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Giuseppe “Joe The Boss” Masseria
By Mobster | August 27, 2007
Giuseppe “Joe The Boss” Masseria (c. 1887–April 15, 1931) was an early Mafia don in the United States.
Early Days
After immigrating to the United States in 1903 to avoid murder charges in Sicily, Masseria became an enforcer for the Morello Gang in the Lower East Side of New York City.
After the death of Nick Morello in 1916 he became the leader of one of several splinter groups who fought a “civil war” for control of the gang. In this struggle Masseria is said to have had the backing of Salvatore “Toto” D’Aquilla, the leader of the Brooklyn Mafia. After the death of Nick Morello, D’Aquilla came to be regarded as “capo consigliere” or “senior adviser” among the New York Mafia families. This means that, because of his perceived wisdom, he was considered first among equals and consulted by the other leaders on important matters. However this does not mean that he had any direct control over the other gangs or that they had to pay him any financial tribute. Some later chroniclers have erroneously equated his position with that of “Capo-di-Tutti-Capi”, the despotic title to which Joe Masseria was later to aspire.
“The Man Who Can Dodge Bullets”
In 1922 Masseria was ambushed outside of his home by rival Rocco Valenti. Valenti found Masseria walking along the street with two of his body guards and opened fire on all three of them. Valenti emptied his pistol killing the bodyguards, but no shots hit Masseria, who quickly dodged inside Heiney’s Millinery shop. Valenti re-loaded and pursued, confident that his quarry was now trapped. While Masseria ducked and dived around behind the merchandise, Valenti fired off further rounds and missed each time. Having exhausted his supply of ammunition and with police sirens sounding in the distance, Valenti then fled. Masseria escaped unharmed but for a few bullet holes through his new straw boater. This incident gained Masseria new respect among superstitious Italian gangsters as “the man who can dodge bullets”.
Morello Leadership
The following month Masseria arranges for a peace meeting with Rocco Valenti and former Morello leader Peter (formerly Joe) Morello, hinting that he was prepared to give up his aspirations to being the Boss. Valenti and three of his supporters arrived at the restaurant and were met by three of Masseria’s men. The men chatted amiably for some time until Valenti realised that it was a set up, Masseria wasn’t coming, that Masseria and Morello had reached some sort of deal and he was the odd man out.
Everyone went for their guns and started shooting, two of Valenti’s men went down and he made a run for it. The Masseria men gave chase but their aim was poor, and the next casualties were a streetcleaner and an eight-year-old girl. Valenti jumped onto the running board of a passing taxi and began to return fire. Seeing their quarry about to escape one of the pursuers took careful aim and dropped Valenti dead in the street.
Joe Masseria now became head of the Morello family with Peter Morello as his number two. This may have fitted in well with the Peter Morello’s desire to avoid attracting undue police attention. He was safer taking on a secondary role as a form of consiglieri, or senior adviser, behind the overt leader.
Joe The Boss
The death of Frankie Yale in July 1928 appears to have been the catalyst for Joe Masseria’s ambition to become overall leader of all the Mafia gangs of New York.
In October of 1928 Toto D’Aquilla, the Mafia leader in Brooklyn, is killed by Peter Morello and others. D’Aquilla was accosted in the street by three men after his regular visit to the doctor. The discussion became heated and one of the men drew a gun and shot D’Aquilla dead. There was known to be bad blood between D’Aquilla and the Morello, possibly arising out of resentement over D’Aquilla’s rise to the position of “capo consigliere” within the New York Mafia, which had coincided with the decline in the fortunes of the Morello family.
Al Mineo and his enforcer Steve Ferrigno, allies of Joe Masseria, take over leadership of the D’Aquilla family.
In June 1929 Ciro Terranova is questioned in connection with the murder of Frankie Marlow. Marlow was last seen having dinner with Terranova the night he was shot to death. As a fellow Sicilian, Marlow may have been an approached, on behalf of the new Unione president, with requests that he pay tribute or otherwise comply with the wishes of Joe Masseria. Frankie Marlow was a leading figure in the New York crime scene, he would certainly have dismissed any such advances. Perhaps he was guilty of under-rating the seriousness of the threat posed by the “old fashioned” Morello’s and paid the ultimate price. Ballistics evidence has shown that the bullets that killed Marlow were fired by a machinegun owned by the Capone Outfit, and that the same weapon was also used in the killing of Frankie Yale and for the St Valentines Day massacre. The weapon eventually came into the hands of the authorities after the arrest of Fred ‘Killer’ Burke, a St Louis gunman who participated in the St Valentines Day plot.
