When was Tommy Reina born?

Tommy Reina was born on 19 July 1888 in Corleone.

You can ask Wikipedia or ask ChatGPT when Tommy Reina was born, and the answer they will give you is probably wrong.

I’ll prove it. I know you want receipts.

This is a subject I screwed up in the early days of the Mafia Genealogy blog. (Believe it or not, the entry in question begins by apologizing for a screw up in the previous post.) I was corrected in the comments by a careful reader of both my blog and my source material, and set on the correct course.^[1] 

Nine years later, I still receive regular corrections from readers and colleagues. Being wrong is a critical part of doing Mafia Genealogy. I’ve left all my old posts up so those who want to take that deep dive can see history and genealogy progress by the same methods as other sciences. A lot of research, I would wager—maybe even the majority—is powered by the competitive thrill of proving someone else wrong.

Gaetano “Tommy” Reina, the founder of what is now called the Lucchese crime family of New York City, is obviously an important figure in the formation of the American Mafia as we know it today. And yet, despite a recent uptick in interest in this early period of Mafia history, there are persistent, major mysteries surrounding the life of the founder of one of New York City’s Five Families. An elusive fact has been Reina’s exact date and place of birth.

You can ask Wikipedia or ask ChatGPT when Tommy Reina was born, and the answer they will give you is probably wrong. At least they were when I wrote this.

Mike Dickson, in a biography of Tommy Reina currently available on the American Mafia History website, writes that Gaetano Reina immigrated with his family and grew up in poverty on the mean streets of New York City.^[2] In fact, he was the son of a wealthy mafioso and only left his native Corleone at seventeen to be wed in what was certainly an arranged marriage. Both of his brothers followed him to New York, but their mother died when they were children, and their father would not set foot in the US until he was past seventy.

Gaetano Reina was born in Corleone in 1888, the son of an unwed mother. Originally, he wasn’t named Gaetano Reina: he was called Carmelo Gaetano Rumore at birth.^[3] “Rumore” was his mother’s surname. His parents already had one son, Bernardo, born in 1885, and they had six more children after Gaetano. Giacomo Riina (there are two common spellings of the same surname, the Italian and Latin words for “queen”) and Carmela Rumore had a secular marriage in 1891 in Calatafimi, but they weren’t married by the Church until right before Carmela’s death in 1898.^[4] [5]

Tommy Reina’s parents were both Corleone natives. The 1890s were a turbulent decade in Italian history, and the first decade of Giuseppe Battaglia’s thirty-year rule of the Mafia cosca in Corleone. Under Battaglia, Giacomo Riina rose from field guard, or campiere, to borgese: someone whose businesses and land holdings were sufficient to support himself and his family. His career trajectory was only possible due to the corruption of the Mafia.

In a society where some ninety percent of people were agricultural workers living in desperate poverty, during some of the worst economic years for southern Italy, Giacomo Riina and his family were comfortable. Not that they didn’t suffer. Riina achieved his wealth and status by belonging to Battaglia’s cosca and committing whatever crimes that entailed. Giacomo Riina was a contemporary of Giuseppe Morello, active in the same years as the Vella murder, and belonged to the same notorious cosca.

As for Tommy’s mother, Carmela Rumore lived most of her adult life in a marriage that was not fully recognized by her extremely religious community, dependent upon a man whose wealth rested on his reputation for violence. Together, Giacomo and Carmela saw three of their children die in infancy; their youngest daughter, who outlived her mother, died at the age of five.^{[6] [7] [8] [9] [10]} Carmela and Giacomo’s relationship was only formalized in the Catholic Church in Corleone in 1898 “in extremis,” when Carmela was on her deathbed.

Gaetano and his brothers, Bernardo and Antonio, grew up in Corleone. All three emigrated to New York City as young men, with Tommy leading the way. Their father remarried in 1899 and had another son, Francesco. The oldest of the brothers, Bernardo, married in 1910 in Corleone before joining Tommy and Tony in New York. His wife and eldest daughter arrived in the summer of 1913.^[11] 

Anthony Reina emigrated in the fall of 1909, joining Gaetano at 225 E. 107th Street. He lived above the saloon owned jointly by Angelo Gagliano and Ippolito Greco, and worked in the same wet wash laundry where, a few years later, Gagliano employed Jack Dragna, freshly returned from his Italian military service. Dragna was suspected of being the gunman in the contract killing of poultry dealer Barnet Baff in November 1914. The year before, Baff’s house was the target of an attempted bombing; Antonio Reina was one of the men arrested.^[12]

Antonio worked as a saloon keeper in 1917, and still lived with his brother, Gaetano, when he registered for the draft.^[13] He moved to Second Avenue where he married his new neighbor, a recent immigrant from Castrogiovanni, the following January. One of the witnesses to their civil marriage was Mariano Marsalisi, a barber, who had been a neighbor of the Reina brothers on E. 107th Street.^[14] Mariano Marsalisi is best known in Mafia history as an international narcotics trafficker, active in the 1930-40s, when in fact he had been a mafioso for decades. Marsalisi was an early Morello gangster, like Tommy Reina, and likely made the split with him to what would be known as the Lucchese Family.

Eldest brother Bernardo Reina petitioned for naturalization in 1922 as a coffee merchant. In 1928, when his father came to live with him, Bernardo’s family was still at E.107th Street. In the 1930 census, the family lived in the Bronx and Bernardo was a retail grocer. In 1940, he was a building construction laborer. Bernardo died in 1949. He and Lucia had six children. The two youngest of his sons retired to Palm Coast, Florida.

