John Mirabella

Because he plied his trade in such out-of-the-way spots as Detroit, Toledo, Youngstown and the like, John Mirabella never garnered the national press like the big-city mob hit men. It was, a cynic might observe, an outrage. Mirabella was a true master of murder.

His memoirs would make those of Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno read like Sunday school texts. Mirabella was tough, and he knew where so many bodies were buried that he had to be pensioned off for years of retirement while on the lam from the law.

The normal laws of practicality, for which the Mafia is noted, might suggest the mob could save a small fortune as well as gain peace of mind by the simple expedient of knocking him off. The problem that arose was where could someone tough enough be found to take Mirabella out. The consistent answer was nowhere. Ever.


Mirabella labored originally for the Licavoli family, who moved into Detroit to provide added muscle for the notorious Purple Gang. The Purples were vicious Jewish mobsters who could kill with the worst of them, but even they came to respect Mirabella. He killed with finesse, wiping out some of the toughest enemy bootleggers with deadly efficiency.

In 1930, Mirabella handled what is still regarded by many as Detroit’s most shocking murder, that of pioneer radio newscaster and muckraker Jerry Buckley.

Buckley made war on the mobs, which in one period of 14 days gifted the city with 11 killings, and on a city hall that seemed totally unconcerned with cleaning up the gangster element. At 1 A.M.—shortly after he had broadcast a recall election special declaring that the rascals were thrown out—Buckley was sitting in a hotel lobby in a happy mood when three gunmen entered. One stood guard by the door while the other two approached Buckley and pumped six shots apiece at him. Only one slug missed; Jerry Buckley crashed to the floor dead. In time, Mirabella was identified as the lead gunner, the craftsman who planned the operation, but, by that time, Mirabella had vanished.

The Licavoli forces were chased out of Detroit by the ensuing heat and settled for a time in Toledo where beer baron Jackie Kennedy held sway. There Mirabella proved a vital hit man, who demonstrated his value by putting many Kennedy enforcers on a slab in the morgue.

Getting the hoods was one thing, but Kennedy was another. When boss Yonnie Licavoli gave Mirabella the contract on Kennedy, the previously murder-proof booze baron was as good as stone cold dead. Love had come to Kennedy in the form of a beautiful brunette who, after many weeks of romance, accompanied him on a walk through a quiet Toledo suburb. As they strolled a dark street, the woman had hold of Kennedy’s gun arm. He never had a chance when Mirabella stepped out of a black car and shot him dead at close range, close enough that his female accomplice did not get in the way of any bullets.

By early 1934, murder warrants were out on Mirabella for the Kennedy and Buckley rubouts, as well as for a half-dozen others. Yonnie Licavoli went to prison for conspiracy to commit murder, and many other top mafiosi faced serious legal problems. If John Mirabella could be found, he might spill the secrets of many Mafia murders and could send many a member of the Honored Society to prison—probably even to the electric chair.

The general rule of thumb is that a hit man with that much knowledge is better off dead. But Mirabella did not face that fate. No one would take him on, and he disappeared into the grimy, steeltown surroundings of Youngstown. In 1945, Mirabella, long carrying the name of Paul Magine, married a local woman.

Mirabella appeared to be the owner of a produce business, but he was never on the premises. Instead he was a constant habitue of gambling joints and bookie parlors. He was never short of money and was seldom without a bottle of Scotch in his hand.

Once a week, Mirabella, the FBI was later to discover through informers, had a visit from Cadillac Charley Cavallaro, a top Youngstown mafioso. Author Hank Messick in The Private Lives of Public Enemies relates the testimony given the FBI by Cavallaro’s chauffeur-bodyguard: “They always embraced and kissed each other on the cheek, each cheek, and had a helluva reunion, as if they hadn’t seen each other for years. Then Charley would hand over a wad of dough. All the way home he would curse and rave about having to give money to ‘short coats and leeches,’ but the next week he’d go back and the same thing would happen all over again.”

Nobody could figure out anything to do with Mirabella but pay him off. Even in a perpetual alcoholic haze, he inspired nothing but fear.

