Today, April 15, 1931 - Joe the Boss Masseria was shot dead in a restaurant in Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY.

Very important date in NY mob history. Apparently it was a horrible thing to watch Joe the Boss eat.

I only learned recently that Maranzano celebrated his victory in the Castellammarese War with a party in the very same restaurant where Masseria was killed.

Yeah, he was a sloppy eater.
Interesting though is the fact that, according to the autopsy report, his stomach was as good as empty. So he died on an empty stomach. Strangely enough, he apparently did not have a lunch that day.

He was not particularly charismatic either. He was, and still is, wrongly regarded as not very smart. But I think he was much smarter than we want to give him credit for.

I think he had to be very smart to rise to the position he held when he died. Interesting that his stomach was empty at the autopsy. Thought he just finished his late lunch when he was shot?

Also, I've read reports that Luciano was still at the scene when the cops arrived, and reports that Lucky fled with the killers. Wonder which one is true?

Chopper do you have these reports? I never knew of the party either, any documents on it? If you haven't read Thom L. Jones article at gangsterinc.com you should do so right now before you even finish reading my post.


Id like to get everyones thoughts on Joe? How do you think he got started? What year do you think Luciano joined his group? Do you know how he started his rise to be the top boss of New York? There are, and always will be due to the time past since then, many holes in the story of Joe the boss but i believe he is a fascinating character. Also on a sidenote, the notion that Joe the Boss and Salvatore Marazono did not allow non-Sicilians into their gangs is all movie bullshit, they may not have let them into their inter circle but there were plenty of main land Italians in both of their gangs.

This has been a matter of debate for a long time. I can´t remember exactly where the story of Luciano being there when the cops arrived origins from. Perhaps Valachi? However, "recent" research show no police reports or newspaper clippings from the day suggesting Luciano being there. I personally think that the "oh, I was at the bathroom when it happened" is fabricated.
So is the famous photograph showing Masserias hands clinching the ace of spades card btw. A reporter (or the photographer) put it there after he had arrived at the scene, all for the dramatic effect of it all.

Actually, Danny, Masseria was the one who recruited mainland Italians. A lot of remnants from the old Camorra gangs ended up as members in the Masseria group. Castellammarese and Palermitanos (basically) filled out Maranzano´s group.

Daniel, with reports I meant the literature I've read on that period, like Five Families, Man of Honor (great on the Castellammarese War), Tim Newark's Lucky Luciano, American Mafia etc. etc.

The most common story is that Lucky stayed on the scene, weeping for poor Joe the Boss, saying that he went for 'a long leak' and when he returned, Joe was dead. Newark claims in his book that none of the news reports of the time mention Lucky being there, and that he probably fled after the shooting.

After the shooting, Maranzano declared himself Capo di tutti Capi, celebrating with a big three day banquet at the same Coney Island restaurant.

According to Nick Gentile, there was an immense table in the middle with a big tray, in which everybody who attended placed money. The money was supposed to go to the relatives of victims of the gang war. In reality, Maranzano pocketed 100,000 for himself. In 1931. This greed probably didn't sit well with many of the younger mobsters.

Yes that´s correct. And if I´m not mistaken, according to Joe Bonanno, that money went to a "war chest" just in case a new war would erupt. Maranzano had won the war, but he didn´t win the peace.

He sure didn't Hairy ! He only enjoyed his position for a short five months before meeting his end at the hands of some very agressive 'IRS agents'.

I think there's a similarity with Sal Montagna and Sal Maranzano. Both had a short rule because they became arrogant and greedy. Both tried to take out their biggest rival and were killed instead.

That's a fair comparison, Sonny. But I have to believe that Maranzano was much more important at the height of his power than Montagna ever was. But it was a much different time .

The Villa Tammara Restaurant, on West 15th Street in Brooklyn where Masseria was killed.

Joseph Valachi was from mainland Italy and he came up a soldier in the Reina Family, who fought under Maranzano and some sources say Joe Cargo even worked his way up to being a bodyguard for Maranzano. Like i said his inner circle my have been made up of Sicilians but he had mainland Italians in his structure. I also dont like it when i read that Maranzano took over the "Castellamarese family", the leader of the family before him Cola Schiro was from Roccamena, many people claim he was a stooge for Milazzo and Magaddino before they fled town, but neither of them were a force at this time. Also Maranzano's underboss Angelo Caruso was not Castellamarese either.

The first big step taken by Luciano, Costello, Lansky and Seigel in taking control of the mob and organizing crime by creating the commission. It is believed that the hitmen were Seigel, Joe Adonis, Vito Genovese & Albert Anastasia......


....speaking of which brings us to another important event that took place this day in mob history :

In 1951 Vincent Mangano mysteriously ( ) disappeared clearing the way for Albert Anastasia to take control of the family which eventually went on to become known in the underworld as the Gambino family.

