Chapter Four

Fascists in New York

It was a summer morning in 1925 and New Yorker Lino Balatie, 24 years old, and Lapolto Petilo, 34 years old, from Newark, New Jersey, were looking forward to attending an Italian-American meeting in Laurel Gardens, Springfield Avenue, Newark. They were members of the Fascist League of North America.

That morning, they would be seeing their new 32-year-old leader, Count Ignazio Thaon di Revel, a dynamic young man with excellent contacts back in Fascist Italy but now working as a bond dealer on Wall Street. The last meeting they had gone to had been a big success. There had been some anti-Fascists there, but the Fascists had good speakers and convinced many undecided Italian-Americans to join them. They hoped for a similar result this time round. But when forty of them walked into the hall, the mood was different. Anti-Fascists had come armed and were ready to ambush them, as the New York Herald Tribune reported:

There were yells of ‘Here they come!’ and as the Fascisti reached the center of the hall a half hundred Socialists closed in behind them, some flourishing guns. Every man in the hall rose and started for the center of the room.

Vicious fighting broke out between the two factions with both sides wielding stiletto knives, razors, sticks, and guns.

The yells of the combatants, punctuated by occasional pistol shots, could be heard for blocks . . . The count escaped without a scratch. His men formed a circle about him as they fought.

By the time the police arrived in six patrol wagons, most of the audience had fled the scene, leaving only the wounded and piles of abandoned weapons. The police arrested those left behind. Most of them claimed to be members of the Fascist League who had been ambushed as they entered the building. Balatie and Petilo were among six seriously injured and taken to hospital. Both had stab wounds.

Emotions ran high in the Italian-American East Coast community when it came to Benito Mussolini. Even a civilised debate about Fascism between senior commentators could descend into violence.

On the evening of 11 March 1928, Fascists and anti-Fascists gathered at the Selwyn Theatre on West 42nd Street in Manhattan to listen to two distinguished speakers discuss the merits of Benito Mussolini. Dr Vincenzo Nitti, son of a former Italian premier, began the debate by condemning Il Duce for abolishing all political liberty in Italy. ‘The warlike speeches of Mussolini’, said Nitti, ‘are having the same effect on the peace of Europe as the utterances of the Kaiser had before the World War.’

The Fascists, the larger proportion of the audience, sat high in the gallery and hissed at Nitti as he sat down. It was then the turn of American publisher Samuel S. McClure to argue the case for the Italian dictator. He had just returned from an eighteen-month trip to Italy and was highly impressed by the Fascist state. Mussolini had ‘solved the problem of democracy’ said McClure. He should be praised for ‘suppressing the Mafia’ and for having ‘developed the most miraculous method in 100 years for making real democracy workable.’

Strangely, for a magazine publisher, he extolled Il Duce for turning the press into a ‘house organ . . . maybe the most miraculous of his achievements’. Coining the most famous cliché about Mussolini, McClure noted ‘he had never known a train to arrive behind schedule’, which indicated ‘the railway employees were contented and that they were no exception’.

The working man felt safe and happy in Italy, concluded McClure. This assertion got a barrage of loud laughs from the anti-Fascists sitting in the orchestra stalls. That made the Fascists furious and they yelled ‘Patria!’ at them.

When Dr Nitti rose to rebut McClure’s claims, the Fascists booed. They called him a liar and asked him how much he had been paid to talk that night. A fist-fight broke out in the gallery and one man was about to fling himself at his opponents across the aisle when he was held back by his friends and carried out of the theatre.

McClure got more support by far among the audience and when the debate ended, he was hoisted on the shoulders of excited Fascists who carried him out on to 42nd Street as supporters sang Black Shirt songs around him. McClure waved his hat at surprised theatre-goers.

Mussolini was proving highly popular on the East Coast. He ensured he grabbed the headlines by teasing US democracy when he gave an interview to the New York Times:

Democracy is a regime of luxury compatible with countries possessing great present and future resources. In the United States democracy, which in certain respects is more apparent than real, functions well because the immense riches of the country render possible compensation for the dispersion of energy, which it appears to me is inherent in a democratic regime.

In contrast, said Mussolini, Italy was a poor country and could not afford to disperse its energies:

Life in a poor country is a continual struggle, for which it must be organised in a most efficacious manner, like militia, unable to permit itself to lose any battle, and over which the government must have complete authority and supreme command.

