bullets over Broadway
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/bullets-over-broadway
2023-09-23T08:03:27.000Z
2023-09-23T08:03:27.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/12230322485?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>Everyone called him Tommy Brown, but that was not really his name.</p>
<p>It was a nickname, a mob monicker, but it really got confused. His name in Italian is Gaetano Lucchese, and the closest we get to that is Guy Lucchese, as the name is pronounced “Guy-tano,” and there is no English version of his forename.</p>
<p>So where did Tommy come from? Tanu is the diminutive of Gaetano, which some people confuse with Tommy. The Brown is a tag from a ubiquitous story that a booking officer, following an arrest in 1921, remarking on the fingers missing on one hand, said “We’ll call you ‘Three fingers like the baseball player Mordecai Brown.’”</p>
<p>He did thirty-three months in jail for this arrest, grand larceny, theft of an automotive. In his long career of wrongdoing, he served only one prison sentence.</p>
<p>This is how legends, myths, and nicknames are born. And he had a lot of names.</p>
<p>Such as Thomas Luckese (right), and Thomas Lucase, and Tom Branda, and Thomas Arra, as well as Thomas Lucchese. Which is often spelt with one c.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12230319500,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="250" alt="12230319500?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>And just to really confuse us, his family buries him under the name Thomas Luckese, one of his many aliases or "also known as". Using a different first name would have been more appropriate to trick the curious, according to some sources. We’ll never know.</p>
<p>What we know is that The New York Crime Commission in the early 1950s considered him “the most important crime figure” in New York. During one of their hearings, George White, a legendary investigator for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, claimed Lucchese “was the overall general of a mob which divided the USA into four zones for the trafficking of dope. In charge were Abe Chait, Joe Rosato and Steve La Salle.”</p>
<p>That's a lot of praise for an unknown fifty-three-year-old man.</p>
<p>He was also involved in killing his problems. At least twice, personally, maybe more. Three men shot Louis Cerasuolo, 24, at the corner of First Avenue and 118 Street in Harlem, and the police linked Lucchese to the murder. Although the victims’ wife and daughter identified the killers, they both later retracted their statements. The men walked free.</p>
<p>The usual mob way solved the dispute with an extortion scheme involving chickens.[1]</p>
<p>The alleged shooters were <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-lucchese-crime-family" target="_blank">Lucchese</a>, a dressmaker called Joe Rosato (the same one whose name would come popping up at the Crime Commission) and John “Charlie Scupete” Gaudio who was based somewhere around 107 or 108 Streets, an area notorious for producing gangsters, especially Italian ones. Allegedly, Scupete is a slang Italian or Sicilian term for shotgun, which this killer supposedly favored, although he did not choose it as his weapon on June 30, 1928, when the action occurred. Gaudio was perhaps a killer of choice for the mob in this part of New York.</p>
<p>Indicative of the way Mafia members maintain their power through family ties, Rosato was married to Rose, sister of the man, with many names.</p>
<p>The killing went down on an interesting cross-road. Within two blocks, are located the office where Giuseppe Morello, an alleged boss of the New York Mafia, will be murdered two years later, the home and social club office of Anthony Salerno, who will become a front boss for the Luciano/Genovese Family (Originally Morello’s gang) in the years to come, and Pleasant Avenue, an area that will become infamous for drug dealing which will ravage the neighborhood like the plague, mainly because of the Lucchese Mafia clan.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-corner-on-pleasant-avenue-the-mafia-crooked-cops-and-drugs" target="_blank"><strong>The Corner on Pleasant Avenue.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>A man with an Italian name meaning "Good fortune" enters the story. Like the main character in John O’Hara’s novel Appointment in Samarra, he will travel a road that leads to his own special destiny.</p>
<p>And an inevitable fate.</p>
<p>Bonaventura Pinzola (sometimes spelled Pinsola) is born in Serradifalco, Sicily, which will create all kinds of problems for crime historians, because there are two of them.. One's a Palermo commune, the other's a town in Caltanissetta, 130 km south. Although genealogy sites favor the one in the southern part of the island.</p>
<p>Whichever one is his birthplace, he is nineteen when he enters America, in 1906, and moves to Pittston, where he has family connections. This area in north-east Pennsylvania was a stronghold of mafiosi from Caltanissetta, which may also have been a draw card for Pinzola. Two years later he is in New York, living in a notorious slum tenement at 222 Chrystie Street, on the Lower East Side, presumably starting his career in crime, or at least continuing it. Like most of his peers, he will be known in the underworld by his nicknames, Bontunio, but most often Joe.</p>
<p>He’s hardly arrived when he’s caught trying to dynamite a building, a tenement house with over forty families living there, on East 11 Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s part of a Black Hand [2] scheme seemingly under the control of one Giuseppe Constabile, allegedly a local mob boss.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12230319874,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="143" alt="12230319874?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>Pinzola, twenty years old, gets a prison sentence of up to five years, serving it at Sing Sing prison. He goes down in Black Hand's history as one of two men caught planting a bomb by the police in New York. It seems, without the bad luck in his life, he wouldn't have any luck at all.</p>
<p>The only image we have of him, front-face, is taken after the police arrest and book him (right). The two police officers who track and arrest him are Detective Charles Corrao and Lieutenant Joe Petrosino. In the scuffle, Petrosino jams his revolver into Pinzola’s head so hard, it penetrates the cheek, and creates the image of the heavy bandaged face that peers out at us from the past.</p>
<p>We know he marries in 1916, to Carmela Riccobono, whose brother Joe will one day be part of the Gambino Crime Family. Maintaining the ever important blood links in the Mafia chain, the witness to his marriage is Marco Li Mandri, and his wife, Marianna Pecoraro. They will move to California in due course, where Marco will become part of the Los Angeles Mafia. His wife’s father and brother were both part of Giuseppe Morello’s original gang, (some claim the first Mafia Family in New York,) the father being a suspect in the murder of New York Police Inspector Joe Petrosino, in Palermo, in March, 1909, a year after his encounter with Pinzola.</p>
<p>Degrees of separation in the Mafia. Always.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-sun-king-of-the-mafia" target="_blank"><strong>The Sun King of the Mafia.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>The Pinzolas will have three children, and at some stage they move to a home at 209 1st Avenue, near 13 Street; records report he was a timber contractor. An arrest in 1922 shows he was never far removed from the wrong side of the track, in an area overflowing with thugs, gangsters, degenerates, racketeers and gunmen. Then the trail peters out.</p>
<p>Historically, we next hear about Pinzola after the murder of Gaetano Reina, who is the leader of his own gang, which we believe links into the Masseria group.[3]</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12230320056,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="127" alt="12230320056?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>Reina’s (right) base is primarily East Harlem and The Bronx, and he is the second Tommy coming into the story. There’s another one, yet to appear.</p>
<p>The alliance is part of an underworld conflict which will come to involve four of New York's five Mafia clans. Reina dies on February 26, 1930, and it’s presumed his murder is the beginning of a gang war. In fact, it begins 600 miles west of The Bronx, in Detroit, three months later.</p>
<p>Unknown assailants shot Gaspare Milazzo and Rosario Parrino while they were having lunch at a fish market in May 1930. Milazzo, who was originally based in Brooklyn, has a close connection to Salvatore Maranzano, who leads the dominant faction that opposes Giuseppe Masseria and his gangs. Although presumably killed by local mobsters, part of an opposing group within Detroit, someone probably orchestrated the murders from New York through Masseria.</p>
<p>Two men murder Reina as he escorts his girlfriend, Maria Ennis, to their waiting car at 1522 Sheridan Avenue, in The Bronx. One of them is alleged to be Pinzola. Reina may have died because Masseria lusted after his large and lucrative share in the ice-business.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12230320662,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="135" alt="12230320662?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>In an age before widespread electrification, New York’s residents and businesses relied on ice to store food and to cool drinks. Italians dominated the industry in The Bronx and Harlem. With little skill or capital required, it was a lucrative business on the scale that Reina operated. Masseria (left), who allegedly had an insatiable appetite for food, also hungered for power and money.</p>
<p>History does not tell us when, but some time following the killing of number two Tommy, Masseria forces through the appointment of Pinzola as the head of the <em>brugad</em> or <em>borgo</em>, (interchangeable description used to describe a village or commune in Sicily, and used by Mafiosi to indicate their allegiance.) There may have been about 200 men in this family, including Lucchese and Rosato.</p>
<p>Pinzola may have been part of Reina’s gang. Reports and narratives are vague about this. The move upset Tommy number three, who was second in command and expected to become the leader.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12230320678,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="129" alt="12230320678?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>Tomasso Gagliano (right) was born in Corleone, as had been Reina. Becoming a successful business investor with over twenty-five companies under his wing, basing himself in The Bronx, he would live a long and fruitful life and died peacefully in retirement. He was also the second-in-command of Reina’s gang and, along with Lucchese and a dozen members, set about fitting out Pinzola before he became too important to Masseria’s plans or expectations.</p>
<p>As well as Vincenzo Mangano, who would lead the Mafia group we know today as The Gambino Family, Gagliano would serve as a boss for twenty years, a record only beaten by Giuseppe Profaci, whose group, based in South Brooklyn, stayed conspicuously absent from the turmoil of 1930-1931.</p>
<p>Mark Twain once said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.” Although five months away, Joe Pinzola was about to find out.</p>
<p>Only three Pinzola images are public domain. One shows him with the bandaged face, following his arrest for the attempted arson attack, the other two show him dead, face down on an office floor.</p>
<p>There is one description we have of him which comes from Joe Valachi, who met him briefly in a bar in mid-town Manhattan.[4]</p>
<p>Valachi refers to him as a “greaseball” a term used to describe old-time gangsters, although Pinzola was only forty-three when he died. Joe remembers him because of his huge moustache and the reek of garlic that hung around him.</p>
<p>Charley Luciano, a leading figure in the gangland war that creates Pinzola’s promotion and demotion (the hard way) claimed in his much-maligned biography, his opinion of Pinzola this way:</p>
