Albert Anastasia Despised Vito Genovese — The REAL Reason Is SHOCKING

Albert Anastasia Despised Vito Genovese — The REAL Reason Is SHOCKING There was a photograph that every New York newspaper ran on October 26, 1957. Albert Anastasia lay on the floor of the barbershop in the Park Sheraton Hotel, covered by a white towel. America read it as a Mafia purge. The man who ordered his killing, Vito Genovese, was not standing in the shop that day. He held no gun. He saw no blood. He merely received the result. Twenty-six years earlier, both men had stood together in a restaurant in Coney Island and shot Joe Masseria dead. Same side, same guns, same blood on the floor. Then one became something the other despised to the bone. There was a conference in Havana, a beating that broke three ribs, a handshake forced in front of twenty bosses, and a hatred that people called a power struggle. The story begins in Calabria. To understand why Albert Anastasia despised Vito Genovese, one must understand the power structure that bound them both. In the mid-1940s, Lucky Luciano had been deported to Italy after serving time for prostitution. Frank Costello, whom the underworld called the Prime Minister of the Underworld for his diplomatic skills, held the acting boss seat of the Luciano family. Albert Anastasia was the boss of the Mangano family, one of the five largest families in New York, and Costello’s closest ally on the Commission. The Costello-Anastasia alliance controlled most of the waterfront, gambling, and labor union activity in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Vito Genovese, after nine years of self-exile in Italy to escape prosecution for the 1934 murder of Ferdinand Boccia, had just returned to New York.