As Reina stood by the door, his aunt touched his cheek and pulled his collar closed around his neck. It was the dead of winter, and she worried about him. The fact that he was forty years old and the leader of a criminal organization that controlled rackets in the Bronx and ice distribution all throughout New York City made no difference to her. He still needed looking after.
She studied his face, looking for signs of illness or worry, but he immediately broke into a big smile and kissed her cheeks, thanking her for dinner and telling her to be well. But he couldn't fool her. She had seen the worry in his expression�it had been there all night�but Reina wasn't about to burden his elderly aunt with his troubles. She was right�something was bothering him, and it had been eating at him for a long time. His boss, Giuseppe Masseria, had become much too demanding. Masseria was the Mafia boss of all of New York, and he ruled with an iron fist, insisted that everyone call him "Joe the Boss." The greedy bastard now wanted an even bigger slice of the pie, and from Reina's point of view it was undeserved.
For months, Reina had been thinking very seriously about switching his allegiance to Masseria's rival, Salvatore Maranzano, a relative newcomer to New York who had arrived in America from Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, just a few years earlier. Maranzano was now gaining strength and giving Masseria a run for his money. Reina hadn't totally made up his mind yet, but with every fat envelope that passed from his hands to Masseria's arrogant emissaries, he came that much closer to making his decision.
Reina's aunt caressed his cheek with the palm of her hand and startled him out of his simmering anger. He flashed a quick smile to assure her that everything was all right as he reached for the doorknob and bid her goodbye.
As Reina walked down the front steps toward the sidewalk, he noticed a familiar face. Vito Genovese, then 33, who would later become the namesake of the largest crime family in New York, stood under a streetlight, waiting for him. At the time, Genovese was an associate of Charles "Lucky" Luciano, who was "Joe the Boss" Masseria's top lieutenant. Reina started to wave to Genovese, but "as he did," Carl Sifakis writes in The Mafia Encyclopedia, "Vito blew his head off." Genovese left Reina's body where it fell, in front of his aunt's house on Sheridan Avenue.
Tom Reina became the first victim in the bloody struggle for control of the Sicilian Mafia in America called the Castellammarese War, named after the town in Sicily where many of the participants were born. But why kill Reina? many people wondered. Lucky Luciano had been chafing under Masseria's harsh grip himself, and he knew that Reina was thinking about joining forces with the newcomer Maranzano. Why rub out someone who could have been a powerful ally in ousting "Joe the Boss"?
The ingenious Luciano had his reasons.
Lucky Luciano was always thinking three moves ahead. Lucky's master plan was to set up a national crime commission that would be bigger than the Mafia and include gangsters of all stripes, not just Sicilians. To do that, he knew he would have to eliminate the old-fashioned "Mustache Petes" who had come to America from Sicily and ruled like medieval barons in a land of limitless criminal opportunity. "Joe the Boss" Masseria was naturally at the top of Luciano's hit list, but Lucky was also wary of Masseria's rival, Salvatore Maranzano. Luciano didn't want a new boss; he wanted to be the boss. But he knew he wasn't strong enough to make that move yet. And that's why he ordered the hit on Tom Reina.
Luciano worried that if Reina sided with Maranzano, Maranzano would become too powerful and potentially harder to deal with than Masseria. Besides, Luciano already had secret commitments from Reina's right-hand men, Gaetano "Tommy" Gagliano and Tommy Lucchese, who saw Luciano's national commission as the future of crime in America. The Castellammarese War was the Young Turks' insidious rebellion against the old-timers.
In the wake of Reina's death, Masseria alienated Reina's Bronx gang by bringing in an outsider to take over as their leader, another "Mustache Pete" named Joe Pinzolo. The two top figures in the gang, Tommy Gagliano and Tommy Lucchese, chafed under Pinzolo's high-handed leadership, and it wasn't long before Lucchese murdered Pinzolo, which Masseria mistakenly attributed to Maranzano.
Fed up with "Joe the Boss," Gagliano and Lucchese decided to join forces with Maranzano, but Lucky Luciano, always thinking ahead, convinced them to make the switch secretly so that Masseria wouldn't know. This made the two Tommys much more appealing to Maranzano, who thought he now had two well-placed spies in Masseria's organization, when in fact it was Luciano who had two well-placed spies in Maranzano's organization. Luciano was now ready to make the boldest moves ever committed by an American Mafioso.
The murders of Giuseppe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano are Mafia legend and mark the birth of modern organized crime in the United States.