Umberto Valenti

Umberto "The Ghost" Valenti (August 14, 1891 – August 11, 1922) was a Sicilian-born New York City gangster and prominent member of the D'Aquila crime family during the 1910s. He is frequently confused with Rocco Valenti, a Camorra gunman of the same era.

Valenti was born in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, Sicily and immigrated to America in 1910. After settling in the Lower East Side of New York, he joined the Mafia family led by capo di tutti capi Salvatore D'Aquila. He was said to have been the shooter in the May 1914 murder of D'Aquila's chief rival, Italian Harlem mobster Fortunato Lomonte, After this successful hit, Valenti became known as D'Aquila's chief assassin.

By the beginning of Prohibition, Valenti was considered one of the best gunmen in New York; he was suspected in at least twenty murders. During this period, Umberto Valenti had run afoul of his boss, Salvatore D'Aquila, and was one of twelve men (including Giuseppe Morello, Ignazio Lupo, Ciro Terranova and others) marked for death. Valenti fled to Sicily for a time. Upon his return to America in January 1922, Valenti attempted to make amends with D'Aquila by eliminating his chief rival, Vincent Terranova.

On May 7, 1922, the boss of the Morello/Terranova crime family, Vincent Terranova, was killed in a drive-by shooting near his E. 116th Street home. Valenti was believed to have been personally responsible. Mere hours later, Terranova's underboss Silva Tagliagamba was fatally wounded in Lower Manhattan by Valenti and gunmen working for him. The next day, Valenti and some of his men attacked the new boss of the rival Terranova family, Giuseppe Masseria. Valenti found Masseria and his bodyguards on Grand Street "within a block of Police Headquarters". The New York Herald reported that "When the fight was ended, the gunmen had shot four men and two women, but had not harmed each other." Masseria tossed his pistol away and was arrested while fleeing the scene.

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