Honor Thy Father (25 page)

Luciano, Genovese, and other former members of Masseria’s gang were unhappy about this last point. They saw boss rule as obsolete, an anathema to the effectiveness of a large organization; they feared that Maranzano had become, like Masseria before him, obsessed with a sense of singular power, and they saw no solution but to plot against him.

They moved with extreme caution, for Maranzano was a formidable figure after Masseria’s death, and quite prosperous, too, as gangsters from around the nation made sizable contributions to fund-raising benefits held in Maranzano’s honor. At one such banquet in Brooklyn, Maranzano was believed to have received more than $100,000. But Maranzano was not quick to share the profits with his underlings, nor did he return many of the trucks that had been stolen from men like Luciano; he was also said to have shared in merchandise stolen from a man who was on his side, Thomas Lucchese.

And so while Maranzano basked in glory through the summer of 1931, Luciano intrigued against him, slowly succeeding in convincing even such loyalists as Bonanno and Profaci that Maranzano was in reality an old-fashioned tyrant, not much better than Masseria, and certainly ill equipped to unify the diverse groups in organized crime into a large modern syndicate. When Maranzano learned of Luciano’s campaign against him, he hired men to kill him. But before Maranzano’s mercenaries could do the job, Luciano’s own hired assassins—four Jewish gangsters, posing as detectives, who were affiliated with the Siegel-Lansky mob that was friendly with Luciano—walked into the real estate office that was Maranzano’s “front” in the Grand Central Building, at Park Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, where they flashed their badges at the men who sat in the outer room, entered Maranzano’s suite and, catching him by surprise, shot him four times and stabbed him six times in the abdomen.

There would be several other deaths on that day—September 11, 1931—and also on the following day, most of the victims being old-style gangsters referred to as Moustache Petes or greasers, men considered too stubborn, illiterate, and incapable of fitting into the modern scheme of things.

The modern scheme, as outlined by Luciano at later meetings, would abandon Maranzano’s “boss of bosses” position but would preserve most of Maranzano’s other ideas on the organization of “families.” Luciano urged that mafiosi no longer seek power through threats and vendettas, but instead adopt the more subtly aggressive tactics of large modern corporations, some of which had been founded by robber barons but were quietly committed to profiteering within a free-enterprise code of rules and restrictions. While Luciano hoped that the mafiosi would continue to work with other ethnic gang leaders, particularly with men like Meyer Lansky, who was a genius at finding profitable investments for Mafia money in legal as well as illegal enterprises, Luciano also believed that membership in the Mafia itself should still be limited to men of Sicilian or Italian origin. Despite their many differences and jealousies, the Sicilian-Italian element felt a rapport with one another that they did not feel with outsiders. Though its membership of perhaps 5,000 was a small percentage of the more than 100,000 individuals that law enforcement officials estimated to be involved in organized crime, it was tighter ethnically at this time than were members of Jewish gangs, Irish gangs, hybrid gangs, or the numerous cliques and free-lancers around the country. If it could remain cohesive, it could dominate the underworld.

Luciano was not alone in advocating less violence—Frank Costello had spoken similarly at a gathering of gangsters at Atlantic City in 1929—but Luciano was now a most persuasive figure. At thirty-four, living up to the nickname that had been inspired by his luck at gambling, he had managed to dispose of both Masseria and Maranzano, and yet, partly because he had resisted the top job himself, he was able to convince the surviving leaders of his sincerity for solidarity and peace. Without tactlessly denigrating the life of Maranzano, Luciano nonetheless deglamorized him in the eyes of most Castellammarese by depicting him as a victim of excessive power, a follower of Caesar in an era of the organization.

