all others, a father, or boss, or
representante
, would govern with unquestioned authority. His main assistant or executive officer was the
sottocapo
, underboss. Crews or street units,
decini
, would be formed, consisting often or more inducted soldiers or button men. Each crew would be led by a
capodecina, capo
, or captain, appointed by the boss, and the units would be the family’s workhorses for all illegal operations.
Maranzano further mandated that Mafia rules, which were inviolable in Sicily, be imposed on all the New York clans. His fundamental precepts, all carrying the death penalty if ignored, were unquestioned obedience to the father, or boss, and his designated officers; no physical assaults or insults against a fellow mafioso; a ban on desiring or courting the wife or sweetheart of another mafioso, and, most important, obeying
omertà
, the code of secrecy.
Maranzano’s high-handed moves provoked Luciano, who now reassessed him as more backward in his thinking than Masseria had been. Not only had Maranzano reneged on their deal for equality in New York, but he was thirsting for power throughout the country.
From his trusted crony Tommy Three-Finger Brown Lucchese, Luciano gotwind of more alarming news. The duplicitous Lucchese had cozied up to Maranzano and his top lieutenants and learned that Maranzano had marked Luciano for a machine-gun assassination by the Irish cutthroat Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll.
Befitting his new grandeur, Maranzano had moved his headquarters from Little Italy to an elegant suite of offices in the building atop Grand Central Terminal. Lucchese’s spies tipped off Luciano that Maranzano was having tax troubles and expected that his phony export-import business records would be scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service. In anticipation of an audit, Maranzano had instructed his bodyguards to be unarmed while in his office to insure there would be no arrests for gun violations.
Acting quickly to catch Maranzano off guard, Luciano decided that the Grand Central office would be his best chance. On September 10, 1931, Lucchese showed up unannounced at the office for a courtesy call on Maranzano. Minutes later, a group of men swept in, announcing they were 1RS agents. None appeared to be Sicilian or Italian, and neither Maranzano nor his bodyguards suspected they were hired killers. Before the bodyguards could react, the hit men got the drop on them, and at gunpoint lined them up along with Lucchese and a female secretary, with their faces pressed to the wall.
Lucchese identified Maranzano with a head movement and a gunman nudged Maranzano into his private office. There were sounds of a struggle followed by a barrage of gunfire. Five months after his arch foe Joe the Boss had been annihilated, Maranzano lay dead, his body torn by bullets and knife wounds.
Organized-crime historians are uncertain if Luciano had schemed from the start to remove both Masseria and Maranzano as dinosaurs, antiquated obstacles to the Mafia’s progress and realignment. A thin, slightly built, dark-haired man with an impassive, pockmarked face, Luciano came to New York as a boy of nine from a village near Palermo. A school dropout at fourteen, within a decade he compiled an arrest record for armed robbery, gun possession, assault, grand larceny, gambling, and possession of narcotics. Remarkably, most of the charges were dropped, and except for an eight-month sentence, Luciano avoided any long jail time. A prison psychiatrist aptly analyzed him as highly intelligent but “an aggressive, egocentric, antisocial type.”
As a teenager, Luciano held only one honest job as a five-dollar-a-week shipping clerk in a hat factory. He quit the day after he won $244 in a dice game, but used his experience at the factory to hide heroin that he transported andsold in hat boxes. At age eighteen, he admitted to a probation officer that he found regular work unsuitable for his personality. “I never was a crumb and if I
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