Reply With QuoteYawn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
GOOD KILLERS GANG MARKED MOB BOSS MAGADDINO'S AMERICAN DEBUT
By Mike Hudson
"Li bruceremo!"
"We will burn you!"
Pithy, as mottoes go, direct and to the point. And for the immigrant Italian communities in New York City during the first half of the recent century, a terrifying one as well.
For they knew better than anyone the battle cry of the infamous Good Killers mob, a gang of Sicilian assassins who, for a price, would kill anyone, at any time, and in any place. By 1921, police credited the Good Killers with as many as 125 murders, not just in the city but around the country as well. The underworld knew that the gang could be counted on to reach out and touch someone in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland or Detroit with bone-chilling efficiency. At their peak, even the Torrio outfit in Chicago regularly made use of the Good Killers' services.
Founded in the years leading up to World War I by Vito Bonaventure, the Good Killers were based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Roebling Street near the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Today,
Williamsburg is known as a hip, artsy neighborhood, where artists and models do whatever it is they do with little regard for the district's sinister past. It's unlikely that anyone living on Roebling Street today knows of the old Bonaventure Bakery, its notorious oven, or the Good Killers' feared motto.
It was for Roebling Street that a 29-year-old Stefano Magaddino made a beeline when he got off the Ellis Island ferry at Battery Park in Manhattan one sunny day in 1919. An illegal immigrant, Magaddino knew he could blend in easily with the Sicilian population there, many of whom came from his hometown, Castellammare del Golfo, in Trapani Province. His own uncle, Vito Bonaventure, would even help find him work.
Magaddino's skill set was lacking for most practical purposes, as he was barely literate, spoke virtually no English and had never held a regular job. But back in Sicily, he had distinguished himself with both the gun and the knife in a long-running blood feud between his own family -- which included the Bonaventures and the Bonannos -- and clans aligned with a rival family, the Buccellatos.
In the lawless and chaotic days following the Armistice, the feud escalated into open warfare, and Stefano fled the island with his brother Antonio after their older brother, Pietro, was murdered by Buccellato killers.
But Stefano's lack of education and rough manners were no obstacles in Williamsburg, since Uncle Vito had something else in mind entirely for his young nephew.
In today's corporate world, Magaddino's transition from coarse country bumpkin to well-heeled mafia hitman might be described as seamless. He went about his murderous assignments with icy precision, quickly rising through the ranks. The Good Killers started to become known as the Bonaventure-Magaddino gang.
He saved his explosive temper for those who had been associated with the Buccellato clan back in Sicily, and one by one, they began to vanish from the New York streetscape. According to Capt. Michael Fiaschetti, then head of the NYPD's famous "Italian Squad," the gang's prowess at murder became so noted that its services were sought and paid highly for by wealthy and influential members of the Italian community.
"Many of the killings grew out of the struggle by Sicilians to control the crooked manipulations in this country connected to the Italian policy game," Fiaschetti told The New York Times. "Other victims were selected because they 'squealed' when fleeced at zenchenetto, an Italian card game. But always in back of the killings lay the original feud, which played a part not only in the direct selection of victims to be killed, but which influenced the choice of men to be swindled from fixed gambling, and who were then destroyed if they murmured."
By August of 1921, few Buccellato men remained in New York. One, a minor thug by the name of Carmello Caizzo, had gone into hiding across the Hudson River in Avon, N.J., where he found work on a friend's farm. Caizzo had been one of the killers of Pietro Magaddino, and was marked for death from the moment he got off the boat at Ellis Island.
Knowing that they'd stand out like so many sore thumbs in what were then the rural environs of New Jersey, Magaddino and the Good Killers hatched an audacious plan. They would intimidate an unfortunate barber, Bartola Fontana, who happened to be Caizzo's best friend from Castellammare del Golfo, into doing the murder for them.
They went about this simply enough, three of them backing him into the hallway of a Brooklyn apartment building, pressing their pistols to his stomach and demanding he swear to commit the crime or they would shoot him to pieces. Knowing the Good Killers mob and its fearsome reputation, there was no doubt in Fontana's mind that they meant business.
Following his capture on August 16, Fontana told Fiaschetti the strange story, which led to Stefano Magaddino's only American incarceration in what was to become a bloody and violent six-decade criminal career here.
