On this day in 1957 the founder of the New England Crime Family, Gaspare Messina died of natural causes at the age of 77. He founded what is now known as the Patriarca Crime Family, back in 1916, but the family under Messina was as no where near as powerful as the Partriarca’s are today. He retired as mob boss in 1924 at the age of 45 and spent his final years in Somerville.

On this day in 1957, Gaspare Messina, the founding boss of what would eventually become one of New England's most formidable criminal organisations, passed away from natural causes in Somerville, Massachusetts, at the age of 77. Though his name may not carry the same weight as some of the era's more celebrated mob figures, Messina's place in American organised crime history is firmly secured as the architect of a criminal enterprise that would outlast him by decades.

Born in Sicily in 1880, Messina arrived in America carrying with him the traditions and structures of the Sicilian Mafia, and it was these roots that informed his approach to building a criminal organisation in New England. In 1916, he established what would grow into the New England Crime Family, laying the groundwork for an outfit that controlled rackets across Boston, Providence, and the surrounding region. His was a relatively modest operation compared to the sprawling empires being constructed around the same time by figures such as Lucky Luciano in New York or the emerging power of Al Capone in Chicago, but Messina provided something equally important — stability and structure in a territory that had previously lacked cohesive mob leadership.

Messina led the family through some of the most turbulent years in American criminal history, including the early years of Prohibition, which transformed organised crime from a collection of street-level rackets into a multi-million dollar enterprise. Yet despite the enormous opportunities that the bootlegging era presented, Messina was not a boss defined by ambition or aggression. He was a quiet administrator of crime rather than a headline-grabbing gangster, and it was perhaps this temperament that allowed him to retire peacefully in 1924 at just 45 years of age — an almost unheard-of luxury in the mob world. Few bosses of his era walked away from the life voluntarily, and fewer still managed to do so with their lives and liberty intact.

Following his retirement, Messina spent his remaining years in Somerville, living out a quiet existence far removed from the violence and intrigue of the underworld he had helped shape. Leadership of the family passed through several hands before eventually landing with Raymond Patriarca in the 1950s, under whom the organisation would reach its fearsome peak of power and notoriety, ultimately taking Patriarca's name as its own.

Gaspare Messina may have been a reluctant legend, but without his foundational work in 1916, there would have been no empire for Patriarca to inherit — and that, in the history of American organised crime, is a legacy that cannot be overlooked.