Mustache Pete
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mustache Petes were the members of the Sicilian Mafia who had come to New York City as adults in the early 1900s. The younger Sicilian-Americans who later formed the Five Families, unlike the old guard Mustache Petes, had made their bones in America. The most prominent members of this group were Joe "the Boss" Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano.
The Mustache Petes wanted to maintain Sicilian criminal traditions in their new country, and were more interested in exploiting their fellow Italians rather than the public at large. To that end, they opposed their younger soldiers' desire to work with the powerful Jewish and Irish gangs. This rankled younger capos, such as Lucky Luciano, to no end.
Luciano and other "Young Turks" in the New York Mafia soon concluded that the Mustache Petes were too set in their ways to see the millions of dollars that working with non-Italian gangsters could bring. During the Castellammarese War, Luciano secretly built a network of younger mafiosi in both the Masseria and Maranzano camps and secretly intended to rub out (assassinate) one of them, then bide their time before killing the other. They eventually decided to kill Masseria, and feigned loyalty to Maranzano until they got a chance to eliminate him as well.
[edit] Further reading
- Raab, Selwyn. Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005. ISBN 0-312-30094-8
