The East Village Mafia

By Thomas F. Comiskey

Few New Yorkers are aware that the tenements and storefronts of the East Village, famous for Beat poetry, avant-garde art, and alternative rock music, were a stronghold of mafia racketeering, treachery, and intrigue for almost seventy years. From the 1920s to 1990, mob icons lived in or frequented the East Village, known as part of the Lower East Side until the mid-1960s.

In The East Village Mafia, author Thomas F. Comiskey shares the history of this little-known Manhattan mafia enclave that wielded influence on the direction and destiny of organized crime in New York City, telling how:

Mafia royalty Lucky Luciano, Joe "the Boss" Masseria, and Joseph Bonanno lived in or frequented the East Village; East Village-bred Mafiosi plotted the assassinations of five Cosa Nostra bosses; Lucky Luciano ordained the East Village to be one of the mafia’s major heroin distribution centers after World War II; A mobster from Avenue A conspired to sell the Vatican millions worth of bogus stocks and bonds, some forged in the East Village; A sit down in Mafia don Joseph Bonanno's favorite Social Club on East Twelfth Street determined control over a New Jersey hotel; and A federal agent from Avenue A and Fifteenth Street became the nemesis of mafia narcotics dealers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Mar 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781480875678

Thomas F. Comiskey

Thomas F. Comiskey is an attorney who had a thirty-three-year career at the New York City Department of Investigation exposing criminal conduct in New York City's anti-poverty programs and public schools. He currently lives in Scarborough, New York.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-7568-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7567-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019903209

Archway Publishing rev. date: 10/20/2020

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I: THE BOSSES

Chapter 1     Salvatore from Fourteenth Street

Chapter 2     Joe the Boss

Chapter 3     The Boss’s Favorite Club

PART II: THE UNDERBOSSES

Chapter 4     Little Rabbit

Chapter 5     Joe Piney

Chapter 6     Lilo

PART III: CAPOS AND SOLDIERS

Chapter 7     The Vatican Connection

Chapter 8     Nino

Chapter 9     The Albertis

Chapter 10   The Tramaglinos

Chapter 11   The East Fourth Street Connection

Chapter 12   The Ghost

Chapter 13   Operation Home Run

Chapter 14   The Rat

Chapter 15   The Cop

Epilogue      Joseph Biondo’s Legacy

INTRODUCTION

F ew New Yorkers are aware that the tenements and storefronts of the East Village, famous for Beat poetry, avant-garde art, and alternative rock music, were a stronghold of Mafia racketeering, treachery and intrigue for almost seventy years.

From the 1920s to 1990, mob icons like Charles Lucky Luciano, Joe the Boss Masseria, and Joseph Bonanno, and their underbosses and capos, lived in or frequented the East Village, known as part of the Lower East Side until the mid-1960s.

There they planned and perpetrated headline-grabbing murders, international heroin trafficking, extortion, counterfeiting, gambling, and loan-sharking in local social clubs, bars, restaurants, and coffeehouses.

The blocks just south of East Fourteenth Street may have been home to the smallest Italian immigrant enclave in New York City, but the ruthless Mafiosi who reigned there helped to orchestrate the assassinations of no fewer than five of Cosa Nostra’s most powerful dons. These executions—of D’Aquila, Masseria, Maranzano, Anastasia, and Castellano—restructured the mob hierarchy decade after decade, expanding and, with Castellano’s demise, diminishing the influence of organized crime in almost every facet of city life.

PART I

THE BOSSES

CHAPTER 1

SALVATORE FROM FOURTEENTH STREET

C harles Lucky Luciano, one of the most powerful and mythologized gangsters in American history, resided at 183 and 265 East Tenth Street (between Avenue A and First Avenue) for about twenty years, from 1907 to 1927. Luciano is universally recognized for creating the modern-day New York City Cosa Nostra in 1931 after he arranged the murders of two consecutive reigning Mafia chieftains, Joe the Boss Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. Luciano instituted the Mafia Commission, a group of nationwide crime family dons who met every five years, or as necessary, to settle disputes between crime families.

Born Salvatore Lucania in Sicily, Luciano lived briefly on First Avenue between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets before his family settled on East Tenth Street. Luciano attended PS 19 on East Fourteenth Street, currently the site of the 14th Street Y. Neighborhood legend has Luciano and Meyer Lansky hatching schemes together in De Robertis Pasticceria at 176 First Avenue, around the corner from Luciano’s tenement. As a teenager hanging out in Mulberry Street pool halls, Luciano was known as Salvatore from Fourteenth Street, not for his school’s address, but because that was where he perpetrated his crimes, including selling heroin, burglary, and auto theft. His friends were a Who’s Who of future notorious gangsters, including Lansky, Benjamin Bugsy Siegel, and Frank Costello. Luciano and Al Capone were reportedly groomed in the legendary Five Points gang, and the Brain, Arnold Rothstein, schooled Luciano in the finer points of bootlegging and narcotics peddling.

While Masseria and Maranzano discouraged doing business with non-Italians, Luciano set up lucrative criminal partnerships with non-Italian gang leaders like Meyer Lansky and Louis Lepke Buchalter, who were masters of gambling and labor racketeering, respectively.

Throughout the 1920s, Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Albert Anastasia, Louis Buchalter, Frank Costello, Tommy Lucchese, and Dutch Schultz, among others, hit the jackpot by bootlegging illegal alcohol during Prohibition. The upper echelon of organized crime gathered at Luciano’s Palm Casino at 85 East Fourth Street (at Second Avenue) to drink, gamble, and solicit female companionship.

Luciano eventually outgrew the East Village. In 1927, he relocated to a suite at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, which he rented under the guise of Charles Lane. Luciano later settled as Charles Ross in suite 39C in the Waldorf Towers of the Waldorf Astoria.

Lucky Luciano’s rise to ultimate crime boss began on April 15, 1931, when he invited his boss, Joe Masseria, the reigning capo di tutti capi (boss of all bosses), to lunch at Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant in Coney Island. Masseria, who was driven around town in a steel-armored sedan with inch-thick plate glass windows, apparently