Fontana told how he was driven to the killing and went on to recount the way he decoyed Caizzo to the farm of Salvatore Cigravo near Avon. There, he said, Caizzo "worked his own destruction." While Fontana was hesitating, making up his mind about how to do the deed or whether to do it at all, Caizzo discovered a shotgun in Cigravo's house and said he wanted to go hunting.
There were no shells in the house, so the two walked into town and bought some. Later, Fontana was carrying the gun when they reached a deep spot in the woods. Magaddino's terrifying threats of murder came back to him, and realizing he might never get such an opportunity again, he pressed the gun's muzzle against his friend's side and pulled the trigger.
Leaving the body where it fell, Fontana walked back to the Cigravo farmhouse and called a Magaddino associate, Francesco "The Wolf" Puma, as per instruction. After a while, Puma and another Good Killers assassin, Guiseppe Lombardi, arrived on the scene.
The men trussed the body with clothesline and put a burlap sack over the head and shoulders, tying this off and attaching two large pieces of sandstone for weight. They drove to a place called Tucker's Cove, four miles north of New Jersey's Stark River, and tossed the body into the water. The tide was against them, however, and the late Mr. Caizzo was fished out of the shallow waters by the local constabulary. Detectives quickly arrested the farmer Cigravo and recovered the shotgun, and soon were on Fontana's trail.
Arrested without incident at the corner of Broadway and 37th Street in Manhattan, Fontana seemed relieved. He quickly confessed to the Caizzo murder, and without much prompting began rolling over on various members of the Good Killers mob.
According to the Times, "Fontana said that he was moved to confess when he was seized by certain knowledge that the gang, having forced him to commit a murder with his own hands and knowing that in his long association with them he had become aware of many of their crimes, would silence him at first opportunity."
After the killing, Fontana went on, the mob tried its best to get him to return to Brooklyn, but he knew they wanted to "put me in the oven" -- Fontana's phrase for the fate he was certain awaited him there. The marked man preferred to take his chances with the law if he could take the others with him, he said.
The first name he gave up was that of Stefano Magaddino, whom he described as the fiercest of the Good Killers.
Fiaschetti's ears perked up. He'd been hearing Magaddino's name whispered in connection with numerous Good Killers murders in the Italian sections around Mulberry Street in Manhattan and Roebling Street in Williamsburg for nearly two years. No sooner had the ink dried on Fontana's lengthy confession than Fiaschetti hatched a plot to capture the notorious assassin.
As Italian Squad detectives hovered nearby, Fontana phoned Magaddino at the gang's headquarters, the Bonaventure Bakery. His voice trembled as he told the future Mafia chieftain that the police were looking for him and he was fearful of capture. He had to get out of New York, he pleaded.
Magaddino showed no sign of suspicion. He told the frightened barber-turned-hitman he would meet him at Grand Central Station, and would give him the money to travel to Buffalo, where Fontana could count on the protection of the local mafiosi, who would be there to meet him. There was little doubt in anyone's mind that Magaddino was intent on sending Fontana to his death.
At the appointed time, detectives drove Fontana to Grand Central, unshackled him, and allowed him to roam the vast train station as they lurked nearby. Magaddino appeared and gave Fontana $30 to cover expenses on his trip. The Italian Squad men closed in with their pistols drawn, but it turned out that Magaddino had come unarmed, and they slapped the cuffs on him.
Locked up in the Tombs while the detectives went about the business of rounding up the rest of the gang named by Fontana, the future don's mood didn't improve.
Magaddino paced the floor of his cell for hours before he learned that police had arrested his cousin, Bartolomeo DiGregorio, his uncle, Vito Bonaventure, and Manano Galante, along with Puma and Lombardi, the two who had helped Fontana dispose of Caizzo back in New Jersey. All were charged with suspicion of murder except DiGregorio, who had two pistols on him when he was picked up, in violation of New York's Sullivan Law.
The questioning began, and nobody was saying anything. As far as the cops were concerned, the Sicilians didn't speak any English. The only reaction the detectives got out of any of them was when Fontana was brought in to point the finger at Magaddino for his involvement in the Caizzo killing.
Magaddino charged up from his chair and fought viciously as the detectives tried to subdue him. He wanted to kill the squealer with his bare hands, and might have, but repeated blackjack blows to the back of his skull pounded him to the floor and submission. In the mug shot taken of him later that same day, his fedora can't completely cover the bandages wrapped around the top of his head.