In the end, Mother Nature did the Mafia a favor. At the age of 48 Mirabella died of cirrhosis of the liver. Killer Scotch had taken the Detroit

George “Bugs” Moran

By the late 1920s, Al Capone was the rising star of organized crime in Chicago. Left in his way were only a few potent foes, chief of whom were the Aiello family of mafiosi and the depleted ranks of Dion O’Banion’s North Side Gang. The latter was bossed by George “Bugs” Moran. Although he gained his nickname from his often bizarre and flaky behavior, Bugs was known, especially to Capone, as a brutal and efficient killer.

Bugs Moran ascended in the O’Banion Gang largely due to Capone’s machinations. In 1924, Capone had engineered O’Banion’s murder, and in 1926, he got the successor, Hymie Weiss. The leadership of the North Siders next fell to Schemer Drucci who was killed by a policeman in 1927. That elevated Moran to the top spot.

Capone realized with Moran in charge, the shooting war with the O’Banion gang would escalate. That was the Bugs’s way. Through the years it would have been impossible to dredge up an O’Banion mob shooting caper in which Moran was not involved. He was said to be the first to put a bullet in the head of a riding academy horse the O’Banions snatched and “executed” after it had thrown and kicked to death their celebrated compatriot Nails Morton.


He was the gunman who charged across the street to finish off Johnny Torrio after he had been hit four times by shots fired at his limousine (Moran’s gun misfired and Torrio lived.) Moran was also in the lead car in the famous machine-gun motorcade that sprayed Capone’s Hawthorne Inn with over 1,000 slugs.

Moran’s hatred for Capone bordered on the pathological; he often referred to him, in or out of his presence, as “the Beast” or “the Behemoth.” To vex him, Moran would frequently make peace with Capone and then break the agreement within a matter of hours.

Bugs considered Capone a lowly human, especially since he’d deal in prostitution. A regular churchgoer, Moran, like his predecessors, refused to let whorehouses operate in the gang’s North Side territory. Capone kept trying to set up shops, sending offers to split the profits evenly with Moran. Irate, Bugs once thundered, “We don’t deal in flesh. We think anyone who does is lower than a snake’s belly. Can’t Capone get that through his thick skull?”

Moran, born of Irish and Polish immigrant parents in Minnesota in 1893, grew up in the predominantly Irish North Side of Chicago. He grew up with street gangs, committing 26 known robberies and serving three incarcerations before he was 21. He was soon running with Dion O’Banion, who loved him like a brother.

A natural pair, both possessed the same sort of homicidal “wit.” Once Moran ran into Judge John H. Lyle, one of the city’s few honest and courageous jurists of the era, at a baseball game and said, “Judge, that’s a beautiful diamond ring you’re wearing. If it’s snatched some night, promise me you won’t go hunting me. I’m telling you now I’m innocent.”

Moran’s sense of humor made him rather a darling of newspapermen. Portrayed as something of a jolly good murderer, he was made out to be a likeable fellow. This good press probably put more Chicagoans on Moran’s side with hopes that he would win the war of survival with Big Al.

But the war ended in a draw. The closest Capone got to getting Moran was in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. The Capones suckered Moran into believing he was about to buy a load of hijacked booze from some Detroit racketeers and Bugs arranged to have the loot delivered to the gang’s headquarters, a garage, on the morning of February 14. Moran was late for the appointment, having overslept. Accompanied by two aides, Bugs rushed to the garage just in time to spot three men dressed as policemen and two others in plainclothes enter the garage.

Believing it to be a police shakedown, Moran decided to wait until they left. Minutes later, machine-gun fire was heard from inside the garage, leaving six Moran men and an innocent bystander dead. Moran took off. He announced, “Only Capone kills like that,” and promised vengeance. In order to get Capone, Moran allied himself with the Aiellos and some disgruntled Jewish mobsters under Jack Zuta in a plot to get some of Capone’s men to defect and kill Big Al. All their plots failed, and both Joe Aiello and Zuta died from Capone bullets.

Throughout the 1930s, Moran’s power waned even though Capone himself had gone to prison on income tax charges. In 1936 Moran may have enjoyed a measure of retaliation when Machine Gun Jack McGurn, a Capone enforcer generally held to have been one of the planners or perpetrators of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, was murdered. The press speculated that Bugs Moran had finally got his revenge; but McGurn, at that time on the outs with the mob, was more than likely killed by Capone adherents.