He made no apology for the hundreds of thousands of Italians who emigrated from his country. Once his grand public schemes had been completed, he expected many more to travel to America.

The Fascists capitalised on US interest in Mussolini by establishing a Fascist League of North America. As early as May 1921, there had been enthusiastic supporters of Mussolini in New York intent on organising their own Fascist groups in America. Many of their earliest members were Italian war veterans working in the USA. Top Fascists frequently referred to these centres of support as their colonies in America.

Mussolini’s first ambassador to the United States, Gelasio Caetani, took a dim view of these early efforts. He knew that Il Duce wanted to maintain good relations with the US government in order to secure loans and moderate restrictive immigration legislation – and he did not want American Fascists giving the wrong impression of their movement.

Unfortunately [Caetani reported to Mussolini], the less worthy elements of our colonies are often those which are the most active and who expose themselves publicly when it is a question of taking credit for promoting noble initiatives.

Caetani wanted American Fascist groups to limit themselves to charitable activities and not become involved in political events that might appear to threaten the US. To this end, with the blessing of Mussolini, he organised an official Fascist movement in New York called Fascio Centrale. It was run by Umberto Menicucci, a tailor from Pisa who now lived in Philadelphia and who had fought as an Arditi storm-trooper in World War I, and Dino Bigongiari, an assistant professor at Columbia University. Menicucci could control the war veterans while Bigongiari presented the right cultural face to the Anglo-Saxon establishment. With headquarters at 220 East 14th Street, the Fascio Centrale had up to 800 members. Elsewhere, there were some thirty branches throughout the US, including in the cities of Chicago and Detroit.

By bringing some discipline to Fascists in America, Caetani had hoped to reassure the US government of their peaceful intent. However, the American media continued to carry lurid stories highlighting the menacing side of the Black Shirt phenomenon. Brawls like those at Laurel Gardens were not good news. And it was not just street fights that worried Americans, it was the more profound influence of Fascist ideology.

William Green, President of the American Federation of Labor, spoke out strongly against Mussolini, calling his movement as dangerous as Communism. He framed his concerns in a letter sent out to all five million working members:

Not satisfied with the powers of a dictator in Italy, he has extended the tentacles of Fascismo into other countries. His dictum that ‘once an Italian always an Italian to the seventh generation’, prohibits Italian immigrants to the United States becoming naturalized. They must remain Italian citizens to Fascismo. If they enter any organization having for its purpose opposition to Fascismo their property in Italy will be confiscated.

Organizations have been formed in this country to discourage the naturalization of Italian immigrants . . . Fascismo and communism have the same fangs and the same poison which it is intended to inject into the political life of our nation.

With the appearance of numerous critical newspaper features, such as one in the New York Herald Tribune yelling ‘Fascisti Invade United States in World Expansion’, Caetani could see that he was failing to win the war of words. His advice to Mussolini was to shut down the Fascio Centrale. He received support from US Ambassador in Rome, Richard Washburn Child. Although a fervent admirer of Mussolini, even Child could see that the presence of foreign political organisations on American soil might not be purely benign.

This lack of official support for their movement made many Fascists furious with Caetani. Ignoring his attempts at diplomacy, Menicucci and Bigongiari declared their intention to fight radicals – that is, Socialist opponents – on the streets of New York. Among these, the most vociferous was Carlo Tresca.

Tresca was a Socialist activist who had already made a reputation for himself by supporting numerous strikes in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York state. In Minnesota, while inflaming striking miners, he narrowly escaped a lynching. He eventually settled in Greenwich Village in New York City where he was considered a leading character.

‘Tresca has the distinction of having been 37 times in jail in this country for his ideals’, enthused a sympathetic local newspaper, the Greenwich Villager. ‘Carlo Tresca loves America. He finds her young, daring, beautiful, royal, with a “don’t care” grandeur that is bewitching.’

‘This is the fighting ground for me’, said Tresca. ‘I love it, and I hate it. I fight to make everybody happy.’

He did not make Caetani happy.

Tresca’s newspaper Il Martello (‘The Hammer’) constantly criticised the Fascists and called Mussolini the arch-traitor of Italy. Caetani considered Tresca the principal enemy of Fascism in America and worked with the US Department of Justice to get his newspaper shut down. In 1925 they succeeded in getting him jailed for a year for obscenity, but the public outcry meant he was out after four months. In 1926, the Fascists failed to kill him with a bomb at an anti-Fascist rally. Tresca remained a thorn in the side of the Fascists for years to come until the Mafia finally intervened in the vendetta between Tresca and Mussolini – but that is a later story.

