Salvatore Maranzano - crime boss

Sicilian ‘Little Caesar’ who established New York’s Five Families

Salvatore Maranzano had a
mission to kill rival boss

The criminal boss Salvatore Maranzano, who became the head of organised crime in New York City after the so-called Castellammarese War of 1930-31, was born on this day in 1886 in Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily.

Maranzano’s position as ‘capo di tutti capi’ - boss of all bosses - in the city lasted only a few months before he was killed, but during that time he came up with the idea of organising criminal activity in New York along the lines of the military chain of command established in ancient Rome by his hero, Julius Caesar.

His fascination with and deep knowledge of the Roman general and politician led to him being nicknamed 'Little Caesar' by his Mafia contemporaries in New York.

Installing himself and four other survivors of the Castellammarese War as bosses, he established the principle of replacing the unstructured gang rivalry in New York with five areas of strictly demarcated territory to be controlled by criminal networks known as the Five Families.

Originally the Maranzano, Profaci, Mangano, Luciano and Gagliano families, they are now known by different names - Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese to be precise - but are essentially based on the same structure.

Charles 'Lucky' Luciano, pictured at the exclusive
Excelsior Hotel in Rome in 1948

Maranzano, perversely, had originally set out to be a priest in his homeland and even undertook the necessary studies to become one. Somehow, his path changed and he found himself drawn into the criminal underworld and became a respected figure in the Sicilian Mafia.

He decided to emigrate to the United States shortly after the end of the First World War. He opened a business as a real estate broker in Brooklyn, while simultaneously growing a bootlegging business, eager to cash in on the restrictions of the Prohibition Era. In time, his activity extended to prostitution and the illegal smuggling of narcotics. He became acquainted with a young mobster called Joseph Bonanno, whom he groomed for power.

Maranzano’s true purpose in going to the United States, however, was not simply for his own personal gains. He had been despatched there by Don Vito Ferro, a powerful Sicilian mafioso who had designs on seizing control of Mafia operations in the US from Giuseppe ‘Joe the Boss’ Masseria, another Sicilian but one from the Agrigento province on the south coast of the island.

Joseph Bonanno was groomed
for high office in the Mafia

From his base in Castellammare del Golfo, not far from Palermo on the north coast, Ferro sent Maranzano specifically to eliminate Masseria, a mission he accomplished but only at the end of the 14 months of the Castellammarese War.

Masseria was shot dead in April 1931 while playing cards at a restaurant on Coney Island. The hit had been arranged by Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, the former Masseria lieutenant who had defected to Maranzano’s side along with Vito Genovese, Frank Costello and others on the understanding that Masseria’s death would result in Maranzano calling off the conflict, which was impacting heavily on gang profits.

Maranzano kept his side of the bargain and Luciano was rewarded with a position of power within the Five Families structure.

However, Luciano was uneasy about Maranzano declaring himself ‘boss of all bosses’ and it was not long before he concluded that his new boss was no more forward thinking about Mafia activity than his predecessor.  There were major ideological differences between the two. While Maranzano, like Masseria, trusted only fellow Sicilians, Luciano had partnerships with Jewish gangsters, of which Maranzano strongly disapproved.

Luciano decided that to leave Maranzano in charge would not be in the best interests of progress and began plotting his downfall almost immediately. In fact, Maranzano had been boss for only five months when four men, including Luciano’s Jewish associates Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel and Samuel ‘Red’ Levine, entered his office in what is now the Helmsley Building in Manhattan, posing as tax officials, and murdered him.

It left Luciano as the most powerful boss in New York City. He did nothing to change the Five Families structure Maranzano had established but, in a further measure aimed at reducing conflict between rival groups, not only in New York but across the United States, by establishing The Commission, a kind of board of directors of the American Mafia, consisting of the heads of the Five Families and the leaders of the Chicago and Buffalo crime families, who would oversee and coordinate Mafia activities across the US and mediate in disputes.

The attractive port area at Castellammare del Golfo

Travel tip:

Castellammare del Golfo is a resort and fishing town overlooking a large bay in the northwest corner of Sicily, midway between Trapani and Palermo.  It has an attractive setting, guarding over a broad sweep of water and with steep lanes of houses climbing the hillside from the harbour towards the elevated Piazza Petrolo.  A popular backdrop for TV dramas, including some episodes of the Inspector Montalbano series, it has the remains of a castle probably built at the time of the ninth-century Arab occupation of the town, and a good selection of bars and restaurants. It is the birthplace of many American Mafia figures, including Sebastiano DiGaetano, Stefano Magaddino, Vito Bonventre, John Tartamella and Joseph Bonanno, as well as Maranzano.

