On the night of September 5, 1930, cleaning women let themselves into a small office on the tenth floor of a building in the middle of Times Square. It was a little after nine. On the frosted glass of the door was a company name: California Dry Fruit Importers.
Inside, on the floor, lay a heavy man in a good suit. He had been dead for hours, perhaps since the afternoon. Nobody in the building had heard anything, or nobody said they had.
In the office next door, police found a .32 caliber revolver with six empty shells. It had been thrown away where any cleaner would have found it.
The dead man was Joseph Pinzolo. On the street, they called him Fat Joe. He was the boss of a New York crime family, a job he had held for about six months. Almost nobody in the family had wanted him.
The office he died in had been rented by his own business partner. When police went looking for that partner, he was out of town.
This is the story of the shortest reign in the history of the five families. The man who was made a boss without ever being in charge of anything. The only boss of his rank for whom not one photograph is known to survive.
Joseph Pinzolo was born in Italy in 1887. His given name was Bonaventura. Joseph was the American version. Everything else about his beginnings is guesswork, and much of what has been written about him cannot be backed up.
What can be backed up starts with a bomb. In July 1908, a bomb went off at a tenement on East 11th Street in Manhattan. The building belonged to a family the police named as Spinelli. The bombing was not random. It was a bill.
In those years, the Black Hand ran a simple business: a letter asking for money, and an explosion for anyone who did not pay. The same buildings on that street were hit again and again. This was ordinary in that part of New York at that time.
The Black Hand was not one gang with one leader. It was a method, and anybody with a pen and a stick of dynamite could use it. A shopkeeper or a landlord would get a letter, badly written and polite in a way that made it worse, asking for a sum of money and naming a place to leave it.
If the money did not come, something in his life exploded. A hallway, a stairwell, a shopfront with his family asleep above it. Police counted these blasts by the dozen every year and solved almost none of them, because the people who paid would not say they had paid, and the people who did not pay were usually too frightened to say why.
Police arrested a young man for the 1908 bombing: Joseph Pinzolo. And then Pinzolo did something that twenty-two years later would look impossible. He gave the police his own boss.
He named Giuseppe Costabile, a Camorra man who ran the streets from Houston down to Canal, from East Broadway to the river. He told them who was above him. Then in court, he refused to say it again. He would not testify, and because he would not, he went to prison himself for a term reported as two years and eight months to five years.
Hold that in your head. The man who was going to be handed a mafia family in 1930 had already informed on his own boss and had done the time to prove it.
In the Bronx and East Harlem, the boss of the family was a man named Gaetano Reina. Everybody called him Tommy. He was born in Corleone in Sicily in 1889, and by the 1920s he had built something that sounds small and was not. He controlled the ice.
In a city where almost nobody had a refrigerator, ice was not a luxury. It was a utility. It was how a butcher kept meat and how a family kept milk. Every ice box in the Bronx had to be filled by somebody, and in Reina's territory that somebody paid Reina. It was a tax on a hot day, collected every hot day.
That is the part of these stories that gets lost. The rackets people remember are the glamorous ones, the liquor and the gambling and the nightclubs. The ones that actually paid, week after boring week, were the dull ones: ice, coal, laundry, bread deliveries, fish, anything a neighborhood could not do without, and anything that came into that neighborhood on a truck.
A man who controlled the trucks controlled the price. And a man who controlled the price did not have to do anything dramatic ever again.
Reina's second in command, his underboss, was a quiet man called Tommaso Gagliano. Tommy Gagliano. Remember that there are going to be three men named Tommy in this story, and two of them end up running the same family.
Above Reina, in theory, stood Giuseppe Masseria. Joe the Boss. The most powerful mafia boss in New York. A short, heavy man with an appetite for other people's money. And by 1930, he was at war.
His rival was Salvatore Maranzano, who had come from Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily and who had a following in New York that would not bend to Masseria. That fight is what history calls the Castellammarese War. It ran for about two years, killed men on both sides in numbers nobody has ever counted properly, and at the end of it the New York mafia came out organized in the shape it kept for the rest of the century.