New York State Senator Salvatore Cotillo tried to ease the tension between American Fascists and anti-Fascists by steering a course between the two factions, as he said in March 1923:

The American citizen of Italian extraction is actually earnestly engaged not in Fascismo but in Americanization. The Order of the Sons of Italy, 200,000 strong, with a membership of 40,000 in the state of New York, has assumed this great task . . . The Italian Ambassador, Prince Caetani, in his address to Italians, has urged them to become American citizens and he has also reiterated that they must not mix up Italian with American politics. This ought to be sufficient for the Fascisti of the United States to understand that America has no use for them . . .

To take his case further, Cotillo went with Caetani to Rome later that year to meet Mussolini. Like many others, he was impressed by the dictator and ended up calling Mussolini a ‘commanding element of the highest order . . . as soon as I return in America, I will do everything I can to make Fascism known not as mere brigandage . . . but as a lawful and strong government, full of patriotic ardour . . .’

When he returned to America, Cotillo was interviewed by Carlo Tresca who quoted out of context his reference to Fascism as ‘brigandage’. Mussolini was incensed and withdrew the decoration – the Cross of St Maurizio – he was about to bestow upon Cotillo. Cotillo responded by saying Tresca had misquoted him and that he retained the ‘highest admiration’ for Fascism in Italy, but, ‘there is no place for it or any similar organization or association in America.’

Cotillo’s fate was to remain caught in the crossfire of a savage battle between Fascists and anti-Fascists. Even when he was elected to the Supreme Court of New York State, he could not avoid controversy. When Harvard Professor Edward East called Italian immigrants ‘the dregs’ of Italy’s population, Cotillo struck back. ‘Such remarks’, he said, ‘as that Italy would be “well rid of” of southern Italians as of a “cancerous tumor” and that southern Italians are “incompetent and lacking in intelligence” . . . [indicate] rash and antagonistic thought.’ He countered, saying that it was Italian immigrant workmen that helped build the New York subway and its skyscrapers.

However, Cotillo could not win. Emotions were running too high. Only the month before, the head of the New York branch of the Order of the Sons of America had condemned Cotillo for ‘obeying the dictates of Communists in attacking its alleged Fascist policies’.

Caetani could not win either. Under a storm of criticism from American Fascists, resenting his muzzling of them, he gave up the struggle in October 1924 and resigned his post as ambassador. In July 1925, the Fascist organisation in the US was given a new name – the Fascist League of North America (FLNA). Numbers of supporters continued to grow with seventy branches throughout the USA and some 7,000 members.

Ignazio Thaon di Revel was put in charge of the FLNA as its president. He was a glamorous figure, an aristocratic young man who had worked in the movie business but now wanted to gain experience of American capitalism in the bond department of a brokerage company. He seemed a responsible figure to quieten the reputation of New York’s Black Shirts. But almost immediately he lost control of the organisation and several violent incidents followed. It was Di Revel who led the forty Fascists in the Laurel Gardens brawl and he claimed to have been stabbed in the back during the fighting.

Just a month earlier, on Independence Day, a mob of Fascists clashed with anti-Fascists at the Garibaldi memorial at Rosebank, Staten Island. Carlo Tresca had given a speech to his Socialist supporters when it was the turn of the Sons of Italy to hold their own ceremony. The police allowed 350 Fascists to march in front of the memorial but not stop. A woman in a red dress then ran up to the Fascists and started to shout at them. The band of the Fascists struck up a marching song and a crowd of anti-Fascists jeered. The New York Times reported what followed:

Bottles and stones were hurled in a great shower and the police sent out a fresh call for reserves. For twenty minutes the police had a stiff fight on their hands. They made vigorous use of their night sticks, and marched the Fascisti to the train at Tompkinsville that took them to the ferry for Manhattan.

Seven Fascists were arrested and two of them were said to have been armed with clubs wrapped in newspapers. Some policemen claimed they had been lashed by a weapon a prisoner called a riding crop, which he said was carried by all Black Shirts on parade. One policeman described this as being more like an extended blackjack.

The New York Herald Tribune pointed the finger at the red-shirted radicals for starting the trouble:

The moral courage displayed by a small group of black shirted Fascisti, who remained peaceful in spite of a manifest desire to fight, was the final factor in winning the day for law and order. As fifty of these war veterans faced several hundred frenzied radicals they never once faltered, although a barrage of rocks and bottles rained among them.

