Gangs of St. Louis, The: Men of Respect

Prologue

Dies Irae

DAY OF WRATH

Wednesday, September 17, 1980, was just another day in the steeplechase of life for most residents of St. Louis, Missouri. The hottest summer in recent memory was ending, and the weather was refreshingly fair and cool this Wednesday. That day saw Jimmy Carter squaring off against Ronald Reagan in the presidential race. In Gdansk, Poland, Lech Wałâsa and his strikers inaugurated a new trade union, Solidarity. Former Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza Debayle was assassinated in Asunción, Paraguay. The St. Louis Cardinals were up at Chicago’s Wrigley Field defeating the Cubs in a lightly attended day game. Disco was dying a gruesome death and rock ‘n’ roll was king, as sales for AC/DC’s recently released Back in Black album showed. Movies like The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack and The Empire Strikes Back ruled at the box office, while kids everywhere pestered their parents for an Atari 2600 video game system.

About noon on that unremarkable Wednesday, seventy-four-year-old James Anthony Michaels Sr. guided his black 1979 Chrysler Cordoba toward St. Raymond’s Maronite Catholic Church hall, located at 1020 South Tenth Street in St. Louis. Jimmy, as he was called, had come to the church for lunch, as he did most Wednesdays. Joining him would be his grandson, James A. Michaels III, aka Beans. Jimmy exuded an air of success and nobility as he stepped from his Chrysler and walked to the church hall’s door. With his flowing white hair and mustache, Michaels looked like an aristocratic retiree, which indeed he was. Jimmy Michaels was one of the most respected men in St. Louis’s Lebanese-Syrian community and one of its most feared as well.

For decades, Michaels had been head of the Syrian faction of the St. Louis underworld. Jimmy had gotten his start as a ferocious gunman with the old Cuckoo Gang back during Prohibition. Although nicknamed Horseshoe Jimmy for his knack for escaping trouble, Michaels eventually served a total of thirteen years in the Southern Illinois State Penitentiary for armed robbery. Over the years, Jimmy acquired great wealth from his businesses and had a good working relationship with the Sicilian mob, led by his friend Anthony Tony G Giordano.

By 1980, all of the aggression of Michaels’s younger years was in the past; Jimmy’s existence was no more violent than that of your average senior citizen. His neighbors in suburban Mehlville knew him as a quiet yet pleasant man who loved playing golf and could occasionally be seen puttering around his yard. In a sense, Michaels was the last survivor of an era long gone, that of the Prohibition-era mobster. In years past, St. Louis had seen celebrity gangsters like William Dint Colbeck, Edward Jelly Roll Hogan, Vito Giannola, Charlie Fresina, Herman Tipton, Fred Killer Burke, Carl Shelton and Buster Wortman. Jimmy Michaels had known them all. Out of those men, Jimmy was the only one still alive.

Michaels’s life had not been without personal tragedy, as his wife, Dorothy, died of an overdose of sleeping pills in 1967. Eleven years later, in July 1978, Jimmy’s son, James Jr., succumbed to leukemia at the age of fifty-one. Lately, Jimmy had been having health problems of his own. Nevertheless, Michaels was in good spirits as he entered the church to partake of its excellent Lebanese cuisine and socialize with friends, businessmen, politicians and the otherwise curious.

Just after Jimmy entered the church, a Dodge van with tinted windows pulled into the parking lot and backed into a space across from Michaels’s Chrysler. The four men inside the van had not come for lunch or to mingle with the masses. They had come to kill Jimmy Michaels.

The architect of the plot against Jimmy Michaels was Paul John Leisure. Thirty-six years old, Paulie was a longtime member of St. Louis’s Syrian crime family. Paulie, his brother Anthony and their cousin David had for years been trying to make a name for themselves in the underworld, only to find their way continually blocked by Michaels.

The Leisures’ beef against Jimmy dated back to 1964, when Richard Leisure (older brother of David and cousin of Paul and Anthony) was killed in an East St. Louis tavern. It was said that Michaels intimidated witnesses in order for Richard’s killers to escape justice. Jimmy, along with Mafia boss Tony Giordano, controlled the Local 110 of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. The Leisures coveted a position in this union, but as long as Michaels and the Sicilian mob (which the Leisures hated) stood in their way, there was nothing doing.

