Free Boardwalk Gangster by Tim Newark Page B

organization. Peter “the Clutch” Morello was so called because of his maimed right hand, on which only the little finger remained. Born in Corleone, his brothers had grown rich out of muscling in on legitimate immigrant businesses. His half brother Ciro was known as the “Artichoke King,” because of his domination of the vegetable racket, and Peter controlled the Bronx building racket. With his droopy mustache, he was a classic old-style Sicilian, dubbed a “Mustache Pete,” and had become a valued adviser to Joe the Boss. At 3:50 P.M. on the fifteenth, the sixty-year-old Morello was sitting in a sparsely decorated office on the second floor above the Sassone Realty Company on East 116th Street. Across a table from him was twenty-six-year-old Joseph Perrano, who was looking forward to going back to Italy the next day, and a third associate called Gaspar Pollaro.

    There was a loud rap on the office door, and Morello opened it a crack to see who it was. Two men armed with pistols pushed their way into the room. They aimed point-blank at the Clutch and nailed him with five bullets, one through the forehead. The other two men sat motionless before they realized the gunmen could not leave any witnesses and the gunmen turned on them. Two shots hit Perrano as he jumped through the second-floor window, crashing to his death on the sidewalk below. Pollaro was shot once and seriously wounded.
    Twenty minutes later, farther along the same street in a building housing the Harlem Casino, there was another hit. Benjamin Prince, a gambler and narcotics dealer, was just about to enter a Hungarian restaurant when he was called to the telephone in the barbershop on the floor below. As he turned around, an assassin hidden in the corridor washroom stepped out and executed him with a shot to the forehead. It looked like a day for clearing up unfinished business.
    As a crowd gathered outside the Morello headquarters, the police asked for witnesses, and a little boy handed them a black book he had picked up off the street. The book contained more than fifty names with large sums of money written next to each one. It seem likely that one of the two assassins had taken it from Morello but dropped it as he ran to the getaway car waiting for them.
    The Morello killing was a very high-profile blow against Joe the Boss, and several rival mobsters later claimed responsibility for it. Bonanno says Maranzano was behind it, while the government informer Joseph Valachi, a minor Maranzano gang member at the time, says it was a fresh-faced gunman hired from Chicago known only as Buster. Buster had supposedly told Valachi the detail that Morello just wouldn’t go down when he shot him and he had to chase him around the office with four more shots before he finished the job. It has since been suggested that Valachi made up the killer “Buster from Chicago” to cover his own role in murders ascribed to him, although other sources
have identified Buster as the professional killer Sebastiano Domingo.
    In The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, it is claimed that Luciano ordered the killing of Morello and it was his gunmen, Albert Anastasia and Frank Scalise, who shot him. This contradicts Valachi’s testimony and doesn’t make sense. Why would Luciano bother doing this when the Castellammaresi were on a war footing anyway? In Mogul of the Mob, Lansky also claims it was Anastasia and Scalise, but this clashes with his own stated intention of letting the Sicilians shoot themselves to pieces without getting involved. Yet again, this casts doubt on certain aspects of Mogul of the Mob, first published in 1979, which tries too hard to accord with the Last Testament, which appeared four years earlier
    Regardless of who was behind it, Masseria was furious and blamed Maranzano. He put word through to Al Capone to shoot Joe Aiello, his major Castellammarese rival in Chicago. In October, Aiello was struck by fifty-nine slugs from two Thompson machine guns and a