It was the radicals who were arrested said the Herald Tribune, one carrying a police baton and another armed with what the police termed a ‘dangerous oak club’.

Later that day, Fascists attacked an elderly red-shirted veteran of Garibaldi’s liberation army. He was making his way to the office of Carlo Tresca’s Il Martello when he was assaulted – the Black Shirts grabbed at the medals on his red shirt. He managed to escape up the stairs to the magazine, but a riot broke out behind him.

The band of Fascisti were blocked [said a newspaper report]. They turned toward the street. A crowd was now surrounding them, and in it were numerous red-shirted enemies. The blacks started a harangue. A blow was struck. Then a free-for-all fight ensued. Women and children joined, either trying to extricate their men or taking revenge for injuries.

Police with night sticks restored order.

While black and red-shirted Italians brought their battles from the Old World to the New, other immigrant Italians kept their heads down and concentrated on getting richer. ‘Prohibition provided a splendid and accelerated opportunity for immigrants to make money’, recalled Joseph Bonanno.

In 1925, Bonanno was twenty years old and staying with an uncle in Brooklyn. The uncle offered to teach him how to make a living as a barber, but Bonanno was not interested. Since 1920, there had been a ban on the selling of alcohol in the US and the Sicilian could see that there was a gold-mine to be had in providing illicit liquor. In his extended Castellammarese family, he met other like-minded young men and they set up a bootlegging operation. They started with their own basement distillery making contraband whiskey. It was little different, he thought, from the centuries-old tradition of Sicilians making their own wine. Local Irish cops were easily paid off and soon Bonanno and his friends were living the high life, buying cars, wearing sharp suits and spending large amounts of money in nightclubs and dance halls.

It was the same story throughout the Italian immigrant community in New York. Bonanno was not the only Mafioso to have fled Sicily in the wake of the Fascist crack-down. Don Vito Cascio Ferro, the Palermo Mafia chieftain, is said to have organised an escape route by which some 500 young gangsters sailed from Sicily to Marseilles and on to America, or from Tunis to Cuba and then to Florida. Not only were they avoiding Mussolini’s round-ups, they were also attracted by the huge sums of money to be made during Prohibition.

Don Vito had lived in New York City briefly around the turn of the century and been impressed by the criminal opportunities there. Back in Sicily, he liked to keep up links with New York in the hope, one day, of setting up a major criminal organisation there. In 1909, a New York policeman called Joseph Petrosino came to Sicily to investigate these links but one night, while wandering in the Piazza Marina near the harbour in Palermo, he was shot in the back several times by local Mafiosi. Legend has it that Don Vito interrupted his dinner with a senior politician to fire the finishing shot.

The death of Petrosino caused a sensation in New York. He had been sent out secretly to Palermo to gather the criminal records of Mafiosi and the police continued to refuse to discuss the purpose of his journey. More than 250,000 New Yorkers turned out in Little Italy to watch a funeral procession 7,000 strong. The great opera singer Enrico Caruso had been a friend of Petrosino ever since the detective trapped the writer of a Black Hand letter who was trying to extort money from the star.

Don Vito later became one of Mori’s greatest scalps. He was arrested in 1929 on a charge of smuggling. During the trial, Don Vito remained aloof from the process, ignoring the court’s authority. When finally convicted, he declared ‘Gentlemen, as you have been unable to obtain proof of any of my numerous crimes, you have been reduced to condemning me for the only one I have never committed.’ He died in prison in 1932.

One of the leading gangsters coming to America in the 1920s was Salvatore Maranzano. He was said to be a key associate of Don Vito and arrived in 1927 in New York with a strong reputation as a man of respect. Like Bonanno, he came from Castellammare del Golfo. It was the home town of many leading US Mafiosi, including Stefano Magaddino, Gaspar Milazzo and Joe Aiello. ‘The Castellammarese tended to stick together’, said Bonanno. ‘We had our own distinct neighborhoods, not only in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but also in Detroit, Buffalo and Endicott, New York. Not only did we all know each other, but we were often related to one another.’ They spoke Sicilian to each other, hardly ever used English, and asked for no favours from outsiders.