<p>“As big a shit as Masseria was, he didn't hold a candle to Pinzola. That guy was fatter, uglier and dirtier than Masseria was on the worst day when the old bastard didn't take a bath, which was most of the time.”</p>
<p>Pinzola was a Sicilian, and as a result he probably never thought of himself as Italian, and never read the writing of Machiavelli.[5] Had he done so, he may not have found himself alone, and isolated that afternoon, on the day he died, Friday, September 5, 1930.</p>
<p>Machiavelli claimed, “The man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done learns the way to self-destruction rather than self-preservation.”</p>
<p>Pinzola lacked the respect of the gang Masseria had handed him on a plate and apparently cared little about the politics of the rank and file. Why he found himself there is just one of many conundrums that aggravates Mafia historians. How was he related to Masseria? Why did the boss want him in a supposed allied group? Surely a mobster as street-smart as Masseria would realize the conflict this would trigger?</p>
<p>Due to the unknown truth about others and the enigmatic nature of humans, we are left with a mystery in the end.</p>
<p>Sometime around the end of May or early June, Tommy Lucchese signs a lease for an office on the 10th floor of the Brokaw Building, which stood on the corner of Broadway and 42 Street at 1457 Times Square in mid-town Manhattan. It was to house a company called California Dry Fruit Importers, with Tommy and Pinzola sharing the business as partners.</p>
<p>Lucchese and his partners were playing the long game. Short.</p>
<p>Pinzola spent some of his time staying at a hotel in Lower Manhattan while his wife and children now lived at 2069 2 Avenue in East Harlem. Most likely, it allowed him to get to the office as an easy commute. He operated in the Lower East Side, while Reina's influence was in the Upper East Side. Misreading mob politics is risky, as he discovered. If the residue of design is good fortune, for Pinzola, it was running on empty the first week of September.</p>
<p>Someone shot dead Bonaventura Pinzola in the office in the late morning or early afternoon of that Friday. Hours later, around nine in the evening, two office cleaners, Mrs Delia Magee and Mrs Henry Walters discovered his body. Shot multiple times in the body, and sprawled face down near the desk. In his suit pockets, police find a roll of $1600 (almost $30k in today's currency), serious walking-around money, and a list of mid-town speak easy premises. Discarded in an outer office, officers discover a .32 revolver, all chambers discharged.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12230321061,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="710" alt="12230321061?profile=RESIZE_710x" /></a><strong><em>Photo: Pinzola dead.</em> </strong></p>
<p>Over the weekend, police are chasing leads, and announce Lucchese is a person of interest. On the Monday morning, accompanied by his lawyer, a former judge, he appeared at the office of the district attorney. They arrest him on suspicion of homicide, but prosecutors can’t produce enough evidence to convene a grand jury to indict and they eventually dropped the charges.</p>
<p>He claimed he and two others were in the office with Pinzola when armed men with guns and badges forced them to face the wall while killing the boss.[6]</p>
<p>Joseph Valachi will claim the killer was a member of their crime family, Girolamo Santuccio, who, finding Pinzola alone and unarmed, gunned him down.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-gunman-a-mafia-story" target="_blank"><strong>The Gunman. A Mafia Story.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Maybe that it is how it happened. We will never know. Gary Potter points out the 1963 testimony of Valachi is ‘riddled with contradictions, factual errors and uncorroborated assertions.’[7]</p>
<p>Lucchese would become a mighty little force in the mobs of New York. As Gagliano wound down and aimed for retirement, Tommy gradually moved into the number one spot, a position he would hold until his death from cancer in July, 1967. Pinzola’s place in the history of New York’s Mafia will be forever, his Black Hand connection, and his short-lived career as a mob boss. Historically, the most fleeting chairmanship, ever.</p>
<p>Tommy Lucchese almost certainly killed Bonaventura Pinzola, one way or the other. But his violent death in the violent life he lead did not have to replicate as it so often does in the world of the Mafia.</p>
<p>If we do not know for certain where Pinzola was born, his family buried him in Calvary Cemetery, in Queens. His wife, Carmela, would join him there, forty-four years later. Their middle child, John Peter, will serve his country as a major in the U.S. forces during World War Two, and lies in Arlington National Cemetery, which shows that good can come from bad, and the dichotomy that edged him from a life of crime that seduced his father, was a paradigm of the great American dream which tells us right trumps wrong every time.</p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>Acknowledgements:</strong></span></p>
<p><em>Thanks to Bill Feathers, Dave Critchley, Tom Hunt and Ismael Abdusalaam for digging up the facts and images, and:</em></p>
<p><em>Editions of The New York Times, Post, Press and Herald and all those reporters, long gone, who tried their best and gave us enough to help us on our way.</em></p>
<ol>
<li><em>The poultry industry was one of the biggest in New York, and in 1930, the largest in the world. A world in New York, rife with illegal practices, it naturally attracted hoodlums with the lure of big profits for little overheads. The most infamous case involves a man called Barnett Baff, shot dead one evening in November 1914. Corleone born, Ignazio Dragna, allegedly played a part in killing Barnett Baff. Authorities indicted Dragna but later dismissed the charges, after which he moved to Los Angeles. He eventually became the boss of the Mafia in Southern California. Gaetano Reina was also a suspect, but never indicted.</em></li>
<li><em>Beginning around 1903 and lasting over fifteen years in New York, La Mano Nera was the extortion of the more wealthy Italians by their criminal brethren. Similar groups had operated across America and Canada since perhaps the late 1880s. Bombing their victims seemed their favorite modus operandi.</em></li>
<li><em>Giuseppe Masseria was a Sicilian-born gangster, and mob boss who, after winning his battles with a gang that Salvatore Aquila had controlled, following his murder in 1928, began a campaign to dominate the Mafia of New York. His primary target was the Castellammarese gang based in Brooklyn, that Salvatore Maranzano would lead. A senior figure in the Mafia of Trapani Province in Sicily, he arrived in New York around 1925.</em></li>
<li><em>Joe Valachi was a member of the Reina Family, then joined the Bonanno and finally became part of the Luciano mob, Masseria’s original gang. He became a government informant and gave testimony in a senate hearing on organized crime in the early 1960s, disclosing many details about what he called Cosa Nostra, Our Thing.</em></li>
<li><em>Niccolo Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat, author, philosopher and historian who lived during the Renaissance. He created a political treatise which he named “The Prince,” maintaining that the acquisition and control of a state requires the politics of power, using any means to achieve this, including cunning, duplicity and bad faith. Markers the Mafia has followed since its origin.</em></li>
<li><em>New York State Crime Commission Paper. Butler Library, Columbia University.</em></li>
<li><em>Potter, G. Criminal Organizations; Vice, Racketeering and Politics in an American City. 1994. Illinois: Waveland Press.</em></li>
</ol>
<ul>
<li><strong>Back to <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/thom-l-jones-mob-corner">Thom L. Jones' Mob Corner</a> or the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-lucchese-crime-family">Lucchese crime family section</a> on Gangsters Inc.</strong></li>
<li><strong>Check out the latest news on organized crime and the Mafia at our <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/blog/list/tag/news">news section</a></strong></li>
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</ul>
<p><strong>Copyright © Thom L. Jones & Gangsters Inc.</strong></p>
<p> </p></div>
Those Who Go By Night: Dominic Di Ciolla and the Los Angeles Mafia
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/those-who-go-by-night-dominic-di-ciolla-and-the-los-angeles-mafia
2023-08-13T06:59:16.000Z
2023-08-13T06:59:16.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/12188260453?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>John Derek, the movie actor, once said, “Live fast, die young, and leave a good looking corpse.”</p>
<p>Dominic Di Ciolla managed two out of three, but missed out on the last one.</p>
<p>A lesser known player in the field of American organized crime, he came and went without too much fuss, and perhaps, his only claim to any kind of notoriety is his connection to the early days of the Los Angeles Mafia.</p>
<p>He was born in Bari, in the province of Puglia, a city on the Italian Adriatic, in September, 1902.</p>
<p>He died on a street that apparently never existed, six months shy of his thirtieth birthday..</p>
<p>If life is a conundrum, death by violence, especially in the field of criminal activity, is an enigma that often challenges us for a solution.</p>
<p>Although youth gangs may have emerged in the US early as the late 1780s, as the industrial revolution emerged in the 19th century, so did criminal gangs, most visible and violent during tectonic and rapid population shifts. Like seedlings in a vast field of economic fertilizer, they multiplied across the land, as major cities developed, commerce blossomed and opportunities offered wealth and prestige for those that could succeed. And not only the home-bred versions were present as the brave new world began to welcome the 20th Century.</p>
<p>As millions of Italians emigrated to the Americas, they brought another kind of gang. It would become known as The Mafia, after its namesake in Sicily where it had first emerged, and it may first have established itself in Louisiana, before spreading across the conterminous United States. Not all Italian criminals were Mafia, and in Chicago, there were various groups operating, some Italian, some Irish, some, perhaps Mafia.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12188260485,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12188260485?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="350" /></a>Di Ciolla (right) would find his way to The Windy City after moving to America, and it was here, it’s alleged, he began his career on the wrong side of the law.</p>
<p>He was short, about five-four according to one line-up police image, slender of build, dark hair, and because he was from further north in Italy, had a fair complexion. According to statements from his associates, he was unpredictable, easy to fly into rages, and prone to violence. An arriviste. Squared. He has also been described as a skilled politician, strategist and born double-crosser. Like a member of the senate or congress in Washington, he would use these to his advantage in his business, which was crime.</p>
<p>Which a lot of people think is not unlike politics.</p>
<p>In Chicago, he teamed up with a group of Sicilian gangsters, who were brothers. Terrible brothers apparently, because that is how they would become know-The Terrible Gennas-as they went about their business in the city’s Little Italy district located in the near west side on and around Taylor Street. Arriving at various dates from 1906 onwards, from their origins in Marsala, south-west Sicily, they ran coffee shops, saloons, billiard halls and blind pigs-illegal drinking dens.</p>
<p>Operating as their own gang, they were loosely connected to Al Capone and his mob.</p>
<p>During Prohibition they became masters in the business of distilling and selling corn sugar alcohol. Constantly at war with their competitors and enemies, they are gradually eliminated, one by one. Tony is the last of three sibling killings in consecutive months, his in July 1925. The others give up and retire, to die of natural causes.</p>