Masseria then moved in on what had been Frankie Yale’s organisation and Anthony Carfano, ‘Little Augie Pisano’ became head of the Yale family. Carfano’s group retained control of Yale’s gambling and bootlegging interests, however it may have been at this time that the Waterfront racket was reallocated and came under the control of the D’Aquilla family, headed by Al Mineo.
Joe Masseria was now “Joe the Boss” head of the largest Mafia grouping in New York. Other Sicilian gangsters who were not yet part of his empire, such as Ice racketeer and Bronx Mafia boss Tom Reina, took note of what had happened to D’Aquilla and Marlow and soon began to pay homage.
However this does not mean to say that Joe the Boss was now in control of all organised crime across New York, or even that he was the single most powerful gangster in the city. The labour union extortion kings Lepke & Gurrah and bootleggers like Waxey Gordon and Owney Madden were making more money, commanded equally powerful gangs and had better political connections. There were also others on the rise who did not recognise his authority such as Dutch Schultz and the Broadway Mob. The Mafia at this time was still largely centred around the exploitation of their fellow Italians.
The imperial gaze of Joe The Boss now fell upon “the Broadway Mob” and he identified Charlie Luciano as the logical recipient of his demands for homage and tribute. Because Luciano was the only Sicilian member of that group ; – Frank Costello was Calabrian, Joe Adonis was born near Naples, Albert Anastasia also from Calabria, Vito Genovese from Naples and of course Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel were Jewish. Luciano had little interest in the rites and rituals of secret societies and initially found the attentions of the traditional Mafiosi irritating. However it was an irritation he could not afford to ignore. Eventually he would come to see the accident of his birth place as a stroke of good fortune, the Mafia were the most exclusionist of the major ethnic crime groupings, and it added to his value amongst his allies that he could wield authority over them, by virtue of being seen as one of them, while his other friends would always be seen as inferior outsiders.
The Castellamarese War
Masseria next began to put pressure on a Mafia family known as the Castellamarese. Cola Schiro, the groups official leader, turned out to be a weak man, nothing more than the avatar of more senior men elsewhere. He paid Masseria $10k and then “went into hiding”, although in fact he was never heard from again. After the disappearance of Cola Schiro, Joe The Boss attempted to install his own candidate as the new leader, as he had with the other families. He supported Joe Parrino, however Parrino was soon shot to death in a restaurant.
Instead his place as leader was taken by Salvatore Maranzano. Maranzano was sent with several other men from Sicily in 1927 to gain control of the American Mafia for Don Vito Cascio Ferro. Masseria issued a decree ordering the death of Maranzano. This event then, marks the formal beginning of the Castellamarese War
On April 15, 1931 Joe Masseria was assassinated at the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant in Coney Island. Gangland legend has it that Masseria dined with Charles “Lucky” Luciano before his death. While they played cards, Luciano excused himself to the bathroom, when Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Vito Genovese, and Joe Adonis rushed in and shot “Joe the Boss” to death.
However both the New York Times and the Herald Tribune paint a much different picture. Neither newspaper mentions Luciano being there. The Herald Tribune had Masseria arriving at the restaurant in his armoured steel car in the company of three other men shortly before 3pm. Scarpato’s mother-in-law, Mrs Anna Tammaro, waited on them while they played cards. According to two eyewitnesses, two well dressed young men drove up and parked their car at the curb. They strolled leisurely into the place and the shooting began immediately. Some twenty shots were fired. Then the two gunmen came out without any visible signs of haste, entered their automobile and drove away. Masseria was hit with four bullets in the back and one in the back of the head. The bullets were identified as .32 and .38 caliber. In an alley next to the restaurant police recovered two guns matching those caliber bullets.
In a footnote to Masseria’s murder, Gerardo Scarpato, owner of the restaurant where “Joe the Boss” was killed, was murdered himself in September 1931, within days of the killing of Salvatore Maranzano.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
(“Joe the Boss”)
Masseria was the undisputed head of the American Mafia in the late 1920s. Born in Sicily in 1886 or 1887 (or thereabouts), Masseria became a Sicilian Mafia enforcer before taking off for the New World in 1903 as a young adult.
Upon his arrival in New York, he appears to have gone to work with Ciro Terranova’s outfit in Italian Harlem. He was arrested in 1907 and convicted of burglary and extortion, but the sentence was suspended. Upon the 1910 imprisonment of boss of bosses Ignazio Lupo, Masseria was one of the Mafiosi who set up shop in lower Manhattan, attempting to step into Lupo’s old role.
His plans were set back a bit when he was sentenced to four and a half years for a failed burglary attempt at a Bowery pawn shop. By the time he was released, the Sicilian Mafia groups in New York were having a rough time. A war with a Brooklyn Camorra group had cost the Mafia many of its top members, including acting boss Nicholas Morello and his bodyguard Charles Ubriaco.