Bonanno knew Maranzano from Castellammare where he had been an effective ‘soldier’ for his Uncle Stefano. As a student in Palermo, Bonanno had had lunch with Maranzano several times. He liked his style. When Maranzano came to America, he dressed like a businessman in ‘soft pinstripes on the blues’ and wore no showy jewellery, only his watch and wedding ring. He was in his forties and powerfully built. Bonanno considered him a natural leader and immediately allied himself with him. Bonanno became one of his enforcers. They shared a hatred for the Fascist regime that had forced them into exile.

Maranzano quickly took to the bootlegging business, made money, and came to dominate the Castellammarese clan in Brooklyn and Manhattan. By 1928, Maranzano and his mob were attracting the attention of Giuseppe Masseria, known as Joe the Boss. Masseria was a squat, fat Sicilian who had made his reputation in street shoots-outs in the early 1920s. He too made a fortune out of bootlegging and attracted many of the toughest gangsters of New York. One of them was Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano. They concluded a gang alliance over a table groaning with Italian food.

There was enough on that table for a banquet [recalled Luciano] and I kept figurin’ that any minute half of Masseria’s mob was gonna show up and sweep down on that table. But nobody showed. I think Masseria ate half of all that food himself, most of it with his fingers – and if he didn’t look like a pig on two legs, I never saw one.

Luciano was thirty years old, lean, with a long knife scar on his right cheek that added to his mean look. He had been born in Sicily but left as a little boy and really grew up on the Lower East Side, a melting pot for all kinds of immigrants. Luciano started his career of crime early by threatening the kids around him. He found that some of the toughest kids were Jews and he made good friends among them – some would later become major gangster allies, including Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. Luciano’s was a very New York approach to crime. He would work with whoever got things done. He did not mind where they came from.

This was different to Maranzano and Masseria, who brought Old World prejudices with them. Both of them had an inbred Catholic dislike for Jews and both preferred to work with Sicilians. Luciano disliked Masseria but he loathed Maranzano. The very aloof quality that Bonanno found attractive and sophisticated in Maranzano, Luciano found snobby and irritating. ‘He was always tryin’ to prove that he was superior, that nobody could be his equal’, Luciano said of Maranzano. ‘I didn’t wanna put myself in a position where I hadda kiss his ring at nine o’clock every morning.’

By the late 1920s, Masseria had a firm grip on the New York underworld, dominating at least three of the five main crime clans, and he had more ‘soldiers’ on the streets than the Castellammarese. But Maranzano was a persuasive figure and he played on the Sicilian Tradition for support. A fourth Mafia family in Brooklyn was run by Joe Profaci who came from the same region of Sicily in 1921. Maranzano managed to persuade Profaci to stay out of the upcoming feud.

Tensions rose when Masseria encouraged Al Capone to move from Brooklyn to Chicago and compete with Castellammarese gangster Joe Aiello, who was already making his way in that city. Masseria then tried to split Aiello from his fellow Castellammarese ally in Detroit, Gaspar Milazzo. These Sicilians were all from the streets of Bonanno’s home town. They told Masseria to back off.

Fighting first started in Chicago with Capone getting the best of Aiello and his gangsters. Then, in 1930, Milazzo was shot down in a Detroit fish market. It was not looking good for the Castellammarese and they held a war council in Brooklyn. Maranzano dominated the meeting and said that the killing of Milazzo was a declaration of war. Others wanted to quieten the situation so they could carry on with their businesses, but Maranzano persisted in arguing for the need for action and with the blessing of Stefano Magaddino in Buffalo, he became the wartime leader of the Castellammarese.

‘We carried pistols, shotguns, machine guns and enough ammunition to fight the Battle of Bull Run all over again’, recalled Bonanno. Maranzano and his closest associates travelled in two armoured Cadillacs fitted with steel plates on the sides and bullet-proof windows. ‘Maranzano would sit in the back seat of his car with a machine gun mounted on a swivel between his legs. He also packed a Luger and a Colt, as well as his omnipresent dagger behind his back.’ When Tom Reina of the Bronx was shot dead for expressing his admiration for Maranzano, the Castellammarese struck back by killing Masseria’s right-hand man, Peter Morello, in his Harlem office, plus two of his men.

Luciano told a different story to Bonanno. He claimed that it was he who ordered Morello’s death and Albert Anastasia carried it out. Masseria blamed the Castellammarese and had Al Capone hit men kill Joe Aiello in Chicago.

A failed attempt to kill Masseria prompted Luciano and his Jewish associates to consider ending the war themselves. A meeting between Maranzano and Luciano settled this.