After that it was all downhill for Moran. His crimes turned petty compared to what they had been in the bad old days. Eventually he moved to Ohio and in July 1946 he was seized by the FBI along with two others for robbing a bank messenger of $10,000. During Prohibition Moran would have tossed around such a sum as if it were confetti. Moran got 10 years for the crime; when he was released he was rearrested for an earlier bank robbery and sent to Leavenworth for another 10-year stretch. He died there of cancer in 1957.

All his underworld chums—O’Banion, Weiss, Drucci—had lavish gangster burials. Bugs Moran outlived them all but his funeral was a quick burial in a wooden casket in a potter’s field outside the prison’s walls.

Morelli Gang

In 1927 two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were executed for a 1920 Massachusetts robbery in which two victims were killed. The Sacco-Vanzetti case remains to this day a cause célèbre, with many feeling they were innocent of the charge and had been convicted in an era of superpatriotism and hysteria about foreign radicals.

Within mob circles there was never any doubt as to the pair’s innocence, a fact confirmed in the 1970s by underworld informer Vinnie Teresa (whose testimony has probably been of greater value to authorities than that of another renowned informer, Joe Valachi).

According to Teresa, the $15,776.51 payroll robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company of South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920, was the work of the notorious Morelli gang. The Morellis were five brothers who moved to the New England area from Brooklyn during World War I. Two of them, Frank “Butsey” Morelli and Joseph Morelli, were the leaders of a terrorist mob that ran roughshod over several states, pulling all sorts of robberies and burglaries.

Much speculation by civil libertarians has tied the Morellis to the robbery for which Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted. Newspapers from time to time revived the case, and mentions were often made of Joseph, who died in 1950, and Butsey, who in the 1950s went so far as to sue the Boston Globe for printing a story linking him to the crime.

Butsey was at the time dying of cancer and his motive in this, says Teresa in his book My Life in the Mafia, had nothing to do with trying to clear his name—he was generally identified as the first Mafia boss of Rhode Island—but rather to shield his adopted son from the unwanted publicity. Butsey insisted to the boy he had nothing to do with the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Teresa said he asked Butsey, “What the hell are you suing them for? You can’t beat a newspaper.”

Butsey replied, “What they said was true, but it’s going to hurt my kid. I don’t give a damn about myself. I’m ready to die anyway. But look what it’s doing to my boy. He’s a legitimate kid. He never knew what was going on before.”

As to the murders, Butsey told Teresa: “We whacked them out, we killed those guys in the robbery. These two greaseballs took it on the chin. . . . That shows you how much justice there really is.”

The fact that Teresa’s testimony has been considered reliable enough to lead to the indictment or conviction of more than 50 mob figures certainly lends his disclosure about Sacco and Vanzetti a considerable measure of credibility.

Nicholas Morello

Great men are creations of their times. When Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky formed the national crime syndicate in the early 1930s, they succeeded because the underworld could at that time be logically organized. But Luciano was not the first to dream of a national crime syndicate.

Nicholas Morello, of the notorious Morello family, rose far above his relations to realize that the Americanization of the gangs would have to give birth to a great criminal network, each of its components at peace with the others and in concert controlling all the rackets in the country.

Morello probably saw less need to cooperate with other ethnics than Luciano would later, mainly because during World War I the great ethnic Irish and Jewish criminal gangs were disintegrating. This was even true to some extent of the Italian gangs, but the mafiosi and Camorristas maintained their cohesion. (With the later advent of Prohibition the Irish and Jewish mobs would reorganize.)


In fact, Morello should have had an easier time organizing crime in America than Luciano and Lansky would later, but he found himself too mired down by old-country conflicts. While Morello’s Sicilian gangs controlled the rackets of East Harlem and Greenwich Village in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Camorristas, immigrant criminals from the Camorra gangs of Naples, extended their power in Brooklyn, collecting protection money from Italian storekeepers, coal and ice dealers and other businessmen, as well as operating rackets on the Brooklyn docks.

The Camorristas were under the leadership of Don Pelligrino Morano, a man who had his own dreams of expansion—all aimed solely at eliminating the Manhattan mafiosi. When Morano ordered his men to move in on the East Harlem rackets, money considerations were probably secondary. He really looked to demean his Old World rivals.

