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necessary? From humble beginnings, he clambered up the greasy pole until he looked down on all of them, the ones who survived his fight for success.
    When his family arrived in the New World in 1912, they quickly established themselves in the Queens area of New York, his father starting a small contracting business. For Vito it was not nearly enough, however. He was in a hurry to be someone and needed more excitement in his life. Soon, he moved out and went to live with relatives in the much more cosmopolitan and vibrant Little Italy in Lower Manhattan.
    He started hanging around with a bad crowd as a youngster and, aged 20, had his first brush with authority when he was sent to jail for 60 days for carrying a gun. It was 1917. It was a slight hiccup, but his relentless climb up through New York’s underworld had begun.
    He launched his Mafia career serving New York boss Giuseppe ‘Joe the Boss’ Masseria during the early 1920s, working mainly in bootlegging and extortion. However, what Genovese really brought Masseria was a propensity for violence. Vito was afraid of nothing and no one. It was around this time that he met Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, the criminal visionary who would shortly become the lynchpin of the American Mafia, reshaping it at the end of the 1920s. While Luciano would become one of Genovese’s closest allies, the two men had a complex relationship and would never be what could be called friends.
    When Luciano organised the extermination of the old boss, Masseria, Genovese was one of the four gunmen who made the famous hit. Later that year, Luciano organised a hit on Salvatore Maranzano, the victor in the Castellamarese War that had split the Mafia for two years. With both Masseria and Maranzano dead, Luciano became boss of his very own crime family, appointing Genovese as underboss.
    According to those who knew him, Vito Genovese was not a man to be trusted. ‘Sly’, ‘devious’ and ‘cunning’ are words often used in conjunction with his name. Joe Valachi, the first Mafia man to turn informant, famously said: ‘If you went to him and told him about some guy doing wrong he would have the guy whacked. And then he would have you whacked for telling on the guy.’
    And he had no compunction about using violence to deal with his problems. After the death of his first wife, he fell in love with another woman who, unfortunately, happened to be already married. No problem for Vito – he killed the husband.
    In the 1930s, Genovese began to make serious money from the various rackets in which he was involved, but mainly from the Italian lottery which he had come to control. He invested this wealth in nightclubs in Greenwich Village.
    Then, when Luciano was convicted and imprisoned on pimping charges in 1936, Genovese was made acting boss. He did not last long, however. In 1937, he was indicted for the murder of Ferdinand Boccia, a small-time gambling racketeer. Boccia and Genovese set up a rigged card game and, a few days later, Boccia demanded a third of the profits. He thought it was only fair as he had introduced them to the victim, a wealthy Italian businessman. Genovese refused to pay up, instead hiring Willie Gallo and Ernest ‘the Hawk’ Rupolo to murder Boccia. His body was pulled out of the Hudson River in May 1937, at which point Genovese offered Rupolo $175 to murder Gallo in case he talked. Rupolo made two bodged attempts before Gallo decided that this was getting ridiculous. He went to the police and implicated Genovese and Rupolo in the murder. Rupolo got 20 years, but Genovese took off before they could lock him up, too. He bought a house for his second wife in New Jersey, deposited money in various accounts for her and fled to Italy with a suitcase stuffed with $750,000. He settled in the town of Nola, not far from his home town Naples. Not a man to kick his heels when there was money to be made, he threw himself enthusiastically into the local narcotics trade.
    So, when the Allies