Free Boardwalk Gangster by Tim Newark Page A

don’t like it.”
    In the wake of Luciano’s 1929 testimony at Richmond County Court, this last statement is unconvincing—as he volunteered the name “Charles Lucky”—but the rest of the story seems the best account there is of the incident. The beating was nothing to do with the Castellammarese at all, but the encounter did leave Luciano with the scars that made him look like a gangster.
    It also brought him into the public eye—and that was a big mistake as far he was concerned. As soon as he entered the public arena, he became an irritant to the authorities and that meant they’d never give up on him until he was behind bars.
    Curiously, it may have been Luciano’s own fault that he was grabbed by the police searching for Diamond. Just seven months before the ride, he was in Ardonia on Good Friday enjoying some hunting with friends. They were shooting pheasants, but it was closed season for the birds and he was in violation of the local conservation laws. When state game protector Ed Nolan came to arrest Luciano at his upstate home, he was accompanied by the state trooper in charge of the district, who noted that Jack Diamond was staying at the house with Luciano.
    That Diamond regularly stayed with him in the country was indicated by a story later told by Luciano in which Diamond tested out a machine gun on one his prized fig trees, shooting it to pieces. Luciano was furious with the trigger-happy mobster and
told him to practice shooting at the brick wall behind the house. That the police would come calling on Luciano while hunting down the murderer Diamond was not exactly surprising.
    Luciano, incidentally, was fined $50 on March 31, 1929, for shooting a pheasant out of season—the only killing he was ever successfully prosecuted for.

5
    WAR OF THE SICILIAN BOSSES
    T he Castellammarese War began at a low level with rival Sicilian gangsters hijacking each other’s convoys of illicit booze. Castellammarese gunmen shot it out with Joe “the Boss” Masseria’s soldiers. “We carried pistols, shotguns, machine guns and enough ammunition to fight the Battle of Bull Run all over again,” said Bonanno.
    Sicilian-born New York mafioso Nick Gentile blamed the war on “Joe the Boss.” “The actions of the administration of Masseria were imposed in dictatorial and exasperating commands which did not allow reply,” said Gentile in his typically elaborate Italian. “They used to govern through fear.”
    Masseria had links with Al Capone in Chicago and encouraged him to make a move against Joe Aiello, one of the leading Castellammaresi in that city. Elsewhere, Masseria tried to split away Detroit gang leader Gaspare Milazzo, another key Castellammarese figure. The plan was to drain Maranzano of his network of support throughout the United States and isolate him
so Masseria could finish him off on the streets of New York. In May 1930, this culminated in Milazzo being shot dead in a Detroit fish market. In response, Maranzano called a war council of his followers in Brooklyn.
    “It’s a dirty spot on the honor of Castellammare,” he told the assembled mobsters. “It was as if he were sounding our battle cry,” said Bonanno. Maranzano dominated the meeting and even though other senior members of the crime family wanted to quiet down the affair so they could carry on with their business, the well-groomed Sicilian took them to war against Masseria in New York. Even Stefano Magaddino in Buffalo, the elder statesman of the clan, granted him permission to become their warlord.
    Maranzano had two Cadillacs fitted with armor plating and bulletproof windows and these formed the core of his convoy as he patrolled his fiefdom. “Maranzano would sit in the back seat of his car with a machine gun mounted on a swivel between his legs,” said Bonanno. “He also packed a Luger and a Colt, as well as his omnipresent dagger behind his back.”
    On August 15, 1930, Maranzano struck back at the very top of Masseria’s