Little Italy is a small neighborhood in New York City, located at Feldspar Street, and bordering the Lower East Side, City Hall, Chinatown, and SoHo.
History[]
Little Italy grew rapidly in the 1890s up to the 1940s with Italian immigration to the United States following political changes in Europe, becoming an Italian enclave. Beforehand, it was a Neapolitan center; now it was almost entirely-Sicilian. The neighborhood was originally controlled by powerful boss Massimo Fanucci, leader of the Black Hand and a racketeer who was feared by many. In 1920 he was killed by Vito Corleone, an associate of his, who was tired of paying debts to him, and Corleone became the Padrone of the neighborhood as Don of the Corleone crime family. The neighborhood was taken over by the Tattaglia crime family in 1945 but reclaimed in the Sollozzo Intrigue by Aldo Trapani after the fall of the Verona Warehouse, and it became territory of Joey Zasa in the 1970s, transforming it into a drug-infested area, because his black and Spanish associates dealt drugs without his permission. His death in 1979 ended the problems and Little Italy was in Corleone control until 1999, when Vincent Mancini was killed in an ATF gunfight. The neighborhood became territory of other Five Families families, who recruited enforcers from the neighborhood, although it shrunk with the growth of Chinatown due to increased Chinese immigration. In 2008 it was the scene of a string of mob killings.