Paul Leisure made his first move in late 1979 when union official John Paul Spica was killed by a car bomb. Spica was backed by mob boss Tony Giordano, who was furious at his murder. The actual bomber had been an East Side gangster named Ray Flynn, who had secretly formed an alliance with the Leisures. By the summer of 1980, Giordano had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. In the past, Paulie Leisure had demurred from killing Jimmy Michaels in fear of attracting the wrath of the Mafia. With Giordano’s impending death, Paulie felt comfortable enough to move against his nemesis. With Jimmy dead, Paulie would take over the Syrian faction, as well as the Local 110. Additionally, both Leisure and Michaels owned hidden shares of the Aladdin Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. If Jimmy died, Paulie would inherit a percentage of his shares.

The Leisures staked out Jimmy for weeks. Three aborted attempts to ambush Michaels in a diner where he breakfasted failed, as did a nighttime raid on his Mehlville house. Finally, the Leisures decided that a bomb would get the job done. Anthony Leisure procured ten sticks of dynamite, and Fred Prater constructed the device, which would be carried in an attaché case. The Leisures stole a Chrysler Cordoba identical to the one Jimmy drove so that David Leisure could practice sliding underneath the car and attaching the bomb under the driver’s seat. Anthony timed him repeatedly until David was able do it in less than a minute. Anthony Giordano died on August 29, 1980, and three weeks later, the Leisures pulled into the parking lot of St. Raymond’s.

No one seemed to notice the Dodge van that brooded in the parking lot of St. Raymond’s that Wednesday afternoon. A recent addition to the Leisure crew, John Ramo, sat in the driver’s seat. Next to him was Anthony Leisure, who held the model airplane remote control that would be used to detonate the bomb. In the back with David Leisure was Ronald Broderick, a mountain of a man who served as the Leisures’ main muscle. The four men listened to the two-way radio in the van.

Two blocks away, another hoodlum named Charles Loewe sat behind the wheel of a tow truck belonging to LN&P Towing and Salvage, a wrecking company owned by the family. Loewe was carefully monitoring his own radio, as his task was to transmit the all-clear signal to the men inside the van. Inside LN&P’s main office at 2130 Chouteau Avenue, Paulie Leisure was hunched over a police scanner, ready to notify Loewe if anything was amiss.

After getting the all-clear signal, David hopped out of the van and strode purposefully toward Michaels’s Chrysler, attaché case in hand. After making sure that no one was watching, Leisure deftly slid underneath the Cordoba and attached the bomb below the driver’s seat using two rubber straps with hooks. The entire operation took less than sixty seconds.

Oblivious to what awaited him, Jimmy Michaels spent a pleasant afternoon inside the church hall with his grandson, Beans, and other acquaintances. A little after three o’clock, Jimmy and Beans walked out to the parking lot and talked briefly next to Jimmy’s Chrysler. Neither man noticed the Dodge van nearby. David piped up from the backseat, Let’s hit ’em now. We can kill them both. Anthony said that they couldn’t. There was bound to be plenty of heat from killing Michaels, but doing it at the church would double or triple that heat.

Jimmy left the parking lot and headed down Tucker Boulevard toward the southbound Interstate 55 on ramp. Ramo followed a few car lengths behind while Anthony activated the remote control and pressed the button. Much to their shock, nothing happened. Leisure hammered the button yet again, but there was no explosion. The Leisures had no choice but to follow and look for their chance.

Traffic was getting heavy on I-55 as the rush-hour exodus to the South St. Louis County suburbs began. Michaels motored along at about fifty-five miles per hour, heading for his house at 3718 Lan Drive in Mehlville. By 3:30 p.m., Jimmy had driven out of St. Louis proper and was just north of the Reavis Barracks Road exit, where he intended to turn off the freeway in order to proceed to his nearby home.

As Jimmy drove underneath a pedestrian overpass, he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw the Dodge van for the first time. Whatever thoughts Michaels had just then were scrambled by a loud noise and a tremendous thud. As the world bloomed in orange, Jimmy had the sensation of flying through the air, after which his senses shut down and he passed on to what awaits us all someday.

