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| Founding Boss Giuseppe Morello |
The first Mafia family firmly established in this country was literally a family of criminals. The Morellos settled in New York in the latter part of the 19th century, after emigrating over the years from the Sicilian town of Corleone, a community credited with supplying more Mafia members to America than any other place on the island.
The American head of the huge clan of brothers, half-brothers and brothers-in-law was Antonio Morello, a brutal and cunning criminal credited with personally committing between 30 and 40 murders in the 1890s. His two younger brothers, Joe and Nick, succeeded him to leadership.
Joe was noted as even more vicious, and with his brother-in-law, the notorious Lupo the Wolf, operated the so-called Murder Stable in East Harlem where enemies or victims of the gang were taken and either convinced to give in or tortured and killed. The screams in the night from the Murder Stable were an awesome yet frequent sound in East Harlem.
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But Joe lacked the vision to be a great crime leader and he was soon superseded by his brother Nicholas. Not illogically, Nick Morello was described later as an early version of Lucky Luciano in that he also dreamed about forming a great criminal syndicate to run all major rackets in the country. However, he was assassinated by Brooklyn Camorristas in 1916, and the superstructure that was to become national organized crime remained unbuilt for another decade and a half.
Nick was the last Morello to achieve leadership of the clan, which later passed on to Ciro Terranova, who maintained, despite personal weakness, a measure of authority in the Mafia until the 1930s. Peter “the Clutching Hand” Morello rose to near top power as the number one adviser to Joe the Boss Masseria, but he was killed during the Castellammarese War in 1930. His demise, since he was clearly the brains of the Masseria loyalists, assured the doom of Joe the Boss.
This hardly spelled the end of the Morellos in organized crime. Today a great many Morello descendants remain entrenched in various New York–New Jersey Mafia rackets.
