Who planned to kill who first in the contest between Salvatore Maranzano and Lucky Luciano after the Castellammarese War remains a mystery. It’s been suggested that Luciano might have wanted to wipe out Maranzano and his own boss, Joe Masseria, from the start of the war, but he remained in Masseria’s camp for months and seemed content after changing sides until Maranzano tried asserting authority over him. On the other hand, some gangland testimony, as recorded in “The Origin of Organized Crime in America,” suggests that Maranzano put Luciano, Al Capone, Frank Costello, and other Mafiosi on a hit list for being insufficiently trustworthy or malleable. He extorted tribute payments from other families that were squirreled away as a war chest.
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That Maranzano was scheming to kill him became Luciano’s justification for what came next. Per Selwyn Raab’s “Five Families,” Tommy Lucchese, a Maranzano associate who was also Luciano’s friend, alerted Luciano to the plot. In retaliation, the two of them recruited Irish gunmen and disguised them as IRS agents; Maranzano expected to be audited and had his bodyguards go without guns to dodge weapons charges. On September 10, 1931, the gunmen arrived in Maranzano’s office and, after Lucchese singled the boss out, shot and knifed him to death.