Umberto Valenti appeared to be next in line to supervise the Morello-Lupo organization and the city’s Mafia, but Masseria had the support of uptown big shot Terranova.
During the early days of Prohibition, Masseria worked overtime to defeat and incorporate the Brooklyn Camorra. His assassination of rival bootlegger Salvatore Mauro on Manhattan’s Chrystie Street in 1920 enhanced his prestige among city Mafiosi. That act may have been the final step of the subjugation of the Camorra.
In 1921, Toto D’Aquila proclaimed himself boss of bosses of the American Mafia, but the real power rested with Masseria and Valenti, who turned their guns on each other beginning in 1922.
Newspapers charged that Valenti had been responsible for more slayings than any other man in the city. Valenti or his associates were believed responsible for the murder of Ciro Terranova’s brother Vincent in May of 1922. Masseria immediately responded by gunning down Valenti lieutenant Silva Tagliagamba at the Manhattan Liquor Exchange. Joe the Boss was charged with the murder, but the case never went to trial (Terranova’s connections within the various branches of the government were exceptional for the time).
Masseria narrowly escaped an ambush as he left his home on the Lower East Side on Aug. 9, 1922, and Joe the Boss established a reputation as a man who could dodge bullets. Masseria apparently slipped out of the way of his would-be assassin’s close-range shots. After his escape, the Boss announced his retirement and called a peace conference with Valenti.
Valenti met with Masseria associates at a restaurant on East 12th Street. After the meeting, he was shot down in the street – apparently Masseria was not yet willing to retire. Some sources indicate the killer was a young Charlie Luciano, just emerging as a force within the Masseria organization.
While D’Aquila retained the “capo di capi re” title as far as the outside world was concerned, Joe Masseria became the de facto boss of the Italian-Sicilian underworld in New York beginning in the summer of 1922. In 1928, he bumped off D’Aquila and handed the old boss’s organization to Masseria ally Al Mineo.
By that time, Luciano had risen within the Masseria organization’s leadership and was overseeing all operations within Manhattan. Frank Uale had been managing affairs across the river in Brooklyn, and, when he was murdered in 1928, Anthony Carfano performed that duty.
Behind the boss’s back (Masseria may have been aware but chose not to deal with it), Luciano established relationships with various gang leaders inside of and outside of the Mafia society across the United States. He participated in the Seven Group, a bootlegging cooperative, and planned with Frank Costello for the illicit enterprises the underworld might enter into once Prohibition ended. Luciano maintained contact with Jewish mobsters and childhood companions Meyer Lansky and Benjamin Siegel and established a relationship with Dutch Shultz.
Masseria had grown drunk with power by 1929 and began meddling in the internal affairs of Mafia groups around the country. He sensed that the Mafiosi transplanted from Castellamare del Golfo, Sicily, were combining against him and against his ally Al Capone in Chicago.
To suppress the rebellion and weaken the anti-Capone Aiello Family, Masseria ordered the assassination of Detroit Mafia leader Gaspare Milazzo, the senior Castellamarese leader in the country. Observing that Bronx mob leader Gaetano Reina of the Bronx was siding with a rebellious Castellamarese clan in Brooklyn, Masseria had Reina killed as well. The boss installed his own allies as bosses of the Detroit and Bronx families. He then attempted to do the same with the troublesome Brooklyn group.
He forced a huge cash tribute payment from the gang’s leader Cola Schiro. Schiro then disappeared. Masseria endorsed his friend Joe Parrino for leadership of the group, but the organization followed famed Castellamarese Mafia warrior Salvatore Maranzano instead.
In 1930, the leaders appointed by Masseria were gradually overthrown by their underlings, and a solid Castellamarese alliance of Detroit, Brooklyn, Bronx and Buffalo opposed Joe the Boss. Masseria’s meddling cost him a great deal of his earlier support – even Ciro Terranova began conspiring against him.
As a last ditch attempt to preserve order, Masseria named old Morello-Lupo mob boss Giuseppe (Peter) Morello as boss of bosses. Masseria had hoped to convince the underworld once again that he was ready for retirement. No one bought it this time. Morello was assassinated. Shortly thereafter, the Castellamarese eliminated Al Mineo.
In 1931, Luciano, Terranova and some other key figures in the Masseria organization went over to the other side. Luciano set up Masseria for assassination on April 15, 1931 at Coney Island’s Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant.
A grateful Maranzano handed the Masseria Family to Luciano. But friction between the two leaders grew until Luciano turned on Maranzano as well and became the supreme leader in the American underworld.
Topics: Mobsters | 1 Comment »
February 5th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
joe the boss was my great grandpa and i luv him !!!!!!!