Lupo Gang
 Ignazio Lupo in a 1909 federal identification photograph | |
| Origins | |
|---|---|
| Founding Location | New York City |
| Territory | Lower Manhattan and Little Italy Brooklyn (early business period) |
| Lineage | |
| Predecessor(s) | Palermitani network |
| Merged With | Morello organization (operational cooperation preceded the 1904 marriage) |
| Successor(s) | Morello–Lupo combine (joint enterprises and kinship alliance) |
| Profile | |
| Structure | Palermitan kinship, business and criminal network |
| Activities | Counterfeiting associations Wholesale-grocery coercion Extortion and fraud Violence and murder allegations |
| Politics | |
| Leader | Ignazio Lupo |
| Activity | |
| Status | Lost separate identity in the Morello–Lupo combine |
| Years Active | c. 1898–1904 (as a distinguishable Lupo-centered network) |
The Lupo Gang is a conventional name for the Palermitan criminal and business network around Ignazio Lupo before and during its convergence with Giuseppe Morello's Corleone-centered organization. Evidence supports Lupo as an independently important Palermitan leader, but “Lupo Gang” was not demonstrated as a formal public self-name.[1]
Independent development
[edit]Lupo was born in Palermo on March 21, 1877 and fled Sicily after killing a business rival during an 1898 store dispute. He passed through Liverpool, Montreal and Buffalo before settling in New York in 1898.[2] He first operated with a cousin on East 72nd Street, moved a business to Brooklyn, and returned to Manhattan in 1901 with an import store at 9 Prince Street and a saloon at 8 Prince Street.
Those businesses and Lupo family grocery interests supplied a distinguishable Palermitan commercial network. Former Secret Service chief William J. Flynn later described coercion of neighborhood grocers, threats, counterfeiting and investment in apparently legitimate enterprises.[3] Flynn's sweeping “Black Hand Society” terminology is treated as law-enforcement rhetoric rather than proof of a formal organization by that name.
Alliance with Morello
[edit]Lupo and Morello were already cooperating before they became relatives. Lupo's Prince Street saloon adjoined Morello's restaurant, served as a meeting place and figured in Secret Service counterfeiting surveillance by 1902–1903.[1] Their operations should therefore not be described as two previously isolated gangs that merged at the instant of a wedding.
On December 22, 1904, Lupo married Salvatrice Terranova, Morello's half-sister; Morello and his wife witnessed the marriage.[2] The marriage formalized kinship and strengthened an existing operational alliance. Later joint grocery, counterfeiting and protection ventures are safely described as the Morello–Lupo combine. Some specialist researchers reconstruct Lupo and Morello as heads of allied but distinct Palermitani and Corleonesi Mafia families; because that interpretation is not settled consensus, formal boss–underboss ranks are not imposed here.
Relationship to the 107th Street phase
[edit]The Lupo network did **not** merge directly with an organization contemporaneously called the 107th Street Mob. That label refers retrospectively to the reduced East Harlem Morello–Terranova phase after Lupo and Morello were imprisoned in 1910—six years after the marriage. The defensible sequence is:
- Lupo's Palermitan network + Morello's Corleonesi organization → Morello–Lupo combine → post-1910 East 107th Street phase under Nick Terranova.
This is personal, operational and factional continuity, not a 1904 merger with a gang name that belongs to a later period.
References
[edit]- ↑ 1.0 1.1 David Critchley, The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891–1931 (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 46–60.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 “Ignazio Lupo”, Gang Rule, citing Italian court, immigration, business and Secret Service records.
- ↑ William J. Flynn, The Barrel Mystery (New York: James A. McCann, 1919), especially pp. 23–47.