Some info i found on Pollaccia's adventures and RUMOURS....

Joe the Boss” was violently deposed in a Coney Island restaurant on April 15, 1931, and the legends say “Lucky” Luciano set him up. During a private card game with the boss, Luciano supposedly stepped into the bathroom just as a team of handpicked assassins entered the restaurant. Various underworld figures have been named as participants in the assassination, including Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia and Benjamin Siegel.

The legend, however, turns out to be generally untrue. The boss was known to be lunching that day with Sam Pollaccia, who by that time might have risen as high as underboss or consigliere(me:it is not known) in the Masseria organization.

Other Masseria lieutenants might have been present, including Luciano. But it was far from a Masseria-Luciano tкte-а-tкte, and no reliable account of the period mentions the tale of Luciano’s conveniently timed trip to the bathroom.

As Brooklyn detectives tried to get to the bottom of Masseria’s assassination, they are known to have brought Pollaccia in for questioning. Pollaccia denied any knowledge of or involvement in the killing.

Some years later, when the Kings County district attorney’s office probed the Murder, Inc., organization, it discovered a report that Pollaccia and a small group of men were with Masseria, as “Johnny Silk Stockings” Giustra entered the restaurant behind Masseria and shot the boss to death. None of the other men in the restaurant apparently did anything to interfere with Giustra, who by himself easily could have delivered all five slugs found in Masseria’s body.


Giustra was a Brooklyn labor racketeer and possible rival to the organization of Vincent Mangano and Albert Anastasia at the Brooklyn waterfront. Less than a month after Masseria’s killing, Giustra was found dead in a Bronx apartment building.13 If that killing was related to Masseria’s death rather than to labor racket rivalry, it could be interpreted as an effort by Mafia leaders to remove an individual who linked them with the boss’s assassination.

Salvatore Maranzano, victor of the Castellammarese War, assumed the title and responsibilities of boss of bosses of the American Mafia in April 1931. But he, too, was assassinated, gunned down in his Manhattan offices on Sept. 10, 1931.14 The old group of anti-Masseria conspirators looks to have been involved in that killing as well.

source: http://www.onewal.com/a018/f_pollacciap04.html