Manfredi Mineo was born in Palermo and became boss of the Gambino Family after the 1928 murder of Salvatore D’Aquila. His rise, however, was more complicated and his connections to the mafia in both New York and Palermo were complex. His brother-in-law Antonino Grillo was a powerful Sicilian mafia leader in Palermo’s Resuttana neighborhood who can be linked to three stateside Cosa Nostra bosses, including Mineo, and may have been a significant transatlantic powerbroker in the developing American mafia spanning two decades. Manfredi himself may have also represented a different New York mafia Family years before taking over the Gambino group. His world was secretive and the little we know of his story is anything but simple.
Mineo was also apparently a product of Palermo’s upper classes, a classic “Alta Mafioso” whose brother was the esteemed mathematics professor Dr. Corradino Mineo, some of their descendants being celebrated figures in Sicily today. Manfredi Mineo and his in-law Grillo were not low-brow bandits who gained status from the bottom up, but men with significant resources available to them as they navigated the highest levels of Cosa Nostra. One can only imagine the grand performances they acted out in their treacherous underworld theater but their audience was not the general public and it certainly wasn’t us.
The episode is long and does little to bring Manfredi Mineo’s full story out of the shadows. It does hopefully help to render some of the shapes lurking in the darkness and give more life to a man who is most commonly thought of as a Castellammarese War corpse alongside his confederate Stefano Ferrigno. Mineo was a byproduct of Palermo’s mafia elite and his life in New York reflects that, the nineteen years he spent in America drawing continually from his roots in Sicily.
This discussion rests on the foundation provided by the May 2014 Informer Journal article by Angelo Santino, Richard Warner, and Lennert van`t Riet, which can be accessed here. I fully credit them with shifting Mineo’s story from “Masseria’s buddy who ran the Gambinos for a couple years” to “well-established Palermo mafioso and rival boss of D’Aquila who somehow succeeded him fifteen years later.” I add my own research and interpretations here but also borrow heavily from both their findings and new leads their work created.
The Movements of Manfredi Mineo