Joe Masseria - Joe The Boss

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 1928, Toto D'Aquilla, the Mafia leader in Brooklyn, was 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 gang, possibly arising out of resentment 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. Alfred Mineo and his enforcer Steve Ferrigno, allies of Joe Masseria, then took over leadership of the D'Aquilla family.

In June 1929, Ciro Terranova was 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 approached, on behalf of the new Unione Siciliane 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" Morellos and paid the ultimate price. Ballistics evidence has shown that the bullets that killed Marlow were fired by a submachine gun owned by Al Capone's Chicago Outfit, and that the same weapon was also used in the killing of Yale and for the Saint Valentine's Day massacre. The weapon eventually came into the hands of the authorities after the arrest of Fred “Killer” Burke, a St. Louis, Missouri gunman who participated in the St. Valentine's Day plot.

Masseria then moved in on what had been Yale's organization 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 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 Gaetano "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 Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro 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 centered around the exploitation of their fellow Italians.

The imperial gaze of Joe the Boss now fell upon "the Broadway Mob" and he identified Charles "Lucky" Luciano as the logical recipient of his demands for homage and tribute. This was because Luciano was the only Sicilian member of that group - Frank Costello and Albert Anastasia were Calabrian, Joe Adonis and Vito Genovese were from Naples, and Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel were Jewish. Luciano had little interest in the rites and rituals of secret societies, and he 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 birthplace 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.