The final shoot-out occurred at a Coney Island restaurant, Nuovo Villa Tammaro, on 15 April 1931. Masseria drove his steel-armoured sedan to a lunch meeting with Lucky Luciano. Masseria ate a big meal of spaghetti with red clam sauce and lobster, all washed down with Chianti. Luciano ate sparingly and sipped a little red wine. After they finished eating, they played a card game, then Luciano excused himself to go the men’s room. The New York Times took up the story:

At 2 o’clock the quiet of the little street near the bay was broken by the roar of gunfire and two or three men walked out of the restaurant to an automobile parked at the curb and drove away. When the police got there they found Mrs Tammaro [the owner] bending over the body of Joe the Boss. He lay on his back. In his left hand was clutched a brand new ace of diamonds.

Albert Anastasia, Bugsy Siegel, Vito Genovese and Joe Adonis were the Luciano hit men who killed Masseria. Luciano emerged from the toilet and called the police. He said he saw nothing because he was having a ‘long leak’. Maranzano and the Castellammarese were delighted – and so should have been Masseria. ‘He died on a full stomach’, said Bonanno, ‘and that leads me to believe he died happy.’

Maranzano celebrated his victory by calling a meeting of all the American Mafiosi to confirm the new gangster hierarchy of five crime families with himself at the top, ‘boss of bosses’ – Capo di Tutti Capi. Maranzano outlined to them his concept of a more organised Mafia with strict rankings of bosses, under-bosses, lieutenants and soldiers.

Joseph Valachi was one of the lower-ranking gangsters at the gathering and noted the antique character of Maranzano’s rules:

I didn’t know until later that he was a nut about Julius Caesar and even had a room in his house full of nothing but books about him. That’s where he got the idea for the new organization.

Before going to a meeting with Al Capone in Chicago, Lucky Luciano asked Maranzano if he could take along his right-hand man, Meyer Lansky. ‘But Lansky was a Jew’, recalled Bonanno, ‘and could not take part in our Tradition.’ Maranzano said Lansky could travel with Luciano but could not be in the same room when they had their meeting with Capone. ‘A Sicilian of the old school would not even have thought about taking a Jewish friend along’, said Bonanno.

Maranzano and Luciano continued to regard each other with disdain and suspicion. Maranzano constantly underestimated the power of New York’s Jewish mobsters and so Luciano decided to take advantage of his Old World blindness by creating a hit squad of exclusively Jewish gangsters, headed by Samuel ‘Red’ Levine. From Toledo, Ohio, Levine was strictly religious and yet found no conflict with his job as a hired killer. If he had an assassination to attend to on the Sabbath, he wore a yarmulke under his hat.

Lansky oversaw their training in the Bronx, but in the meantime Maranzano was organising his own hit on Luciano. For that, he too went outside the Sicilian Tradition and hired an Irishman – Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll – to kill Lucky and all his top associates. It was to be a bloodbath and both sides raced towards it. When Luciano heard that he and Vito Genovese were to attend a meeting at Maranzano’s office, he got suspicious and activated his own assassination plan.

Four men dressed as Internal Revenue Service tax-inspectors burst into Maranzano’s office. ‘When I arrived at the Park Avenue office’, said one witness, ‘I found Maranzano and others lined up with their faces against the wall. I was told to face the wall.’ What happened next no one saw – except the killers.

Maranzano, who at this stage still believed his visitors were genuine government agents – his lawyers had warned him of such just such a surprise visit – went in to his office to talk to two of the agents. With the door of the office closed behind them, the two agents pulled out knives to kill him quietly, but Maranzano fought back strongly. The two Jewish hit men had to use their guns to shoot him four times – in addition to inflicting six stab wounds and cutting his throat.

Coincidentally, Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll was on his way up the stairs to see Maranzano in his office when Maranzano’s bodyguards rushed down and told him their boss was dead. Coll shrugged and kept the $25,000 advance for his contract on Luciano.

Just five months after winning the Castellammarese war, Maranzano was dead. Luciano justified it by saying it would stop all the other killing. Luciano was now Boss of Bosses and ran his criminal empire with less attention to the Tradition and more on brutal efficiency.