The explosion had shattered the Chrysler Cordoba and punctured it in over a dozen places, sending orange flames and black smoke skyward. Jimmy Michaels was blown in half by the blast, which scattered pieces of his body all over the highway. John Ramo had to swerve the van in order to avoid hitting Jimmy’s torso. Other cars around them jammed on their brakes and tried to miss the debris on the freeway. The Cordoba veered to the right and came to rest at the bottom of a nearby ditch. Witnesses were too shocked by what they had just seen to notice the Dodge van, which continued on unmolested. Ramo turned east onto Interstate 255 and crossed into Illinois, where the Leisures meticulously scrubbed the van clean and slathered themselves with shaving lotion to kill the heavy stench of dynamite that clung to them.

A three-mile stretch of the interstate was closed off while investigators combed the area for clues. Pieces of both the Chrysler and Michaels himself were spread all over the freeway. Most law enforcement officials were divided on whether Michaels had still been active in the St. Louis underworld. What they didn’t know at the time was that Jimmy’s murder was the opening volley in a gang war unlike any other St. Louis had seen. Jimmy Michaels’s demise was the latest incident in an underworld that stretched back nearly one hundred years and had its roots in a number of colorful Prohibition-era gangs.¹

1.

Ab Initio

IN THE BEGINNING

Seen from outer space, the island of Sicily looks vaguely like a rough arrowhead that’s about to be punted across the Mediterranean Sea by the boot of Italy. With its rolling meadows, white beaches and craggy hills (which include the largest active volcano in Europe), Sicily is a beautiful yet unforgiving land. It has also been of great strategic significance throughout history due to its position in the Mediterranean. Dating back to Ancient Greece, waves of successively more powerful civilizations had conquered the island. The Sicilian language, with words derived from Greek, Latin, French, Spanish and Arabic, is a testament to the impact of those invaders. Even after the Italian city-states unified in 1860, the northern-based government stationed half of its army there.

As a result, most Sicilian citizens viewed this not so much as unification but as a conquest of the south by the north. Sicilian residents had a strong regional identity and sense of community but almost nothing in common with those of the more prosperous northern regions like Liguria and Tuscany. Rome might as well have been on the moon as far as they were concerned. Most had never left the immediate area in which they were born and had known little else but hardship and oppression. Thus, many Sicilians nursed a mistrust of foreigners and any kind of central authority.²

Sicily’s long, hot summers and frequent droughts made agriculture a harsh business. By the late nineteenth century, the majority of its citizens were rural peasants eking out a meager living. Many of them raised sheep and/or cattle, while others grew citrus fruits or wheat. Some fished the surrounding seas, while still others toiled in the sulfur mines of the south-central portion of the island. For many families, the promise of a better life in America was a tantalizing possibility. Not long after the city-state unification, droves of emigrants from Sicily and southern Italy began traveling across the ocean to the United States.

Sicilian immigrants in St. Louis originally settled in a neighborhood just north of downtown, sprinkled amongst the many other nationalities there. In the nineteenth century, they were subjected to the same bigotry that Irish and blacks suffered, living segregated from the rest of the population, working menial service jobs and suffering high poverty and disease rates.

St. Louis’s downtown Italian colony, aka Little Italy, was bounded by Washington Avenue on the south, Cass Avenue on the north, the Mississippi River on the east and Fourteenth Street on the west. The main drag was Biddle Street. The numerous markets on North Third Street led to that avenue being nicknamed Commission Row. A second Italian neighborhood was growing on the large hill in southwestern St. Louis that served as the highest geographic point in the city. Bound by Hampton Avenue, Arsenal Street, Kingshighway Avenue and Manchester Avenue, the neighborhood was known by residents simply as the Hill. Non-Italians derisively referred to it as Dago Hill. Residents of the Hill were about evenly split between Sicilians and Lombardians, who hailed from the northern Italian region of the same name.

The newcomers immediately began trying to make the best for themselves in their new country. Many went to work in the clay mines surrounding Fairmount City, Illinois. Others worked hauling trash or as vendors. The downtown produce markets provided income for many of them. Others became barbers, restaurateurs, bakers, grocers, et cetera.

