On April 15, 1931, Joe Masseria sat down to a seafood meal at Gerardo Scarpato’s restaurant on Coney Island with his top lieutenant, Charles Luciano. Some accounts place Vito Genovese at the table as well. After the meal, the men began playing cards. Luciano excused himself to use the bathroom.
Moments later, two or three gunmen entered and opened fire. Five bullets struck Masseria in vital areas. He died on the floor. When Luciano returned, he found the body and later told police he had no idea who would want to harm Joe the Boss.
No one was ever arrested for the murder. The killing was the culmination of a power struggle that had divided New York’s Italian underworld. Masseria, known as Joe the Boss, had risen to dominance through bootlegging, backed by men like Frank Costello and Luciano, with Genovese as a trusted subordinate. But Masseria’s greed had begun to unravel his own organization.
In February 1930, he ordered the murder of Gaetano Reina, a Bronx ice dealer who refused to hand over profits. The killing unsettled his own men, who saw it as treachery. Luciano, Genovese, Costello, and others secretly aligned with Masseria’s rival, Salvatore Maranzano, a Sicilian who had arrived in Brooklyn in the 1920s and built his own bootlegging empire. The conflict that followed became known as the Castellammarese War, a bloody struggle between Masseria’s and Maranzano’s factions.
In a secret meeting, Luciano, Genovese, and Costello reportedly concluded that Joe the Boss had to be eliminated. With Masseria dead, Luciano declared himself leader of the organization, with Genovese as his second-in-command and Costello as a key adviser. Maranzano, as arranged, was acknowledged as capo di tutti capi, boss of all bosses. He reorganized the mob into families, each with a boss, underboss, and lieutenants, a structure that would endure for decades.
But Maranzano’s paranoia and ambition soon turned him against the men who had helped him rise. Luciano learned of a plot to kill both himself and Genovese and moved first. On September 10, 1931, Maranzano was shot and stabbed to death in his office by Jewish gangsters hired through Meyer Lansky. With Maranzano gone, Luciano persuaded the other bosses to form a Commission, a governing body to resolve disputes and set policy.
It became the mafia’s highest authority. Genovese emerged from the war in a strong position. His bootlegging operations had prospered, he had legitimate business fronts, and his close associate Luciano now stood at the top of the underworld. The end of Prohibition in 1933 forced the mob to diversify into gambling, labor racketeering, and the garment industry.
Genovese opened nightclubs using front men and continued building his wealth. His personal life also changed. After his first wife died in 1931, he became involved with his cousin Anna, who was married to a struggling carpenter named Gerard Vernotico. On March 17, 1932, Vernotico and another man were found beaten to death with sash cords around their necks on a rooftop near Thompson and Prince streets.
Mafia lore held that Genovese, infatuated with Anna, had her husband murdered. But the truth is more complicated. Anna had been granted a divorce three months before Vernotico’s death, and the exact circumstances of the killing remain unclear. She and Genovese married two weeks after the murder, and she gave birth to a son three months later.
In 1934, Genovese and his associate Michele Miranda ran a scam that swindled a merchant out of $160,000 using a rigged card game and a fake currency machine. When Ferdinand Boccia, who had brought the merchant to them, demanded his cut, Genovese and Miranda ordered his murder. William Gallo and Ernest Rupolo carried out the killing in a Brooklyn cafe. Fearing Gallo would become a liability, they ordered Rupolo to kill him too, but Gallo survived an ambush.
Rupolo was eventually charged and imprisoned. Genovese was arrested on a homicide charge but released when a witness failed or refused to identify him. By the mid-1930s, the political climate in New York had shifted. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia launched an attack on mob operations, and District Attorney Thomas Dewey targeted organized crime with increasing success.
Dewey indicted Luciano for running a prostitution ring, secured a conviction, and had him sentenced to thirty to fifty years. Luciano, from prison, handed control of his family to Frank Costello and trusted Genovese as well. But Genovese, feeling the pressure, chose to flee to Italy, leaving Costello as acting boss. In Italy, Genovese built ties within Mussolini’s government and reportedly became involved in the narcotics trade.
In 1943, as the Allies advanced, he adapted, positioning himself as an interpreter for the Allied military government in Nola while continuing black market operations. American military police arrested him in August 1944, and he was eventually returned to New York on June 1, 1945, to face the old Boccia murder charge. Meanwhile, Ernest Rupolo, disillusioned after more than a decade in prison, had become a state witness. The trial began in May 1946 but fell apart for lack of corroboration.
Judge Samuel Liebowitz told Genovese that if there had been a shred of supporting evidence, he would have been condemned to the electric chair. The charges were dismissed. Two weeks later, Genovese was honored at a welcome-back dinner at the Hotel Diplomat in Manhattan. But Luciano’s influence remained strong, and Genovese resented having deferred to Costello during his absence.
His marriage also unraveled. In 1950, Anna filed for divorce, and her testimony revealed details of his criminal activities, including lottery operations, nightclubs, and drug trafficking. The divorce case dragged on, generating headlines and exposing the mob’s reach into legitimate businesses. Genovese also faced a denaturalization suit, and the government stripped him of his citizenship in 1952.
Costello, meanwhile, was dealing with his own troubles. He had lost allies like Willie Moretti, murdered in 1951, and Joe Adonis, deported. In May 1956, he began serving a five-year sentence for income tax evasion. His appeal was still alive, however, and in March 1957, the Supreme Court agreed to hear it, releasing him on bail.
Two months later, Vincent Gigante shot Costello in the head outside his apartment building. The wound was minor, but the message was clear. Costello retired from power, retreating to his homes and his orchids. Genovese declared himself the new head of the family.
One obstacle remained: Albert Anastasia, the volatile boss of the Brooklyn waterfront family and one of Costello’s strongest allies. Genovese approached Anastasia’s underboss, Carlo Gambino, and convinced him to join a plot. Gambino, unsettled by recent events within his own family, agreed. On October 25, 1957, Anastasia was shot dead while sitting in a barber’s chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel.
The assassination devastated Costello, who feared he would be next. Genovese then organized a summit of mob leaders to explain the recent hits and establish his position. The meeting was scheduled for November 14, 1957, at the estate of Joseph Barbara in Apalachin, New York. On November 13, two New York State Police officers, investigating a bad check at a local motel, discovered that Barbara’s son had booked rooms for what was described as a Canada Dry bottling convention.
The officers checked the soda plant, found no activity, and drove to Barbara’s estate. They saw cars in the driveway and began recording license plates. When they set up a roadblock at the estate’s only exit, the mobsters panicked, fleeing through the woods and across fields. Many were apprehended, including Genovese, Joseph Bonanno, and Santo Trafficante.
No incriminating evidence was found, and no one was charged at the scene. But the Apalachin meeting became a national scandal, exposing the mafia’s existence and embarrassing its leaders in the press. Federal prosecutors indicted several attendees on conspiracy and perjury charges. Twenty were convicted, but the appeals court overturned the convictions, ruling that the government had failed to prove the meeting’s purpose.
Genovese avoided federal charges, but his reputation was damaged, and the FBI, long skeptical of the mafia’s existence, turned its attention to organized crime. The fallout from Apalachin marked a turning point not just for Genovese, but for the American Mafia as a whole.