<p>The year following Tony Genna’s murder, Dominic Di Ciolla is also gone from Chicago and reappears on the west coast. In Los Angeles. Why he moved here rather than say New York or some other major city closer to the action in the eastern states, has never been explained. Maybe he had connection or an introduction to the players in the city of the angels. Maybe after years in Chicago he just wanted sunshine most of the time.</p>
<p>Arriving with a wife, Elizabeth Pinto, and a baby son, he started his “legitimate” working career as a butcher. He gathered together a group of similar Chicago ex-pats and social misfits, and it seems, went after a slice of the local enterprises revolving around the liquor business. Prohibition had been in force as a federal act for six years, and would last another seven, so there was a lot of opportunities for those prepared to risk importing or creating and selling alcohol, as the demand would always exceed the supply. At some stage he and his family move into a house at 3021 West Boulevard in West Adams, one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. Two more children will arrive in the years ahead.</p>
<p>By the time of his arrival in Southern California, there were close to 20,000 Italians living in the greater Los Angeles area and there was a man allegedly in charge of the Italian Mafia operating here, called Joseph Ardizzone.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12188260867,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12188260867?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="679" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Joe Ardizzone</strong></em></p>
<p>From Palermo Province in Sicily, Ardizzone arrived in the US late in the 19th century, settling first in Louisiana, before moving to California. His father and some brothers had preceded him so there was a family base to welcome him. He was soon coming into dispute with a group of Italians already based there, called Matranga who ran a mob called The College Park Gang. Although distant cousins, they were at loggerheads for some reason, and on July 2, 1906, he shot and killed one of their allies, a man called George Maisano, at about six in the evening on the corner of Avenue 19 and Main Street.</p>
<p>Maisano lived nearby at 1822 Darwin Avenue, an area so notorious it become known as “Shotgun Alley.”</p>
<p>It was also home to Osario ‘Sam Matranga,’ shot-gunned to death as he drove into the garage of his house at number 1837. His wife found him in the early hours sitting in the car, engine running, minus most of his head.</p>
<p>We do not know for certain what triggered the Maisano killing.</p>
<p>It may have been a personal beef or related to the criminal activities of warring factions.</p>
<p>Some sources claim it revolved around a dispute which was mediated by one Giuseppe Cuccia, a well-known and respected farmer, who found in favor of Ardizzone. Hardly surprising as they were cousins, although some sources claim they were uncle and nephew. Maisano swore revenge on Cuccia so Ardizzone killed him, then left town. On the lam for eight years. Almost certainly hiding in plain sight.</p>
<p>The Ardizzones, Matrangas and Cuccias were from the same area centered around Monreale and Pianna dei Greci which lie a few miles west of Palermo City. Mafia hot spots for generations. They were all also distant cousins.</p>
<p>The Mafia of Sicily is filled with familial families within criminal families. First cousin marriages in some areas was the norm rather than the exception. Early Mafia clans were dominated by the same groups of related members. Fathers, sons, nephews and cousins. Lots of cousins.</p>
<p>Killing Maisano didn’t help Cuccia, who was shot dead three months later on North Main Street, by a gunman riding a bicycle. The shooter, brandishing a revolver, was never identified, (although the main suspect was Antonio Matranga aka Tony Schino one of the leaders of the College Park Gang,) so we don’t know for sure that is why Cuccia went down. Possible. Always possible. Almost certainly the first drive-by shooting by a cyclist in history.</p>
<p>Perhaps the only one.</p>
<p>Deadly as it was, there was a Keystone Cops element about the incident especially seeing as how Keystone Pictures, the producers of the Cops movies, was based in Edendale, just across Elysian Park, to the west.</p>
<p>For the first twenty or so years from 1900 onwards, there is much coming and going between various criminal cabals in the Los Angeles area and bodies falling with a metronome regularity. There are multiple gangs fighting for control of the spoils- booze, extortion, hi-jacking, gambling-all the good stuff that fills the pages of the crime writers journals. There is probably the Mafia in some form or another although it is difficult to pin down with any real certainty just who this might be and who is running what with whom.</p>
<p>It looked something like this:</p>
<p>Ardizzone arrives, establishes his base, works in the fruit and vegetable business, starts working on his gang credentials. After killing Maisano, he is eventually indicted for the crime but the case is dismissed due to lack of witnesses. A not usual outcome in these kind of murders. Years are passing, things changing. He gets married, buys a ranch, presumably becomes more than a little wealthy.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12188261655,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12188261655?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="350" /></a>Into the picture comes another gangster, Vito Di Giorgio (right).</p>
<p>Born in Palermo Province, he moves to America, perhaps in 1904, living first in New York. With his cousin, Giuseppe Morello, a man who would become infamous in the years ahead as perhaps the leader of New York’s first Mafia clan. By 1909, Vito and Maria Cristoforo marry, and in due course, have four children and are living in New Orleans. He runs a grocery shop front end, and does lots of bad stuff on the side. Then, as they almost all seem to do, he ups stakes and moves to Los Angeles sometime before 1921. They settle in a house on East 21 street, in central LA. Somehow he become the boss of the Mafia. His number two man is Rosario Di Simone.</p>
<p>It’s claimed the appointments of Di Giorgio and Di Simone are managed by a Mafia national leadership, although it’s not easy to figure out who that would have been. There is no hard evidence that a formal board of governors existed at this time. Mafia clans emerged and operated as individual criminal conspiracies, and although there was much familial relationships between gangs nothing seemingly confirms there was a structured panel of managers until the Commission was formed following the end of the Castellammarese War** in New York in 1931.</p>
<p>We are pretty certain however that Vito is the boss because of the disclosures of Nicola Gentile. A Sicilian-born gangster, he had moved to America in 1903 and became a kind of Mafia Forrest Gump-everything, everywhere, always at once. In his memoir, published as a book in 1963, he refers to Di Giorgio as the <em>capo</em> of Los Angeles, a Sicilian name for boss.</p>
<p>In the spring of 1922, Vito is visiting Buffalo, New York, for a reason, either mob business or something else. On the way back to California he and an associate, Vincenzo Cammarata, stop off in Chicago, and are shot-gunned to death in a barber shop on Larrabee Street in the Little Italy section of the city. What happens next in Los Angeles is open to debate. Some claim, Di Simone takes over, others that Ardizzone slides back into position number one. He is also a suspect in the murder of Di Giorgio.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12188263465,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12188263465?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="621" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Rosario Di Simone</strong></em></p>
<p>For a man with the reputation of killing at least thirty victims, eliminating the man who stole your job, seems child’s play. Joseph is almost certainly number one by 1925, when Di Simone steps down and retires to live out his life as a normal citizen. Although he died in 1947, he wasn't finished with the mob. His second son, Frank, became the family boss in 1956 and ran it for eleven years. There is another interpretation on the Mafia leadership transformation that claims Di Simone stayed boss until his death, with his number two Jack Dragna then taking over</p>
<p>And then, just to confuse the picture even more, there is Marco Albori. A man with so many aliases he must have struggled at times to remember just who he really was, the law knew him, in LA at least, mainly as Albert Marco. </p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12188262256,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12188262256?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Marco Albori</strong></em></p>
<p>Born in Trieste, now Italy, but then part of the Austrian Kingdom, in April 1887, he claimed he arrived in New York in 1906. Moving first to San Francisco, he arrived in Los Angels in March, 1914 and slowly built up his own criminal enterprises revolving around brothels and boot-legging.</p>
<p>Working in conjunction with Charles H. Crawford, an influential political deal-maker, Mayor Cryer who ran perhaps the most corrupt city hall ever, from 1921 until 1928 and a police force almost bent out of shape most of the time, he seemingly had something going as the media referred to him as “the asserted king of Los Angeles so-called underworld.”</p>
<p>An interesting turn of phrase indicating the media’s perception of a scrambled and confusing criminal society operating across the city. The word racket dates back to 1765 although the term racketeer did not enter the popular lexicon until 1928 just as Dominic Di Ciolla was building up steam in his own criminal chicanery.</p>
<p>In June of 1928, Albori/Marco gets into a fight with two men in a bar in the seaside town of Venice shooting them and ends up sentenced to fourteen years in prison. Following his release in 1933, he is deported and his citizenship revoked in 1938, making him well and truly out of the running.</p>
<p>Before 1920, the mob in Los Angeles was perhaps, not so much an organization than groups of local criminals. A loose confederation. It’s possible The Volstead Act* was the glue that joined them together. Their biggest competitor it seems was the “Spring Street Clique”- opportunist grifters, scammers and dishonest businessmen- using City Hall to profit from the same kinds of business the underworld profited from. Sometimes in competition, other times cheek by jowl.</p>
<p>The police vice squad was on the take and mayors like the afore mentioned George E. Cryer often turned a blind eye to the nefarious activities going on around his office. The city was essentially controlled by an unseen, underworld kind of government. Tony Cornero, a well-known gangster and rum-runner allegedly once complained about not getting the police protection he had paid for.</p>
<p>The Hollywood movie business was almost half-way through its second decade when Di Ciolla arrived in Los Angeles. He found himself in the middle of a landscape that could easily have been scripted by one of the movers and shakers of the film industry.</p>
<p>Italians would congregate around a place in down-town that became known as Little Italy, centered on Ord and Broadway, and spreading north into Sonoratown, Dogtown, Lincoln Heights and other areas. Thousands crammed into a few square miles, corralled by poverty, stranded by language and culture, ignored by and mistrustful of the police, they were simply prey to hunters like Di Ciolla.</p>
<p>By the time he arrives, the hierarchy of the Mafia clan seems sorted and Ardizzone has become a successful business man with a ranch near Sunland in the Crescenta Valley, about twenty miles north of down town. He gets the nickname, “Iron Man” for the way he pulls together the various Sicilian gangs into some kind of structure. A respectable restaurateur and businessman he runs his bootleg empire from his ranch in the foothills off Mount Gleason Avenue, now the site of the local middle school. How he and the new guy in town from Chicago interacted has never been fully explained. </p>