He didn't disappear .... he's sleeping with the fishes in Sheepshead Bay.

Was his brother's body found?

Yeah, his brother's body was found in Sheepshead Bay (the neighborhood, not the bay, itself).

Marazano was obviously more powerful and influential than Montagna ever was, but besides that there's a strong resemblance. Both were members of the Bonanno family who were agressively seeking to become a top boss by wiping out the competition. But in the end, their hunger for power is what got them killed.

Yes that´s corect. Valachi was a mainland Italian. But he might have been the only mainland Italian close to Maranzano. The vast majority throughout the ranks within the early Bonanno Family, was Castellammaresi. That is why that family is/was sometimes refered to as such.
Schiro was an early leader. However, there seems to have been yet another leader (prior to Schiro) by the name of Salvatore "Turi" Saracino. Not much is known about this fellow, only that he most probably was a Castellammaresi.
Angelo Caruso was from Palermo and he led the Palermitano faction within the Family. He was bumped down from underboss to caporegime in 1931, but was extremely loyal to Bonanno. Caruso held a capo spot for more than 40 years, running his crew out of the "Shoreview Social Club", located at 405 12th Street in the Lower East Side section of Manhattan. A true old timer!

Didn't Bonanno say that at the next Commission meeting, Anastasia simply showed up and took Mangano's place at the table? Goes to show that even back then, the rules could be bend / broken when it was convenient.

hey hairy do you have anymore info on Salvatore "Turi" Saracino? I read on rd that the name was an alias of Giuseppe Palermo, who was from the province of Palermo and associated with the Morellos in their 1909 counterfeiting scheme. But if Bonnano takes about him being with him and the rest of the bunch im sure its a different guy.

Newspaper reports at the time say the place was empty and Luciano's arrest record doesn't show anything for April 1931. On the claim that the hitmen were Seigel, Joe Adonis, Vito Genovese & Albert Anastasia - very unlikely (this information is originally in the discredited Gosch and Hammer book, I believe).

In your years of research have you come up with a single name that is linked to that day in April Dave?

Wasn't Michael "Trigger Mike" Coppola one of the shooters?

In the Bonanno book, there is a picture of Bonanno´s father standing and shaking hands with Turi Saracino. Below the picture the text says "New York City, 1910. My father and Turi Saracino, two of Castellammare´s most important men of Tradition in New York."
If this picture was taken in 1910 (I have no reason to doubt it) the man shaking Bonanno´s father´s hand most probably is not Giuseppe Palermo. Palermo had been picked up in early January of that year and in February sentenced to a 18 year prisonterm. So when did Palermo find the time having a picture taken with Bonanno´s father?

Palermo seems to have had used an alias of Saracina though. According to David Critchley and I think that this is in his book "The Origin of Organized Crime in America" Palermo´s alias may have originated from the Castellammare born Giaccoma Saracina who briefly in 1906 had stayed with Palermo in Manhattan. Palermo used the alias throughout his life and it was the name he was buried under.

Negative

No reason why he would be!

Nice article about Joe The Boss and his assassination i found on the net...Part 1
By Thom L. Jones
‘It is the theory that decides what can be observed.
If the facts don’t fit the theory change the facts.’
Albert Einstein

It took ten years and a lot of shooting to kill Giuseppe Masseria. He was Joe the Boss to the underworld--but his enemies found him with his back turned yesterday in a little Italian restaurant in Coney Island…….

Not with a whimper, but more of a bang. A number of bangs in fact……
In a dingy street, in a dingy corner on Coney Island, filled with the stink of fish and the stench of treachery most foul, as Shakespeare or someone would have said.
At various times on this same day:
The Brooklyn Robins went down to the Boston Braves three to nine in Beantown.
King Alfonso and Queen Ena of Spain went into exile.
The first walk backwards across America began in California.
Prince Thomas, Duke of Genoa and the nephew of the first king of a united Italy, died.
As did a man who was claiming to be the first king of the New York Mafia.
His name was Giuseppe Masseria (right), sometimes called ‘Joe the Boss.’
Short, fat, (although at 5’4’ and 155 lbs some might think him more squat than tubby) a bit of a trencherman, which is a polite way of describing a glutton, he had the habit of squinting his eyes when talking, hence the sobriquet ‘The Chinaman’ though never apparently to his face.
Sometime on the afternoon of that long-ago Wednesday, he came to the restaurant, in a building owned or leased by a thirty-two year old man from Angri near Pompei, Italy, called Gerado Scarpato, who lived in the apartment above the restaurant with his wife and mother-in-law.
Just what Scarpato’s place in the New York Italian-American underworld was, has never been satisfactorily explained. He was a restaurateur, but other things as well.
Probably involved in extortion, one of his victims arriving at the restaurant unexpectedly that very afternoon, chased away by Scarpato who was talking to a group of men on the sidewalk, including notorious hoodlum, Anthony Carfano and others of an equal bent. Carfano was tight enough with Masseria to have gone into partnership with him in a horse racing stable and a bookmaking business among other things.
A document in the New York archives indicates that Scarpato had taken over the extortion ring previously run by Giuseppe ‘Clutching Hand’ Piraino, (a close associate of Carfano,) who had been killed the previous August during the mob war that had been taking place in New York since February of 1930.
Whatever he did on the wrong side of the law, he was good at it. He did not have an arrest record of any sort.
Scarpato was married to twenty-seven year old Alvera, whose mother, Anna Tammaro, was the head chef and whose name was above the door on West 15th Street, here on Coney Island.
She may have been busy with her other customers on this day, but for Joe ‘The Boss’ there was little to do. Contrary to all the reports that have been published in the last eighty years that he ‘pigged out’ prior to his demise, his autopsy showed hardly any food content in his stomach - only two ounces of bile.
Mrs Tammaro claimed that she had served coffee, and the men had asked for fish so she had left the building to purchase some.
Whatever he was doing at the Nuova Villa (right), eating was not on the agenda for Joe the Boss.
According to newspaper reports, on this day in the warmest April New York had experienced in 63 years and the driest since 1910, Joe was accompanied to the eating house by three men in his bullet-proof car, but just who these were has never been completely ascertained.

