On the morning of April 19, 1951, a woman walking through the tall marsh grass near Avenue Y and East 72nd Street in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, found a man lying face down in the dirt. She had found a body on almost the same spot two years earlier, so she knew what she was looking at. She went for the police.
The man wore a white shirt, a white undershirt, black socks, and a black tie with a gold clip. He had no trousers, no shoes, and no coat. He had been shot three times at close range, once in the back of the neck and once in each cheek.
His socks were clean. Whoever killed him had done it somewhere else and carried him into the grass.
There was nothing on him to say who he was. The police took his fingerprints, and the fingerprints gave them a name they knew: Philip Mangano, 50 years old, of 84th Street, Brooklyn. He had eight arrests, one of them for murder, and had never once been found guilty.
He was a union man on the docks and the younger brother of the most powerful man in Brooklyn. The next morning, the New York Times ran the story under a headline that called him an aid of Joe Adonis. That was wrong. Philip Mangano was nobody's aid but his brothers.
And his brother, Vincent Mangano, the boss of one of the five Mafia families of New York, could not be found. Not that day, not that week, not ever.
Vincent Mangano was born in Palmo, Sicily, in the late 1880s. The records do not agree on the year. Around 1906, still in his teens, he came through New York Harbor and settled in Red Hook, at the tip of Brooklyn, where the piers were.
He went back to Sicily for a bride and married her in Brooklyn on New Year's Day 1912. They had four children.
On paper, he was in real estate, and he did own property. Off paper, in the 1920s, he was in liquor and in the Brooklyn Mafia, in the group that lived off the docks.
Sometime early on, a Brooklyn paper started calling him the executioner. The name stuck for the rest of his life, though the men who worked for him seemed to have called him Don Vincenzo. There is no record of him ever standing trial for anything. He was arrested a few times. He always went home.
His brother Philip was 10 years younger, born in Palmo in 1898. He went to work on the piers as a dockhand and then, as his brother rose, as a paid officer of one of the dock union locals. In 1923, he was arrested over a killing. He was not found guilty. He rarely was.
On December 5, 1928, police in Cleveland walked into the Statler Hotel and found 23 men from Sicilian families across the country holding a meeting. Vincent Mangano was one of them. They were booked and let go. It is the first time his name turns up on a list of the men who ran the American Mafia.
The pictures of him that get used are two police photos, one from January 1931 and one from February 1933. A heavy man in a dark suit and tie, hair combed back, looking at the camera the way a man looks at a wall. That is about as close as the public ever got to his face.
Two years later, the Mafia in New York went to war with itself. On one side was Joe Masseria, who called himself the boss of bosses. On the other was Salvatore Maranzano, who led the men from the Sicilian town of Castellammare del Golfo.
Mangano's own group in Brooklyn stood with Masseria at the start. On November 5, 1930, the leader of that Brooklyn group was shot dead in the Bronx beside one of Masseria's captains, and the group went over to Maranzano.
On April 15, 1931, Masseria himself was shot dead over lunch in Coney Island. His own men had set him up. Maranzano then divided New York into five families and named a boss for each. For the Brooklyn group, he chose the man who had brought it over to his side. Mangano was not the choice.
Maranzano lasted five months. On September 10, 1931, he was killed in his own office on Park Avenue. The man who had arranged that, Charles Luciano, whom the papers called Lucky, took a new approach. There would be no boss of bosses. There would be a commission, a board of the family bosses, and disputes would be settled around a table.
Luciano removed Maranzano's man from the Brooklyn family and put Vincent Mangano in his place, with a seat on the commission. From then on, the family carried Mangano's name, and would carry it for 20 years.
He made two choices that matter to this story. For his underboss, his second in command, he took a man from Calabria who had worked the Brooklyn piers and been in and out of prison, a man named Albert Anastasia. For his closest aid, he took his brother Philip.
The Manganos ran their family from the 300 block of Clinton Street in Red Hook, in a building Vincent owned. In September 1932, he, Anastasia, and a vice president of the dock workers union founded a club there on the corner of Clinton and Degraw. They called it the City Democratic Club.