Masseria had two problems with Tommy Reina. The first was that he wanted a bigger cut of the ice money. The second was worse. Reina was supposed to be his ally, and Reina was leaning the other way, toward Maranzano.
So Joe the Boss solved it the way he solved things. On February 26, 1930, Reina had been visiting an apartment on Sheridan Avenue in the Claremont section of the Bronx. He came out into the evening and a man stepped up close with a shotgun and fired twice. Reina died there on the pavement. In his pockets, police found a handgun he never got to and $84 in cash.
Most accounts name Vito Genovese as the shooter, but it was never proved in any court, and the accounts do not all agree. What is agreed is who wanted it. Masseria had killed a boss of his own side, and now there was a chair to fill.
Inside the family, everyone knew who should take it. Gagliano was the underboss. That is what an underboss is for. Masseria did not give it to Gagliano. He gave it to Joseph Pinzolo.
Understand what that meant. Pinzolo was not from that family. He had not come up in the Bronx or in East Harlem. He did not know the men, and the men did not know him. He had no standing in their streets. He was Masseria's man, dropped into a dead man's chair from outside. And what he was really there to do was take over the ice.
Nobody was asked. Masseria killed their boss in February, and by the spring he had handed them a stranger.
There is a line from one of the soldiers of that family, a man named Steve Relli, that says the whole thing plainly. He is quoted by Joseph Valachi, a soldier in the same family who thirty years later became the first made man to talk in public about all of it.
Valachi is not a neutral witness and never was. He told his story from inside a prison, with reasons of his own. But the sentence survives, and nothing in the record contradicts it. Joe the Boss killed our boss. Then he put this man Pinzolo in his place without us having anything to say about it. So we killed him.
Before we get to that, two things get said about Pinzolo that you should not believe. The first is that he ran the artichoke racket. He did not. That belonged to Ciro Terranova, who was known as the Artichoke King and who was still running it years later when the mayor of New York broke it up in public. The artichokes are somebody else's story.
The second is that Pinzolo spent his six months squeezing money out of the family's own members. It is written everywhere. There is no record from the time that shows it. It may be true. It may be a story told afterward to make the killing look tidier.
What is certain is simpler, and it was enough. The men did not accept him because of how he arrived.
While Pinzolo sat in the chair, the family went on without him. Gagliano and a young man named Gaetano Lucchese, the third Tommy, built a second family inside the first one. They kept their own men, took their own decisions, and to the outside world they bowed to Pinzolo and swore they were loyal to Masseria.
A soldier called Dominic Petrilli was in it with them. Most accounts say that during these months they were already dealing with Maranzano on the quiet. Some say the open defection came only later. Either way, the family that Pinzolo thought he was running had already replaced him.
Then Tommy Lucchese did something friendly. In the spring of 1930, he set Pinzolo up in business. The two of them became partners in a company called California Dried Fruit Importers.
The product was clever. It was a brick of dried grape concentrate. You added water and let it sit, and you had wine. This was Prohibition, and everything about that brick was legal until the customer did the obvious thing with it.
Lucchese found the office for the business. Lucchese signed the lease. The office was suite 1007 in the Brokaw building on Broadway between 41st and 42nd Streets, and the name that went on the door was California Dry Fruit Importers.
It is worth picturing the building for a second, because the address is part of the story. This was not a warehouse on a pier. The Brokaw building stood in the middle of Times Square, a few steps from 42nd Street, in the loudest and most crowded part of the city.
Garment offices, salesmen, theater people, lawyers, hundreds of strangers going up and down in elevators all day, a lift operator who saw every face. Somebody chose to do this there, in daylight, in an office with a stranger's name on the door. His partner picked the room. His partner held the keys.
That summer, the ground under Masseria was giving way. On August 15, his oldest and sharpest adviser, Giuseppe Morello, the man they called the Clutch Hand, was shot dead in an office in East Harlem. Morello had been at the top of the New York mafia when Masseria was nobody. Now he was on a floor with the money still in his pocket.
Three weeks later, it was Pinzolo's turn. The afternoon of Friday, September 5, 1930. He went to the office. Somebody came to see him there, or was already waiting, and that somebody had a .32.
