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Exclusive article by C. Alexander Hortis
Books on the mob tend to recycle old stories about prominent gangsters like Al Capone and Charles "Lucky" Luciano. In The Mob and the City: The Hidden History of How the Mafia Captured New York, I go beyond the usual suspects to detail the lives of lesser-known mafiosi who had an outsized impact on organized crime in the United States. Here are four such wiseguys discussed in the book:
Nicola Gentile was a high-level fixer for mafiosi from Pittsburgh to Kansas City to New Orleans. In 1937, he was indicted on narcotics charges and fled to Italy. Gentile became an informant and tried to work out a deal to return, but then the Second World War broke out in Europe. Gentile's biggest impact, however, came through his pen. In 1963, Gentile published his memoirs Vita di Capomafia ("Life of a Mafia Boss"), in which he helped to shatter omertá by talking openly about such explosive secrets as "the Commission" the high-level arbitration board for the Mafia. His book was used by the FBI to corroborate details of American informants such as Joe Valachi.
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Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria, ca. 1922.
(Courtesy of the New York Police Department)
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Joe Masseria rose from obscurity to become the capo di capi or "boss of bosses" of the American Mafia. After serving time in Sing Sing in the 1910s, Masseria's fortunes reversed dramatically during Prohibition. He became a major bootlegger in the black market "Liquor Exchange" on the Lower East Side. Unlike his rivals, Masseria didn't care if his men were from his same village or were even Sicilians. His Masseria Family became the first pan-Italian Mafia syndicate in New York. While his recruit Lucky Luciano is often said to have "Americanized" the Mafia, this process actually began with Masseria. He was eventually betrayed by his own men who shot him in the back at a Coney Island restaurant in 1931.
John "Big John" Ormento was a living refutation of the lie that the Mafia stayed out of drugs. From his base on East 107th Street in Harlem, the 240-pound Ormento used his connections to Corsican crime syndicates to smuggle heroin into the United States, and then redistribute it throughout the rest of the country. Convicted three times on narcotics violations, he nevertheless remained a high-level caporegime in the Lucchese Family and was a delegate to the 1957 meeting of the Mafia in Apalachin, New York. For decades, Ormento and his drug partners wholesaled much of the high-grade heroin in this country.
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Frankie Carbo, ca. 1928. Carbo was a de facto boxing commissioner due to his influence over managers and fighters. (Used by permission of the John Binder
Collection)
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Frankie Carbo became the de facto commissioner of professional boxing during the 1950s. The shadowy figure they called "Mr. Gray" gained power by locking up managers and boxers on the fight circuit through payoffs, threats and coercion. Carbo and his cronies became known as "The Combination," the behind-the-scenes group that controlled fight cards (and fixed fights for gamblers) at premier arenas such as Madison Square Garden. Scandals in boxing ultimately lead to their downfall. In 1959, Carbo was convicted along with prominent sports businessmen on Sherman Anti-Trust violation for using extortion to obtain a monopoly in professional boxing.
Mafia mythology tends to rely on gauzy portraits of prominent gangsters. By focusing on lesser-known, yet influential mobsters, The Mob and the City offers a more authentic and realistic picture of this organized crime syndicate.
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