Its purpose on the face of it was to deliver the Italian vote of the third assembly district to the Democratic Party, and it did. On October 31, 1932, the club held its first big dinner at the Hotel St. George, and the guests included the lieutenant governor of New York, a former mayor of the city, and the head of the dock workers union.
That was the front room. Men who talked later said that in the back room men sat down to settle disputes, and that some of those disputes ended with a name in an envelope.
Anastasia by then was the man in Brooklyn who arranged killings for the whole of the New York mob. The papers would later call his outfit Murder Incorporated.
The money came from the piers. Every morning the dock workers lined up in what was called the shape-up, and a hiring boss picked who worked that day. To be picked you paid a few dollars a week to the right man, week after week, on every pier in Brooklyn, and the right man passed it up the line.
The union locals that ran the Brooklyn piers belonged to the family. Philip Mangano was the business agent of one of them. And from 1932, the biggest of them, Local 1814, belonged to Anastasia's younger brother, Anthony, whom everyone called Tough Tony. By 1937, Tough Tony held six locals. When he needed to make a point, he only had to say the words, "My brother Albert."
In July 1939, a young dock worker who had been holding rallies against the shape-up and drawing a thousand men at a time went to a meeting with the union's people and did not come home. His body was found in New Jersey a year and a half later. Vincent Mangano and Albert Anastasia were both named as wanted in the case. Nobody was ever tried for it.
One order of Mangano's own did come out years later, from a killer who turned state's witness. On September 4, 1939, he said Mangano handed Anastasia an envelope with the name of a gambler who had cut into his business and said, "Al, he's got to go." The gambler was dead soon after. It is the one killing ever laid at Vincent Mangano's door by name, and it rests on that one man's word.
In 1940, the Italian Treasury Police, writing a report on the Mafia in America, listed the men they believed sat on its ruling council. There were nine names. Two of them were Vincent Mangano and Philip Mangano. Whatever the truth of the report, that is how the brothers were seen from the other side of the ocean: as a pair.
So on paper, Brooklyn was Mangano's. In practice, a great deal of it belonged to Anastasia, and a great deal of Anastasia belonged to other people. He had worked for Luciano and for Frank Costello, the men at the top of the commission, since the war of 1931. They gave him jobs directly. They did not ask Mangano first.
Mangano was the boss, and the boss is supposed to be asked, and he resented it for 20 years. The two men argued. One writer, drawing on what men said later, says the two came close to blows more than once.
Anastasia was the famous name, the one with the mansion on the cliffs in New Jersey. Mangano was the older, quieter man with the seat at the table and a brother at his side.
Both of them survived the 1940s. Luciano went to prison and then to Italy. Anastasia spent part of the war in the army training recruits in Pennsylvania, and after 1948 he left the day-to-day running of the piers to Tough Tony. Costello ran the Luciano family in Luciano's absence, and Anastasia was Costello's man.
And then in the spring of 1951 the United States Senate came to New York. The committee was led by a senator from Tennessee named Estes Kefauver, and its hearings in March went out live on TV. Millions of people watched.
Frank Costello refused to let the cameras show his face, so they showed his hands, and on March 15 he walked out. Albert Anastasia was called and answered almost nothing. Asked about his lawful business, he said he could not recall having any. Tough Tony was called as well.
Vincent Mangano was not there. The committee's men had been trying to find him for months and could not. Where he was in those months, nobody has ever said.
On the morning of April 17, 1951, Philip Mangano left his house on 84th Street. His wife said later that he was going to see the man who kept his books in Brooklyn. That is the last time anyone admits to having seen him alive.
Two days later, he was in the grass at Bergen Beach. The medical examiner put his death at between 10 and 20 hours before he was found, which is to say the night of the 18th. Three shots, no trousers, no shoes, no coat. Nobody has ever said why the clothes were gone, and the accounts do not even agree on what it might mean.
The police went looking for the brother first, because the brother was the boss and the boss was the one who would know. They did not find him. No one at the house, no one on Clinton Street, no one on the piers could say where Vincent Mangano was. He had not been reported missing. He simply was not anywhere.
