In 1913, Masseria had ruthlessly taken over the Morello Gang, New York's first major Mafia family. Short, stocky, and cold-blooded, Masseria insisted that his underlings call him "Joe the Boss," but he was hardly a beloved leader. Like Nick Morello before him, he was an old-school "Mustache Pete," who ruled with an iron fist and always took the biggest piece of the pie for himself. But in the late 1920s, newly arrived immigrants from the Sicilian town Castellammare del Golfo challenged his control of the New York rackets. Salvatore Maranzano emerged as the boss of these newcomers and thus became Masseria's arch foe. Maranzano's organization established its headquarters in Brooklyn and set up outposts in Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit.
In New York, gangsters were forced to take sides. Either they were with Masseria or Maranzano. Neutrality wasn't an option. Masseria had his "young Turks:" Lucky Luciano, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis, Willie Moretti, and Carlo Gambino. Maranzano could count on Joe Magliocco, Joe Bonanno, and Joe Profaci as well as "secret defectors" from Masseria's camp, Tommy Lucchese and Tommy Gagliano.
Maranzano was as much a stern "Mustache Pete" as Masseria, and privately the young Turks wished both bosses would go back to Italy. They felt handcuffed by the old-timers' insistence on tradition and impoverished by their bosses' greed. They watched jealously as their rival Irish and Jewish gangs grew fat on the spoils of their wide-ranging criminal activities. Finally fed up, the young Turks secretly formed a third faction, led by Lucky Luciano, who had been running his own rackets behind Masseria's back with Jewish hoodlums Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, both of whom the anti-Semitic Masseria despised.
On that spring day at the Coney Island restaurant, Masseria and Luciano played hand after hand. The usually suspicious Masseria relaxed and enjoyed himself. As the afternoon shadows grew longer along the boardwalk, Luciano put his cards face down on the table and excused himself. He had to go to the bathroom, he told his boss. Masseria watched him head toward the rear of the restaurant. As soon as Luciano was out of sight, four men came in through the front door�Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis, and Bugsy Siegel. They each pulled out a gun and opened fire on the startled Masseria who took six shots and died on the spot. Luciano came out of the bathroom, looked down at the slain boss, and nodded approvingly to the hit team.
When word of Masseria's murder got out, Luciano brokered a truce with Salvatore Maranzano, who declared himself the Boss of Bosses. The Castellammarese War was over.
But Maranzano's reign was short. A few months after Masseria's death, Luciano struck again. According to John H. Davis in his book Mafia Dynasty, four hired guns from the Lansky-Siegel gang wearing treasury agent uniforms went to Maranzano's office where the boss was expecting a surprise audit from the IRS. As Tommy Lucchese, who was in on the plot, kept Maranzano busy in the inner office, the killers disarmed his bodyguards in the waiting room. Two of the hit men held the guards at gunpoint while "the other two burst into Maranzano's office and shot and stabbed him to death."
With the dominant "Mustache Petes" now out of the way, New York was ready to realize Luciano's dream, a new national syndicate that would encourage cooperation among gangs regardless of ethnic origin. Lucky Luciano would bring the Mafia into the modern age, putting the group into organized crime. Out of the ruins of the Masseria and Maranzano gangs would emerge the Five Families of New York. One of the most powerful would become known as the Gambino Family.
After the murders of Masseria and Maranzano, one old-school Mafioso managed to survive the purge and thrive among the young Turks: Vincent Mangano. Though he was included in Lucky Luciano's plans to remodel organized crime in America, he still retained many of his old-world ways. He was tolerated because of his close association with Emil Camarda, vice-president of the International Longshoremen's Association, which gave Mangano tight control of rackets on the docks. Mangano and Camarda established the City Democratic Club, which promoted bedrock American values in the front room, while illegal activities were hatched in the backroom. It became a regular meeting place for the members of Murder, Inc., the infamous gang of assassins who were mostly Jewish and who, for a price, did the bidding of the Italian mobsters. Mangano's cutthroat brother Philip frequented the club as did Albert Anastasia, the brutal, hot-headed mobster who was also knows at the "Mad Hatter," "Il Terremoto" (the Earthquake), and the "Lord High Executioner" of Murder, Inc. Of all the killers in that elite group, Anastasia was the most feared, and for good reason.
Anastasia had been "close to some thirty assassinations with gun and ice pick and strangling rope, either in person or by direction," write Burton B. Turkus and Sid Feder in Murder, Inc. "The killings claimed by the torpedoes of the troop he commanded ran well into three figures." Though formally aligned with the Mangano family, Anastasia preferred the company of gangsters from other families, particularly Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, and Louis Lepke, which didn't sit well with Vincent Mangano. Over the years, Anastasia's relationship with his boss deteriorated to the point where they nearly came to blows on several occasions and had to be physically separated.