The Birth of Joe Cargo

After prison release Valachi picked up where he left off in his life of crime. One major difference now however was his connection to members of the Mafia. Through friends Valachi met up with Tom Gagliano a member of the Castellammarese Mafia family and took on a series of assignments. His level of success prompted the Family to entrust him with the assignment of murder. Carrying this assignment out successfully he was given the opportunity to join the Family as a "Made Man". He was introduced to Salvatore Maranzano, the leader of a number of Families in the New York area, as Joe Cargo. Under this new identity he was introduced to the world of the "gun and the knife." He swore allegiance to the Family and promised to maintain the vow of Omerta - total silence about the world he had entered into. He was informed that this new world was the Cosa Nostra - This thing of ours. A world in which it made and maintained its own laws and utilized violence as a means to reach their goals. The Family came before anything else and you were on call for Family business 24 hours a day. While the rewards could be high the threat of violence and the punishment for any lack of loyalty could also be high. Joe was then assigned a gombah, or godfather, to be his mentor and immediate boss. The designated man was to be Joseph Bonanno. He was assigned the role of "shooter" for the Maranzano faction in the Castellammarese Wars, against the Masseria faction.

The war began to turn in favor of the Maranzano faction and some of the younger crime leaders felt it was time to end the fighting in favor of making money and not war. Two of the younger rising crime bosses, Charlie Luciano and Vito Genovese, met up with Maranzano and some of his key men in a meeting held in the Bronx Zoo. In return for their promise to eliminate Masseria, Maranzano agreed to end the war. Following the death of Giuseppe Masseria, Maranzano called a meeting of all the major Family leaders to paint a picture of the future. Valachi provides one of the few eyewitness accounts of what took place at that meeting. Maranzano gave a brief background of the war and why it had started, and then he outlined the way things would be in the future. He would be the top boss, calling himself Capo di Tuti Capi. He would share in the wealth of all the "families." He then announced who would be the boss of each family. Each family boss would be supported by an under-boss, and beneath them would be the backbone of the families---the soldiers. These men would be grouped into crews or regimes; each controlled by a lieutenant or caporegime. Everything would be businesslike and there would be strict lines of communication between soldiers and bosses. There would also be rigidly enforced rules. The organization, this Cosa Nostra, would come first above everything, no matter what. Anyone who broke the code of omerta, the vow of silence, would die. No one was to ever strike another member, regardless of provocation. No man could covet another's wife.

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