4. The End of This Feud Led to a New Beginning for the American Mafia
In November 1930, Alfred Mineo and another key Masseria henchman were murdered, and Mineo’s successor defected to Salvatore Maranzano. The tide then swiftly turned, and other Masseria allies switched allegiance to the Castellammarese. Masseria’s remaining key henchmen, led by Lucky Luciano, realized that their boss’s ship was about to sink. So Luciano approached Maranzano, and offered to defect and seal the deal with the murder of Masseria, who was duly rubbed out on April 15th, 1931. Maranzano then reorganized the Italian-American mafia, and set up the basic structure that survives to this day of made soldiers who answer to captains, who in turn answer to a family underboss and boss.
However, Maranazano, an egomaniac with delusions of grandeur who fancied himself a Julius Caesar of the criminal world, did not enjoy his victory for long. Five months after Maranzano declared himself capo di tutti capi, or Boss of All Bosses, Lucky Luciano had him murdered. He then abolished the Boss of All Bosses title, and set up a collective mafia leadership council to avoid future gang wars. On the surface, the Castellammarese War had been a power struggle between Masseria and Maranzano. An underlying current of the feud, however, was a generational struggle. Younger underlings, who grew up American, resented the rival bosses and their entire generation of leadership – derided as “Mustache Petes”. They saw them as insular, set in their Old World ways, and unwilling or unable to adapt to American realities.