Terranova set his sights on a gambling ring not run by the Camorra, but by a man named Joseph DiMarco. He ordered two attempts on DiMarco's life, but despite his henchmen hitting their target, DiMarco survived both. So Terranova went to the Navy Street Camorra gang, led by Alessandro Vollero (pictured above), to ask for help with the job. According to Gang Rule, the Navy Street gang got to DiMarco on July 20, 1916, killing him and his friend Charles "Nine-Fingered Charlie" Lombardi at a card game. The other eight players left in such a hurry that the police found their hats still hanging on the wall.
The death of DiMarco put the gambling racket on the city's East Side in the hands of the Mafia, but Pellegrino Marano, the head of another Camorra group, had hoped to form a syndicate of mutually beneficial Italian gangs. In his 2011 book The First Family: Terror, Extorsion, and the Birth of the American Mafia, Mike Dash wrote that Marano was not happy when Terranova didn't want to share. "I will show them who Don Pellegrino Marano is," one of his men recalled him shouting in rage. "I will have them all killed."
So Marano set up a meeting with Terranova and other Mafia bosses under the pretense of talking things out. Instead, they shot Terranova and the one other boss who showed up, and the Mafia-Camorra War was on.