<p>Domenic Di Ciolla was probably never a Mafioso. There is no evidence he was made into the Los Angeles Family, which would have to be approved by Ardizzone, as the boss, and the Chicago mob was not connected at the time he left Chicago. Al Capone, again according to Gentile, was “brought into” the Mafia Family ran by Giuseppe Masseria, which was based in New York. This was in 1930, four years after Di Ciolla left Chicago. It was part of a campaign in Masseria’s war against his enemies during The Castellammarese War.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/kill-the-chinaman-1" target="_blank"><strong>Kill The Chinaman.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Di Ciolla works to establish control over the illegal booze trade in the city’s North End, which is now Chinatown but then was the Italian enclave of the city. He gets arrested numerous times for this activity, the very first the year that he arrives in California. He’s also a suspect in at least two murders.</p>
<p>August Palumbo, age twenty-eight, is found in his quaintly named Willys Knight sedan outside 2912 Hillcrest Drive in West Adams on July 18, 1928. It’s a few hundred yard north of the Di Ciolla family house. Blasted in the head by a shotgun. It was posited that another car had forced him to pull up then bam! The police and the prohibition enforcement and vice detail round up twelve suspects in their hunt for the killer, including Dominic Di Ciolla. Authorities claim a gang war was under way and had been for weeks. At least seven dead, including Palumbo.</p>
<p>Although bound over for trial on August 10, a superior court judge, for some reason, signed an order releasing the suspects.</p>
<p>Palumbo may have been an associate of Albert Marco, and this may have been why he died. Working out reasons and consequences in these mob killings requires a doctorate in confusion-solving.</p>
<p>As part of this problem solving, police and sheriff’s department officers had been tailing a car for some weeks prior to the murder. Nothing like it seems to have been registered by local law enforcement. It had bullet proof glass and parts of the bodywork were armor plated. The vehicle was seen frequently in front of the home of a man called Mike Pupillo and a cafe on Western Avenue owned by him and another man called Vito Ardito. It’s been alleged they were imports from Chicago, brought in to boost Di Ciolla’s group.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12188262472,RESIZE_584x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12188262472?profile=RESIZE_584x" width="556" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Mike Pupillo</strong></em></p>
<p>Four months after the Palumbo killing, a mysterious explosion demolishes a house on the corner of Tellfaire and Filmore Streets in Pacoima, in the San Fernando Valley. Three men were rushed to the hospital-Di Ciolla, and Leo Gargano, along with Rocco Gravino-who will die from his injuries. All three were suspects in the Palumbo hit. It’s been claimed the attack on the property, owned by Antonio Martino, was an extortion plot that went wrong. </p>
<p>Initial reports indicated that the two survivors were to be charged with murder for Gravino’s death, although this went nowhere.</p>
<p>In April 1929, Di Ciolla along with Mike Pupillo and Vito Ardito went to trial for the murder of Palumbo, and were found not guilty on May 15. As he left the courthouse, Di Ciolla had less than two years to live.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}12188262700,RESIZE_584x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="12188262700?profile=RESIZE_584x" width="538" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Vito Ardito</strong></em></p>
<p>Whatever he was doing that final evening of his life, death would have the final word.</p>
<p>On a lonely and desolate country road, to the north-east of Van Nuys, he pulls over the car he is driving, and parks facing north. It is late evening early morning March 18 through 19, 1931. Leaving the headlights at full beam, he leaves the vehicle and walks forward to meet someone or some ones. His footprints are still visible in the dust the following morning. Whoever was there waiting, may have been drinking. The only thing found at the murder scene, apart from a not so good looking corpse, is a partly filled bottle of whiskey.</p>
<p>His body is found on Arleta Street, about five miles from the town, a few hundred feet north of the Van Nuys Boulevard according to a newspaper report. He had been blasted in the head by a shotgun leaving the body badly disfigured.</p>
<p>There is an Arleta Avenue, which does bisect the boulevard, but no street by this name listed on city maps. Maybe the reporter in the LA Times got his facts mixed up or the printer screwed up the plate. It wouldn’t be the first time that the news would be less than perfectly reported in a newspaper. Italian names are often misspelt, facts confused with theory or even fiction. Bias is founded on newspaper ownership. There’s a lot going on keeping the public informed, and not all of it helpful when its analyzed years after the event.</p>
<p>Within days, police arrest five men at an address-13252 Vaughn Street- in Pacoima, about three miles to the north and east of the murder scene. The detective leading the enquiry is certain at least one of these men is the killer, although in typical mob-murder fashion, the investigation goes nowhere. No forensics, no eye witnesses, not CCTV cameras on every street corner in those days. And not a snitch in sight to help the cops.</p>
<p>The suspects were released due to the efforts of their young attorney, one Sam Rummel, who ironically, is himself shot-gunned to death outside his home in December, 1950. He had become famous over the years as a mob lawyer for those in need in Los Angeles. LA’s version of Roy Cohen, one of New York’s most infamous attorneys.</p>
<p>On March 21st, two days later, another body is found. This one in a ditch. In Downey, thirty miles to the south and east of the scene of Di Ciolla’s murder. We don’t know if this was linked into the killing of Dominic. It’s possible.</p>
<p>That evening, Ardizzone and a man called Jimmy Basile had visited the home of De Simone for dinner. Later, driving home, their car is overtaken and multiple shots are fired at the vehicle from three men wielding sawn-off shotguns. Ardizzone is seriously wounded but survives, Jimmy not so much. He’s the one in the ditch.</p>
<p>What was happening here is another Fabergé Egg kind of thing. Opening one simply reveals another, identical. Some sources claim the real target of this attack is Ardizzone and Jimmy is collateral damage. That the killers were part of his own crime family after the boss for reasons unknown. Others, that the shooters were part of DiCiolla’s group, which also ironically seems to have included Basile, out for revenge, and that poor Jimmy was not meant to get hit. It’s even been suggested Joe himself shoots Jimmy, and then, just like that, a group of killers arrive after him.</p>
<p>The law it seems believed Ardizzone had a dispute with Basile and his partner in the bootleg business, Di Ciolla. These two had invested $1,000 in a "still" to start making alcohol. Ardizzone tried to move in but was rejected. It was alleged he told Di Ciolla that he had killed 30 men and he would make Di Ciolla the thirty-first-if the partners didn't "cut him in." This information presumably came from an informant and was covered in a special investigation on organized crime at state government level.***</p>
<p>Investigators believed the boss was the killer of Basile, taking him for a ride, which of course he was, after dining with him and others that night.</p>
<p>Whatever and whoever, it seems that seven months later all things would pass.</p>
<p>Early in the morning of October 15, Joe Ardizzone left his home in a dark blue 1930 Ford coupe. Formally dressed for the journey in a suit, shirt, tie and fedora, he’s also carrying a .41 caliber revolver. His wife, Elsie, the former Miss Ellenberger, remembered waving him off, and watching as he stopped the car and picked up a man standing on a street corner. Then he was gone, for good.</p>
<p>His journey was to the ranch of a cousin, another Cuccia, this one Joe, in Etiwanda, about fifty miles east. He was going to pick up yet another cousin, Frank Borgia, who had recently arrived from Italy. The police searched the route for a week, but found nothing.</p>
<p>It was speculated he had been murdered and his body buried somewhere in the endless deserts in this northern area of the Los Angeles basin. He was a big man for a Sicilian, five ten, over two hundred pounds and armed. It’s easy to assume he did not go quietly into whatever night awaited him. </p>
<p>His brother Frank, who lived in Lincoln Heights, told the police officer who interviewed him, “Don’t bother looking for enemies. It will be one of his friends that did it.”</p>
<p>In a barbarous cruelty to verbs, they were “exiting” him.</p>
<p>Police have suspects, and arrest Antonio Bartolotta aka Tony Bruno, Antonio Trapani and a man called Mazzola, on December 3, and as usual, nothing develops. The suspects are just that, nothing more. Its was also suggested that one of his killers was his cousin Frank Borgia, who was himself, three years later already in prison for conspiracy to violate the internal revenue laws.</p>
<p>Seven years later Ardizzone’s wife declared him legally dead.</p>
<p>Whether she knew about her husband’s criminal activities will never be known. Secrets and lies bind families together like the chains in the building block of DNA. She will live another fifty-six years until her death at the age of eighty-nine.</p>
<p>They had married when she was just sixteen, on Boxing Day in 1914, and he was almost twice her age. They have a son and a daughter. A seemingly perfect family within a Venn overlap of another kind of family linking so much violence it can be hard to comprehend.</p>
<p>Someone once said the bad moments in life will pass. Even the good moments will pass. This is our existence. Ardizzone and the men who travelled his highways probably thought of themselves as deal makers and businessmen. Violence, intimidation and murder was simply part of doing business. They lived in a parallel universe to the rest of society, governed by their own rules and regulations.</p>
<p>Another wife, Elizabeth Pinto Di Ciolla and her children would also live long and hopefully fruitful lives, unlike the husband and father, who found out how short and deadly it is for those who go by night.</p>
<p><em>* The Volstead Act, officially known as The National Prohibition Act, was an act of the 66th United States Congress designed to execute the 18th Amendment (ratified January 1919) which established the prohibition of alcoholic drinks. Passed in October 1919, it came into effect January 16, 1920.</em></p>
<p><em>** The Castellammarese War was a period of intense conflict between various Mafia-type gang factions in the greater New York area in 1930 through 1931.</em></p>
<p><em>*** State of California Special Crime Study Commission on Organized Crime, Sacramento. January, 1953.</em></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong><em>Acknowledgement:</em></strong></span></p>
<p><em>My thanks to crime historians, Tom Hunt, Richard Warner, Justin Cascio and J. Michael Niotta for their extensive research and biographies on LA’s underworld, The Los Angeles Times, Foothill Reader, and all the websites that dipped in their ten cents worth.</em></p>
<ul>
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Sicilian Blood: The Produce War in Palermo
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/sicilian-blood-the-produce-war-in-palermo
2023-06-09T05:05:00.000Z
2023-06-09T05:05:00.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/11521116879?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>According to Giuseppe Montalbano, a deputy in the Regional Parliament, “Sicilians are by nature delinquents, all mafiosi or tending to mafiosi.” To him, “the mafia constituted an occult middle class with its fingers in every social stratum, imposing on the aristocracy while intimidating the peasant.” *</p>
<p>Late, thirty minutes before midnight, on August 22, 1956, Nino Cottone was dead.</p>