The more forward-looking Morello thought it foolish to continue such old battles and offered to make a peaceful settlement. Morano took such a move as a sign of weakness and spurned the offer. By 1916 the warfare was so intense that only the most hardy mafioso or Camorrista dared cross the East River into the other’s domain. They usually returned home in a hearse.

Then, surprisingly, that same year Morano announced he was in favor of Morello’s call for an armistice. He invited Morello to come to Brooklyn to discuss terms, of course guaranteeing him safe conduct.

Morello proved wisely cautious and for six months did no more than dicker about holding such a peace meeting, though he realized he would have to go if he hoped to advance his master plan. The meeting was arranged in a café on Navy Street, and Morello showed up accompanied only by his personal bodyguard. Morano was deeply disappointed. He had hoped Morello would bring his top lieutenants with him. Still, Morello was the main prize, and as soon as the mafioso and his bodyguard stepped from their car, a five-man execution squad opened up on them, killing them in broad daylight.

Morano was greatly surprised when he was arrested for murder. He had been under the assumption that the payoffs he had made to a New York police detective, Michael Mealli, had “cleared the operation with the cops.” Some of the killers cooperated with the law for lighter sentences and Morano and his top aides were sent to prison for life. When the sentence was pronounced, the Brooklyn Eagle reported: “Morano was surrounded by a dozen Italians who showered kisses on his face and forehead. On the way to the jail other Italians braved the guard and kissed Morano’s hands, cheeks and forehead.”

With Morello dead and Morano imprisoned, what the newspapers called the first Mafia War came to an end. So too did the dreams of Nick Morello for a “great combination” of the gangs. At the time Salvatore Luciana was only a teenage thug, but already he appreciated what Morello had tried to do. When he grew older he would Americanize his name to Charles “Lucky” Luciano and he would Americanize the Mafia as well.

Peter “the Clutching Hand,” Morello

One of the most important members of the notorious Morello family, Peter “the Clutching Hand,” Morello was a devious killer whose tactics terrified his enemies. During the 1920s he was the bodyguard- adviser to Joe the Boss Masseria, regarded at the time as the most important mafioso in New York. Joseph Bonnano (Joe Bananas), shortly thereafter a boss of one of New York’s five crime families, made it clear why Morello was also called “the old fox”— he did Masseria’s thinking for him.

The Clutching Hand was cut down in August 1930 during the Castellammarese War. By whom is a matter of some dispute. Informer Joe Valachi insisted the job was done by Buster of Chicago, a mysterious hit man imported by Salvatore Maranzano, the leader of the anti-Masseria forces. This, like much of Valachi’s testimony, has been viewed with considerable doubt by Mafia watchers. Morello was cut down in his East Harlem business office, and it is doubtful that a stranger like Buster could have gotten to him, especially since at the moment he was handling a huge amount of cash, receipts from his loansharking racket.

Far more believable is Lucky Luciano’s version. The ambitious Luciano, like Morello, was allied with Joe the Boss, but he had decided by then that the time was ripe to get rid of Masseria. That being the case it was decided that Morello had to die first. As long as Morello lived, Masseria was considered impregnable, and even if the Boss were killed, Morello would undoubtedly go underground to carry on a fierce war with Luciano.

Luciano assigned Albert Anastasia and Frank Scalise to the job and they were able to penetrate Morello’s headquarters. They found Morello with a collector in his operation, Giuseppe Pariano, and, as Luciano put it, “he hadda get it too.” As a bonus, Anastasia and Scalise appropriated the $30,000 in cash lying on Morello’s desk.

Morello family

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.


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.

Willie Moretti

In his day, Willie Moretti was a tough enforcer and syndicate boss, a power in New Jersey rackets to whom extortion, dope pushing and murder were part of the normal way of doing business. By the time he died in what the mob regarded as a “mercy killing,” he was a clown, the comic relief at the Kefauver hearings, and a real threat to the mob with his loose lip. That was to prove to be the end of tough Willie Moore, as he was sometimes known.

A boyhood friend of Frank Costello, Moretti was in his younger days as rough and ready as any gangster. In New Jersey, he bossed an enforcer troop of about 60 gunmen, who protected his longtime partner, Longy Zwillman, and his own racket interests. The racket interests were extensive, often intermingled with the New York interests of Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis and others.