Bonanno was saddened to hear of Maranzano’s death but not surprised. Even he – a passionate advocate of the Tradition – had to admit that Maranzano represented ‘a style that often clashed with that of the Americanized men who surrounded him’. Bonanno’s main concern was survival. He met with Luciano who explained his killing of Maranzano by saying Maranzano had set Mad Dog Coll on him. Luciano now said he wanted peace and was happy to work with the Castellammarese clan. Bonanno had little choice but to accept. It meant he now headed his own crime family – the youngest man to do so.

Bonanno celebrated the end of the Castellammarese war and his own elevation to Padre of his people by getting married. Shortly after, his wife Fay gave birth to a boy they called Salvatore, after Bonanno’s father. A lot had happened since Bonanno had taken himself away from the Black Shirts in Sicily.

As Italian gangsters died on the streets of New York, so did Fascists. On 30 May 1927 – Memorial Day – a group of fifteen Black Shirts gathered near the stairs of a station on the elevated railway in the Bronx. One of them, 39-year-old Joseph Carisi, a tailor and war veteran, stopped to buy an Italian newspaper. A reporter described what happened next:

Suddenly two men, wearing flaring red neckties, stepped from a post near the entrance at Turin’s restaurant, at 4,423 Third Avenue . . . One of the strangers looked in the direction of Carisi and started running towards him, at the same time pulling a knife from his sleeve.

Carisi had heard the pattering of footsteps and turned just as the long knife blade came into sight. He shouted for help, and as he looked upward to where his companions were approaching the top of the flight of stairs the stranger stabbed him six times. The blows were delivered with lightning speed and were all within a space of inches and around the collarbone.

The other Fascists ran down the stairs to chase the murderer but lost him. Then they heard a shot. Nicholas Amorroso, aged twenty-two, a printer, was a block away when he saw a second stranger run towards him. Before Amorroso could move, the man produced a knife and stabbed him in the chest, just above his heart, but it was not a killing blow. The assassin realised this, pulled a revolver from his hip pocket, and shot Amorroso through the heart. Both Carisi and Amorroso were dead at the scene, as was reported by another newspaper:

The dual killing may have been a case of mistaken identity. The opposing Italian groups had been bitter for some time. Police believe the plot was engineered to do away with Giacomo Caldora, president of the Fascist organization in the Bronx . . . He was following closely after Amorroso but was untouched by any of the four bullets.

Later that afternoon, more violence erupted in West 45th Street. The World reported that one Black Shirt was set upon as he smoked a cigarette outside the Fascist League’s headquarters. He called for help and 200 Fascists pounded down the steps of the office to pursue the three red-tie-wearing Socialists across town. ‘Across the broad plaza they ran’, said the newspaper, ‘toward the Hotel Astor, while astonished pedestrians fled for cover before the onrush of whip-waving, yelling Italians. Traffic officers blew their whistles. Motorists clamped brakes.’

Ignazio Thaon di Revel, leader of the Fascist League of North America, responded to the front-page news by saying that the killing of Carisi and Amorroso was not part of a Fascist/anti-Fascist war but was ‘simple murder’. His cool reaction was not what Fascists in Italy wanted to hear. They were outraged and even Mussolini telegrammed his US ambassador demanding that measures be taken to control the anti-Fascists. But what should have been a propaganda coup for the Fascists in America turned into a disaster during the following trial. Two anarchists were charged with the murders but Carlo Tresca organised their defence and very effective it was too. One witness stood up and declared: ‘I abandoned the Fascist League of North America because it is a nest of criminals, foremost among them being its Presidente Count Ignazio Thaon di Revel.’ It was even suggested that the two deaths might have stemmed from in-fighting within the Black Shirts. The anarchists were acquitted.

As a result of the murderous incident, parades of Black Shirts – along with the Ku Klux Klan – were banned by the New York police. Further negative newspaper stories revealed the torn allegiances of American Fascists. Thaon di Revel exacerbated the crisis by claiming that 90 per cent of Italian-Americans were pro-Fascist.

Mussolini was getting angry now. Just as Luciano and Bonanno wanted to step back into the shadows to conduct their criminal business, so Mussolini wanted an end to bad publicity in America. The axe finally fell in December 1929, two days before Christmas. The Fascist League of North America was dissolved. Di Revel went back to Wall Street.

At a time when New Yorkers might be finally breathing a sigh of relief that Fascism no longer seemed a threat to their city – and the Sicilian gangsters seemed to have shot themselves to pieces – then a new menace loomed. It came from northern Europe and was headed by another disaffected war veteran. The Nazis were coming to Manhattan . . .