One may have been Saverio ‘Sam’ Pollaccia, who was Masseria’s consigliere, or advisor. Another could possibly have been Nicola Gentile, a Sicilian Mafia Pied-Piper who had been wandering across America for twenty-five years, although he claimed that Joe was already dead when he arrived outside the restaurant. Consequently he never went in. At least he did in one of the versions of his memoirs. In another, he claimed he was there with among others, Vincenzo Mangano.

As to the third?

Was it Charlie Luciano?

Part 2

His real name was Salvatore C. Lucania and by the age of thirty-four he was, it seems, the right hand of Masseria. A petty criminal and minor drug dealer, he kick-started his career by becoming an informant in 1923 at the age of twenty-six, and never looked back. By the time he came under the wing of Masseria he had established himself as a bootlegger, and operator of betting and gambling rings in Lower Manhattan.
Every book, article or story on this king-hit in Brooklyn, ever published, will tell you:
a) it was orchestrated by Charlie,
b) he was there having lunch and playing cards with his boss, and
c) was taking an interminably long leak in the men’s room when all the action was going down, so he did not see anything. As you do.
It is interesting, however, that even though every flatfoot and detective in town knew who he was, according to the press, nobody bothered to speak to him, and he was never detained or officially interviewed after the event. It seems certain though that the cops would have contacted him as they must have known of his connection to Masseria. Any notes they kept would have made interesting reading.
Neither the New York Times or The Herald Tribune in their reports on the shooting make any mention of Luciano being present at the restaurant. Gentile claimed he went straight from the Villa Nuova to the home of Luciano in mid-town Manhattan where a meeting was held between himself, Luciano and Vincenzo Troia an associate of Salvatore Maranzano the man who headed the faction opposing Joe.
If this is true, it might confirm that Luciano was not at the restaurant when the shooting took place.
It has been reported that two men and in some reports, four men, arrived while Joe and his friends were playing cards, walked into the restaurant and shot him repeatedly. The autopsy on his body showed gunshot wounds to the back, and one in the back of the head.
It’s been posited that Joe was swinging around to give these upstarts un occhio, the traditional Italian ’evil eye’ but simply got one there for his efforts. In fact, all the kill-shots came from behind. The eye wound was an exit one.
The day after he was killed, Dr. G.W. Ruger carried out an autopsy on the body of Guiseppe Masseria.
Joe had been dressed to the nines that day:
Light gray three-piece suit by Vincent Balletta matched to a white Madras shirts by Henry and Al, New York. Black leather belt with silver buckle. His dainty size six feet in black Oxfords and blue cotton lisle socks. Underneath, cream, silk underwear.
Dressed to kill!
Two of the four back shots were through and through as was the head shot. Two of the shots to the back had smudged the coat jacket with gunpowder, indicating the shooter was only inches away. Heart, lungs and liver were torn apart. Brain was shredded. Two lead bullets were recovered, both .38 calibre. Although the autopsy does not indicate it, Joe was most certainly dead when he hit the wooden floor.
You could say they are the usual suspects. Whether or not any of these were the two or four shooters that day is open to debate. Why Italians would hire Jews to kill the biggest Italian mobster in town is something to speculate on. Although interestingly, it was done some months later to dispose of Masseria’s opponent, Salvatore Maranzano.
Anastasia and Adonis were very likely members of another gang run by Stefano Ferrigno and Manfredi Mineo which was in support of Masseria in his war on the rest of the New York Italian-American underworld at this time. Albert was a stone killer, with a long list under his belt. Adonis was more a businessman than a hit man. Genovese was definitely another stone-killer and could well have pulled the trigger.
However, it’s highly unlikely Anastasia was one of the killers.
Samuel S. Leibowitz who became a judge in Brooklyn’s King County Court, in 1931 was a young lawyer with a reputation for being a top man in the defense’s corner. He had an office at 66 Court Street in downtown Brooklyn. At noon that day, Anastasia walked into the lawyer’s office demanding the receptionist check the time on the office clock. She did and confirmed it was correct. Anastasia asked for Leibowitz and was told he was in court until later in the day. He told the receptionist he would wait, and settled back, thereby creating for himself the perfect alibi.