New York Times crime reporter Meyer Berger once observed, “the Morettis had their bookmaking agents among workers in the major factories in Bergen, they shared the bookmaking profits pouring into the New York mob’s astonishingly widespread New Jersey wire system, and they were partners in plush casinos and so-called ‘sawdust,’ or dice barns deep into Pennsylvania.”


Their top casino in Bergen was the Marine Room in the famed Riviera nightclub, located just north of the George Washington Bridge on the Palisades. The Riviera was a nightclub with top entertainers. The floor show was open to the public; getting into the gambling room was another matter. All the players had to be known or they had to stay in the dining rooms and watch the show.

Moretti was known within the underworld as singer Frank Sinatra’s original godfather. They had become fast friends when the singer from Hoboken was performing for peanuts in local roadhouses and clubs. In 1939, Sinatra, while singing with Harry James’s orchestra, made his first hit recording, “All or Nothing at All.”

Band leader Tommy Dorsey signed him for what Sinatra must have regarded as a princely sum, $125 a week. Sinatra’s popularity was soaring thanks to the bobbysoxers who followed him everywhere. But he was locked in by his contract to Tommy Dorsey. The much-repeated underworld tale of what happened is this: One night Willie Moretti showed up at Dorsey’s dressing room and stuck a gun into the band leader’s mouth. Moretti then suggested that Dorsey might sell Sinatra’s contract. The price agreed on was one dollar.

A few years after that Moretti started acting funny at times, showing the first signs of mental illness brought on by the ravages of untreated syphilis. Moretti loved to gamble and claimed to be winning bets on horses for millions of dollars. He tried to place bets on horses and races that didn’t exist. He even started at times to talk about syndicate affairs, matters that were not to be mentioned in public. Eventually quite a few capos loyal to Costello began saying Willie was a threat to everyone.

Murder of Willie Moretti

Costello had been best man at Willie’s wedding and held him in high affection. Costello decided the best thing to do with Moretti was to get him out of the line of fire, sending him for a long vacation out West with a male nurse. Moretti frequently telephoned Costello, in conversations wiretapped by the police, begging to be allowed to come back. Costello refused and went on protecting Willie from himself. Only when Moretti became less voluble was he allowed to return.

When Moretti was called before the Kefauver committee, many mobsters wanted him knocked off, even though he had been behaving better. Costello again prevented it, and after much stalling Moretti finally appeared before the Senate committee. He proceeded to talk and talk and talk, though he said very little.

No, he explained, he was not a member of the Mafia because he didn’t have a membership card. And he offered such pearls of wisdom as “They call anybody a mob who makes six percent more on money”; and concerning gangsters he knew: “wellcharactered people don’t need introductions.” When Moretti left the stand, the committee members seemed satisfied. Senator Estes Kefauver thanked him for his forthrightness, and Senator Charles Tobey found his frankness “rather refreshing.”

“Thank you very much,” Willie replied to the praise. “Don’t forget my house in Deal if you are down on the shore. You are invited.”

The mob was quite pleased with how Moretti had handled himself on the witness stand, but Willie started to deteriorate in late 1951. He talked regularly to New Jersey newspapermen and made noise about holding a press conference to review gambling in New Jersey. Vito Genovese, a Costello enemy, began strong lobbying for Moretti’s execution.

Genovese knew that if he could get rid of Moretti he could move his own men into Willie’s operations and further erode the power of Costello. Moretti, Genovese said, was losing his mind, and the entire organization could be in trouble. “If tomorrow I go wrong, I want you to hit me in the head too,” Genovese said. Finally even such a staunch ally as Albert Anastasia was convinced that a “mercy killing” was necessary for the sake of both Willie and the syndicate.

On October 4, 1951, Willie sat down in a New Jersey restaurant with three or four men (the testimony varies on this). When the waitress stepped into the kitchen, they were chatting amiably in Italian. Suddenly there were several gunshots and when the waitress peered through the kitchen door, all the customers except one were gone.

Fifty-seven-year-old Willie Moretti lay dead on the floor, his left hand on his chest. It was a typical mob rubout, and there would be no convictions. Willie had been shot up front, supposedly a mark of “respect” accorded to bosses. They had a right to see what was happening.

In this case it could well have been a sign of respect since, after all, everybody genuinely liked Willie. They just happened to like him better dead.