There was a very small minority in the Italian community who had no desire to work but to take from those who did. Often a wealthy businessman or merchant would receive a cryptic letter demanding that a specific amount of money be paid soon or else great harm would be inflicted on him. The letters were usually written in red ink and decorated with crude symbols, daggers and skulls. Occasionally the letters would be signed "a Manu Neura, or the Black Hand. Sometimes these letters were written by neighbors or business rivals who were jealous of others’ success. These Black Hand" letters, however, were also used by some members of a sinister secret society that had its origins on the island of Sicily.

The exact date or circumstances of the inception of what we today call the Mafia are unknown, lost under the weight of time. Some say that it was a secret society formed by peasants to combat the various groups of invaders. The logic behind this was that family was the only thing worthy of trust and loyalty. These men protected the citizens and meted out their own code of law enforcement and justice. Other scholars believe that the original Mafiosi were small bands of outlaws put to use in the various Sicilian revolutions of the mid-nineteenth century, after which they transformed into a criminal organization, terrorizing wealthy landowners and renting themselves out as hired killers. They became as brutal and treacherous as their original oppressors. By the means of their shared traits, all of the independent bands were organized in a common brotherhood.

The word Mafia, which came into use in the mid-nineteenth century, was a corruption of the Sicilian adjective mafiusu, an ambiguous term that roughly described someone as an arrogant bully, but one that was fearless, proud and enterprising. The individuals who possessed these qualities were uomini di rispettu (men of respect). New members were sworn in with a blood oath and a pledge to never speak of their activities. The organization came before everything, even family. Breaking the code of silence, omertà, was punishable by death. Once a man joined, he never left the organization while still alive. Each soldier belonged to a cosca, a Sicilian term for artichoke (a multilayered vegetable surrounding a core), which signified a clan. In America, the term family was most often used to address these clans.

Ironically, these men rarely referred to themselves as the Mafia. Most used the terms cosa nostra (our thing) and/or l’onorata società (the honored society) when speaking of the organization. Ultimately, members knew that what they belonged to needed no name.

For decades, the Black Hand and the Mafia have often been either confused for each other or intermingled. For example, St. Louis law enforcement and media personnel used the terms interchangeably in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In fact, according to a new groundbreaking study by David Critchley, The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891–1931, they were two separate strains of criminality, each with its own subtle characteristics and nuances.

The Black Hand in St. Louis consisted almost solely of either individuals or a small group of like-minded friends or relatives, often not numbering more than a half dozen or so. They were devoted primarily to extortion, usually by letters. If their demands were not met, they often retaliated by planting bombs at the homes and businesses of those who had resisted (guns and knives were rarely used). Such infernal devices served to terrorize the populace even more. Another crime popular with the Black Hand was the kidnapping of children of wealthy individuals for ransom. Unlike their Mafia counterparts, Black Handers had no qualms about killing law enforcement or government officials who got in their way. Ultimately, Black Hand operations had nowhere near the structure or resiliency of their counterparts.

The Mafia, by contrast, usually focused on more refined methods of criminality. Extortion was not its primary means of income. Indeed, numerous shopkeepers and businessmen often paid protection money to a Mafia boss so they wouldn’t be victimized by extortionists. The traditional Mafia boss strove for the appearance of respectability, often taking part in local politics and/or the business community. The Black Hand boss was usually much more of a blatant criminal, and such rampant malfeasance would often bring him into conflict with the police. Evidence indicates, however, that (perhaps uniquely) Mafiosi in St. Louis frequently used Black Hand–style terror tactics to extort money from their compatriots.³

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Mafia had made its first appearance in America. It specialized in robbery, kidnapping and extortion in New Orleans, Louisiana. Soon enough, the criminal organization spread up the Mississippi River and reached St. Louis, Missouri. Mafia-related activities and Black Hand extortion were recorded in St. Louis at least as early as the mid-1890s. Such episodes became more frequent in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, when St. Louis was plagued by a wave of Black Hand–related crime. Many prosperous Italian businessmen and citizens were targeted. Among the most frequent victims were the Viviano brothers.