It would not be the last time Albert arranged a cast-iron alibi at the time a mobster was being murdered. Twenty years later, in October 1951, he arranged to be having an X-Ray in a public hospital as Willie Moretti the infamous little New Jersey hoodlum was gunned down in another restaurant, this time in Cliffside, New Jersey.
Livorsi, Stracci and Coppola were all part of a crew of the Masseria family that operated out of East Harlem under the supervision of Ciro Terranova. His father had married the mother of Joe Morello (who had been the previous head of Masseria’s crime family,) and at forty three, was a senior member of the organization in years and experience. The three soldiers were seasoned gunmen, Coppola even carrying a nick name, ‘Trigger Mike’ as testament to his prowess with a gat, (For more on Coppola, check out Thom's earlier story here) so any of these could have qualified.
Scarpato claimed he went for a long walk that afternoon and returned to find his prize guest gutted on the restaurant floor. But did he? Maybe he was the shooter. Who better to come up behind an unsuspecting customer than the maître d of the establishment?
The only really strong link to the killer though, lies with a man called Johnny ‘Silk Stocking’ Guistra who according to some sources was part of the crew of Vincenzo Mangano, a capo in the Mineo crime family, operating the family’s businesses on the South Brooklyn Piers around Red Hook. Which could have been strange seeing as how he was from Calabria and Mangano was a staunch Sicilian Mafioso and averse to working with non-Sicilians in his crew.
Other information however, implies Johnny was in fact in competition with Mangano and was part of the Masseria crime family. He was apparently involved in rackets linked into the laundry business across New York. It’s been suggested his nick-name indicated his penchant for the opposite sex on the one hand, and also that it represented his favorite tool of destruction as he had, unusually for a mobster, an aversion to blood.
His connection into the hit was an overcoat he left hanging up in the restaurant.
Seemed a strange thing to do though. Walk into a room, take off your coat, kill a man and then walk out leaving behind such incriminating evidence.
Of course if he was there at the moment so to speak, and he was caught unawares, he may well have fled the scene in panic, with obviously no thought for his coat. You’re sitting at a table, talking to your boss, sipping a coffee, when suddenly someone or ones, starts shooting holes in him. It could be cause for extreme concern.
‘I’m outa here!’
Not unlike the comment and action of Jerome Squillante, when sitting next to Albert Anastasia in that barber shop twenty-six years later in mid-town Manhattan, who also found things just a little bit too hot to hang around when two men came in and banged his boss.
Didn’t really matter to Johnny the Silk. Three weeks later he was shot numerous times in the head and chest and died in the hallway of a dingy tenement at 75 Monroe Street on the Lower East Side on May 10th. By his side lay his pearl-handed pistol. He’d been able to get it out, but tests revealed it had not been fired.
Maybe loose ends being tied together? Maybe a double-cross too many? Maybe late on a loan? Never easy to pin the donkey in these tangled tales. All we know for sure is that he or someone wearing his coat, went to that Coney Island food place that afternoon and maybe killed Senor Masseria.
It’s also possible of course that Johnny had left this coat on a previous visit and simply never got around to collecting it, and the fact that it was found had absolutely no bearing on the shooting at all.
There was an interesting by-line to his murder. On May 14th his body was waked at 11 First Place in Carroll Gardens. Two men attending the service, Vincent Gesino and Ettore Zappi were given a message at 5 PM that a man called Joe wanted to see them at 1331 Sixty-ninth Street in Brooklyn. When they got there, they were ambushed in the hallway of the building and both men were shot and seriously injured, although surviving their wounds.
Gesino who worked as a longshoreman, had apparently been involved with Giustra in some kind of business deal, perhaps in relation to the funeral company that Johnny ran from the very premises from where he himself was buried.
Zappi who eventually became a capo or crew boss in the Mineo crime family
was reported to be the ‘boss’ of Gesino and Giustra, although he claimed at the time to be a simple fruit merchant. Were these two men linked into Masseria’s death in some way and had been designated the chop as a result?
‘Silk Johnny’ was not the only one who met an unnatural death following the killing of ‘Joe the Boss.’