Lucky Luciano was a consummate organization man, and while younger men like Bonanno and Profaci remained individualistic in outlook, they had no difficulty in relating to Luciano, a fellow Sicilian whose astuteness and forward-looking approach they quickly respected. Bonanno was in agreement with Luciano that the “boss of bosses” title should be eliminated and that no one boss should have the right to dictate to other bosses—the individual bosses would be largely autonomous in their designated areas. Bonanno was somewhat concerned, however, about the future role of the commission and the specific steps the commission could take in the interest of maintaining peace within the national brotherhood. During the five months that Maranzano had been the boss of bosses, Bonanno worked with Maranzano on a concept of the commission, but neither Maranzano nor Bonanno had been entirely satisfied with the result. Bonanno still felt that a commission might develop into a policy-making body that could intrude upon the autonomy of individual bosses, and Bonanno urged at the meetings that the commission be clearly designed to serve as a forum for debate or explanation but not as an agency with power. Other Mafia leaders, less independently minded, were not opposed to the prospect of an authoritative commission, although they did not wish to argue for it. There had been so much disagreement among the mafiosi in recent years that they now wished to avoid delving into another controversial issue.

There was rather quick agreement to Luciano’s general proposals, and soon the twenty-four separate groups of mafiosi around the nation each elected their own boss and received the proper recognition and respect accorded a Mafia “family.” Many of the twenty-four families were widely scattered in cities through the Far West and the South and had memberships of only twenty or thirty each, while other families, concentrated in the industrial centers of the Midwest and the Eastern Seaboard, had memberships of between 300 and 500.

In New York City, the largest market for illegal activity, five Mafia families were established. Luciano was the head of one family, and the other charter-member dons were Vincent Mangano, Gaetano Gagliano, Joseph Profaci, and Joseph Bonanno. At twenty-six, Bonanno was the youngest don in the national syndicate.

On November 15, 1931, two months after Maranzano’s death, Joseph Bonanno was married to Fay Labruzzo. The elaborate wedding reception was held at the Knights of Columbus Hall at Prospect Park in Brooklyn and was attended by an impressive gathering that included all the New York bosses and several from out of town.

After the party, the bridal couple left in Bonanno’s new Chrysler Imperial for a honeymoon in Niagara Falls, and thus began a period of tranquillity and prosperity that would dominate the next twenty years. Bonanno’s large cash reserve permitted him to make many profitable real estate investments during the Depression; and unlike the other bosses, Bonanno seemed to have a sure instinct for avoiding controversy and trouble.

Al Capone was convicted in 1931 for income tax evasion and served seven years in prison. In 1934, Vito Genovese, an underboss in Luciano’s family, became involved in a murder charge and fled the country. Luciano himself was sentenced in 1936 to serve a thirty-to-fifty-year term because of his prostitution business, a conviction obtained largely through the efforts of an aggressive prosecutor named Thomas E. Dewey. Other mafiosi, despite their previous endorsement of a policy against violence, were again shooting at one another as disputes arose over the territorial boundaries of certain book-making and numbers rackets, for these two enterprises had replaced bootlegging as the primary source of revenue after the repeal of Prohibition.

The single encounter Joseph Bonanno had with the law during this period occurred when a Brooklyn clothing factory that he partly owned was charged with violating the Federal Wage and Hour Law; he was fined $50. He was in the process then of becoming an American citizen, having left the country in 1938 and reentered it legally at Detroit from Canada. He became naturalized in 1945, by which time he was a multimillionaire.

He owned a home in Long Island, another in Tucson. He was respected member of both communities, a major contributor to charities and to the church. His organization of slightly more than 300 members was one of the smaller New York families, but it was probably the most unified and coordinated—it had virtually no internal dissension and little harassment from rival gangs or the law. Bonanno’s principal officers, all from Castellammare, included Frank Garofalo, a persnickety white-haired bachelor in charge of management details; John Bonventre, an equanimous elder who handled personnel problems bucked up from the captains; and Carmine Galante, a tough cigar-smoking underboss who dealt with representatives of other gangs when there were issues to be resolved or cooperative ventures to be planned. Among the eight captains, each commanding a crew that might consist of thirty or more soldiers, the closest to Bonanno was Gaspar Di Gregorio. Bonanno also had what was unique in the national syndicate—a kind of alumni association comprising a dozen retired mafiosi in their seventies who had known Bonanno’s father or grandfather and who were now invited by Joseph Bonanno to attend meetings and offer advice or even to arbitrate minor differences within the family.

