The Good Killers

1921’s Glimpse of the Mafia

Epilogue

The Good Killers gang was quickly forgotten by Americans and their press. Bootlegger conflicts in major cities and gangland murders resulting from the Mafia’s so-called Castellammarese War at the start of the next decade grabbed the headlines.

Magaddino

While he was out of the news, Stefano Magaddino continued to rise through the Sicilian-Italian underworld. He settled in western New York State in 1922 soon after DiCarlo’s death. Mafia rackets in Buffalo and Niagara Falls quickly fell under his control.120 His proximity to Canada, where quality liquor could be legally obtained, and his leadership of the Castellammarese colony throughout the U.S. combined to make him one of the more influential mob bosses of the Prohibition Era.

Magaddino would remain an underworld power until the early 1970s, when his great personal arrogance, Apalachin- and Valachi-related revelations during the McClellan Senate subcommittee hearings and dissension within his crime family diminished his power.121 He died peacefully at the age of 82 on July 19, 1974, having served as titular boss of the Buffalo-Niagara Falls region for more than half a century.122

Bonventre

Vito Bonventre continued to be a leading figure in Brooklyn’s Castellammarese underworld for a decade after the Good Killers case. During the 1920s, he amassed a fortune through bootlegging. He was assassinated at his home by an unknown gunman on July 15, 1930.123 His murder and that of senior Castellammarese leader Gaspar Milazzo in a Detroit fish market a month earlier124 – both of which appear to have been orchestrated by Manhattan-based underworld rival Giuseppe Masseria – are often considered the opening salvo of the American Mafia’s Castellammarese War.

Michael Fiaschetti, the press-hungry leader of the Italian squad, went on to found a successful detective agency in New York.125 In 1932, his old newspaper friends sought him out for comments relating to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.126 A short time later, he was named New York City deputy commissioner of public markets,127 a post created in the LaGuardia Administration to halt underworld monopolies on wholesale produce. Sadly outliving his only child,128 Fiaschetti retired to the lecture circuit in the late 1930s and attempted without success to convince Hollywood to make a movie of his life. He lived into his seventies, dying in July 1960.129

Fontano

Of all the accused assassins in the Good Killers case, only Fontano – the informant – ended up doing considerable prison time. He was confined – under his given name of Bartolomeo Fontana – at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, beginning on March 25, 1922.130 It is widely believed that he died there.

However, prison inmate registers show that he was paroled temporarily Dec. 15, 1939, after almost two decades behind bars. He was readmitted for observation Aug. 1, 1940, and then permanently released Jan. 21, 1941.131 World War II draft registration record from 1942 shows Bartolomeo Fontana residing at 860 Sutter Avenue in Brooklyn.132

Though his parents, Giuseppe and Giacoma Salvato Fontana, reportedly died years before the Good Killers story hit the newspapers,133 Fontano remained in touch with his family. On his draft registration, he listed his sister Anna Arena of Brooklyn as the person who would always know his address. Anna, whose given name was Sebastiana, had married Vito Arena and had produced a houseful of nieces and nephews to Fontano.134

Fontano’s death appears not to have been noted in public records.