On this day in 1930 the first boss of the Lucchese family, Gaetano Reina was shot in the back of the head with a double-barrelled shotgun.

The man behind organizing the hit was Lucky Luciano, who was given orders to get rid of Reina by Joe Masseria after Reina switched sides in the Castellemmarese War that raged on between 1930 and 1931.

Reina was in fact one of the first victims of this war.

On this day, February 26, 1930, Gaetano Reina met a violent end on the streets of the Bronx, shot in the back of the head with a double-barrelled shotgun in what would prove to be one of the most consequential murders of the era. He was just 40 years old, and his death sent immediate shockwaves through the New York underworld, signalling that the bloody Castellammarese War had well and truly begun in earnest.

Reina was a significant figure in the Italian-American criminal landscape of the 1920s. Born in Sicily, he had established himself as the boss of what would eventually become known as the Lucchese crime family, one of New York's future Five Families. He built his power base largely through control of the ice distribution rackets across the Bronx and East Harlem, a mundane but enormously profitable enterprise that gave him both wealth and influence at a time when Prohibition was reshaping organised crime across America.

The killing was rooted in the bitter power struggle between two rival factions vying for supremacy over the New York underworld. On one side stood Joe "The Boss" Masseria, and on the other, Salvatore Maranzano, whose supporters drew heavily from those with roots in Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily. Reina had initially been aligned with Masseria but, growing disillusioned with his boss's increasingly greedy and overbearing demands, he quietly began tilting his loyalties towards the Maranzano camp. When Masseria learned of this betrayal, he ordered Reina's elimination without hesitation.

The man tasked with organising the murder was none other than Lucky Luciano, then one of Masseria's most trusted lieutenants. Luciano, ever the calculating operator, arranged the ambush with ruthless efficiency. The irony was not lost on history — within little more than a year, Luciano himself would orchestrate Masseria's own murder, bringing the Castellammarese War to its bloody conclusion and reshaping American organised crime entirely.

Following Reina's death, Masseria installed his own loyalist, Joseph Pinzolo, as the new boss of the family, a move that deeply angered Reina's former lieutenants and only served to further destabilise the fragile alliances holding the New York mob together. Gaetano Reina's assassination stands as a stark reminder of how swiftly loyalty could become a death sentence in the world of organised crime, and his murder remains one of the pivotal early moments that set the stage for the modern American Mafia.