The shots were close. The papers of the next morning could not agree on how many. One New York paper counted three: two in the neck, one in the chest, just above the heart. Another counted five: two in the back, two in the chest, one in the side. Take your pick.
Either way, it was done quickly, in the middle of the afternoon, in an office building full of people, and nobody came running.
The revolver was left in the next office along with all six shells fired. Whoever did it did not throw it in the river and did not keep it. He walked out of one room, put it down in another, and kept walking, because a gun found in an empty office proves nothing about who was holding it.
Pinzolo lay there for hours. The building worked around him, and at about nine that night the scrub women came in with their buckets and found him.
Police went straight for Tommy Lucchese. Of course they did. He was the partner, the lease holder, the man whose name was on the room. Lucchese's family told them he had left the city that morning and would be away for the weekend.
Three days later, on September 8, Lucchese walked into the district attorney's office with his lawyer beside him, a former judge named Francis Mancuso, and gave himself up. He was arrested on suspicion of homicide, and then nothing happened. The grand jury refused to indict him. The charge went away. Tommy Lucchese walked out and went back to work.
Nobody was ever convicted of killing Joseph Pinzolo. Nobody was ever even tried.
Two names have been offered since. Valachi, in his manuscript, said the gunman was Girolamo Santuccio, a man they called Bobby Doyle. The book that claims to carry Lucky Luciano's own account names Dominic Petrilli instead. Neither man was ever arrested for it. Neither claim has anything under it but the word of a man with a reason to talk. And the two claims do not even agree with each other.
What is not really disputed is where the order came from. It came from inside the family Pinzolo had been sent to run. The men Masseria had insulted in February had answered him in September.
In the weeks after, Joe the Boss called a meeting on Staten Island and asked, in a room full of mafiosi, who had killed Morello and who had killed Pinzolo. He was told nothing. The alibis held. The men who had done it sat there and let him ask.
That is the detail that tells you how far gone Masseria already was. The most powerful boss in New York had two of his own men shot in three weeks, called in everybody who might know, and went home knowing exactly as much as when he arrived.
After Pinzolo, the Reina family stopped pretending. They went over to Maranzano openly, and they took their guns with them. Masseria had lost a boss, an adviser, and a whole family in one summer.
In November, two more of his allies, Al Mineo and Steve Ferrigno, were shot dead, and another of his gangs walked over to the other side. On April 15, 1931, Masseria himself was killed at a restaurant at Coney Island by his own people, and the war was over.
Tommy Gagliano got the family. Masseria appointed him after Pinzolo's death, which was exactly what the family had wanted in February and exactly what Masseria had refused to give them.
Gagliano then did the smartest thing any boss in this story does. Nothing loud. He ran that family for twenty years and stayed out of the newspapers so completely that even his photograph is hard to find.
When he died in 1951, his underboss took over. That underboss was Tommy Lucchese, the partner, the leaseholder, the man who had given himself up and walked out again. And the family took his name. It is still called the Lucchese family today.
Gagliano and Lucchese had waited, taken the insult, kept their heads down, run their own family inside somebody else's, and ended up with everything. It took them one bullet-riddled afternoon in an office they had rented themselves, and then twenty years of saying nothing in public.
So what was Joseph Pinzolo? He was not a great gangster. He informed on his own boss at twenty-one and went to prison for refusing to finish the job. He was handed a family by a man who did not own it, to take an ice racket he had not built, from men who had not agreed to him.
He sat in an office rented by the man who is generally believed to have arranged his death, selling grape bricks to people, pretending they were not making wine. Six months at the most. No trial, no convictions, no answers.
They buried him in Calvary Cemetery out in Queens, across the water from the city he had been given six months of. Reina is not there. Gagliano is not there. Those two lie up in Woodlawn in the Bronx, in the ground that belonged to their own family. One of them under a mausoleum with his name cut into the stone.
Even in a cemetery, Pinzolo is the outsider in this story.
Of the five families of New York, the Luccheses are the only one whose modern history begins with its own members killing the boss they were given. Every one of those men is on record, with photographs, with files, with names that are still known.
And the man they killed to get there left behind an address, a date, a fake company on a door, and not one picture of his face.