According to a former U.S. attorney general, “forty members of La Cosa Nostra died by gunfire” on September 10, 1931—the same day the Luciano-Lansky forces eradicated the last obstacle to their power, Salvatore Maranzano.
Many criminal accounts hold these murders took place all around the country as old Mustache Petes were assassinated to make way for the new order of organized crime. Yet, no one has ever been able to compile a list of the 40 supposed victims on the Night of the Sicilian Vespers.
A number of murders in the New York area were tied to Maranzano’s fate, but these were more or less predictable rubouts of the crime leader’s more ardent supporters. Such underlings included Jimmy Marino, gunned down as he stood in the doorway of a Bronx barbershop, and Louis Russo and Sam Monaco, who were reported missing and not found for three days when their bodies, throats slit and skulls smashed, washed ashore in Newark Bay. (Informer Joe Valachi recollected, “Sam had an iron pipe hammered up his ass.”) The Luciano-Lansky final touch was obvious: Maranzano faithful were admonished to eschew revenge and join the new setup.
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But what of the alleged murders glorified in the press as the Night of the Sicilian Vespers? Luciano maintained that mass slayings were unnecessary, and he was right. Younger mafiosi around the country had been knocking off older Mustache Petes in the past few years for the same reason Luciano had killed Maranzano and before him Joe the Boss Masseria: They stood in the way of new ways to make money. And Luciano said, “The real and only reason Maranzano got his was so that we could stop the killin’. That it was all over.”
There was one other killing that fatal night, however. Gerardo Scarpato, the owner of the Nuova Villa Tammaro, the Coney Island restaurant where Joe the Boss was murdered, was killed.
Scarpato had conveniently disappeared from the restaurant to go for a walk along the beach before Luciano went to the bathroom and four killers walked in and gunned down Joe the Boss. It may be presumed that Luciano felt killing off Scarpato would be a nice gesture to the Masseria faithful.
