Overview

On the afternoon of April 15, 1931, Joe Masseria sat down to lunch at a Coney Island restaurant with Lucky Luciano. He ate well. He played cards. When Luciano excused himself to use the bathroom, gunmen walked in. By the time Luciano returned, the most powerful organized crime boss in America was dead - killed by the man he trusted most, on behalf of a generation that had decided the old order had to end. For nearly two decades, Giuseppe Masseria - Joe the Boss - had ruled the New York underworld with the iron logic of the Old World he had carried from Sicily. His tribute demands were absolute. His supremacy was personal. His management model, rooted in the specific organizational culture of western Sicily's Mafia, had built an empire. It had also generated the specific resentments that the Castellammarese War - the bloodiest internal conflict in the history of the American Cosa Nostra - would eventually express. Masseria's death was not simply a murder. It was an institutional event: the violent end of the immigrant Sicilian crime boss and the specific organizational world he represented, and the opening act of the national crime syndicate that Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and their generation built from its ruins. Joe Masseria, The Last Mustache Pete is the definitive narrative account of the man, the war, and the organizational transition that remade American organized crime - gripping, rigorously sourced, and unflinching in its examination of what the old order was, and what its passing cost.

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