Authors: Paul R. Kavieff
The lengthy war between the Giannola and Vitale Mobs seriously depleted the number of gunmen within the ranks of both gangs. Over a period of approximately 10 years, more than 100 men were killed as a result of the strife. Peter and Thomas Licavoli arrived in Detroit from their native St. Louis, Missouri, during this time when new recruits were desperately needed by the various criminal groups.
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The Licavoli brothers were born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. Their mother and father had immigrated to the United States from Terrasina, Sicily, during the early years of the 20th century. The family eventually settled in a large, red-brick tenement house that was located in a predominately Jewish slum neighborhood in St. Louis. The building reportedly contained 11 three-room flats and housed two stores. One flat, which was located across the hall from where the Licavoli family lived, was used as a Jewish synagogue. The building was eventually purchased by Mathew Licavoli, the boys’ father.
It was into this environment that Peter Joseph Licavoli Sr. was born in 1903, and Thomas Licavoli in 1904. Peter and Thomas were the two oldest children of Mathew Licavoli, whose family would eventually grow to include a younger brother named Dominic and several sisters. Mathew Licavoli and his wife were hardworking, religious people who had dreams of seeing their oldest son Peter become a doctor and Thomas a priest. Time, fate, and the environment in which the boys were to grow up would lead them down a different path. As youngsters, Peter and Thomas sometimes made their spending money running errands for local gangsters. Sometimes during the long summers, they would dive for coins thrown by tourists from passing boats on the Mississippi River. As a result of their neighborhood exposure to the Jewish culture, both boys were reportedly fluent in the Yiddish language.
The Licavoli brothers grew up in a tough section of St. Louis, where the boys began associating with a group of juvenile thugs known as the “Hammerhead Gang.” Their colorful name was derived from their method of hitting their victims over the head and knocking them unconscious before robbing them. For several years during the late teens, this juvenile street gang terrorized St. Louis.
Both James Licavoli and Pete Licavoli, cousins of Peter Joseph and Thomas Licavoli, were also members of this early St. Louis street gang. Like his cousins, James Licavoli, who was better known by his underworld alias “Jack White,” would settle in Detroit during the early ‘20s. Once in Detroit, he would find employment as a gunman for the River Gang. In later years, James “Jack White” Licavoli would become an important Mob boss in the Cleveland, Ohio, area. Pete Licavoli, known in the Detroit underworld as “Horseface Pete” and “St. Louis Pete” to distinguish him from his more famous cousin, would eventually settle in Detroit as well. Horseface Pete would later be convicted of first-degree murder in Detroit Recorders Court for the slaying of a minor Detroit gangster named Henry Tupancy during the Mob wars in the bloody summer of 1930. Horseface Pete died in a Michigan prison.
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Although there is no official record of when Peter Joseph Licavoli Sr. arrived in Detroit, it was probably sometime in 1922. Horseface Pete is often assumed to have settled in Detroit much later, as he successfully managed to avoid being arrested by the Detroit police until 1927. It is believed that Peter Licavoli, who sometimes went by the aliases of “Pete Moceri,” “George Rigley,” and “Black Pete,” was imported to Detroit to work as a gunman for Joseph Moceri, the leader of one of the more powerful splinter groups that had evolved in the aftermath of the Giannola/Vitale Gang War. Eventually Peter ran up a long list of Detroit arrests that would include violation of the Prohibition law, armed robbery, kidnapping and murder.
In 1922, a report to the St. Louis, Missouri, juvenile court described 17-year-old Thomas “Yonnie” Licavoli as “incorrigible.” In early 1923, Thomas Licavoli fled St. Louis to avoid prosecution on a concealed weapons charge. He joined the U.S. Navy that same year and promptly deserted, returning home to St. Louis. He was granted amnesty after his desertion from the navy by no less a personage than President Warren G. Harding, shortly before Harding died in office. This act on the part of the President of the United States would seem to indicate that the Licavoli brothers had already developed very good political connections.
In late 1923 or early 1924, Yonnie began working with Francesco “Frank” Cammarata, who was born in Sicily on March 16, 1898. He immigrated to the United States in 1913, arriving in New York and later settling in St. Louis, Missouri. Cammarata was active in the St. Louis underworld for no more than five or six years before moving to Detroit around 1920. He probably began a long association with the Licavoli brothers in the “Hammerhead Gang” of St. Louis and would eventually marry the Licavolis’ sister Grace. Once Cammarata settled in the Detroit area, he worked as a hired gunman and bank robber before joining forces with the River Gang in the mid-’20s. After relocating to Detroit and before joining forces with the River Gang, Cammarata and Yonnie Licavoli became partners in the bank robbing and hijacking rackets.
