The word mafia has come to be used as a signifier for any
group of people involved in organized crime. The gangs known as
Mafia, however, were put to death by the end of The Castellammarese
War which started in the 1930s. The rise of Unione Siciliane, the
Five Families, and The Syndicate marked a change of direction in the
culture of organized crime.
Castellammare del Golfo is a small town on the coast of Sicily.
Named after a sea fortress built during medieval times, it has seen
its share of historical warfare. This quiet Mediterranean village was
the home of Don Vito Ferraro, a Mafia leader who directed American
operations from his base in Sicily. His tribal war again Joe
Masseria’s gang in New York City became known as The
Castellammarese War.
Joe “The Boss” Masseria spent the 1920s building a small
empire of Mafia soldiers. By the end of the decade they had come to
be the richest and most powerful bunch of thugs in the New World.
Masseria’s faction included men whose names would later find a
permanent status in the pantheon of famous gangsters; Albert
Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, and Frank Costello would later
become big shots in The Syndicate. But it was Charles “Lucky”
Luciano who would play the biggest part in taking crime to new levels
of discipline and organization. Masseria’s elitist stable was open
only to Sicilians and Southern Italians.
As Michel Foucault would say, wherever there is power there is
resistance. So Don Vito Ferraro, desiring to seize control over
Mafia, commanded his soldier Salvatore Maranzano to leave
Castellammare del Golfo for the underworld of Broooklyn in order to
command the rival Castellammarese gang. Formally speaking, the battle
was between the two factions led by Maranzano and Masseria. Below the
surface, though, something else was brewing. The Old Guard mafiosos,
known as “Mustache Petes” because of their long drooping
mustaches were increasingly being thought of as old fashioned,
provincial, and out of touch. True to the American youthful attitude,
the newer, more forward looking generation, who came to be known as
the Young Turks, used the Castellammarese War as an opportunity to
exercise their Oedipal complexes and kill off the fatherly dons who
preceded them.
Lucky Luciano was a strange kind of peacemaker. The son of
Sicilian immigrants, he cut his teeth as a juvenile delinquent by
forming the Five Points Gang. One member, a Jewish kid named Meyer
Lansky, would remain a lifelong friend and go on to become a
notorious gang lord himself. Lucky Luciano, as an upstart member of
Masseria’s gang, thought the boss was holding Mafia back so he
hatched a plan to end The Castellammarese War as soon as possible so
greater achievements could be attained. After that, Luciano’s
secret scheme was to make peace between all the Mafia factions so
they could act as one big corporation, just like any big American
company albeit one with illicit intentions.
It is not clear when the bloodshed began. Legend has it that an
early battle happened when Charles Luciano earned his nickname
“Lucky”; a Maranzano-allied gang asked him to switch sides and he
refused. One night, Luciano got abducted. The gangsters took him to
the beach, beat him up, and slit his throat with a razor then packed
him into the trunk and abandoned the car, thinking he was dead. A
couple days later, he showed up in the streets of Brooklyn again,
this time with a scar on his face and a drooping eye that would last
for the rest of his life, a battle scar that would forever make him
look mean. The miraculous survival and escape led to his being
christened “Lucky” and the name has stuck up to the present day.
Another hit that possibly started the war happened when a
powerful ringleader in Detroit got shot. Rival Mafia families had
been engaged in a long-lasting war of their own during the 1920s. One
faction was allied through their boss to Joe Masseria in New York.
When they contacted the rival don, Chet La Mare, to meet in public
and declare a truce, La Mare sensed danger and asked Gaspar Milazzo
to go in his place. Milazzo arrived at the Detroit Fish Market, sat
down for a meal and waited for the other boss to show up. La Mare’s
instincts were correct, though, and while Milazzo waited for his
food, a hitman arrived with a rifle and shot Milazzo in the head. No
doubt, his brains and blood made a nice addition to the house’s
signature ragu. The assassin did not know that La Mare was not there;
Milazzo was a high ranking member of Mafia, especially known for his
negotiating skills. He had a close friendship with Maranzano and the
Castellammarese family so some people say this was the beginning of
the war.
