Nicolo Terranova

In 1892 Nicolo Ter­ra­nova arrived in New York from Cor­leone with his fam­ily includ­ing his mother, step-father, four sis­ters, and broth­ers Ciro and Vin­cent. They were join­ing their step-brother Giuseppe who had arrived six months ear­lier. The fam­ily stayed in New York for around a year, but suf­fered from the lack of avail­able work. They trav­elled to Louisiana, the father and Giuseppe worked for about a year plant­ing sugar cane before mov­ing on to Bryan, Texas. They fam­ily worked in Texas as cot­ton pick­ers, but left after two years when the fam­ily was hit with Malaria. In 1896 they arrived back in New York.

Nicholas was arrested in 1910 in con­nec­tion with the big coun­ter­feit­ing trial. He was held for pass­ing the coun­ter­feit money that his broth­ers had been pro­duc­ing High­land NY.

In Novem­ber 1915, “Three Fin­gered” Sam Anto­nio, thought to be an asso­ciate of Joe DeMarco, attacked Nicolo Morello in Harlem with a shot­gun. Morello was hos­pi­talised but sur­vived the attack.

On June 24^th 1916 a meet­ing took place at Coney Island between the Sicil­ian Morello gang, the Neapoli­tan Navy Street gang and the Neapoli­tan Coney Island gang. The idea of the meet­ing was to dis­cuss the expan­sion of gam­bling dens in lower Manhattan.

Even though the two gangs worked along­side each other for some­time, the Camorra devised a plan to kill the Morel­los. Morano had been run­ning a pol­icy game in Harlem, the realm of the Morello fam­ily, but could not make it pay enough to cover the rake that the Morel­los demanded from him, another fac­tor was the killing of Nicolo Del Gau­dio had angered Alle­san­dro Vollero and he now wanted the Morel­los dead. The Neopoli­tans believed they could taken over the Harlem rack­ets if they could elim­i­nate the Morello lead­er­ship. They hatched a plan where they would try and lure the entire Morello lead­er­ship down to Brook­lyn and ambush them.

On Sep­tem­ber 7^th 1916, Nicholas Ter­ra­nova and Charles Ubri­aco trav­elled down­town to meet with the Navy St gang, where they were both mur­dered.