Thomas “Yonnie” Licavoli was always the more aggressive of the two Licavoli brothers. He soon earned a reputation in the Detroit underworld as a ruthless hijacker and strong-arm man. It would be Yonnie Licavoli who would be instrumental in organizing the Moceri/Licavoli River Gang into a force to be reckoned with on the upper Detroit River.
Aside from his rum-running and hijacking activities, Yonnie was interested in several underground saloons, known as blind pigs, and other underworld resorts in the Detroit area. Alvin C. Hoyle and another unidentified man were partners with Yonnie in the ownership of a popular Detroit blind pig known as the Subway Cafe. The Subway Cafe was located in the basement of a building in downtown Detroit. The cafe had been raided and closed several times by Detroit police for gambling and Prohibition law violations. Finally, the owner of the building in which the cafe was operated notified Hoyle and his partners that they would have to move. Licavoli had evidently told Hoyle to wait until they could get together and decide upon an equitable division of the equipment in the cafe, before moving it out. For some reason, Licavoli decided that he was being double crossed by Hoyle, believing that he was taking jointly owned property out of the blind pig without his okay. In an effort to set up Hoyle, Yonnie made arrangements with him to assist in moving the remaining equipment out of the Subway Cafe one night in the late summer of 1926. A young man names Charles Phillips, who had worked at the Subway as a bouncer, was hired by Hoyle to help the men move their equipment. According to testimony that was later given to the Detroit police by Phillips, Hoyle said that Licavoli called and told him that he had arranged to borrow a truck which the men could use to move the equipment. Hoyle asked Phillips to come along and drive the truck for them. On the night they had planned to move the equipment, Licavoli came by in a car and picked up Hoyle and Phillips. According to Phillips, Hoyle got into the front seat with Licavoli, and Phillips sat in the back seat next to a man who had accompanied Licavoli. Phillips told police that he had never seen this man before. The four men drove to a dark street on Detroit’s east side near the Elmwood Cemetery. Licavoli pointed to a dark driveway where he told the men that they could find the truck. As the four men walked up the driveway, the shooting began. Hoyle was killed instantly. Phillips was shot 14 times but somehow managed to survive. He described to police how a gunman had stood over him as he lay writhing from pain on the ground from wounds he had received only moments before. The gunman emptied his pistol into Phillips’s hat. The killer’s poor aim was the only reason why Phillips was still alive. There were five furrows in Phillips’s scalp and five bullet holes in his straw hat. Of the other nine wounds, none was deeper than a flesh wound. Yonnie Licavoli was not wounded and denied that he had been with Hoyle and Phillips the night they were shot. Licavoli was briefly held as a suspect in Hoyle’s murder. Phillips, who had identified Licavoli from his hospital bed, disappeared after recovering from his wounds, and the case was dropped.
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When Frank Cammarata was not working with the River Gang, he sometimes supplemented his income by robbing banks in the Detroit area. On the morning of July 1, 1925, four gunmen patiently waited outside the People’s Bank of Wayne County located at the corner of Grand River and Brooklyn Avenues in Detroit. The men were waiting for the bank’s bookkeeper to arrive that morning. When the bookkeeper walked up to the bank, the four men pushed him inside as he opened the front door. At gunpoint, they forced the terrified man to open the safe from which they took $2,100 in silver coins and escaped. Cammarata was the only one of the bandits that was positively identified by witnesses as participating in the holdup. On September 22, 1925, he was arrested by Detroit police and arraigned in Detroit Recorders Court on charges of armed robbery. He was released on a bond of $10,000 to await trial on the charge.
