On This Day in 1931 Salvatore Maranzano was Killed Aged 45

On this day in 1931 Lucky Luciano’s hitman entered Maranzano’s office building on the 9th floor of The Helmsley Building, posing as tax men to raid the building. Maranzano’s guards were disarmed, and fled the scene (including Mad Dog Coll who was about to sit in a meeting with Maranzano).

The hitmen, said to consist of Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia, Joe Adonis, and Samuel Levine stormed Maranzano’s office.

They first grabbed Maranzano and then pinned him to the wall where they proceeded to stab him 4 times in the chest, stomach and face (slicing his mouth) and then strangling him.

They finally finished off the Boss of Bosses by firing off 6 shots at him from close range. This day would mark the end of the old era and the beginning of a new era of Cosa Nostra.

On this day, September 10, 1931, one of the most significant assassinations in American organised crime history took place when Salvatore Maranzano, the self-proclaimed Boss of All Bosses, was murdered in his Manhattan office, effectively bringing the curtain down on the old-world Sicilian model of organised crime and ushering in the ruthless, modernised era of the American Mafia.

Maranzano had only recently emerged victorious from the bloody Castellammarese War, a brutal power struggle fought between 1930 and 1931 against rival boss Joe Masseria. With Masseria eliminated in April of that year — also at the behest of Lucky Luciano — Maranzano had crowned himself the supreme ruler of the Italian-American underworld, reorganising the New York gangs into what would eventually become the five families we know today. However, his reign at the top was destined to be short-lived. Maranzano had already drawn up a list of men he wanted killed, with Luciano and his associates firmly at the top, but Luciano struck first.

On that September afternoon, a team of hitmen entered the Park Avenue offices of Maranzano, located on the ninth floor of what is now known as The Helmsley Building, disguised as Internal Revenue Service agents conducting a tax raid. Maranzano's guards were swiftly disarmed and cleared from the scene, among them the notorious Irish gunman Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll, who had ironically been summoned there that very day for a meeting. With the office secured, the assassins moved in. The team, said to include Vito Genovese, Albert Anastasia, Joe Adonis, and Samuel "Red" Levine, set upon Maranzano with a ferocity that left little doubt about the message being sent. He was pinned against the wall and stabbed four times — in the chest, stomach, and face, with his mouth grotesquely sliced in the process. As if the stabbing alone were not enough, the killers then strangled him before finally firing six shots into his body at close range. Maranzano was 45 years old.

The murder of Salvatore Maranzano marked the definitive end of the Mustache Pete era, the old-guard Sicilian bosses who clung to tradition and viewed their American-born counterparts with suspicion. In the power vacuum that followed, Lucky Luciano wasted no time in establishing the National Crime Syndicate, a cooperative body of organised crime families that would shape American gangland for decades to come. Maranzano's death remains one of the most pivotal moments in Mafia history, a cold-blooded coup that transformed the underworld forever.