The Bonanno organization’s bookmaking and numbers businesses in Brooklyn and on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, far from declining during the Depression, actually became more lucrative; people seemed to be gambling more during hard times, and none of the twenty-four families in the syndicate was an economic victim of the thirties. With the coming of World War II, conditions became even better as the Mafia expanded into black-marketing enterprises to meet the public’s demand for war-rationed food products, gasoline stamps, and similarly controlled items.

The war also restored to prominence several Sicilian dons whose careers abroad had been diminished by Mussolini and such American dons as Lucky Luciano who had been removed from circulation by law enforcement officials in the United States. As the war began, Luciano was serving what seemed to be a lifetime sentence at the New York State Penitentiary at Dannemora. He was treated regally by the prisoners there and was able to send out messages and orders to his organization through visitors and convicts who were being discharged, but he had no expectation of regaining his own freedom in the immediate future.

Then in 1942, as incidents of German sabotage were believed to be increasing along the New York waterfront and after the huge French liner
Normandie
caught fire and capsized at her West Side berth in Manhattan just prior to becoming an Allied troopship, the Bureau of Naval Intelligence and other federal agencies decided, after much debate and soul-searching, to seek the aid of mob-controlled longshoremen, truckmen, and watchmen in guarding against future sabotage or infiltration by enemy spies. The man the navy contacted was Joseph (Socks) Lanza, a dock leader whose men worked along the East River piers in lower Manhattan and in the Fulton Fish Market. Though Lanza was under indictment for extortion at the time, the investigators for the navy saw him as a patriotic American, and thus he was entrusted to help organize the program.

Within a year, since no other suspicious incidents occurred, the navy concluded that the program was working, and it wished to expand it to include the dock workers on the West Side. But Lanza could not get their cooperation on that side of town—the West Side was Luciano’s territory, and only he could guarantee their compliance. So the naval representatives traveled to Dannemora and visited Luciano in jail. When he promised to cooperate, he was transferred to more comfortable quarters in a prison near Albany. There he soon played host to numbers of visitors, not only naval officers but also individuals from the ranks such as Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, and Willie Moretti. And, as on the East Side, the navy believed that the West Side waterfront was made more secure by the vigilance of the dock workers.

What specifics were discussed in the many meetings with Luciano, what precise contributions he and other mafiosi made, were never fully revealed and would remain a mystery long after the war had ended. Even Senator Estes Kefauver in 1951 was unable to gain access to the Pentagon’s secret files on the subject. The navy was then apparently embarrassed about its dealings with gangsters, although during the uncertain period of the early forties when German submarines were considered capable of slipping through the defense of the port of New York, it had seemed both a practical and wise thing to do.

The United States Army also fostered a relationship with the Mafia during the war, a fact documented years later in several articles and books that cited the names of certain American officers and mobsters; and again a significant role was said to be played by Luciano. He reportedly sent messages through his henchmen to his fellow dons in western Sicily, where bands of mafiosi were organized to serve as underground agents and guides for the arriving Allied armies. After invading the southern shore of Sicily in the summer of 1943, the Allies moved quickly from one village to another, retracing the steps of a thousand conquerors before them, but this time being greeted by cheering crowds particularly in western cities like Castellammare. Although the British and Canadian troops that moved through eastern Sicily did engage in battles with the retreating German and Italian armies, the resistance was short-lived and undermined by incidents of civilian sabotage. The entire island of Sicily was in Allied hands in approximately five weeks; and then, as the Allied officers advanced the war to the Italian mainland, they appointed to key positions in many villages and towns men who were militant anti-Fascists and, in most cases, also members of the Mafia.

As the Allied armies moved into Naples, there was working within their ranks an Italian civilian who served as a translator and liaison official. This man was knowledgeable and helpful, but he refused to accept money from the Americans, a gesture they had rarely encountered. They were further impressed by his awareness of several cases of bribery and black-marketeering among civilian personnel and his willingness to report these to the officers in charge. Three American officers wrote letters of commendation for the man—Vito Genovese—a master in the art of success through shifting, who during the previous year, 1943, had been working with the Fascists.