NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, April 1, 2015, 12:00 PM
FRANK CASTORAL
(Originally published by the Daily News on April 3, 1992. This story was written by Joseph McNamara.)
With John Gotti’s fate decided by a jury of his peers, it is interesting to note the varied ways that predecessors of the natty don ended their days. Many took the Big Bang route to eternity.
While Black Hand methods flared in Italian communities here in the 1880s, the first New York Mafia “bosses” came from the infamous Morello family. First there was Antonio, oldest brother who rubbed out some 40 Manhattanites in the 1890s, then brother Joe, whose killings had a ghoulish tinge, and finally young Nick, a crafty gang leader with a vision of “syndicate” that foretold Charles (Lucky) Luciano.
Nick, who controlled the East Harlem and Greenwich Village rackets, battled the notorious camorristas of Brooklyn don Peligrino Morano in the first of New York’s Mafia wars.
Hopeful of setting up a giant criminal web with elements at peace with each other and each controlling respective rackets, Nick Morello extended an olive branch to Moreno in 1916. Invited to a cafe on Brooklyn’s Navy St., Morello showed with a top aide and was promptly assassinated in what was not the last of mobdom’s double crosses.
By 1920, the undisputed Mafia boss in town was Giuseppe (Joe the Boss) Masseria. With his kill-crazy cohort, Ignazio (Lupo the Wolf) Saiette, Masseria silenced all opposition. When Prohibition came, and with Lupo serving a longer term for counterfeiting, Joe the Boss built a bootlegging empire.
In 1931, the Boss was challenged by Salvatore Maranzano and through the connivance of Masseria men Luciano and Meyer Lansky, Joe was cut down in a Coney Island restaurant Maranzano became the first “Boss of Bosses.”
Maranzano carved New York into five crime families and named his new organization La Cosa Nostra (Our Thing), with himself as super don. Luciano he made No. 2 man. But Lucky wanted to move past the Mustache Petes, as the old-line Mafiosos were called. And Maranzano realized that in order to remain in power he would have to kill his top aides.
He enlisted Irish killer Vincent (Mad Dog) Coll to do the work, but Thomas (Three Finger Brown) Luchese, a Maranzano confidante, got word to Luciano. Maranzano was slain four months after taking power.
Luciano took over one family and, with financial wizard Lansky, set up a national crime “syndicate” that accepted other ethnic elements. Luciano became the most important mob figure in America, even overshadowing Chicago’s Al Capone.
Luciano in 1936 ran afoul of ambitious prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who nailed the hood on prostitution charges. Sentenced to 50 years, Luciano was deported in 1946 to his native Italy, where he died of a heart attack in 1962.
Luciano’s family was taken over by Vito Genovese, one of the most ruthless of dons. He is alleged to have moved the Mafia heavily into narcotics and to have ordered the rubout of Albert Anastasia, a family boss and Lord High Executioner of the mob’s snuff team, Murder Inc. Don Vito was aided by Anastasia underboss, Carlo Gambino.
Anastasia had taken over one of the five families by killing its don, Phil Mangano, in 1951. On Oct. 25, 1957, Big Al was blown out of his barber’s chair in the Park Sheraton, purportedly on a contract given by don Joe Profaci to Brooklyn’s homicidal Gallo brothers. Gambino became the boss.
Genovese, in a further bid for power, angered Lansky and Frank Costello. After all, as don watchers see it, it was Genovese who put Vincent (The Chin) Gigante up to hitting Costello earlier in 1957. The shot grazed Costello’s head. Further, the slain Anastasia was a Costello ally.
So, the sources add, Vito was betrayed by the bosses to the feds on narcotics charges and he went to Atlanta Penitentiary for 15 years. Genovese died there in 1969.
Costello retired from the eternal fray and died a country squire on Long Island in 1973.
Gambino developed awesome power over 20 years and was the model for novelist Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather.” Savage when needed, he urged mediation and often arbitrated mob disputes. He died of a heart attack in 1976.
A lucky boss was Joseph (Joe Bananas) Bonanno Sr., who in the early 1960s sought total control of the rackets. To do so corpses would have to be made of Luchese, who took over one of the five families when don Tom Gagliano died, of Gambino and several out-of-town crime czars.
Joe Colombo - underboss to don Giuseppe Magliocco, who was handed the contract by Bananas - informed the threatened hoods. Bananas, stripped of power and slowed by a heart attack, was allowed to retire to Arizona. And Colombo was rewarded with control of the family of long-time don Profaci, who died of cancer in 1962.
Magliocco threw himself on the mercy of syndicate leaders and, shorn of authority, was allowed to die a natural death shortly afterward.
Colombo, hower, disturbed the bosses with his high-profile advocacy of Italian civil rights and inattention to family business. Shot in the head at a rally in Columbus Circle in 1971, Colombo lingered in a coma seven years before dying.
Crazy Joe Gallo was seen as the author of this violence. Never a boss, though he aspired to be one, Gallo himself was slain the next year in a Little Italy clam house.
Luchese became one of the most popular of mob bosses, keeping a low profile while exerting great power in gambling, narcotics, loan sharking and garment and construction rackets. He died of cancer in 1967 and got one of the biggest funerals in underworld history.
After Joe Bananas was deposed, his family was taken over by Carmine Galante, as brutal a chieftain as Genovese. But Galante made the same mistake his predecessor had - a grab for more dominance. Galante was shot out from under his omnipresent cigar in a Brooklyn restaurant in 1979.
After Gambino cashed in his chips, Paul Castellano took over Carlo’s mob. But the rule of Paul ended in shots outside an East Side steak house Dec. 16, 1985. That hit, the recent jury was informed, was engineered by one John Gotti, whose Teflon coating - which had protected him from prosecution - has disappeared.