On this day in 1936, Vito Genovese became a naturalized United States citizen in New York City. However less than a year later he fled to Italy with $750,000 cash and settled in the city of Nola, near Naples. With Genovese’s departure, Frank Costello became the new Luciano family acting boss.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1945 that Genovese would step-foot on US soil again.

On this day in 1936, Vito Genovese became a naturalised United States citizen in New York City, a milestone that carried a bitter irony — within months, the man who craved legitimacy on paper would be fleeing the country entirely, leaving behind a power vacuum that would reshape the American underworld for years to come.

Genovese had already established himself as one of the most feared and calculating figures in organised crime by the time he received his citizenship papers. Born in Risigliano, near Naples, Italy, in 1897, he had arrived in America as a teenager and quickly gravitated toward the criminal networks of Lower Manhattan. He rose through the ranks alongside Charles "Lucky" Luciano, becoming one of his most trusted lieutenants and a key player in the murderous purge of old-world Mafia bosses during the Castellammarese War of the early 1930s. When Luciano restructured the New York underworld and helped establish the Five Families, Genovese was rewarded handsomely, serving as underboss of what would become known as the Luciano crime family.

Yet his citizenship was barely worth the ink it was printed on. By early 1937, Genovese found himself in serious legal jeopardy, wanted for questioning in connection with the 1934 murder of Ferdinand Boccia, a small-time gambler who had made the fatal mistake of demanding a larger cut of a card game swindle. Rather than face justice, Genovese gathered an estimated $750,000 in cash and slipped out of the country, settling in Nola, a town near his Neapolitan roots. It was a calculated retreat, not a defeat — Genovese was nothing if not a survivor.

With Genovese gone, Frank Costello stepped into the role of acting boss of the Luciano family, a position he would hold with remarkable political savvy and relative restraint for years. Costello preferred corruption and diplomacy to violence, a stark contrast to Genovese's more ruthless temperament. Meanwhile, Luciano himself had been imprisoned in 1936, leaving the family leadership in a state of carefully managed transition.

Genovese would not return to American soil until the summer of 1945, having spent his years in Italy cultivating relationships with Fascist officials — and later with the Allied forces after Mussolini's fall. His eventual return set the stage for one of the most turbulent and treacherous chapters in Mafia history, culminating in his seizure of control over the family that would forever bear his name.