Vito Genovese: The Mafia Boss Who Nearly Seized Control of America’s Mob

Vito Genovese: quick facts

Play the room where it happened · 1930s

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Mulberry Street

Vito Genovese came to New York in 1913, aged fifteen, and settled in Little Italy around Mulberry Street. He started as a thief and a runner for the lotteries and worked his way into the gang of Joe Masseria, where he met a young Sicilian named Lucky Luciano. The two became close friends, and Genovese stayed at Luciano’s side for the rest of Luciano’s American career.

The Castellammarese War

When Luciano decided to end the Castellammarese War by betraying his own boss, Genovese was part of the plan. On 15 April 1931 Joe Masseria was shot dead at a Coney Island restaurant, and Genovese is traditionally named among the gunmen. Months later Salvatore Maranzano was killed too, and Luciano became the most powerful mobster in New York, with Genovese as his underboss.

In 1932 Genovese married Anna Petillo Vernotico. Her husband had been found strangled on a Manhattan rooftop less than two weeks before the wedding.

Flight to Italy

In 1934 Genovese and others cheated a businessman out of a fortune in a rigged card game. The man who had set it up, Ferdinand “the Shadow” Boccia, wanted his cut. He was shot dead in a Brooklyn coffee shop. In 1936 Luciano went to prison, and in 1937, with the Boccia case closing in, Genovese took a large sum of cash and sailed for Naples.

In Italy he cultivated the Fascist regime, and he is widely suspected of arranging the 1943 murder in New York of Carlo Tresca, an anti-Fascist newspaper editor and critic of Mussolini. When the Allies took southern Italy, Genovese changed sides with remarkable speed and went to work as an interpreter for the US Army’s military government, while running one of the biggest black-market operations in the region. In 1944 an Army investigator named Orange Dickey worked out who he was and had him arrested for the Boccia murder.

A witness poisoned

Genovese was shipped back to New York in 1945 to stand trial. The key witness, a cigar store clerk named Peter LaTempa, was being held in protective custody. In January 1945 he took what he thought was medicine for his gallstones and died. The poison in his system was enough, the medical examiner said, to kill several horses. Without him the case collapsed, and Genovese was freed in 1946.

Waiting for Costello’s chair

He came home to find Frank Costello running Luciano’s family, with Luciano deported to Italy. Genovese believed the family should be his. Costello had the politicians, but Genovese had the street captains and the heroin trade, and through the 1950s he built support while Costello was weakened by the Kefauver hearings and his tax case. In 1952 Anna Genovese sued for separation and testified in open court about his rackets and his hidden money, an embarrassment no other boss had suffered.

1957: the year of the takeover

On 2 May 1957 Vincent “Chin” Gigante shot Costello in the head in the lobby of his apartment building. Costello survived but got the message and stepped down. On 25 October Costello’s ally Albert Anastasia was murdered in a Manhattan barbershop, and Carlo Gambino, Genovese’s partner in the plot, took over Anastasia’s family.

Genovese wanted the new order blessed by the whole Mafia. On 14 November 1957, dozens of bosses gathered at Joseph Barbara’s house in Apalachin, New York. A state trooper had noticed the expensive cars, and police set up roadblocks. Men in suits fled through the woods, and around sixty were detained, Genovese among them. For the first time the newspapers and the FBI had to accept that a national Mafia existed.

Prison and Joe Valachi

In 1958 Genovese was indicted for narcotics conspiracy on the word of a dealer named Nelson Cantellops. He was convicted in April 1959 and sentenced to fifteen years. Mob lore has always claimed that Costello, Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Gambino helped set him up.

He ran the family from his cell through acting bosses. In Atlanta penitentiary he shared quarters with a soldier named Joe Valachi, whom he came to suspect of being an informer. In 1962, Valachi said, Genovese gave him the kiss of death. Terrified, Valachi killed a fellow inmate he mistook for an assassin, and then turned to the government. In 1963 he told a Senate committee, on television, about “Cosa Nostra” and named Genovese as one of its bosses. It was the most damaging testimony the Mafia had ever faced.

Death and legacy

Genovese died of a heart attack at the federal medical centre in Springfield, Missouri, on 14 February 1969, aged 71. The family that took his name went on to become the most disciplined and secretive in America, later led by the same Vincent Gigante who had shot Costello. The Apalachin raid he called remains the moment the American Mafia lost its secrecy.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the Genovese family named after Vito Genovese?

Because the name was fixed in the early 1960s, after Joe Valachi’s testimony, when Genovese was the recognised boss of the family Luciano had founded.

Why did Vito Genovese go to Italy?

To escape a murder charge over the 1934 killing of Ferdinand Boccia. He left in 1937 and was brought back by the US Army in 1945.

What happened at Apalachin?

Police raided a national Mafia meeting called by Genovese in November 1957, detaining around sixty men and exposing the organisation to the public.

How did Vito Genovese die?

Of a heart attack while serving a fifteen-year narcotics sentence, at the federal prison medical centre in Springfield, Missouri, in 1969.

Be at the table when the roadblocks go up: the Apalachin escape room on Five Families.