Although his personal history is mostly a mystery, Vincenzo Ottumvo has the distinction of being regarded as the first recorded Mafia victim in the United States. (He almost certainly was not.)
A Neapolitan, Ottumvo was killed by Sicilian criminals in New Orleans on January 24, 1889, during a card game. The crime resulted not from a gambling dispute, but rather from the first shot in an Italian gang war that was to be waged in the city between Neapolitan and Sicilian gangsters.
Apparently, Ottumvo was a member of a Neapolitan “Camorra” faction vying with the Sicilian Mafia for control of the lucrative New Orleans waterfront rackets—at least, that seems to have been the case. However, it is not inconceivable he was a Sicilian mafioso.
An almost total lack of knowledge of the ins-and-outs of Italian criminality, together with a high degree of venality, on the part of the New Orleans police guaranteed that the Ottumvo murder, along with several others that followed in ensuing months, would remain forever in the unsolved file.
There is little reason to believe that Ottumvo was truly the first victim of the American Mafia. The Sicilian underworld had existed in New Orleans since the time of the Civil War, and, indeed, the first Black Hand extortion murder may have occurred as early as 1855. (Not all Black Hand murders were the work of mafiosi, but it would be more remarkable if none were.)