The Tempio di Giunone in the Valley of the Temples

Travel tip:

Agrigento, the home town of Maranzano’s rival boss Joe Masseria, is on the southern coast of Sicily and is built on the site of an ancient Greek city. Its most famous sight is the Valley of the Temples (Valle dei Templi) a large sacred area where seven monumental Greek temples were constructed during the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Situated on a ridge rather than in a valley, It is one of the most outstanding examples of Greater Greece art and architecture anywhere and at 1,300 hectares the the largest archaeological site in the world.

More reading:

How Lucky Luciano brought order among warring Mafia clans

Was Carlo Gambino the model for The Godfather?

Joe Petrosino - the Italian immigrant who fought against the mob

Also on this day:

1598: The birth of sculptor Alessandro Algardi

1969: The birth of football coach Antonio Conte

Home

Stefano Magaddino - mafioso

Longest-ruling Mafia boss in US history

Stefano Magaddino ran the Buffalo crime
family for more than half a century

Stefano Magaddino, the Sicilian mafioso who went on to enjoy the longest period of power enjoyed by any crime boss in the history of the American Mafia, was born on this day in 1891 in Castellammare del Golfo.

Known as ‘The Undertaker’ or ‘Don Stefano’, Magaddino controlled a crime empire radiating outwards from Buffalo, on the shores of Lake Erie in New York State.  Geographically, it was a vast area, stretching from the eastern fringe of  New York State to its western outposts in Ohio and extending north-east almost as far as Montreal in Canada, its tentacles reaching across the Canadian border from Buffalo even into Toronto.

One of the original members of The Commission, the committee of seven crime bosses set up in 1931 to control Mafia activity across the whole of the United States, Magaddino was head of the Buffalo Family for more than half a century.

He died in 1974 at the age of 82, having survived all the other Commission members, including the founder Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Chicago boss Al Capone, with the exception of his cousin from Castellammare, Joseph Bonanno, who along with Luciano, headed one of the Five Families of the New York underworld.

Magaddino never knew any life other than crime.  The third of eight children born to Giovanni and Giuseppa Ciaravino Magaddino, he was born in the midst of a feud between his family and their rivals in Castellammare, the Buccellato family.

He had strong links with the Bonanno family in Sicily, joining forces with Joe’s father, Salvatore, in 1899 after the latter’s brothers, Stefano and Giuseppe, were killed on an order given by Felice Buccellato.

New York boss Charles 'Lucky' Luciano
included Magaddino in The Commission

Bonanno and Magaddino took their revenge by ordering the killing of two members from the Buccellato family. A peace was brokered in 1905, before Salvatore Bonanno emigrated to the United States, to be followed, in 1909, by Magaddino. They settled in a Castellammarese colony in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

The feud followed Magaddino to New York, however, leading to the killing of his brother by Camillo Caiozzo, a member of the Buccellato clan, in an ambush outside a Brooklyn department store. Caiozzo was himself soon killed and in 1921 Magaddino was arrested in Avon, New Jersey on suspicion of his murder.

At the time Magaddino was an influential member of the increasingly powerful Castellammarese clan but when charges against him failed to stick he took the opportunity to relocate to the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area.

There he laid down the beginnings of his empire.  Behind the front of running a funeral home – the Magaddino Memorial Chapel – in Niagara Falls, he set up a profitable Prohibition era business bootlegging wines and spirits across the Niagara River to supply the proliferation of so-called speakeasies in Buffalo.

After Prohibition was ended, Magaddino and his associates moved into loan sharking, illegal gambling, narcotics, extortion, carjacking and labour racketeering, gaining control too of lucrative legitimate businesses such as taxi companies and the laundry and linen services essential to the area’s many hotels.

In the traditional manner of Sicilian Mafiosi, he gave the impression of living a relatively modest lifestyle, doing his utmost to stay in the background and draw as little attention as possible to his criminal activities.