Giovanni, Giuseppe, Pietro, Salvatore and Vito Viviano immigrated to St. Louis from Palermo, Sicily, in the 1890s. Assisted by cousins Gaetano, Pietro, Salvatore and Vito, they immediately founded their own pasta-manufacturing corporation. Starting from the ground up, their fortunes increased tenfold when they acquired new equipment for their Biddle Street factory at the Italian Pavilion during the 1904 World’s Fair. The Viviano family was soon the wealthiest in the city’s Italian community—a classic case of the American Dream.⁴ While they proved inspirational to many of their countrymen, their good fortune also made them prime targets for extortion.

All of the brothers were bombarded with threatening letters, and their macaroni plant was bombed on more than one occasion. Perhaps the most shocking outrage was when five-year-old Tommaso Viviano and his two-and-a-half-year-old cousin, Grace, were abducted from their home at 1011 North Seventh Street at noon on August 2, 1909, by family friend Salvatore Sam Turrisi. They were going to get some ice cream but never returned. At five o’clock that evening, an extremely worried Pietro Viviano received a note demanding $25,000 in exchange for the children. His cousin Pietro, father of Grace, was there as well.

The kidnapping made national headlines as the two pasta manufacturers waited in vain to hear from the children. Grace and Tommaso Viviano were found two months later in Chicago, where they had been held captive since their abduction. Despite a number of clues to the identities of the perpetrators, none was ever charged. Prime suspect Sam Turrisi was said to have fled back to Sicily.⁵

The Antonio Sansone murder trials in 1911 and 1912 introduced the vast majority of St. Louis’s non-Sicilian citizens to the concept of the Mafia. Giuseppe (Joseph) Cammarata, known member of the Mafia and stockholder in the St. Louis Fruit Supply Company, had a serious argument with the youthful Sansone over the alleged poaching of a fruit customer. On September 12, 1910, Sansone stabbed Cammarata to death at the large Fruit Auction building at Carr and Collins Streets. Tony claimed to have acted in self-defense.⁶

Tony Sansone’s first murder trial began on June 19, 1911. The courtroom resembled a dangerous, silent sports match, with members of both the Cammarata and Sansone families packed on opposing sides of the spectator section. The Cammaratas sent repeated death threats to the Sansones. Tony’s father, Michael, was spending most of his life savings on his son’s defense and private security protection.

Tony testified that Cammarata had given him what Sicilians referred to as l’ucchiatura (the evil eye), as well as a menacing hand sign of death. (Sansone demonstrated it by placing his thumb and forefinger of the right hand together in a ring and extending the other three fingers toward an intended victim.) The jury eventually disagreed, and a second trial was scheduled for January.⁷

Before the second trial, on Friday morning, January 19, 1912, a rag picker named Albert Woolbridge was looking through the ash pit in the rear of 1122 North Ninth Street when he discovered the headless body of a man wrapped in a blanket and bound with rope.

Police discovered that the victim wore a heavy beard and rough clothing and was well built, standing about five feet, three inches tall. The body was warm when found (its arteries were still jetting blood), so the murder had to have taken place just a short time before. The coroner disclosed that the head had been removed by two large, jagged cuts made with an exceptionally sharp instrument. The victim had still been alive when he was decapitated (raising the unsettling possibility that the man was actually conscious when this unspeakable outrage was committed upon him).⁸

The Ash Pit Mystery engrossed the city, and nearly five thousand people turned up at the morgue to get a morbid glimpse of the torso. At first, police thought that the dead man may have been grocer Tony Lorenzo, who had incurred the wrath of Black Handers and recently disappeared. A day or so later, the victim was identified as twenty-three-year-old Salvatore Leoni, the star defense witness in Tony Sansone’s murder trial. Leoni’s testimony was the primary reason the jury had hung up in the first trial, and he had been threatened relentlessly. The closest police got to solving the case was discovering that Leoni had been lured out of his hideout by two girls and then abducted by two Italian men in their thirties. The young man’s head was never recovered.⁹

The killers’ plan ultimately came for naught when Tony Sansone was acquitted of killing Joseph Cammarata on March 8, 1912.¹⁰ Sansone and his family briefly left St. Louis, only to return some years later.

