The Nineteenth Century Criminal Factions That Fought America’s First Mob War
The favored destination of southern Italian immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not the United States, but Argentina and Brazil. Those countries’ Latin culture, Romance languages, Catholic religion, and warmer climes, were more hospitable and more easily adapted to than America. New Orleans became a secondary destination in the nineteenth century because of its extensive traffic with those southern locales. As with all waves of immigrants, the new arrivals brought with them their baggage, both literal and figurative. By the 1870s, Sicilian immigrants Carlo and Alberto Matranga had established the Matranga crime family in New Orleans, which operated out of a salon and brothel.
The Matrangas expanded their criminal activities from prostitution to labor rackets and a lucrative extortion scheme known as the Black Hand. They collected “tribute” from Italian laborers, as well as from a rival Italian crime family, the Prozenzanos, who monopolized South American fruit shipments. In the 1880s, America witnessed its first mob war, when the Matrangas fought the Prozenzanos over control of the New Orleans waterfront. Things steadily escalated, as each family brought in more and more muscle in the form of Mafiosi from the old country.