Joseph Bonanno, with whom
Magaddino shared his roots

He was admired by other gang bosses for the success he had in controlling such a large area, while the remoteness of his territory enabled him to remain untouched by the periodic squabbles between the New York families. He was at times called on to an arbitrate in disputes.

He survived a number of attempts on his life.  In 1936, his sister was killed by a bomb intended for him but placed in the wrong house and in 1957 a grenade was thrown through his kitchen window but failed to explode.  The second of those episodes was linked to the so-called Apalachin Conference, a meeting of Mafia bosses at a small town in New York State.

The meeting had been arranged by Magaddino and when it was raided by FBI agents, resulting in the arrest of several mobsters, there were suspicions that he had tipped them off himself as a way of eliminating a few of his rivals.

Later, the respect he enjoyed among his peers diminished when he and his son, Peter, were hauled in by police on charges of illegal bookmaking after a 1968 raid on his son’s home in Niagara Falls, which found around $500,000 in a suitcase.

This aroused more disquiet among senior figures in the Buffalo Family, suspecting him of skimming off profits, and rival groups began to emerge.  Within a year, Magaddino had been ousted as boss, replaced first by Salvatore Pieri and ultimately by Samuel Frangiamore, who had been joint leaders of a breakaway faction.

Magaddino managed to avoid significant spells in jail throughout his rule.  The illegal bookmaking charges, based on a six-year long wire-tapping operation at the funeral home in Niagara, were dropped after a judge ruled the evidence had been obtained illegally.

He was named in Rome in 1967 as the head of a narcotics smuggling ring that had trafficked about $150 million worth of heroin between Europe and the United States between 1950 and 1960 but was never extradited.  He died in 1974 following a heart attack. 

Castellammare del Golfo enjoys a fine location on the
coast of northwest Sicily

Travel tip:

Castellammare del Golfo is a resort and fishing town situated on a large bay in the northwest corner of Sicily, midway between Trapani and Palermo.  It has an attractive setting, guarding over a broad sweep of water and with steep lanes of houses climbing the hillside from the harbour towards the elevated Piazza Petrolo.  A popular backdrop for TV dramas, including some episodes of the Inspector Montalbano series, it has the remains of a castle probably built at the time of the ninth-century Arab occupation of the town, and a good selection of bars and restaurants.

The Basilica of Maria SS Annunziata

Travel tip:

Trapani is a city of some 70,000 inhabitants on a coastal plain around 100km (62 miles) west of Palermo, at the very western tip of the island. Renowned for its seafood, it has a nearby airport but is not well known among overseas tourists, yet offers an attractive base for visitors, with the impressive Basilica-Sanctuary of Maria Santissima Annunziata and a 14^th-century cathedral among its attractions. The city is also famous for the Easter Processione dei Misteri di Trapani, a day-long celebration of the Passion.

Home

Cesare Mori - Mafia buster

'Iron Prefect' who 'eliminated' the Cosa Nostra

Cesare Mori was well known for
his hard-line methods

Cesare Mori, the prefect of police credited with crushing the Sicilian Mafia during the inter-War years, died on this day in 1942 at the age of 70.

At the time of his death he was living in retirement in Udine, in some respects a forgotten figure in a country in the grip of the Second World War.

Yet during his police career his reputation as a hard-line law enforcer was such that the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini personally appointed him as prefect of Palermo, charged with breaking the Mafia’s hold over Sicily and re-establishing the authority of the State by any means necessary.

Mori was born in Pavia in Lombardy, by then part of the new Kingdom of Italy, in 1871.  His upbringing was difficult.  His first years were spent living in an orphanage, although his parents were not dead and looked after him after he had turned seven.

He attended the Military Academy in Turin and was set on a career in the army but after marrying Angelina Salvi in 1897 he quit and joined the police, taking up a posting in Ravenna.

His first experience of Sicily came with a brief posting to Castelvetrano, near Trapani, where he captured a notorious bandit, Paolo Grisalfi, before moving to Florence in 1915.

Mori was sent back to Sicily after the First World War, at which time the island was becoming virtually lawless, with gangs of bandits able to operate almost with impunity. He was placed in charge of a special force created to tackle brigandage.

Mori was uneasy about the Fascists but agreed
to become a blackshirt to carry out his job

He soon became known for taking a somewhat radical approach to the job, pushing acceptable policing methods to their limits and sometimes beyond. But they worked. In Caltabellotta, a town in rugged, mountainous territory between Agrigento and Palermo, he arrested more than 300 suspected bandits in just one night.

