yes, and backing a non-Sicilian against another Sicilian was absolutely unheard of. nobody would dare do it. unless of course hes not Sicilian. I would suggest that masseria had the backing of the old country camorra. if he lived would his faction have won the war?
Masseria was less organized, and he was taken by surprise. Plus he had double agents in his ranks (Lucky and Three Fingers).
For him to win he needed a less ethnically diverse army. The Castellammarese were uniform because they all came from the same village. When the order went out to start shooting, there was no delay because the whole village took orders from one man. Masseria on the other hand had a variety of different bosses with differing degrees of loyalty to him. In Masseria's situation, he probably couldn't organize everyone underneath him to move like one army. He was less organized.
He was taken by surprise. The opening salvo was when Gaetano Reina was felled. But depending on who you read, either Masseria hit him, or Lucky and his confederates did it to make it look like Maranzano started shooting (and to keep Reina from making Maranzano too strong and thus wiping them all out). Either way, Joe the Boss couldn't choose how the war would turn out because he wasn't permitted to choose how and where it would begin.
He had double agents around him. That doesn't need any explanation. That really did him in. He would have been better off leaving Charlie Lucky alone.
How could Masseria have won it? Wow. All I can say is that if he couldn't get someone within the loyal tight nit Castellammarese clan to whack Maranzano, he probably would have to bomb them with TNT in their neighborhoods and speakeasies. There's no other way. I don't think Joe the Boss had the type of loyalty from his supporting cast that they would go out in unison and shoot down 500 Castellammarese.
Maybe the problem was that Joe The Boss's empire was too spread out? Maybe he had more men than Maranzano, but those men were not geographically situated in such a manner that they would be able to surprise the Castellammarese with a unified simultaneous attack.
I read somewhere that the match up was 500 Maranzano men versus 600 Masseria men, and about 200 people under Lucky Luciano and Company before he merged into the Masseria mob. But as soon as the Castellammarese war started, it became clear that Maranzano was stronger solely by the number of soldiers Joe the Boss was losing.