In 1930, one of Mariano Marsalisi’s teenage sons worked as an ice man.^[15] Gaetano and Anthony Reina were both ice dealers in the Bronx.^[16] Ice delivery was highly competitive and territory-based, like trash removal, and like the latter, was an industry charged with brutality and motivated by organized crime associations. Gaetano Reina was killed in February, a death that Mafia historian David Critchley does not necessarily attribute to his resistance to Joe Masseria, but rather, at least potentially, to his many competitors in the violent ice trade.^[17] 

Gaetano’s youngest brother, Anthony Reina, became a naturalized citizen in 1935. He married, but had no children. In 1940, still in the Bronx, he became a spaghetti manufacturer.^[18] He also partnered with the gangster Eugenio Giannini in a scrap metal company.^[19] Anthony reportedly died in the early 1950s.

—

For years now, I’ve known that no one was sure exactly when or where Gaetano Reina was born. I knew what was claimed on Wikipedia, that he was born 27 September 1889 in Corleone, was incorrect. (Non-genealogists might be surprised at how often dates of life on grave markers are inaccurate.) I’ve worked extensively with the record set on FamilySearch and knew where to look for a birth in Corleone on that date. I’m sure it’s not there.

But when was he born? I looked in Corleone and in Calatafimi, the two places I knew his parents lived, for any children that were born to this couple. I found:

1. Bernardo, born 28 October 1885 in Corleone
2. Carmelo Gaetano, born 19 July 1888 in Corleone
3. Antonino Salvatore Roberto, born 7 December 1890 in Calatafimi
4. Salvatore, stillborn 11 February 1893 in Corleone
5. Salvatore Sebastiano Edoardo, born 18 January 1894 in Corleone
6. Calogera, stillborn 10 October 1894 in Corleone
7. Giuseppe, stillborn 29 November 1895 in Corleone
8. Maria Grazia, born 20 April 1897 in Corleone

The first son and only living daughter are named after Giacomo’s parents. Gaetano is Carmela’s father’s name. It wasn’t a universal phenomenon, but sometimes in the families from Corleone I’ve studied, when parents had more than one child with the same name because an older child died, especially when the child was named to honor a grandparent, the younger child was given multiple names to distinguish them.

Based on the evidence, I must conclude that Carmelo Gaetano Rumore was later known as Gaetano Reina or Riina, and is the Gaetano Reina of Mafia history.

On the other hand, multiple baptismal names like “Carmelo Gaetano” or “Antonino Salvatore Roberto” are not that common in Corleone, and are most common among the elite. In the cases I’ve found where younger siblings got a grander baptismal name, the name that was being remembered went first, followed by one or more baptismal names. In the older records you’ll sometimes see multiple given names set off with commas.

Bernardo’s baptismal record has a note, indicating that his birth was legitimized by his parents’ 1898 Church marriage. But no such updates appear on the baptismal records of his brothers, both born before their parents’ civil marriage, or on his sister’s, born the year before her parents were married by the Church.

I was looking for evidence of another child born to this couple in 1886 or 1887. I was concerned about the possibility that the child I hadn’t found a birth record for was Tommy. If the child died in infancy or at birth, that was the end of my search and I could declare Carmelo Gaetano the boy I am looking for in this family.

If by some chance I missed his birth because it occurred in another comune, it should still have been reported to officials in Corleone. The child’s parents being formal Corleone residents, the birth of a child in another comune would be reported to the city of Corleone, and a transcript of the birth would normally appear in the parents’ home comune, in Part II of the annual records. That was policy anywhere in Italy, and was often the case even with births abroad.

But there isn’t another child of this family who shows up anywhere in the records: not in Corleone, where the family lived, nor in Calatafimi, where they temporarily resided and one of the Reina children was born, and not emigrating, registering for the draft, marrying, living, or dying anywhere I can find. An absence of evidence is not positive proof, but a diligent and thorough search that finds no record of an event is one piece of evidence. Many such searches that find no evidence at all of a person existing is even more compelling evidence that the person being sought never lived.

Based on the evidence, I must conclude that Carmelo Gaetano Rumore was later known as Gaetano Reina or Riina, and is the Gaetano Reina of Mafia history.

Why was his birth reported on a different date? Many of Tommy Reina’s contemporaries didn’t know their birthdays. Young Italian men usually knew what year they were born, because it dictated their education and military service. But older men sometimes let a year or more slip and reported themselves younger or older than they were. With women it was about the same. As for the date of their births, birthdays weren’t celebrated in southern Italy. In secondary sources, such as a birthdate on a death certificate, sometimes information is not quite correct because the informant—even in a self-report like a draft registration—didn’t know the answer and made something up.

—

Wikipedia gives an exact date for Gaetano Reina’s birth that is incorrect. Where did this date come from? As of this writing in June 2025, the Wikipedia entry on Reina cites page 175 of Critchley’s Origin of Organized Crime in America. I’ve looked at this page in my paperback copy of Critchley’s book and there is no birthdate for Reina claimed on this page. Only a year of birth appears on Gaetano Reina’s death record; the same is true of his grave marker.^[20] The death certificate for the slain gangster calls him “Gaetano Reena.” His wife of twenty-four years, the informant, knew her husband’s name, approximate age, occupation, birthplace, and the names of his parents, but it appears that not even she knew her husband’s date of birth.^[21]

---