The press hailed the arrests as a "lethal blow to the Mafia", but Mori was aware that these gangs of brigands were not the Mafia, whose presence in Sicilian society was much less visible but far more dangerous, with a sphere of influence that extended into business and local government and even the local police forces.

Mori was actually uneasy about the rise of Fascism.  Back on the mainland, as prefect of Bologna he was one of the few policemen who opposed the suppression of opponents by thuggery that was becoming part of the Fascist culture.  This led him to be posted to Bari, well away from the major centres of Fascist activity. After Mussolini took power following the 1922 March on Rome, Mori took it as his cue to retire, moving with his wife to Florence.

Yet the prospect of eliminating the so-called Cosa Nostra in Sicily continued to interest him and when Mussolini’s Minister of the Interior, Luigi Federzoni, approached him to return to policing in 1924, he accepted the requirement to join the Fascist party as a condition of the job and took up the post of prefect of Trapani.

Just over a year later, having determined that eliminating the Mafia would bring him huge public support, Mussolini made contact with Mori in person, asking him to become prefect of Palermo with 'carte blanche' to re-establish the authority of the Italian government, promising to draw up any new laws he required to carry out the task.

In a four-year campaign, Mori became known as ‘the Iron Prefect’, employing methods that included violence and intimidation on a scale almost the equal of the tactics used by the Mafia themselves.

Joseph Bonanno left Sicily
to escape Mori's purge

His men laid siege to entire towns, humiliating Mafia bosses by dragging them out of their beds in the early hours, and countering the code of silence – omertà – that all members were supposed to follow by using torture to obtain information, even threatening harm to their families if they refused to co-operate.

More than 11,000 arrests were made during his time in charge. Mussolini rewarded him by making him a Senator and retiring him in 1929, his propaganda machine announcing to Italy that the Mafia had been eradicated.

Whether that was true has been the subject of many arguments.  The murder rate on the island dropped sharply in the 1930s as some Mafiosi chose to give evidence to police in return for their own lives and others, such as Joseph Bonanno, relocated to the United States and built crime empires there.

But, according to some historians, too many of Mori’s arrests were of minor figures and a substantial number of bosses simply went to ground, content to lie low in the expectation that the Fascists would eventually fall from power.

This was to come about, of course, with the Allied invasion of 1943, which began in Sicily.  Mafia figures still on the island and in the US took the opportunity to offer their help, both in encouraging Sicilians to turn against the Fascists and in passing on their knowledge of the difficult terrain and often treacherous coastline.

As cities and towns fell and new local administrations were appointed, Mafia figures manoeuvred themselves into key positions and, slowly but surely, their power was restored.

Mori’s story has been the subject of several books and films, notably the 1977 movie, Il prefetto di ferro – the Iron Prefect – directed by Pasquale Squitieri and starring Giuliano Gemma and Claudia Cardinale, with music by Ennio Morricone.

The old part of Trapani sits on a promontory 

Travel tip:

Situated on the western coast of Sicily, Trapani is a fishing and ferry port notable for a curving harbour, where Peter of Aragon landed in 1282 to begin the Spanish occupation of Sicily. Well placed strategically to trade with Africa as well as the Italian mainland, Trapani was once the hub of a commercial network that stretched from Carthage in what is now Tunisia to Venice. Nowadays, the port is used by ferries serving Tunisia and the smaller islands, as well as other Italian ports.  The older part of the town, on a promontory with the sea on either side, has some crumbling palaces and others that have been well restored, as well as a number of military fortifications and notable churches.

The Certosa di Pavia is notable for its lavish
Gothic and Renaissance architecture

Travel tip:

Once a Roman military garrison, Pavia has a well preserved historic centre and, 8km (5 miles) to the north side if the city, the impressive Certosa di Pavia, a monastery complex built between 1396 and 1495. It is the largest monastery in Italian and is renowned for its extravagant Gothic and Renaissance style, a contrast to the plain, austere architecture normally associated with Carthusian religious buildings. Pavia is also home to one of Italy’s best universities, the alumni of which include explorer Christopher Columbus, physicist Alessandro Volta and poet and revolutionary Ugo Foscolo.

Home