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and father had immigrated to the United States from Terrasina, Sicily, during the early years of the 20th century. The family eventually settled in a large, red-brick tenement house that was located in a predominately Jewish slum neighborhood in St. Louis. The building reportedly contained 11 three-room flats and housed two stores. One flat, which was located across the hall from where the Licavoli family lived, was used as a Jewish synagogue. The building was eventually purchased by Mathew Licavoli, the boys’ father.
    It was into this environment that Peter Joseph Licavoli Sr. was born in 1903, and Thomas Licavoli in 1904. Peter and Thomas were the two oldest children of Mathew Licavoli, whose family would eventually grow to include a younger brother named Dominic and several sisters. Mathew Licavoli and his wife were hardworking, religious people who had dreams of seeing their oldest son Peter become a doctor and Thomas a priest. Time, fate, and the environment in which the boys were to grow up would lead them down a different path. As youngsters, Peter and Thomas sometimes made their spending money running errands for local gangsters. Sometimes during the long summers, they would dive for coins thrown by tourists from passing boats on the Mississippi River. As a result of their neighborhood exposure to the Jewish culture, both boys were reportedly fluent in the Yiddish language.
    The Licavoli brothers grew up in a tough section of St. Louis, where the boys began associating with a group of juvenile thugs known as the “Hammerhead Gang.” Their colorful name was derived from their method of hitting their victims over the head and knocking them unconscious before robbing them. For several years during the late teens, this juvenile street gang terrorized St. Louis.
    Both James Licavoli and Pete Licavoli, cousins of Peter Joseph and Thomas Licavoli, were also members of this early St. Louis street gang. Like his cousins, James Licavoli, who was better known by his underworld alias “Jack White,” would settle in Detroit during the early ‘20s. Once in Detroit, he would find employment as a gunman for the River Gang. In later years, James “Jack White” Licavoli would become an important Mob boss in the Cleveland, Ohio, area. Pete Licavoli, known in the Detroit underworld as “Horseface Pete” and “St. Louis Pete” to distinguish him from his more famous cousin, would eventually settle in Detroit as well. Horseface Pete would later be convicted of first-degree murder in Detroit Recorders Court for the slaying of a minor Detroit gangster named Henry Tupancy during the Mob wars in the bloody summer of 1930. Horseface Pete died in a Michigan prison.
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    Although there is no official record of when Peter Joseph Licavoli Sr. arrived in Detroit, it was probably sometime in 1922. Horseface Pete is often assumed to have settled in Detroit much later, as he successfully managed to avoid being arrested by the Detroit police until 1927. It is believed that Peter Licavoli, who sometimes went by the aliases of “Pete Moceri,” “George Rigley,” and “Black Pete,” was imported to Detroit to work as a gunman for Joseph Moceri, the leader of one of the more powerful splinter groups that had evolved in the aftermath of the Giannola/Vitale Gang War. Eventually Peter ran up a long list of Detroit arrests that would include violation of the Prohibition law, armed robbery, kidnapping and murder.
    In 1922, a report to the St. Louis, Missouri, juvenile court described 17-year-old Thomas “Yonnie” Licavoli as “incorrigible.” In early 1923, Thomas Licavoli fled St. Louis to avoid prosecution on a concealed weapons charge. He joined the U.S. Navy that same year and promptly deserted, returning home to St. Louis. He was granted amnesty after his desertion from the navy by no less a personage than President Warren G. Harding, shortly before Harding died in office. This act on the part of the President of the United