Before the night was over, Fiaschetti called in an enterprising reporter from The New York Times and told him an electrifying tale. According to Fontana's confession, the Good Killers were responsible for no fewer than 16 homicides, including five in New York City, one each in New Jersey and Buffalo, and no fewer than nine in Detroit.
The August 17 paper had hardly hit the streets when Fiaschetti called another press conference, this time adding four more victims, and hinting at the possibility of many more.
"The Detroit police have been informed by a Sicilian, whose name they withheld, that farmland on the northern outskirts of Detroit had been used as a burial ground in Sicilian feuds for several years. According to Detroit police records, at least 70 Sicilians have disappeared after Italian shooting affrays, but it was generally thought they had left town," the Times noted.
The number kept going up. Soon the headline read, "125 MURDERS NOW CHARGED TO BAND."
According to Fiaschetti, the Good Killers had been formed in 1907 following the murder of a Bonaventure clan chieftain whose dismembered body had been stuffed into a bag and left on a Williamsburg street corner. It was said that the man's body had been taken inside the Bonaventure Bakery on Roebling Street and placed piece by piece into the hot coal fire of a brick oven as his comrades gathered around.
This was the beginning of the "We will burn you" motto, and the origin of the stool pigeon Fontana's fear that the Good Killers would "put me in the oven" should they ever catch up with him.
Fontana begged to be moved out of the Tombs and transferred to another jail, so he wouldn't have to listen to the threats made by the six men he'd fingered.
The Times reported that Fontana had been visited by "several well-dressed Italian women" while awaiting his court arraignment, and further details of Magaddino and the Good Killers mob were doled out by Capt. Fiaschetti.
According to the Italian Squad chief, the gang was controlled by a mysterious figure based in Buffalo, a man known as "the chief," who reputedly had a $200,000 war chest used to hire defense attorneys and provide bail money for the Good Killers assassins.
Indeed, Magaddino, DiGregorio and the other accused men were freed on bond just a few days after their arrests. The charges were dropped for lack of evidence shortly afterward, and the squealer Fontana was the only one ever prosecuted for Caizzo's murder.
But the trouble was far from over. Sensing a weakness in the Bonaventure-Magaddino mob, the remaining members of the Buccellato clan decided to make their move. Magaddino and another Good Killers kingpin, Gaspar Milazzo, were nearly killed as they exited a Roebling Street candy store by shots fired from a speeding automobile.
Unfortunately, two innocent bystanders weren't so lucky, and Magaddino was again questioned by police.
The pair decided that New York was getting a little hot for their tastes, and they left the city, Milazzo to Detroit and Magaddino to Buffalo, where be became feared enforcer to the aging don "Old Joe" DiCarlo, who had been in power since the days of the Italian Black Hand.
Buffalo's last Polish mob, a brash outfit led by John "Big Korney" Kwatowski, fell in numbers to Magaddino's killers and police arrest. Soon a second war broke out between the Buffalo mob and the Hamilton, Ont., Sicilian gang run by "Canada's Al Capone" Rocco Perri, and Magaddino was again in the thick of it.
His fierce reputation for quick and brutal action made him such a feared individual that, when DiCarlo died suddenly of natural causes in 1922, his underboss, Angelo "Buffalo Bill" Palmeri, agreed to be passed over to allow Magaddino to take control of the Buffalo family.
Nearly 40 years later, in 1961, Magaddino was questioned but never charged with the murder of heroin dealer and suspected police informant Albert Agueci, whose mutilated body was found on a farm outside of Rochester.
Agueci's jaw had been shattered and half his teeth knocked out of his skull. An estimated 30 pounds of flesh had been carved from his bones before the killers strangled him with a length of clothesline. The body was then soaked with gasoline and set on fire.
"Li bruceremo!"
"We will burn you!"
Yawn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sounds like you are related to the mob in some way because this is nothing to yawn at.
Yawn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Originally Posted by Bringthetruth
What have you got against Italians? Sei un razzista o qualcosa?
"Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."
--Stephen King
I have nothing against Italians, I have a problem with them holding back the city from progressing. UNION 91 TO THESE FAKE AND CROOKED MAYORS.
Don't you think you're generalizing? I agree with you about the corruption, but I think you're barking up the wrong tree. Yeah, Anello was crooked. But if he's going to hell for that, there will be a long line ahead of him. Take a look at New York's Govenor. Start there. Imagine what your tax dollars were spent on there?
"Talent in cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work."
--Stephen King
Take note, Tree Ghost "claims" to be Italian!
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