They Gonna Call You 'Joe The King' | Boardwalk Empire
Channel: RELTO
Date: 2022-12-04

Giuseppe Masseria was born on January 17, 1886 in Menfi, Province of Agrigento, Sicily, in a family of tailors. When he was young, he moved to the town of Marsala, in the Province of Trapani. Masseria arrived in the United States in 1902.He then became part of the Morello crime family based in Harlem and parts of Little Italy in southern Manhattan. Masseria was a contemporary of other captains of that mafia family such as Gaetano Reina. In 1909, Masseria was convicted of burglary and received a suspended sentence.On May 23, 1913, Masseria was sentenced to four to six years in prison for third-degree burglary.

As the 1910s ended, Masseria and boss Salvatore D'Aquila vied for power in New York. By the early 1920s, they were at war with each other. In 1920, Masseria had recruited Lucky Luciano as one of his gunmen.D'Aquila also had a gunman working for him, Umberto Valenti, and ordered him to kill Masseria. On May 7, 1922, the boss of the Morello/Terranova crime family, Vincenzo Terranova, was killed in a drive-by shooting near his E. 116th Street home. Valenti was believed to have been personally responsible. Hours later, Terranova's underboss Silva Tagliagamba was fatally wounded in Lower Manhattan by Valenti and gunmen working for him. The next day, Valenti and some of his men attacked the new boss of the rival Terranova family, Masseria. Valenti found Masseria and his bodyguards on Grand Street "within a block of Police Headquarters". Masseria got away, but the gunmen had shot four men and two women; Masseria tossed his pistol away and was arrested while fleeing the scene.

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