On April 23, Philip was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in East Flatbush. The hearse left the funeral chapel on Lafayette Avenue half an hour ahead of the time the family had given, to shake off the press. There was no church service. The casket was closed. Three empty limousines went to collect the family someplace else.
The Brooklyn District Attorney's office spoke to about 75 people over the next weeks. Frank Costello was one of them. Albert Anastasia was one of them. Joe Adonis, the man the Times had called Philip's boss, was one of them, and he offered the theory that it had been about a woman. Nobody found any evidence of that.
Other early reports said Philip had been talking to federal agents, and the district attorney's office knocked that down as well. Philip's son, who was 22, offered another theory. He said his father had wanted out. He had twice been down to Virginia that spring, the son said, trying to buy a building firm. Nothing came of that either.
No one was ever arrested for the killing of Philip Mangano, and no one has been since. And Vincent Mangano stayed gone.
There is a rule that Luciano had written into the commission in 1931, the plainest rule of all: nobody kills a boss without the commission's consent. It existed to stop exactly the thing that had just happened in Brooklyn, if the thing had happened the way everyone assumed it had.
Sometime after April, Albert Anastasia went before the commission. What he said there is known from one account only, written down 30 years later by one of the other bosses who was in the room, and it should be taken as that. By that account, Anastasia said the Mangano brothers had been planning to kill him. He did not say that he had killed them. He said only that he had acted first.
Frank Costello backed him. Costello had his reasons. He was being pushed hard inside his own family by Vito Genovese, and he wanted a strong friend in Brooklyn. With Costello behind him, the commission accepted Anastasia as the new boss. The Mangano family became the Anastasia family.
The murder of Philip was never raised again, and nobody at that table ever said where Vincent was.
That is the whole of what is known. Whether the brothers really were planning to kill Anastasia, nobody has ever shown. Whether Anastasia killed Vincent himself, as one much later book claims on the word of unnamed street sources, nobody has ever shown either.
Anastasia denied it all his life, and his life was not long. He ran Brooklyn for six and a half years. He made Carlo Gambino, a quiet Sicilian who had come up under the Manganos, his underboss. He built the family and he made enemies. And by 1957, the men he had made enemies of were believed to include Vito Genovese and, before long, Gambino himself.
On the morning of October 25, 1957, at about 10:20, Anastasia was sitting in a barber's chair in the Park Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. Two men came in with scarves over their faces, pushed the barber aside, and fired. Anastasia died on the floor. The picture of the empty chair went around the world.
Nobody was charged with that killing either. The police believed Genovese and Gambino had arranged it and could not prove it. Gambino became the boss, and the family that had been Mangano's and then Anastasia's became the Gambino family, the name it still carries.
Tough Tony kept his union but lost his shield. In the years after his brother's death, his power on the piers was cut back, and he died of a heart attack on March 1, 1963. On the day of his funeral, the Brooklyn docks stopped work.
And in the autumn of 1961, 10 years after he was last seen, a court in Brooklyn declared Vincent Mangano legally dead. The papers were filed by his son, a lawyer. The date on the court's order is given two ways in the records. There is a stone with his name on it in a Brooklyn cemetery, and the year on it is 1961, and there is nothing under it.
His wife had been a bride he went back to Sicily to fetch. His son was a lawyer. His son-in-law had been one of Anastasia's gunmen. His brother-in-law had been a union man on the piers. It had been for 20 years a family business in the plainest sense. And in one week in April it stopped being one.
So that is what happened to the Mangano brothers, as far as anyone can say. Philip was found in the grass on a Thursday morning by a woman who had found a body there before. He was buried four days later from a hearse that left early. Seventy-five people were asked about it, among them the three men most likely to know, and every one of them went home.
Vincent was never found at all. There was no body, no funeral, no witness, and no date. The man who took his family told the other bosses that Vincent had meant to kill him. And the other bosses took the family away from a man they could not find and gave it to the man who was standing in front of them.
Twenty years as boss of Brooklyn, a seat at the table that ran the American Mafia, and the end of it is a court order in 1961 saying that in law he may now be treated as dead. Nobody was ever charged. Nobody ever owned up. The docks opened on time the next morning, and the shape-up went ahead as usual.