In the months after Tony Sansone’s acquittal, one of the more powerful and well-organized Black Hand rings was making itself known in St. Louis’s Little Italy. Its leader, Pasquale Santino, was born in Siculiana, Sicily, on September 12, 1886, and came to America at the age of seventeen. After a couple of years spent with his older brother, Michelangelo, in Montreal, Canada, Pasquale made his way to St. Louis and began working for wealthy fruit wholesaler Damiano Capuano.¹¹ The moon-faced Santino stood five feet, four inches tall, with a stocky build topped off by clear blue eyes and a head of short, prematurely receding dark brown hair. Pasquale’s wife, Maria (Mary), was one of Capuano’s eldest daughters.¹²

After his father-in-law was mysteriously gunned down on the Hill on Christmas Eve 1910,¹³ the youthful Santino turned to crime in earnest. Some of Santino’s friends included Giuseppe Lopiparo and the three Fasulo brothers—Antonino,¹⁴ Vito and Michele. All four of these men were originally from the town of Villafranca Sicula, located in the Sicilian province of Agrigento.¹⁵ Their headquarters was Pasquale’s new saloon at 926 Wash Street.

One of Santino’s targets was Dr. Guglielmo Cataldi, who ran a profitable drugstore at 917 North Seventh Street. After receiving Black Hand letters, Cataldi notified the authorities. Postal inspectors listened in on the telephone as Pasquale threatened to kill the doctor if he didn’t pay him $1,000 immediately. On the morning of December 24, 1912, a sting operation was set up with Dr. Cataldi. Santino was notified by the druggist that he would pay his extortion demands. When Vito Fasulo left the drugstore after picking up the decoy package from Dr. Cataldi, police trailed him back to Santino’s Wash Street saloon. Both mobsters were arrested, as was Vito’s brother, Mike. The cops also confiscated a cache of firearms and ammunition. When Vito and Pasquale went to trial in February 1914, Fasulo pleaded guilty. The verdict was set aside, and Vito was ordered to pay $169 in court costs. The case against Santino was nolle prossed for lack of evidence.¹⁶

Santino wasn’t as lucky in the spring of 1915, when he was convicted of third-degree arson after a bizarre incident in which his home at 2309A Franklin Avenue caught fire. Police believed that Pasquale had set the blaze in order to collect a $1,000 insurance claim on his furniture. Santino received a two-year sentence and filed an appeal with the Missouri Supreme Court. At the retrial, Pasquale pleaded guilty and got a year-long sentence in the city workhouse. Santino was paroled immediately from the bench and released without serving any time.¹⁷

By the late 1910s, Pasquale Santino had seen his fortunes increase dramatically. Nevertheless, a series of arrests in the last several years had gradually dimmed Santino’s enthusiasm for the anachronistic Black Hand schemes in which he had been originally trained. The rash of violence in the first half of the decade had brought huge amounts of law enforcement scrutiny on these criminal operations. Immigration restrictions and new federal mail laws had decreased the amount of colorful letters, kidnappings and dynamite bombs. After a slew of murders, arrests and deportations, Santino began looking to more legitimate businesses.

In addition to time spent as a railroad foreman, Pasquale owned and operated a lucrative import/export business. Santino’s time on the railroad took him to different locales. The summer of 1917, for example, found Santino in far-flung Hammondsville, Ohio;¹⁸ while there, he crossed paths with many Sicilian immigrants from the nearby cities of Cleveland and Youngstown. In this group, he met several criminal acquaintances who would one day rejoin him in St. Louis. By this time, Santino had begun collecting dues from merchants who wished to be protected from various extortionists, freelance or otherwise. This activity was much more akin to the Mafia than the Black Hand. While still seen as a man of respect, Santino’s days of writing notes and throwing bombs were done.

While Pasquale Santino was concentrating on a more legal existence, Domenico Giambrone had emerged as the most powerful Mafia boss in St. Louis.

Born in Palazzo Adriano, Sicily, on February 28, 1876, Giambrone landed in New Orleans on May 14, 1903, and moved his family to Birmingham, Alabama.¹⁹ For nearly a decade, Dominick had tried his hand at a variety of occupations—farmer, coal miner and saloonkeeper. Before long, he resorted to Black Hand tactics to support his family.