<p>History reminds us to tell the truth, then at times, leads us down dark alleys infested with deceit and fabrication. Sorting out the fact from the fiction is an endless puzzle that faces investigation into the Mafia history of Sicily. The brutal killing of a man outside his home in a small town on the outskirts of Palermo was a last act in a drama over oranges and lemons and mandarins.</p>
<p>Like so many of his peers, his end was violent, planned, and engineered for a purpose.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}11521192279,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="11521192279?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="280" /></a>In the endless, internecine wars within the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview" target="_blank">Mafia</a>, which have prevailed as long as its existence, the murder of Antonino Cottone (right) and the killings of others linked into the dispute over control of Palermo’s fruits and vegetable market, was an episode in a never-ending story as violent men used violent means to establish control over their territories.</p>
<p>Power, money and prestige, the three pillars that have always supported the structure of the Mafia, will drive the narrative in the life and death of a less-well know figure in Sicily’s criminal underworld. Although he was only fifty-two at his death, Cottone had packed a lot into his lifetime.</p>
<p>Born in Villabate in 1904, he was destined for a Mafia life, almost by default. The Cottones had been part of the criminal substructure in the town for generations. One by this name was the boss in the 1890s, according to the famous Sangiorgi Report.**</p>
<p>Another family member, Andrea, would be a victim over a hundred years later in 2002, as he played a losing hand in yet another mob struggle for power.</p>
<p>Nino was one of thousands rounded up in the great anti-Mafia campaign of 1924-1929 under the direction of Cesare Mori, which was supposed to destroy the mob and almost did, although he survived to live another day.</p>
<p>One of his family, perhaps Antonino, or his father, Vincenzo, was confirmed as the boss in 1937 by Melchiorre Allegra, a Mafioso from Castelvetrano, arrested in a major attack on the organization carried out by The Inspectorate General. Another Andrea, was the family’s <em>consigliere</em> or counsellor in this period in the late 1930s.***</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/when-the-music-changed-destroying-the-sicilian-mafia-again" target="_blank"><strong>When the Music Changed. Destroying the Sicilian Mafia. Again.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Villabate has a long history of Mafia connections, even though it had only about 8,000 citizens in the 1950s. A Mafioso from the town, Giuseppe Fontana, was almost certainly involved in the murder of one of Sicily’s leading citizens, Emanuele Notarbartolo, a former head of The Bank of Sicily. <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-original-new-york-mafia-family-boss-giuseppe-profaci" target="_blank">Giuseppe Profaci</a>, a clan member and family friend of Cottone, left the town in the early 1920s, emigrated to New York and became head of one of the city’s five Mafia families. The town may also have been the home to the first Mafia family to produce a pentito, a government informant, in the 1870s.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/emanuele-notarbartolo-the-man-who-fell-from-the-train-and-the-dar" target="_blank"><strong>Emanuele Notarbartolo, the man who fell from the train, and the dark heart of Italy</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Following the end of World War Two, the military government appointed Nino the mayor of Villabate. He was on the surface, a butcher, running a retail shop in a town with seven others, and yet somehow, he was eminently more successful. He owned land and properties. A man of substance in a place filled with peasants, who would bow to him and touch his hand as he walked down the street, calling him <em>u patre nostra</em>, “our heavenly father.” Their benefactor, who ruled their community by offering protection from threats that he himself created.</p>
<p>The term “father” is one a Mafioso was fond of in Sicily, and adopted by Michele Navarra, boss of Corleone, Genco Russo of Mussomeli and the fearsome Sacco Vanni of Camporeale to name a few.</p>
<p>A famous Sicilian author, Leonardo Sciascia, once wrote, “The silence of the honest and the dishonest will always protect the Mafioso.”</p>
<p>His contacts within the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview" target="_blank">Sicilian Mafia</a> extended to the man who was allegedly the big boss of all bosses - Calogero Vizzini - whose domain was in central Sicily in Villalba, in the province of Caltanissetta. It was claimed whenever he travelled to Palermo, he would always stop on route, to meet and greet Cottone.</p>
<p>Rumors circulated Nino was working with cattle rustlers (<em>abigeato</em> was a major activity by the mob in rural Sicily) connected to a young and very dangerous Mafioso from the town of Corleone. His name was <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of" target="_blank">Luciano Leggio</a>, making his own way in the honored society.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/la-primula-rossa-the-story-of" target="_blank"><strong>Primula Rossa.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>This was how butchers could avoid the commercial costs of legitimate supply chains and undercut their competitors. Cottone allegedly took part in illegal activities, including cigarette smuggling, trafficking immigrants, and extortion. A well-rounded criminal, who also had excellent political connections at both local and state level.</p>
<p>An internet site, highly regarded by Mafia historians, claims that Antonino Cottone moved to America in the 1930s. It claims:</p>
<p>“COTTONE-ANTONINO 1904 Villabate, Sicily /USA?</p>
<p>Alias: - Nino</p>
<p>Relations: - Profaci brothers [?].</p>
<p>The Cottone family were related to the Profacis in Villabate, and both were active in the local Mafia cosca. Nino Cottone was probably inducted in Sicily, and came to America in the 1930s. He worked for <a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-original-new-york-mafia-family-boss-giuseppe-profaci" target="_blank">Joseph Profaci</a>, in his Olive Oil business, and was accepted into the Family. An illegal immigrant, the authorities caught up with him and he was deported back to Sicily (date unknown). Became active again in the local cosca, he rose to head it by the 1950s. He became involved in a conflict, and was killed in 1956. His sons were also members of the Villabate cosca.”****</p>
<p>Various Italian web sites and legal documents such as parliamentary hearings and investigations into the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview" target="_blank">Mafia</a> also mention this, although it's difficult to pin down exact details about Cottone’s movements during this period.</p>
<p>There are reports that when he returned to Sicily, he set up a heroin ring and exported the product to Profaci hidden inside hollowed-out oranges. Again, trying to confirm this is hard. Of the five Mafia clans in New York, Profaci’s was apparently the least involved in drug trafficking as a revenue creation.</p>
<p>Historical records show Cottone was initiated into Freemasonry through the Lux Masonic Lodge of Palermo in 1944 and stayed a member until his death. A mob boss in Sicily is always a Mason. Through this connection, they mix with other men of power - politicians, business people, high church - the institutions who control the destinies of many.</p>
<p>His business and criminal activities began long before that date; when he moved to America and returned is still unknown. Investigators realized tracking his criminal progress, that he was creating links with public officials, administrators and financial institutions, while contesting rival gangs fighting for a share of the spoils. Above all, he would network his political opportunities.</p>
<p>Both the local mafia and those overseas because of his kinship with the gangsters of New York feared and revered him an Italian parliamentary report claims. He was allegedly a friend and working associate of Charlie Luciano, the infamous gangster deported from America in 1946 back to Sicily, his birthplace.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/luckys-luck-how-charlie" target="_blank"><strong>Lucky's Luck: How Charlie Luciano Got Out of Jail and Passed Go</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Nino Cottone was definitely in Villabate when a war broke out between two families.</p>
<p>To the south of Palermo City, under the cliffs of Mount Grifone, communes and settlements here have felt the odor of the Mafia for generations. Three in particular, feature often in records of violence and sudden death: Ciaculli, Croceverde-Giardina, and Villabate.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}11521205699,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="11521205699?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a><strong><em>Photo: Ciaculli.</em></strong></p>
<p>An area famous for its citrus orchards, for generations, it has been a battleground for warring factions and inter-family disputes. Two different groups with the same name, Greco, although only distantly related, began killing each other in 1939. The name is possibly the only common denominator connecting the families.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}11521224683,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="11521224683?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="350" /></a>A Salvatore Greco is listed in the Sangiorgi report as the capo mafia of Ciaculli. The family controlling the <em>borgata</em> or village from the nineteenth century onwards through management of the <em>guardiani</em> (rural watchmen) and irrigation systems, <em>abigeato</em> (cattle-rustling) and smuggling and racketeering involved in the production and trade of citrus fruits for local, national and transatlantic markets.</p>
<p>Another Salvatore (right), called “The Senator” later in life, is the son of boss Giuseppe, known as Piddu who headed the group in Croceverde, and marries Maria, a daughter of Cottone, a common method used by Mafia groups to keep their families in The Family.</p>
<p>Salvatore's brother, Michele, was well known in the Sicilian Mafia from 1970s-1990s, leading their governing body, The Cupola.</p>
<p>Part of the endless puzzle mentioned earlier is trying to make sense of the names of the leading figures who move through mob stories like endless conundrums designed to frustrate and confuse us. In Sicily, they often name male children after fathers and grandfathers, allowing for multiple repetitions within the same family groups.</p>
<p>In 1947, Joe Profaci surfaced again, reportedly spending a month in Sicily, likely in October, and supposedly used his influence in resolving the conflict between the two groups who agreed to settle their differences.</p>
<p>When all was done and dusted, they shared the spoils of war between them. The struggle appeared to be a family-type vendetta, but was more likely triggered to gain control of citrus orchards, futures trading, trucking contracts and wholesale markets in eastern Palermo.</p>
<p>In the Mafia, money trumps everything, every time. Except power.</p>
<p>The ‘fruit of death’ is an idiom pointing to a situation in which dire consequences or outcomes result from a single event or decision. One wrong decision can lead to disaster. For Antonino Cottone, that will be a decision which the city council of Palermo will make in the early 1950s.</p>
<p>In January, 1955, they moved the city’s <em>mercato outofrutticolo</em>, the fruit and vegetable market, from its site on Via Guglielmo in Zisa to a new location off Via Duca Della Verdura in Aquasanta, near the port of Palermo.</p>
<p>Within months, the killings began.</p>
<p>The Grecos of Ciaculli and Croceverde and the Villabate Mafia had long claimed rights over the produce market and, with the move to Aquasanta, the power base shifted. The local Mafia cosca believed their new neighbor was there's for the taking and started tilting the scales accordingly.</p>