On November 7, 1925, five gunmen armed with sawed-off shotguns and pistols held up the Kleiner Cigar Manufacturing Company in Detroit. Patrolman Edward Gerdes, with only two weeks on the police force, had been assigned from the Chene Street station to guard the company’s payroll. Gerdes accompanied Stanley Rootes, who was the Kleiner Company paymaster, to the Central Savings Bank at Chene Street and Harper Avenue. When the two men returned with the payroll to the Kleiner Plant, they were assaulted by five gunmen who jumped out of a parked car and began firing wildly. Rootes dropped the payroll bag, which contained between $8,700 and $10,000, and threw up his hands. Gerdes, who was wounded in the legs, managed to use his own shotgun before he fell and wounded one of the bandits. The five men grabbed the payroll bag and escaped, taking their wounded comrade with them. Cammarata was identified by witnesses who had watched the gunfight as one of the five men who held up the Kleiner Company. Gerdes identified Cammarata as the man he saw come towards him with a pistol in his hand after Gerdes had been wounded.
Cammarata, who was still out on bond and awaiting trial on the People’s Bank of Wayne County robbery charge, was arrested again on November 11, 1925, and charged with the Kleiner holdup. After a second arraignment in less than two months in Recorders Court on a charge of armed robbery, Cammarata furnished the new bond of $20,000 and promptly disappeared. On November 18, 1925, his $20,000 bond was forfeited because of his failure to appear in Court. Cammarata returned to St. Louis, where he was arrested on January 2, 1926.
The Detroit police theorized that the Kleiner robbery was an inside job. The bandits’ car pulled up at the same time that Gerdes and Rootes had returned with the company payroll. The gunmen’s abandoned car was later found by Detroit police with five sawed-off shotguns inside. Detectives believed that one of the bandits’ girlfriends might have been an employee at the Kleiner Company and had tipped the gang off as to the time that the payroll usually arrived.
The first Kleiner holdup trial was declared a mistrial by Recorders Court Judge W. McKay Skillman after a woman who had been a spectator at the trial was discovered to have told jurors during a lunch break that Frank Cammarata was innocent. The woman, a Mrs. Catherine Ivy, was lectured by Judge Skillman and then sentenced to 30 days in the Detroit House of Corrections for contempt of court.
At Cammarata’s second trial in the Kleiner robbery case, several witnesses appeared on behalf of the defense and stated that Cammarata had not been identified by Gerdes when the police officer had viewed him from his hospital bed. Cammarata’s girlfriend claimed that he had been with her during the day and time of the Kleiner holdup. Cammarata stated that he had dropped his girlfriend off at work on the day in question and returned to his apartment, where he slept most of the day. When cross-examined by Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor James Chenot, Cammarata could not remember the address of his apartment or where he had borrowed the Pierce-Arrow car that he was driving when he was arrested. Gerdes, the Detroit police officer who was wounded in the holdup, was the only witness to positively identify Cammarata. Several weeks after the robbery of the Kleiner Cigar Manufacturing Company, Gerdes was mysteriously shot by unknown gunmen while on duty. He believed that he had been shot by friends of Cammarata to keep him from testifying at the trial. Stanley Rootes, the auditor and paymaster at the Kleiner Cigar Manufacturing Company who had been carrying the payroll bag at the time of the holdup, failed to identify Frank Cammarata as one of the bandits.
Cammarata’s second trial in the Kleiner robbery case was again declared a mistrial after the jury had deliberated more than 24 hours and were released by Judge W. Skillman McKay. Cammarata was eventually acquitted in the Kleiner Cigar Company holdup. He was still awaiting trail on the People’s Bank of Wayne County robbery charge, when he and Thomas Licavoli were arrested in Canada on a concealed weapons charge.
There is some evidence that Frank Cammarata, Pete Corrado (later an important leader in the Detroit Mob), and Thomas Licavoli may have been operating a stolen-car ring out of Detroit during the mid-’20s. On June 12, 1925, they were indicted by a Federal Grand Jury on a charge of violation of the Federal Dyer Act (driving a stolen car across state lines). The feds had found proof in shipping records that they were investigating at that time that Cammarata, Licavoli, and Corrado had shipped at least three stolen cars to Buffalo, New York, by boat. Once the vehicles had arrived in Buffalo, they had obtained New York plates for the cars and then driven them back to Detroit for resale. The three men never went to trial on the charge, as other events had begun to shape their futures.
Aside from their other rackets, both Frank Cammarata and Yonnie Licavoli were important leaders in the River Gang. Their partners in this venture were Joe Moceri, Pete Licavoli, and Joe Massei. Joe Massei was a downriver bootlegger, rumrunner, and gunman. Massei was a highly respected, well-liked leader in the Detroit underworld. The son of an Italian father and Irish mother, Massei was to eventually become an important national underworld figure.