Moving north to St. Louis in the early 1910s, Giambrone set up shop in a saloon at 826 Biddle Street. Through sheer terror tactics and brutality (he was a prime suspect in the beheading of Salvatore Leoni), Giambrone maneuvered himself to the top of the ladder. Dominick was assisted by his younger brothers, Paul and Nick, as well as Gaetano Buffa and Momo Anello. The latter served as Dominick’s right-hand man and valet. By 1914, Dominick had opened a second business, a grocery store at 1001 Biddle Street. Soon enough, Giambrone was extracting tributes from all shopkeepers and businessmen in Little Italy.

In the mid-1910s, Dominick Giambrone was widely feared, and citizens often appeared at his saloon to ask for a favor or offer tribute. The only rough time for Dominick was when his eleven-year-old son, Tony, died suddenly on November 9, 1916, from an attack of appendicitis. Such a tragedy did not slow down the formidable mob boss, however, as he quickly had a new threat to respond to in his territory.

In the fall of 1916, Vincent Butera decided to open a saloon right down the street from Giambrone at 901 Biddle Street. The forty-three-year-old Butera had come to America from Sicily in 1901. A large man, standing six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds, Vincent was known as a tough street fighter. On September 27, 1912, he and a rival fought a revolver duel at the corner of Eighth and Biddle. Despite being shot in the neck, Butera still managed to pull a gun and drive off his attacker. Butera, his wife and three daughters lived in a large house at 3870 Page Boulevard. A blunt, brass-balls type, Butera went where he pleased and did what he wanted.

Whispering about Butera’s courage—or, from another angle, foolishness—began to spread throughout the neighborhood. Giambrone made things very simple: give up your business or get out of town. Vincent, however, insisted on staying put and getting his saloon off the ground. At one point, Butera’s wife, Jennie, walked across the street, got down on her knees and begged Don Domenico to spare her husband’s life. Giambrone merely smiled and said that he had no intention of harming him. Nevertheless, it came as no surprise when Vincent Butera was found hacked to death in his saloon at three o’clock on the afternoon of February 14, 1917. His wife discovered him in the hallway that separated the bar from the billiard room, lying in a pool of blood with a hatchet jammed into his skull. Jennie Butera’s screams could be heard up and down the street.

Giambrone and Momo Anello were immediately arrested, but they merely grinned and shrugged their shoulders.²⁰ While Dominick Giambrone was seemingly lord and master of Little Italy, it wasn’t long before two Sicilian brothers began clawing their way to prominence in the neighborhood. They would create the biggest Mafia family the city had ever seen and orchestrate Giambrone’s downfall.

Balestrate, Sicily, is a small, picturesque town located on the southern shore of the Gulf of Castellammare, about sixteen miles southwest of Palermo. An agricultural and fishing village, Balestrate is famous for sicci (cuttlefish), pristine beaches and the growing of the grape varietals used in the making of Marsala wine. It was here that Salvatore Giannola and Caterina Quartararo raised their family. Their union produced four boys and a girl, most of whom would eventually wind up in St. Louis. The eldest was Filippo, followed by Faro, who was born on June 21, 1889. Nicoletta, the only girl, arrived in 1891, while Vito was born on April 8, 1893. Baby brother Giovanni debuted on February 2, 1897.²¹

Salvatore and Filippo Giannola died soon after the turn of the century, leaving the adolescent Faro (Frank) as the man of the house. For reasons that remain unclear, Frank Giannola set out for America in early 1903, winding up at the St. Louis home of a cousin named Graziano Mercurio.²² The lack of a positive male role model seems to have had a profound effect on the two remaining boys. Vito grew into a stocky teenager of medium height.²³ Despite being personable, he was known to have a hair-trigger temper and tremendous strength. Giovanni (John) was an intelligent youth, and while not as prone to quarreling as his older brother, he never backed down from violence, as a large knife scar on his forehead attested.

In the summer of 1909, Vito began courting a fourteen-year-old girl named Maria Saputo. The two were soon married in the nearby village of Cinisi. Within a year, Vito had grown frustrated with life in Balestrate. At this time, Vito Giannola was only seventeen years old (John was only thirteen). The teenaged Sicilian decided to go to America and join his brother Frank. Vito’s decision to travel was hastened by necessity, as Maria (Mary) was pregnant. If Frank could start anew in St. Louis, so could Vito. The youngster landed at Ellis Island on July 8, 1910.²⁴

Upon his arrival in the United States, Vito made his way to