Details are murky and some historians say the opening shot got
fired three months earlier. Vito Genovese may or may not have been
the man who approached Gaetano Reina in the street and blew his head
off with a double-barreled shot gun which he quickly stashed
underneath a parked car before running away. Reina’s small family,
operating out of The Bronx and Harlem, had been absorbed into
Masseria’s organization. When the Castellammarese family began
making noises about challenging Masseria’s kingdom, Reina secretly
switched sides and began making plans to ambush a team of thugs
working for Masseria. But somebody secretly told Masseria about the
plot to betray him and took out a contract on Reina. This proved to
be a mistake because all of Reina’s men later switched sides and
incorporated themselves into the Maranzano team thereby expanding
their dominance with more manpower.
The war blew up and firefights erupted in the streets. The body
count increased quickly. While scoring the initial victories, the
assassinations racked up a lot of points for the Castellammarese side
who began their ascent to control. Masseria scored big, however,
when he sent someone to kill Joe Aiello, the president of Chicago’s
branch of Unione Sicliane. Still, Masseria started looking like a
loser and many of his soldiers began defecting secretly to
Maranzano’s side. Lucky Luciano and Vito Genovese were two in
particular who began clandestine negotiations with their opponents.
Luciano bargained with Maranzano. If he arranged to have Joe
Masseria killed, then The Castellammarese War would be ended. In
April of 1931, Masseria sat down to a dinner in Nuova Villa Tammaro
on Coney Island. While (possibly) sitting in a private room alone,
Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, and Bugsy Siegel entered
with guns and blew Masseria to hell. Lucky Luciano was away on
vacation. Salvatore Maranzano declared himself Il Capo di Tutti
Capi or Boss of All Bosses and called the war to an end.
Luciano and Maranzano devised a structure and organization for
Mafia that exists to this day. They were organized into the Five
Families, each one controlling a different section of New York. Lucky
Luciano became boss of the Genovese familty, Joseph Profaci the boss
of the Colombo family, Thomas Gagliano headed the Lucchese family,
Vincent Mangano controlled the Gambino family, and Maranzano himself
headed the Bonanno family. All the bosses answered to Salvatore
Maranzano who organized Mafia so that they could all be stronger by
working together. Warfare between the families was to end so that
business could be run more smoothly and efficiently. The path to
criminal power would be easier to negotiate if they were not so busy
killing each other off.
Each branch of the Five Families, also known as La Cosa Nostra,
became organized around a hierarchical structure. At the head of each
family was the boss and below him the underboss and consigliere.
Below them were a capo who oversaw an army of soldiers and at the
lowest level were associates. Positions at the highest positions of
the hierarchy were reserved for Sicilians only but lower ranking
members were allowed to be of any ethnicity. Many of the first
associates were Jewish.
Maranzano did not last long. While sitting in his office, a gang
of associates including Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel rushed in; they
stabbed him and shot him until he was a lifeless pile of flesh,
bones, and blood leaking out of a sharp, custom-made suit. The last
of the Mustache Petes was gone. Mafia was dead. The Young Turks had
won and it was time for The Syndicate to take over. Lucky Luciano
replaced Maranzano in his position but soon declared the reign of the
Boss of All Bosses to be null and void. Instead, the heads of all the
crime families would form a parliamentary system of government so
that all members of The Syndicate were equal. The Five Families would
remain and continue to be the core of the board of directors but The
Syndicate reached out to crime families in other cities, becoming a
transnational cartel. Faithful to the American ideals of the melting
pot and multiculturalism, members of other national backgrounds were
allowed in and the rigid hierarchical rules devised by Maranzano were
relaxed to allow for more flexibility; after all, a long-lasting
business is one that can adapt to changes as they come.
Lucky Luciano, in his later years, got arrested and tried for
human trafficking and prostitution. The government deported him and
he spent the rest of his life in Sicily. Many other members of The
Syndicate fried in the electric chair.
The Syndicate and their elite squad of thugs known as Murder
Inc. made Mafia look quaint by comparison. They went on to become
more violent, vicious, and brutal than their predecessors and
definitely more powerful. They have since faded away but organized
crime has morphed into bigger and more varied forms. The American
tradition of criminal gangs, in one form or another, remains with us
today.
Reference
Turkus,
Burtun B. and Feder, Sid. Murder
Inc.: The Story Of the Syndicate. Da
Capo Press, New York: 2003.
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