<p>Two gunmen shot dead Gaetano Galatolo, the Mafia boss of Aquasanta, in May 1955, while he was carrying out business in the newly opened complex, which may have been the first act of violence in the war over control of the market.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}11521244852,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="11521244852?profile=RESIZE_400x" width="350" /></a>One of his killers was a man he knew well, Michele Cavataio (right), one of his own gang. An ex-cab driver with a psychopathic habit of killing all his problems, he would turn the Mafia on its ear in 1962, starting what historians call “The First Mafia War,” and then seven years later, when he became himself a victim of mob violence.</p>
<p>Mafia wars have been a part of their culture since day one. The early 1960s confrontation was simply a continuation of the struggle to gain absolute power.</p>
<p>Cavataio may have been using the dispute over the market as a way of fighting his way to the top of the tree, or he may have been in league with the opposition. We will never know, although either presumption is logical in the twisted, dark maze of Mafia mentality.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-s-viale-lazio-massacre" target="_blank"><strong>The Viale Lazio Massacre.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Galatolo, his brothers and kin, were prominent members of the Mafia in the Palermo area with a long history of criminal malfeasance, wielding power through their control of Palermo’s port and docks. Generations of their family have continued to carry on the business of crime within the biggest city in Sicily, scattering bodies in their wake. Corinthian farmers sowing seeds of death.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/for-those-that-want-me-dead" target="_blank"><strong>For Those That want Me Dead.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>In June, 1956, police were called to a body found on the Corso Vittoria Emanuele in Villabate. It sprawled in the dirt in front of a house at number 854, directly opposite the home of Cottone. Identified as Luigi Paparopoli, age 44, he was the brother-in-law of Giuseppe Greco.</p>
<p>They found a pistol in his right hand, and it seemed he had committed suicide, apparently shooting himself twice in the head, right temple. Except there were no powder burns. No smoke soiling or tattooing, always found when a gun is held close to the skull. Paparopoli, a produce merchant, was closely involved with the Grecos and Cottone in the fruit and vegetable market control.</p>
<p>In March, someone shot and killed Francesco Greco at his home in Torrelunga, a few kilometers north of Villabate. He was another merchant connected to the Ciaculi/Villabate mob.</p>
<p>The newspapers reported that the Aquasanta Mafia, led by Cavataio, and their allies, the Grecos, finally resolved the dispute after murdering over eighty men over almost two years.. Nino Cottone was one of them.</p>
<p>His time came at the end of a long, hot day in August.</p>
<p>He owned two properties on via Corso Vittorio Emanuele, one in the town and the other, further south, more into the countryside. This one had vast citrus fruit groves as part of its estate. Cottone had purchased it for 47 million lire, about US$ 25,000, a significant amount of money in those days for a retail butcher. Over $300,000 in today’s currency. The annual average income in 1956 Sicily was equivalent to US$128.</p>
<p>About 11.15 on this evening, he leaves his house in town and drives his grey Fiat station wagon to the other property. One of its boundaries butted into a garage belonging to Giuseppe Pitarisi. It was closed, but not unoccupied. Sometime that evening, men had broken into the building through the rear door, and position themselves along the tray of a lorry parked against the inside wall which faced the Cottone property. Along this wall were multiple ventilation slots.</p>
<p>An article in Time Magazine tells us:</p>
<p>“One night last week prosperous Nino Cottone, 52, returning home late, gently backed his little Fiat station wagon into the drive of his summer villa. He had just locked the car when he was bowled along the driveway by two streams of machine-gun bullets. As his family and friends poured out of their houses, Nino painfully lifted up his bullet-ridden body and stumbled to the threshold of his villa, where, leaning against the door, he died on his feet as a good Sicilian should.”</p>
<p>It was a lot more prosaic.</p>
<p>As Nino left his vehicle, turning to lock it, the men in the garage presented shotguns through the ventilation slots, letting loose a massive volley of gunfire. Investigators will find 36 empty cartridge cases scattered across the garage floor and one, fully loaded unfired, J6 buckshot shell that had slipped from a cartridge belt or a pocket.</p>
<p>Riddled with the shot, Cottone dies instantly. Neighbors alerted by the noise rush to the scene. One is Doctor Rafael Schillaci, but all he could do is confirm the victim was dead. The killers disappeared into the night, down roads or across fields. The murder has never been solved. A textbook Mafia hit by <em>boias</em> (killers) who knew their trade.</p>
<p>The following day, while driving a borrowed mule-drawn cart down a dusty lane in Resuttana, a village in the north-west of Palermo, someone shot dead Angelo, brother of Gaetano Galatolo.</p>
<p>If this is about scoring dibbing rights in the Palermo fruit and vegetable market, the circle is almost complete. There will be bodies falling and disappearing in the months ahead until Cavataio and the Grecos declare a truce and work out a timeshare of their extortion ambitions.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}11521275696,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="11521275696?profile=RESIZE_710x" width="710" /></a>The evening Angelo dies, back in Villabate, shots are fired at Giovanni Di Perri, age 37, as he stands outside the family garage. Badly wounded, he survives, but kismet awaits him. On Christmas Day, 1981, he is one of three men killed in what becomes known as “The Bagheria Massacre.” He is then the current boss of Villabate Mafia and a victim in the great Mafia War of the 1980s.</p>
<p>In an endless session of stop, kill, reset, Mafia clans regenerate like salamanders in their epimorphic restoration.</p>
<p>Back in 1956, at the funeral of Nino Cottone, his brother had sworn revenge against the Di Perri family who he claims masterminded the murder of the man hundreds farewelled, including many politicians from local and state agencies. By government estimate, the Mafia controlled 500,000 plus votes on the island. The Don of Villabate had himself, had power over more than two thousand in his area. At election time, they ration their votes, generally to the Christian Democratic Party. In return, favours given were always favours received.</p>
<p>Following the Don’s murder, in mid-September, state police and carabinieri forces launch “Operation Rateni” swooping on the towns of San Giuseppe Jato, Sancipirello, Rocella and Villabate rounding up dozens of suspects.</p>
<p>It had little effect.</p>
<p>Two weeks later Girolamo Ingrassia, a key figure at the produce market and ally of Cottone, was at the bus stop on Piazza Figurella, in Villabate at 2.30 pm. People filled the area attending the market day. Two men approached him and shot him dead using a shotgun and pistol. Other men using sub-machine guns lay covering fire down, hitting a young girl leaving the bus.</p>
<p>The gunmen showed no concern for the safety of the crowd as they sprayed deadly bullets, injuring the woman and endangering over 200 people.. Investigators believed the killers, who were part of the Aquasanta Mafia clan, committed the crime with no concern for the safety of the crowd. However, as almost always, the authorities failed to bring anyone to justice for the crime.</p>
<p>It is almost seventy years since Antonino Cottone stepped out of his little gray Fiat and into his own special hallway of darkness.</p>
<p>“Far from being solely or above all the fruit of a bloody and uncontrolled instinct or of a marginal subculture, Mafia murder is mainly pre-meditated murder, it is inspired by strategic logic.”</p>
<p>These words from Chinnici and Santino tell us everything about the power over life and death men like Cottone dispensed and received. Judge Cesare Terranova, assassinated by Mafia hit-men in Palermo in 1979, claimed: “The myth of the Mafioso as a brave, generous man of honor must be dispelled...willing to go to any length to save himself from danger, to avoid the just rigor of the law, and the consequence of his roguery.”</p>
<p>As a magistrate who had studied them, prosecuted them and died at their hands, he knew how easy it was to spill Sicilian blood.</p>
<p>Footnote to this story. As recently as 2018, Palermo’s Anti-mafia Investigations Directorate (DIA) confiscated assets worth more than 150 million Euros from two brothers, who had for years controlled Mafia infiltration of the city’s largest fruit and vegetable market.</p>
<p>Angelo and Giuseppe Ingrassia both 61 years of age, were linked into Cosa Nostra, and using a front company, exercised hidden control over the sale of produce in the market on behalf of the Galatolo clan of Aquasanta, the DIA’s investigations found.</p>
<p>Although the music of the Mafia has transformed over the last thirty years, the melody stays the same.</p>
<p><strong>*</strong> Giuseppe Montalbano (19 June 1895–29 October 1989) was an Italian politician, born in the province of Agrigento.</p>
<p><strong>**</strong> Ermanno Sangiorgi was the police chief in Palermo whose investigation and subsequent reports revealed the existence of Mafia clans and their crimes in the eastern Palermo Province between 1898 and 1900. It was the first in-depth study of this criminal phenomena that had plagued Sicily for decades. Like all prophetic reports exposing the embarrassing truth about Italy, politics and organized crime, they filed it away in archives, and it remained unknown until discovered a hundred years later.</p>
<p><strong>***</strong>Allegra, after his arrest, confessed to his position and details about the Mafia in a statement that ran to 26 pages on July 23, 1937 at the police headquarters in Alcamo, Trapani Province. The first time a made member of the organization had disclosed such details. However, the document was filed away and not published until 1962 by <em>l’Ora</em>, the Palermo daily newspaper. The Mafia kidnapped and murdered Mauro De Mauro, the journalist who disclosed the confession, in 1970. No one has ever found his remains..</p>
<p><strong>****</strong>mafiamembershipcharts.blogspot.com January 16, 2016. Hosted by Bill Feathers.</p>
<p><strong><span style="text-decoration:underline;">Sources:</span></strong></p>
<p><em>The-Mafia-and-Capitalism.-An-Emerging-Paradigm-Schneider-Schneider. 2011. Sociologia.</em></p>
<p><em>Marino, Giuseppe Carlo. Storia della Mafia. Newton Compton, 2008.</em></p>
<p><em>Allen, Edward J. Merchants of Menace. Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Illinois, 1962.</em></p>
<p><em>Cawthorne, Nigel. The History of the Mob. Arcturus, London, 2012.</em></p>
<p><em>Sterling, Claire. Thieves World. Simon and Schuster, London, 1994.</em></p>
<p><em>Chinnici, Giorgio and Santino, Umberto. La Violenza programmata. Franco Angeli, Milano, 1991.</em></p>
<p><em>Time. September 3 1956.</em></p>
<p><em>Cambridge. Org. Hands over the city. The Mafia, L Óra and the sack of Palermo.</em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.piolatorre.it">https://www.piolatorre.it>pdf-pubblicazioni</a></em></p>
<p><em>Session CXXI Wednesday October 10,1956. Parliamentary Report 3071, Sicilian Regional Assembly.</em></p>
<p><em>Commissione Parlamentare D’Inchiesta Sul Fenomeno Della Mafia in Sicilia (Legge 20 Dicembre 1962, N. 1720)</em></p>
<p><em>Palermo Today. May 20, 2021. Sandra Figlirolo. Murder of Andrea Cottone.</em></p>
<p><em>https//www.senato.it</em></p>
<p><em>Palermo Today. August 14, 2018.</em></p>
<p><em>La Stampa 25 August, 1956.</em></p>
<p><em>I’Ora 23 August, 1956.</em></p>
<p><em>Giornale di Sicilia 24 August, 1956.</em></p>
<ul>
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When the Music Changed. Destroying the Sicilian Mafia. Again.
https://gangstersinc.org/blog/when-the-music-changed-destroying-the-sicilian-mafia-again
2023-01-13T08:44:56.000Z
2023-01-13T08:44:56.000Z
Gangsters Inc.
