Ignazio Lupo
American mob boss (1877-1947)
Ignazio Lupo (Italian: [iɲˈɲattsjo ˈluːpo]; March 21, 1877 – January 13, 1947), also known as Ignazio Saietta and Lupo the Wolf, was a Sicilian American Black Hand leader in New York City during the early 1900s. His business was centered in Little Italy, Manhattan, where he ran extensive extortion operations and committed other crimes, including robbery, loan-sharking, and murder. At the start of the 20th century, Lupo merged his crew with others in the South Bronx and East Harlem to form the Morello crime family, which became the leading Mafia family in New York City.
Suspected of at least 60 murders, he was caught by authorities in 1910, when the Secret Service arrested him for running a large scale counterfeiting ring in the Catskills. He was paroled after serving 10 years of a 30-year sentence. A few years later, he was forced into retirement by the emerging National Crime Syndicate led by Lucky Luciano.
Early life
Ignazio Lupo was born in Palermo, Sicily, to parents Rocco Lupo and Onofria Saietta. He has sometimes been referred to as Ignazio Saietta, using his mother's maiden name, but his actual surname was Lupo.
From age 10, he worked in a dry goods store in Palermo. In October 1898, he shot and killed a business rival named Salvatore Morello, by Lupo's account in self-defense after Morello attacked him with a dagger during an argument in Lupo's store.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ignazio Lupo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.