Guest Author - Vance Rowe

Vito Genovese began his career in the American Mafia when he emigrated from Naples, Italy to the United States. He was a childhood friend of Lucky Luciano and began his career in crime in the early 1920’s under Joe “The Boss” Masseria. He was involved in extortion and bootlegging but Masseria was more impressed with Genovese’s proclivity toward violence. In fact it was an act by Vito Genovese that led to the Castellammarese War in 1931. A man named Gaetano Reina defected from Masseria’s crew to join Salvatore Maranzano’s crime family. One day when Reina was leaving his aunt’s house, Vito Genovese walked up to him and killed him on Sheridan Avenue with a shotgun blast to the face.

It is ironic that Vito Genovese was also one of the four men who killed Masseria during the height of the war under he orders of Luciano. This made way for Salvatore Maranzano to become capo di Tutti capi or “boss of bosses”. Shortly after that, Luciano organized a hit on Maranzano and he became boss of the then known Luciano crime family with Genovese as his underboss. When Luciano was sent to prison on a pandering charge, Vito Genovese took over as boss. Then in 1937, Genovese was convicted of a 1934 murder and he fled to Italy to avoid being thrown in jail. In Italy, he befriended Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. He even arranged the murder of Carlo Tresca, the editor of an anti-fascist Italian newspaper in New York, as a favor to Mussolini. However, once Mussolini was losing his power in Italy, Genovese defected to the side of the Allies during the invasion in 1944 and was even appointed as liaison officer with the US Army.

When he eventually returned to the US, he found that Frank Costello was the new boss of the Luciano family. This did not sit well with Genovese. He was also upset to find out that Willie Moretti was the underboss and he had to accept the position as caporegime in the family. This was a hard pill for Vito Genovese to swallow. He went from boss of a family to captain of a crew. During the 1950’s, Genovese ordered the murders of Costello, Moretti and Albert Anastasia. Only Costello would survive but it frightened him enough to give up control of the family and this led the way for Vito Genovese to once again become boss.

In 1957, he arranged for a meeting with top Mafia officials at the home of Joseph Barbara in the small town of Apalachin, New York. It was here that he was hoping to assert himself in the position of power of boss of bosses. However, the NY State Police raided the home and the mobsters fled. Some were caught and arrested and this is when the Mafia was brought out into the public eye. Then in 1959, Vito Genovese was arrested and convicted of dealing heroin and was sent to Atlanta Federal Prison in Atlanta, Georgia. He feels he was set up by law enforcement but others feel hat he was set up by Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello. In 1969, he died of a heart attack in the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri ending a violent chapter in the history of the American Mafia.