https://gangstersinc.org/members/GangstersInc
<div><img src="https://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/10930073681?profile=RESIZE_400x&width=400"></div><div><p>By Thom L. Jones for <a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank">Gangsters Inc.</a></p>
<p>Down a narrow alleyway off the Via Alloro, in The Kalsa District of Palermo City, is a building that was once a convent. Built in 1601, it now houses the state archives, over a million documents, files, manuscripts, papers that tell the history of Sicily over the last five hundred years. In among this mountain of historical resources, is a red-leather binder containing a report filled with densely packed information about a government campaign against the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview" target="_blank">Mafia</a>, that remained lost and forgotten to the public domain for seventy years. A story of a place and a time that seems far away and yet has been repeating itself, generation after generation, like an endless metronome.</p>
<p>The report covers the investigation of 175 suspects, during the period 1933 to 1938, accused of conspiracy to commit crimes. It runs to 179 pages, and refers to over 200 attachments which are filed individually by case, and as yet, not examined, or at least published.</p>
<p>This is what the report shows:</p>
<p>In the mid to late 1930s, the Italian government went to war against the Mafia for the second time in a decade.</p>
<p>In September 1926, the Italian Chamber of Deputies introduces a bill for the suppression of the <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview" target="_blank">Mafia in Sicily</a>. A career law enforcement officer and politician, the government appoints Cesare Mori, as prefect (the states representative in a province,) first to Trapani and then Palermo, supervising a massive campaign to arrest, charge and imprison known offenders. The operation receives a lot of media attention, in Italy and worldwide. Many of the guilty and a lot of the innocent go to prison, some exiled on islands off the coast of Sicily. Guilty or innocent, they all go into the same legal wood-chipper. Figures vary from 11,000 to 30,000. A number escape to Europe and the Americas in particular where they re-establish links with former Mafiosi who have already migrated during the great Italian diaspora and set up their own criminal families across the country.</p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10930073692,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="625" alt="10930073692?profile=RESIZE_710x" /></a><strong><em>Photo: Cesare Mori.</em></strong></p>
<p>Benito Mussolini had been the boss of Italy since 1922, creating the Fascist Party to support his political aspirations. It’s generally accepted that the attitude of a Sicilian mayor offended the Italian prime minister when he visited a small town called Pianna die Greci in May 1924 to inaugurate the opening of a new water-drainage system for the town and surrounding area. Water is one of the most precious assets on an island subject to extreme summer weather patterns. Whoever controls the water exercises power on a considerable scale, something a Mafia boss would understand only too well, which is why so many of them did.</p>
<p>The story goes that the mayor, Don Francesco Cuccia, also the local Mafia boss, chided Mussolini about all his bodyguards, inferring that as long as the prime minister was in his circle, his safety was a given. Mussolini, a dictator in the making, knew another one when he saw it, and thought enough is enough. However, the Mafia was on Mussolini’s radar as a vexation long before his visit to Sicily, and the confrontation with the mayor was simply confirmation of a problem that needed the fix.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10930075081,RESIZE_180x180{{/staticFileLink}}" width="144" alt="10930075081?profile=RESIZE_180x180" /></a>Mussolini told Cesare Mori, “The authority of the state must absolutely be re-established in Sicily. If the laws still in force hinder you, this will be no problem. We will draw up new laws…”</p>
<p>The first war against the Mafia was over by 1929, and that seemed that. Antonino Calderone, a Mafioso from Catania, claimed he was told as a child, “The music changed under Mussolini (right). The Mafia had a hard life.” In fact, not that bad. Many of the sentences handed down were for five or fewer years, and from the beginning of the 1930s, men were returning from prison or exile and re-building their crime family structures across Sicily.</p>
<p>The music would change again, one more time.</p>
<p>Although Mori “stripped and pruned the Mafia tree, its roots remained intact.” One significant driver for this was that it had imbedded many of its members in professional occupations, high social classes and political positions at both provincial and state level. Hiding behind opera masks of polished men, they assured society the worst of the criminal past was over, while quietly rebuilding the Mafia’s structure, ensuring its weakness became its strength while surreptitiously undermining the state. In <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/sicilian-cosa-nostra-overview" target="_blank">the Mafia land of Sicily</a> of the 1930s, you cannot see the boundaries, but those that needed them knew exactly where they lay. This lasagna of criminal conspiracy comprises layers of complicity and devious forces at work, creating dynamic paradigms of control, just as they had for generations past.</p>
<p>Giovanni Falcone, the famous magistrate killed by the Mafia in 1992, claimed, “There is always a new Mafia ready to supplant the old one.”</p>
<p>By 1933, it was either in place, or nearly there.</p>
<p>The state knew it had the problem of the Mafia and its control over law and order looming again on that island in the sun, but seemed to lack the urge to face it. As it had re-emerged from the Mori purge, it had become more dangerous, aligning with powerful forces in big business and politics.</p>
<p>However, in September, Italy created a special task force to investigate and report on criminal activity in twelve designated areas across Sicily, each reporting to a Palermo headquarters agency. The force comprises forty-eight officers, leading investigators from the Public Security police and the Carabinieri, the Italian Military Police, formed in 1814 by King Emmanuel of Sardinia. Officers of the State police and the Palermo Squadra Mobile (Flying Squad) created in 1931 were also engaged in some investigations.</p>
<p>This time, there will be little or no media publicity, at least generated locally. There would be too much embarrassment for Mussolini and his fascists to admit their campaign had failed to wipe out the enemy, first time around. As one writer claimed, “The Mori Operation turns out to be the most elaborate lie in the history of organized crime.”</p>
<p><em>The New York Times</em>, however, on November 20, 1937, headlined, “A Surge in Violence,” noting there had been eighty arrests in Sicily following police activity.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/behold-a-pale-horse-part-one" target="_blank"><strong>Behold A Pale Horse</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-right" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10930073494,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="300" alt="10930073494?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>The combined force, The Royal Inspectorate for Public Security for Sicily, will carry out operations in Sicily for almost four years, although a lot of its effort will concentrate in the Palermo Province, which historically has been home to the most concentration of Mafia clans. In charge of the enterprise will be Giuseppe Gueli (right), a police inspector general, appointed by Italy’s Chief of Police Arturo Bocchini, assisted by carabinieri Colonel Alessio De Lellis.</p>
<p>Gueli, a Sicilian, was a senior police officer who had served under Cesare Mori during the campaign against the Mafia in the 1920s, and he aimed his first campaign shots in the north-west of Sicily, in the Province of Trapani.</p>
<p>An area least-affected by the Mori purge, it was a dangerous region, plagued by stock-rustling, extortion, organized thieving and violent bandits. By 1924, Trapani was averaging 700 homicides a year. Then there was the Mafia!</p>
<p>Criminal groups controlled wide swathes of the rural districts, with intimidation extending into urban areas, resulting in the murder of Domenico Perricone on Jan 30, 1929. The mayor of Vita, a small mountain town near Salemi, he had run afoul of the local Mafia Boss, Salvatore Zizzo, with a predictable outcome.</p>
<p>As The Inspectorate slowly covers the island, they develop intelligence on the structure, activities and dynamics of the Mafia clans they investigate. The task force, in some ways, a precursor to today’s Ant-Mafia Directorate, the DIA, can operate with freedom across territorial boundaries, employing tactics not seen before in criminal investigations.</p>
<p>Sometimes, it is hard going and they are not averse to the odd bit of torture when trying to extract information from particularly stubborn prisoners. In 1938, a lawyer claims The Inspectorate responsible for the killing of his nephew, one Giuseppe Martino, under “heavy” questioning in the main Alcamo police station, but they declare that he in fact committed suicide. Suicide by cop, long before the term became popular.</p>
<p>They make arrests in Messina on the eastern seaboard of the island, discover over 250 Mafiosi operating in Caltanissetta Province, in the south, bring stability to the Trapani area and learn of a 300 strong livestock-smuggling ring network supplying the slaughterhouses of Palermo, that covers most of western Sicily controlled by Francesco Settana, Rosario Madonia and the notorious Pantuso brothers of Carini, Giovanni, Gaetano and Gaspare, reported as “unscrupulous hit men of the Mafia.”</p>
<p>Long before cigarette and drug smuggling became staples of Mafia income generation, there was <em>abigeato</em>, cattle rustling, a crime that had plagued Sicily since the 12th century. Between 1905 and 1910, there were over 3,000 convictions for stock theft, each year preceding the previous. Cattle theft, big or small on scale, would have needed Mafia approval.</p>
<p>The investigation officers also discover that Mafia families operating in the Agrigento area have close links to ones in and around Palermo. There is a communal bridge of some sort, allowing passage of information and people between the two areas, not that easy with limited transport facilities in a journey of over one hundred miles across some of Sicily’s wildest and dangerous terrain.</p>
<p>In the summer of 1937, Inspectorate agents from their Alcamo base arrest Melichiorra Allegra, a doctor who runs a medical practice in Castelvetrano, a town in Trapani Province, which has Mafia roots dating back generations. The current Boss of Bosses, <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-ghost-boss-of-the-sicilian-mafia-police-step-up-hunt-for-mess" target="_blank">Matteo Messina Denaro</a>, who has been on the run for almost thirty-years is based here or somewhere near, and authorities currently consider the town the tax-evasive capital of Italy.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/the-ghost-boss-of-the-sicilian-mafia-police-step-up-hunt-for-mess" target="_blank"><strong>The Ghost Boss of the Sicilian Mafia: Police step up hunt for Messina Denaro, Italy's most wanted fugitive</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Made into a Mafia family in 1916, they introduced Allegra to fellow members who range from fish-mongers to Parliamentarians and aristocrats from long-established noble families. The law stores his file away in Palermo’s archives, but a journalist will discover and published it in <em>L‘ora</em>, the Palermo daily newspaper, in 1962. The man who publishes the story, Mauro De Mauro, will himself become a victim of the Mafia, who kidnap and murder him in September 1970.</p>
<p>Castelvetrano is also famous as the place where the notorious bandit Salvatore Giuliano dies in July 1950. His death, like much of his life, is a mystery. It’s alleged that he and his gang carried out the massacre of agricultural peasants and their families, who gathered to celebrate May Day 1947, near Portella dell Ginestra, just two miles to the south of Pianna die Greci. Eleven men, women and children die, and dozens injured.</p>
<p>Standing on the hill of Mount Pizzuta, looking down on the scene, there could have been a man who will play a major role in The Inspectorate investigation. He may well have helped in organizing the attack on behalf of political figures in Sicily and Rome, desperate to remove the power of the communist party, growing stronger in Sicily following the end of the second world war. He is one of the most interesting of the Mafia leaders who emerges following the great Mori purge.</p>
<p>His name is Ernesto Marasà and will come to figure as a major target in the investigation. Thought by law enforcement to be the youngest of three brothers, it turns out he is the eldest of four. Born like his siblings in Palermo, he avoids Mori’s campaign, slipping effortlessly under the radar. Like many formidable criminals in Sicily, he networks political allies and builds strong relationships with men of influence, creating a stronghold in Boccadifalco, a town midway between Monreale and Palermo.</p>
<p>Originally a <em>gabellotto</em>, a kind of estate manager, he and his brothers build a substantial business of land-holdings, livestock and citrus orchards and they are also running the local Mafia <em>cosca</em>, the family. He has been its boss since 1910. The Inspectorate will come to refer to him as <em>generalissimo</em>. The investigators rate his wealth in millions of lire. A measure of his power is that until the report emerged in 2007, we knew almost nothing about the brothers Ernesto, Francesco, and Antonino (the fourth brother is unknown in the report) and their place in the history of the Mafia. There are no photographs, newspaper reports, or any other government documents to lead us into their back stories. The Inspectorate are the ones who flush him out and discover his links into the politics of the Mafia and the other, equally deadly politics of affairs of the state.</p>
