Where Buster from Chicago was born

The identity of the Maranzano contract killer known as “Buster from Chicago” has been debated for years. Rick Porrello’s AmericanMafia.com contributor Allan R. May proposed the theory that Joe Valachi invented Buster to cover his own murders. Even among those who believe in his existence, “Buster from Chicago” remains a fabulous figure, someone we know very little about. As such, he has attracted devotees, one of them a man born in 1948 in California who persuaded journalist David Evanier, at least for a while, that he was the famed gunman’s illegitimate son.

Buster from Chicago was a cipher: important to the outcome of the Castellammarese War, and therefore interesting to Mafia historians, but unknowable. Joseph Valachi told the nation about a “college looking” young man, about twenty years old, tall, from Chicago, and an excellent marksman, who was responsible for at least six murders in New York City, including that of the one-time boss of bosses, Giuseppe Morello. Valachi, who’d gone on assignments with Buster, and spent many hours in his company, was best placed to know something about the man who helped Maranzano win the Castellammarese War.

A Chicago headline published the day after Valachi’s televised testimony to the McClellan committee claimed Buster was Frank Marlo, an Aiello associate. But Marlo was killed on 17 February 1931, in retaliation for the murder of Unione Siciliana president Anthony Lombardo, in April 1929. Since Valachi reported speaking with Buster on three different occasions after Marlo’s death, Marlo couldn’t have been who Valachi meant.

His unpublished memoir, The Real Thing — suppressed by Alfred Santangelo’s American Italian Anti-Defamation League — and The Valachi Papers, the book later produced by his interviewer, Peter Maas, both include a number of interactions Joe Valachi recalled having with Buster. But as well as Joe might have known him — and despite all they went through together, he only ever knew him as “Buster” — Joseph Bonanno was much closer to the gunman from Chicago. Buster was a witness to Bonanno’s marriage in 1931 and appears in a lineup of important gangsters in attendance at the wedding reception. The photo appears in Bill Bonanno’s book, where he identifies Sebastiano “Buster” Domingo matter of factly as one of Maranzano’s supporters. Whenever Buster is written about, it’s this photo you see of him. He’s standing third from the left.

Immediately after Valachi’s testimony, Joe Bonanno quibbled with his physical description of Buster, which differed from his own recollection of Bastiano Domingo as a tall, thin man, nowhere near as heavy as Valachi described, and a little older, too. The instrument case he’s said to be carrying changes. In 1963, Valachi said it was a violin case holding a machine gun, but none of Buster’s hits were carried out with such a weapon. In the getaway story after Joe Baker’s murder, Valachi says Buster carried a guitar case.

Sebastiano Domingo — the shortened version of his given name was “Bastiano,” which became “Buster” in America — was, like Bonanno, from Castellammare del Golfo, and part of an extended family of organized criminals. It was his pedigree, even more than his grudge against Capone, that made Domingo a trustworthy recruit to Maranzano’s war with Joe Masseria. A series of tragedies that befell Buster’s family in the 1920s segued into a war the family was unable to win against Al Capone’s army. This led him directly to working for Maranzano as a contract killer.

Sebastiano was born on 2 April 1910 to Giuseppe Domingo, a carter, and his wife Mattia Farina, both natives of Castellammare del Golfo, in their home on via Serina. Castellammare is a Mafia stronghold on the northern Sicilian coast, in Trapani province, and carting is one of the rural entrepreneurial professions closely associated with organized crime in Sicily. 

Sebastiano’s oldest brother, Antonino, was born in 1893, and their parents married a month later. Just before Sebastiano’s birth in 1910 his oldest brother, age seventeen, emigrated to the United States alone. Sebastiano, his mother, and siblings joined Tony on the Near North Side of Chicago three years later. It was in Tony’s neighborhood that six year old Angelo Marino was kidnapped by local Mafia gangsters. The neighborhood’s Mafia boss, Rosario Dispenza, was murdered the year after Sebastiano arrived.

When Prohibition began in 1920, every port city in America had the opportunity to get in on smuggling and reap the profits, or to resist the gangsters who would take extraordinary risks to slake the nation’s thirst. Benton Harbor, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, is about two hours by car from Chicago. In the Twenties, Benton Harbor’s Italian community, nicknamed “Brooklyn,” became a hotbed of Mafia activity, and a “leisure center” (Critchley, 209, p. 97) for Al Capone and his gangsters.

In February 1918, at the height of American involvement in the Great War in Europe, Tony Domingo married his first cousin, Maria Di Maria of Benton Harbor, and soon relocated there. The war ended in the fall. In July 1919 Frank, the next oldest brother, married Maria’s sister, Francesca, who was just fourteen but claimed to be eighteen in their marriage license. Another Di Maria sister, Antonina, was married to Carlo Ciaravino. Carlo’s first cousins, brothers Tony, Gaspare (called Jasper), and Vincenzo Ciaravino, were called bootleg royalty. (Become a Member of Mafia Genealogy on Patreon to read more about the Ciaravino family.) Jasper’s son, Leo, followed in the family tradition. When he was only nineteen or twenty, local news reported that he owned the largest distillery in the county. 

The Di Maria family were also involved in local Mafia bootlegging, which brought tragedy on more than one occasion. Tony and Maria Domingo’s six year old daughter, Matilda (or Martha), was accidentally shot and killed by her ten year old uncle, Camillo “Leo” Di Maria, on New Year’s Eve, 1925. The children were unattended at the Di Maria home when Leo found a loaded gun in the sofa cushions, left by a visitor from Chicago. That summer, Leo’s older brothers Frank and Sam Di Maria died on the same day in an accident in the family’s distillery.

