Maranzano agreed and the hit was set up.
On April 15, 1931, Joe the Boss went out to lunch. His friend and top aide, Charley Luciano picked him up from his office on 2nd Avenue in downtown Manhattan and drove over the Brooklyn Bridge and down to Coney Island. There, just off the boardwalk on West 15th street, was the Nuova Villa Tammaro Restaurant, run by Gerardo Scarpato, a close friend of Joe the Boss and Luciano. At about 12:30 p.m., the two men sat down to a lavish lunch. Joe was a glutton, so it can be imagined that he devoured his last meal with glee, savoring every mouthful. The menu consisted of cold and hot antipasti, minestrone soup, salad of calarmari, scungilli and shrimps; lobster Fra Diavola with pastas of linguine in marinara sauce and spaghetti alla Milanese. The best imported Italian wines accompanied the meal, which was topped off with pastries and, finally, demitasse.
At the end of the meal, the two men ordered a pack of cards and played a game of "Klob," a Russian two-handed card game. At about 3:30 p.m., Luciano excused himself and went to the bathroom.
At that moment, four men rushed into the now deserted restaurant and started firing at Joe the Boss. Of the more than 20 shots fired, 6 found their target, and Masseria slumped over the table, dead in a pool of blood.
The men left and drove off in a car that was waiting for them outside. It was later disclosed that the gunmen were Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia and Benjamin Siegel. When the police arrived, Luciano said he had no idea why anybody would want to kill Joe. When they asked him where he was when the shooting occurred, Luciano said, "I was in the can takin� a leak. I always take a long leak".
Among the people interrogated by police detectives investigating the slaying was the restaurant owner, Scarpato. He claimed ignorance of the event, protesting he was out taking a walk when the shooting occurred. A little while later his body, stuffed in a sack, was found in the trunk of a stolen car abandoned near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The only witness to the murder, other than Luciano, Gerardo Scarpato was truly expendable.
Barely two weeks after the murder of Joe the Boss, Salvatore Maranzano held a banquet. He send out invitations to a formal crowning, a ceremony of obeisance, to hundreds of mob leaders and followers in New York and around the country.
More than 500 attended, jamming in to a huge banquet hall on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. From a raised dais, Maranzano addressed the amassed gangsters and laid down the ground rules for the future of organized crime, American-Italian style. Speaking in Italian and lapsing into Sicilian dialect often, he proclaimed himself the Boss of Bosses and announced that he would control all the "families," a phrase he coined to replace the pejorative "gangs." In New York, there would be five "families." And he anointed each family "capo" or boss. Charles Luciano would take over the group that had been under Masseria. Thomas Gagliano would take over the former Reina interests; Joseph Bonanno, Vincent Mangano and Joe Profaci would head the other three groups based on the gangs that they had controlled in the past.
After Maranzano had laid down the ground rules, a banquet followed, and the guests filed before him laying down cash-filled envelopes to demonstrate their fealty to the Capo di Tutti Capi. In all, over $1 million was pledged that night.
But the new king of organized crime was sitting on a throne founded not on rock, but on shifting sands. A plot was underway to overthrow him before his coronation was complete. And the grand architect was that master of deceit, Lucky Luciano.
He and a growing coterie of top ranking mobsters began to realize that Don Maranzano was no better than the late Joe the Boss. Word soon spread that he had become aware of the growing animosity towards him and soon it was a race to see who would kill whom first. On the 10th of September 1931, the race was all over. At approximately 2:50 p.m., four men posing as police officers walked into Room 925/926 in the office building of the Eagle Building Corporation at 230 Park Avenue, Manhattan, and shot and stabbed Salvatore Maranzano to death. The four men escaped and no one, as usual, was ever charged with the murder. It is generally agreed that the leader of the killer squad was Sammy "Red" Levine and one of the gunmen was Abe "Bo" Weinberg. Meyer Lansky, acting for his close friend Luciano, had recruited them.
After the obligatory send off befitting his status, Maranzano and his autocratic ideas and demands were laid to rest for good. Luciano visited Al Capone in Chicago to personally present his credentials and explain how he saw the future of organized crime. Word from other areas of organized crime approving his actions came in from around the country. His good friend Meyer Lansky urged Luciano to give the new organization a name and suggested recreating the cognomen "Union Siciliano," which had been in existence since the 1880�s as a fraternal organization. Although Luciano preferred to refer to a national organization simply as "the Outfit," he agreed to Lansky�s proposal. Luciano also introduced into the scheme of things the establishment of a special position in the crime family.Sitting between the Boss and his "capos" or crew chiefs would be a "consigliere" or adviser. This man would have multiple roles, not just acting as the soldiers' voice in disputes in court, so to speak, but also acting as an intermediary adviser to the leaders, able to speak without fear of reprisal.