On this day in 1885 another old school mobster was born, Ignacio Antinori. Antinori would head the first crime family in the Tampa area of Florida, becoming one of the largest drug traffickers in the country. The family is now better known as the Trafficante Family.

He died at the age of 55 when 2 shotgun blasts took the back of his head clean off.

A message sent from the Chicago Outfit for poor quality narcotics.

On this day, February 17, in 1885, Ignacio Antinori was born in Sicily, destined to become one of the most powerful and feared underworld figures in the American South. Arriving in the United States as part of the great wave of Sicilian immigration, Antinori would eventually plant his roots in Tampa, Florida, where he built a criminal empire that laid the very foundations for what would later become one of America's most notorious mob dynasties.

Antinori rose to prominence during the Prohibition era, establishing himself as the undisputed boss of Tampa's criminal underworld. He headed what is widely regarded as the first organised crime family in the Tampa Bay area, running bootlegging operations, gambling rackets, and bolita — a Cuban numbers game that was enormously popular throughout Florida and proved extraordinarily lucrative for the mob. His reach and influence extended far beyond the Sunshine State, and he maintained crucial connections with major underworld figures of the era, operating within the broader network of Italian-American organised crime that figures such as Lucky Luciano were busy consolidating across the country throughout the 1930s.

Where Antinori truly distinguished himself on a national scale was through narcotics trafficking. At a time when drug smuggling was beginning to generate staggering profits for the American mob, Antinori became one of the largest heroin and drug traffickers in the entire country, with supply lines that stretched from Tampa to major trafficking networks operating across multiple states. His operation was sophisticated, ambitious, and extraordinarily dangerous — both for his rivals and, ultimately, for himself.

It was this narcotics trade that would seal his fate. On October 23, 1940, Antinori was sitting in a Tampa café when two shotgun blasts tore through him, the shots so devastating they nearly took the back of his head clean off. He was 55 years old. The killing was widely attributed to the Chicago Outfit, with the prevailing belief being that Antinori had supplied poor quality narcotics to the wrong people — a fatal mistake in a world where such transgressions carried the ultimate price.

His legacy, however, proved far greater than his violent end might suggest. The crime family he built in Tampa was eventually taken over and expanded by Santo Trafficante Sr., and later his son Santo Trafficante Jr., who became one of the most powerful mob bosses in America. Antinori was, in every meaningful sense, the man who started it all.