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underworld. The Lower East Side was rich in Jewish gangsters such as Meyer Lansky. He was born Maier Suchowljansky in 1902 in Grodno, Poland. His parents fled pogroms there and Lansky fought anyone who tried to intimidate him in America. His family had had a bellyful of that. As he formed his own teenage Jewish gang, the small-statured Lansky got together with a tall, good-looking boy called Benny Siegel, who was three years younger. Quick to anger, Siegel had a formidable reputation as a street fighter and was happy to use a gun from an early age. Lansky saw this both as strength and weakness.
    “His big problem was that he was always ready to rush in first and shoot, to act without thinking,” said Lansky. “That always got him into trouble. I explained patiently to him again and again that if you’re going to succeed, it’s better to work from behind the scenes.” It was advice that Lansky would take himself, but Siegel was too much of a hothead to stay out of trouble for long. According to Lansky, his best friend got his moniker “Bugsy” because he was “crazy as a bedbug.” A later FBI report said he “acquired his title of Bugsy because many of the associates in the old days considered him as ‘going bugs’ when he got excited in that he acted in an irrational manner.”
    Lansky and Siegel turned their teenage gang into muscle for hire and made a fortune in the early years of Prohibition. They offered protection to bootleggers or hijacked their shipment if they failed to come through with the cash. In their gang were other hoodlums who made names for themselves, including Abner “Longy” Zwillman, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, and Arthur
Flegenheimer—who became famous as Dutch Schultz. Ever since they’d met as kids in the Lower East Side, Lansky and Charlie Lucania had kept up their friendship, but the time was not yet right for them to come together as a powerful criminal alliance.
    In 1920, the king of the New York underworld was a stocky, five-foot-two Sicilian called Giuseppe Masseria, known as “Joe the Boss.” Fleeing a murder charge in his homeland, Masseria had joined the Morello gang, an early Mafia crime family based in East Harlem. When their top killer, Ignazio Lupo “the Wolf,” was jailed, Masseria had taken over the gang and his influence extended throughout Manhattan and into Brooklyn. When Lucania’s and Lansky’s gangs clashed with his soldiers in the Lower East Side, Masseria recruited the up-and-coming Sicilian as a gunman, but told him to ditch his friendship with Lansky. As an old-style Italian Catholic, he hated Jews.
    On August 8, 1922, Masseria was at home on the Lower East Side in his three-story brownstone house on Second Avenue near East Fifth Street. Just after midday, a blue Hudson touring car stopped outside a kosher butcher’s shop nearby. Two men stepped out of the car and walked into a restaurant across the road from Masseria’s house. One of the men was thirty-four-year-old Umberto Valenti, a veteran hit man and associate of Peter Morello, who resented Masseria taking over his gang. Two months earlier, Joe the Boss had knocked off Mob rival Silvio Tagliapanna, and Valenti was looking to equalize things.
    For an hour, Valenti and his accomplice toyed with cups of coffee and slices of cake, keeping a sharp eye on Masseria’s house. At just after 2:00 P.M., the tubby Italian Mob boss sauntered down the steps of his brownstone. He was wearing a light summer suit and straw hat. He turned north to stroll along Second Avenue. Valenti and his friend bolted out of the café and strode after Masseria. As Joe the Boss spotted them, Valenti pulled his weapon. Unarmed, Masseria tried to dodge inside a hat shop but was caught outside a women’s clothes store.
    “The man with the revolver came close to the other fellow
and aimed,” said one of the shop owners. “Just as he fired the man jumped to one side. The bullet smashed into the window of my store. Then the man