Tony Domingo’s farm in Hagar, near Benton Harbor, was raided in April 1927 and a distillery found. In another raid the same day, Leo Ciaravino was revealed to be the owner of an even larger distillery. Tony’s brother-in-law — and Leo Ciaravino’s first cousin, once removed — Carlo Ciaravino provided the cash bond for Tony’s release. Carlo was killed two years later by an armed intruder in his home, while the rest of his family slept upstairs. His murder was attributed to gang warfare over illegal alcohol.

Tony Domingo’s wife, Maria, was killed in a car bombing intended for her husband, in October 1927. The suspected assassin was Tony’s former business partner, Louis Vieglo. Tony and Sebastiano went looking for him at the Fourth Ward Republican Club, were arrested for shooting up the place, and released the next day. Unsatisfied, Tony sold his farm and moved back to Chicago, intending to get the drop on the men who were trying to kill him, who allegedly worked for Capone. Tony was unsuccessful; he was shot and killed in a Chicago restaurant in August 1929.

Capone was allied to Joe “The Boss” Masseria, the boss of bosses, in New York City. Already devastated by the accidental deaths of his young niece and brothers-in-law, the murders of Sebastiano Domingo’s brother and sister-in-law galvanized him against Capone, and at the same time, sent him running for his life. In New York, Maranzano made contact and enlisted him in his war against Masseria.

Valachi remembered the details of Buster’s life a little differently than they actually occurred, whether through being misdirected intentionally, or the vagaries of thirty plus year old memories. He thought Buster had lost his father in a bombing that took out his whole family, leaving him alone in the world. In reality, Sebastiano lost his father in Castellammare when he was an infant. Giuseppe Domingo died at home in March 1911 when he was just 46 years old. (The cause of his death is not recorded.) In 1930, Sebastiano lived in New Castle, New York, with his mother and a boy, Joseph Domingo, who is listed as Mattia’s eight year old son, but is in fact her orphaned grandson: the only surviving child of Tony and Maria. Sebastiano appears as “Charles,” an Italian-born “relation” who entered the US the same year as Mattia. Their only other bit of subterfuge on the census form was to claim Joseph was born in New York instead of Michigan. Even their immigration year is accurate.

Buster had always been fatherless, as long as he could remember, and lost his only father figure to mob assassination, but not before trying and failing to avenge the death of his sister-in-law in a bombing meant for Tony. He may have felt some responsibility for his brother’s death, and saw what he was about to do as justice. Sebastiano Domingo was far from the rest of his kin, on a lonely farm in Westchester County. Although he was just barely a man, he was responsible for the lives and honor of his closest kin. Working as a farmer, he supported his elderly mother and his nephew, a little boy who’d lost all three members of his family to violence. Unreported to the census enumerator was his other profession, restoring the honor of the boy’s parents, his brother and sister-in-law, with blood. It was a lot to carry. His burden was about to get a lot heavier. 

Buster’s first target for Maranzano was Masseria’s consigliere, Giuseppe Morello, in August 1930. In November he killed Manfredi Mineo and Stefano Ferrigno in the Bronx. The following February he killed Joseph “Joe Baker” Catania, possibly with Joseph Valachi, though Valachi claimed he only drove the getaway car. Rick Porrello thought Catania’s murder was a clear case of Valachi inventing both killer and motive to cover his solo revenge killing of a nephew of his old archrival, Ciro Terranova, but in Maas’ book, Valachi claims to have known and liked Joe Baker.

Another of Porrello’s arguments against the reality of Buster’s existence, besides the convenience of a fall guy for Valachi’s deeds, is that unlike his peers, his death was not publicized. However, that wasn’t the case, as Critchley would later report. Valachi’s descriptions of Buster’s downfall do not exactly match one another, but they both fairly describe the contours of his assassination as they were reported in newspapers and by the city coroner, thirty years earlier. He died at a craps game on the Lower East Side, and it was a professional hit. Not right after Maranzano’s assassination, but possibly ordered by Vito Genovese, as Valachi claimed.

Sebastiano Domingo and another man, Salvatore Ferrara, were killed on 30 May 1933 in a multiple-gunman attack at Castle Cafe, on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Ten or twelve young men were gambling near the back when several gunmen entered, driving another victim before them into the restaurant. Domingo, identified from papers in his pocket, is called “Charles (Buster) Dominico,” age 22, of 205 Allen Street, in reporting on the shooting. He was a suspected bootlegger, according to police, who found him dead from his injuries on the sidewalk in front of the cafe. Survivors reported that four or five gunmen lined up the victims against a wall and emptied their weapons firing at them. A city record of the death of Sebastiano Domingo confirms he is the “Charles Dominico” reported on by the media, and provides a matching date of birth and the names of his parents as they appear in his civil birth record from Castellammare.

When Sebastiano was killed, his mother released the body for burial in St. Johns Cemetery in Queens, New York. Anello & Bonventre, the undertaker of choice for castellamaresi in Brooklyn, handled both Domingo and Ferrara’s burials. Instead of a quiet and unreported event, which would fit the narrative Valachi offered, their joint funeral drew hundreds who paid their respects.

After his death, Buster’s mother and nephew moved back west. In addition to Tony, Sebastiano, and Frank, there was a sister, Vita, who emigrated. Frank and his wife had three children and eventually owned a little restaurant in Benton Harbor. Vita married Anthony Mandala and they moved back to Chicago. She died in 1941 at the same address on West Walnut Street as her mother, Mathilde Domingo, in 1948. She’s buried with her sons, Tony and Frank, in Calvary Cemetery in Benton Harbor, MI. Joseph Domingo, the young orphan, returned to the Chicago suburbs, had a family, and died in 1992. He’s buried with his mother in Queen of Heaven Cemetery in Hillside, IL. 

Sources

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