<p>Ernesto sets his sights on more than just local domination. His aim is to be the head of all the Mafia in Sicily. “By poising the political system, they carried out their shady criminal activities and stayed hidden in the shadow of baronial and princely coats of arms,” claims one statement about the brothers included in The Inspectorate Report.</p>
<p>Although the Mafia pledge of allegiance taken by all new recruits includes never cooperating with the law, evidence will emerge that Ernesto was prepared to feed information about his rivals to the police in both the Mori campaign and during the years of the inspectorate inquiry to help him remove his rivals. It’s alleged he may have been the source that leads authorities to arrest <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-sun-king-of-the-mafia" target="_blank">Vito Cascio Ferro</a> during the Mori expedition in the 1920s.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-sun-king-of-the-mafia" target="_blank"><strong>The Sun King of the Mafia</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>As investigators keep digging, they unearth one little gem of a case involving men from Boccadifalco.</p>
<p>Giovanni Battista and the brothers, Salvatore and Ignazio Taturi, leave the town and head for Palermo on foot. A distance of about four miles. There, they hang about and catch a bus south to Bagheria, where they meet with Salvatore Pelitteri, the obvious organizer of the caper. The four men head back north to Brancaccio, a southern suburb of Palermo where they commit a robbery at the premises of one Eleonora De Luca. This far removed, it all seems rather quaint, following a bunch of low-life villains on one of their daily jaunts in criminal malfeasance doing the hard-yards on foot or by public transport. Hardly the expected image of organized delinquents at work. A much more modest kind of Mafia than we think of today.</p>
<p>There were, however, plenty of thugs and killers across the province of Palermo that will occupy the agents who are now unravelling cases that keep pointing them to new ones. They will find a feast of Fabergé Eggs, mainly out in the countryside. The outskirts to the west of Palermo City.</p>
<p>Pianna dei Colli (Plain of Hills) emerged and grew towards the end of the 18th century. A hinterland of Palermo City stretching from the seaboard in the north, down in a sweeping crescent to Bagheria, it becomes home to Palermo’s aristocracy, who builds summer residences and develops orchards and citrus groves and stock grazing pastures.</p>
<p>Small hamlets and communes emerge to house the share-croppers and laborers needed to work the estates. In 1861, over 10% of Palermitan live in these outlying communities. Six years later, during a hearing in May 1867, Giovanni Maurigi, advocate general of The Court of Cassation of Palermo, states: “Every village near Palermo has two or three bosses. They are involved in theft and illegal mediations. The authorities have often reached a compromise with the Mafia, and its members have grown proud and become emboldened by this.” Seventy years later, the problem has only become bigger and more intractable,</p>
<p>By 1930, the area between Monreale to the west, Tommaso Natale to the north and Bagheria to the south and east is home to 20 Mafia clans. At least three, Noce, Porta Nuova (within the boundaries of Palermo City) and Monreale had been targets for the Mori campaign that had ended in 1929.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10930074090,RESIZE_710x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="710" alt="10930074090?profile=RESIZE_710x" /></a>The region is a source of endless conflict between warring families, and one in particular will become a focus of both the law and Marasà.</p>
<p>As the agents of The Inspectorate examine reported crimes and trace suspects, they determine the structure of Mafia families, the territories they control and how they interact with each other. One suspect they arrest becomes of particular significance to their investigation. He is the first pentito, a man who will unburden himself to the law and open their eyes with his revelations. An informant to the law. The worse kind of sin a Mafioso can perpetrate.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-madman-of-the-mafia" target="_blank"><strong>The madman of the Mafia.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>His name is Salvatore Anello, and he is part of the family of Tommaso Natale. Although a Mafioso called Salvatore D’Amico had testified against his clan in Monreale in 1878, and Rosario La Mantia cooperated with the law in 1883, disclosing his part in the Mafia of Porto Montalato, an inner-city family that was the focus of the first major Mafia war in the 1870s, Anello is the first known made member to break the confession of <em>omerta</em>, the oath of secrecy in the 20th century.</p>
<p>Or perhaps not. That may have been another man, part of the same crime family as Anello, someone who wanted him gone, and so killed his protector, his uncle, Rosario Napoli, the boss in 1934, when turmoil was unfolding in this northern arc of the Pianna. It’s a complicated story, as is often the case when greed, jealousy and revenge form the principal ingredients. In there somewhere, is Ernesto Marasà doing his bit to make sure whatever the outcome, it will favour him and his ambitions.</p>
<p>Rosario Napoli had conflicted with Salvatore Cracolici for over ten years, whose enemies had murdered his brother on Napoli’s instructions. Cracolici and a man called Francesco Di Trapani, the boss of the Mafia clan of Pallavicino, have Napoli killed and take over his Mafia family. They then finger Anello for the crime, who turns to the law for help after being wrongly arrested and indicted for the murder of his uncle and godfather. There is a side-story involving an affair with his uncle’s wife which his enemies claim is why the murder took place. It runs like a soap opera, except in this one, the water is blood. This is towards the end of 1937.</p>
<p>Three months later, Cracolici is the one stepping forward to offer the police his help after they arrest him, and it’s suggested that he was the originator of the term <em>pentito</em>. He claims confession is an anchor of salvation, while posing as a victim of prosecution. Besides these two, The Inspectorate will, over the course of their investigation, enrol the help and support of another dozen men of honor who will find the urge to unburden themselves and become government witnesses, although in due course, they will all, either be dead or have recanted their testimony as the courts tie up the loose ends, almost eight years later.</p>
<p>Anello offers much detail and background on the Mafia as a criminal institution. He explains about the inauguration of men in each family, what they call <em>giuramento</em>: reading the oath of fealty, pricking a finger and sprinkling blood on an image of a saint as it burns in the hand. All are brothers, men of honour and obedience to the boss is blind. They must swear never to disclose their crime family, never cooperate with the law, never raise their hands against a fellow member, on and on and on. Revenge against violations was forever and could be exercised anywhere, anytime.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/blog/no-way-out-the-life-and-death-of-mafia-killer-mario-prestifilippo" target="_blank"><strong>No Way Out: The Life and Death of Mafia Killer Mario Prestifilippo</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>He talks about the pyramid system of each clan-boss, underboss, counsellor, captain of ten. The soldiers and associates that do all the grunt work, all the stuff that will become common knowledge, but not for almost another fifty years, because his declaration, along with all the other teeming details of organized crime in Sicily The Inspectorate collects, is going into a folder, which authorities will store on a shelf or into a drawer to feel the sound of silence for the next seventy years.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-left" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10930074493,RESIZE_400x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="271" alt="10930074493?profile=RESIZE_400x" /></a>As this is going down in Tommaso Natale, to the south, the agents of law are busy watching and tracking the brothers, Marasà, especially Ernesto. They tail him, moving around between towns, and villages and the city. He visits Hotel Vittoria in the Albergheria district of Palermo, always using room 2 to hold meetings with his cronies and allies. Then, with his bodyguards, will head off in his little red Fiat Balilla car (left), to do death and destructions somewhere as he clears the decks of opposition and declares himself <em>capo di tutti capi</em>, boss of all bosses. His only opposition is Calogero Vizzini a historical Mafia boss of Villalba in the Province of Caltanissetta, although he is somewhat distant from the field of play.</p>
<p>History and events will limit Ernesto’s time in office. He and his brothers are prime suspects in the case being prepared by The Inspectorate. They arrest Francesco and Antonino, who then are released on bail awaiting charges. The eldest brother slips through the system just as he did in the Mori campaign. He may well have been spending his years of freedom living it large in the famous <a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-phantom-of-the-grand-hotel-sicily-the-mafia-a-mystery" target="_blank">Hotel et des Palms</a>, in the middle of Palermo until the war ends and whatever state is normal returns to Sicily. In 1943 both his brothers die, one, Francesco, killed by an exploding bomb during the Allied invasion of Sicily, and the other of natural causes.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>READ: </strong><a href="https://gangstersinc.org/profiles/blogs/the-phantom-of-the-grand-hotel-sicily-the-mafia-a-mystery" target="_blank"><strong>The Phantom of the Grand Hotel.</strong></a></li>
</ul>
<p>Ernesto will last until 1948, when his time to go arrives. By nature or force is unknown. Salvatore Anello, the Mafioso who lead such a troubled existence, found no peace in death. Someone ends his life with a shotgun on August 12, 1947.</p>
<p>By the early days of 1938, The Inspectorate had finished their job. Its report filled with names, places and events that have long passed into history is in some ways, to quote William Shakespeare, “Much Ado about Nothing.” The almost four years of the campaign to break the Mafia did little to change the sciamachy that had infested Sicily as long as anyone could remember. Antonino Ferrante, another informant uncovered during the inquiry, claimed in his statement that it had existed in one form or another since the time of Charlemagne, King of the Franks, in the 9th century.<strong>***</strong></p>
<p style="text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.gangstersinc.org" target="_blank"><img class="align-center" src="{{#staticFileLink}}10930074699,RESIZE_584x{{/staticFileLink}}" width="575" alt="10930074699?profile=RESIZE_584x" /></a><em><strong>Photo: Mori awarding decorations to campieri who swear to serve the Italian State and abandon the Mafia.</strong> </em></p>
<p>Of 190 individuals finally arrested and charged with criminal conspiracy along with assorted acts, then reduced to the 175 listed in The Inspectorate report, only 96 face indictment for trial. This reduces to 83, some being separated and folded into other judgements. The Court of Palermo hands down sentences on June 30, 1942. One of the highest, just under eleven years, is against Francesco Settana, boss of Monreale. Most defendants get five or fewer years as punishment for their crimes. It appears there is no press coverage; everything is about the war raging around the world.</p>
<p>It seems the politics of criminality is more the criminality of politics in Fascist Italy. Disturbing calm waters will often unleash really dangerous fish. In Italy, the only thing more dangerous than a Mafioso appears to be a politician.</p>
<p>The Inspectorate report lost to the world for seventy-years is proof of something long known-history repeats itself, and often, for all the wrong reasons.</p>
<p><em><strong>***</strong> The origin of the word Mafia has, and will continue to frustrate historians. There is a reference in Palermo’s court archives to an alleged witch, Catarina la Licastia, dated 1658, in which the word maffia appears. Pedro Álvarez de Toledo y Zúñiga, a Spanish nobleman and vice-royal of Naples, in a report of 1536, claims that many nobles in Sicily hired bandits, using them as small, personal armies to protect their lands and interests. Almost certainly a forerunner of the criminal entity which will emerge over the decades that lie ahead, although not recognized by this specific noun until the 1860s.</em></p>
<p><span style="text-decoration:underline;"><strong>Sources:</strong></span></p>
<p><em>Cocco, Vittorio. Relazioni mafiose. La mafia ai tempi del fascismo, XL edizioni. 2010.</em></p>
<p><em>Cocco, Vittorio. La Mafia, il fascimo, la polizia: Centro di studi ed iniziative culturali Pio La Torre. Palermo. 2012.</em></p>
<p><em>Ariacchi, Pino. Men of Dishonour: William Morrow & Co. New York. 1993.</em></p>
<p><em>Dickie, John. Mafia Brotherhoods: Sceptre. London. 2012.</em></p>
<p><em>Lupo, Salvatore. History of the Mafia: Columbia University Press. New York. 2009.</em></p>
<p><em>Giornale di Sicilia. May 29/29. 1927.</em></p>
<p><em>Schneider, Jane C. & Peter. Reversible Destiny: UC Press. 2003.</em></p>
<p><em>Adragna, Vito & Antonio and other defendants. August 12, 1941. Archivo di Stato, (ASP) Palermo. Tribunale Civile e Penale. Pages 264-265.</em></p>
<p><em>Statement of Salvatore Anello to the officers of the judicial police, Palermo, December 23, 1937, in ASP, TCP, Pp, b. 4135, attachment 115.</em></p>
<p><em>Falcone, Giovanni. Cose di Cosa Nostra: Milan. 1991.</em></p>
<p><em>McLaren, Colin. Mafioso: Hachette. Australia. 2022.</em></p>
<p><em>La Delinquenza nello Sicilianelle sue Forme piu Gravi o Specifche: Girgenti, 21-25 May, 1911. Tomasso Mercadante, head of Congress.</em></p>
<p><em>Duggan, Christopher, La Mafia durante il Fascimo.: Rubbetino Editore Soverino Manneli. Cosenza. 1987.</em></p>
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