JOE VAGLICA’S LAST PLATE OF FRIES
In the early morning of December 5, 1928, patrolman Frank Osowski was walking his beat in downtown Cleveland when he noticed a car pulling up in front of the Statler Hotel on Euclid Avenue. A group of men emerged that caught the officer’s eye. As he told a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “Well, it was this way. A car, all covered in dust, drove up in front of the hotel. It was about sunrise. I didn’t pay much attention to them at first. Lots of people come to hotels in the morning. But these boys looked tough, as you might say. There were eleven of them.”
Osowski followed them into the hotel, and after they checked in, he jotted down their names and returned to the station to give them to the detective bureau before his shift ended. One of the detectives, Emmet Potts, recognized some of the names as gangland figures. He had also just received a telegram from Chicago stating that some of Al Capone’s men were traveling to Cleveland for a meeting. So, with reinforcements, Potts went to the hotel and rounded up 21 men.
At the station, the men were booked and photographed. The newspapers were already on the scene, calling it a meeting of suspected bootleggers and gunmen. Some powerful names were in the crowd, from New York mob powers Joe Profaci and Vincent Mangano to Capone men Joseph Giunta and Pasquale Lolordo.
The real reason for the Statler Hotel meeting is not fully known. In his essential The Origin of Organized Crime in America, David Critchley presents the most logical theory that the meeting was held to discuss the killing of Brooklyn mob boss Salvatore D’Aquila and other assassinations in Chicago. But authorities could not directly tie the Statler guests to any specific crime. So on December 15, ten days after their arrest, the men were released after pleading guilty as ‘suspicious persons’.
Two of the men arrested were not on the Cleveland PD’s radar. They were Tampa residents Ignazio Italiano and Joe Vaglica. Italiano was the Tampa Mafia’s boss at the time. Vaglica’s exact position in the Mafia was unknown. However, his appearance with Italiano at the Statler meeting suggests he was at least a trusted capo, if not a significant power in his own right. In a 1963 FBI report, Vaglica was described by an informant as “definitely a member years ago of the Italian group referred to as the Mafia” and that “Vaglica had been dealing in narcotics and diamonds.”
Joe (Giuseppe) Vaglica was born in 1894 in Italy. He arrived at Ellis Island on January 24, 1895, at 11 months old. He traveled with his 15-year-old sister, his 7-year-old brother, and their mother, Maria. The family sailed out of Naples on the SS Kronprinz Friedrich Wilhelm.
Vaglica had spent some time in Chicago before relocating to Tampa in the 1920s. In the 1930 census, Joe listed his occupation as a cigar maker. By 1937, Joe was running the White Spot Barbecue, an eatery and dance hall on Nebraska Avenue in Tampa, just south of Nebraska and Broad St. intersection.
Just after 3:00 AM, on July 11, 1937, Joe Vaglica was sitting at the outside counter of the White Spot eating a plate of fries. He was chatting with the waitress, Ethel Hamilton. “I was leaning on the counter-talking to Mr. Vaglica, and when I reached over his shoulder to take a potato, I heard a car stop across the street.”
The car was a black 1937 two-door Ford, slowly cruising past the front of the White Spot. The vehicle stopped directly across from the counter. The back passenger window lowered, and four .20 gauge shotgun blasts ripped through the front of the restaurant and the back of Vaglica. Ethel saw the shots and watched the car speed away, east down Broad St. She later told investigators that three men were in the backseat. However, the witnesses could only give a description of the car and a vague description of the driver, who was described as ‘stout.’
After the shots rang out, Ethel and two other customers in the restaurant ran over to Joe, but it was too late. He had been hit with ten slugs and died instantly. Ethel described the event reported by the Tampa Morning Tribune.
“There were four shots, fast, one right after another, and they fired out the car’s back window. I was within three feet of Mr. Vaglica when he was hit. He was dead before he hit the ground.”
Police questioned all the witnesses except for one waitress, Alice Haneleaf. The 20-year-old fled the scene before police could take her statement. They caught up with her a few days later and held her at the station, thinking she may have been involved in some capacity. However, after questioning her for a few hours, she was released.
Vaglica’s death was the third unsolved gangland homicide within a year, preceded by the deaths of Gus Perez, Frank Carrao, and Charlie Walls’ chief lieutenant Eddie Virella. Police chalked up the Vaglica death as the latest gangland war that rocked Tampa. That war was being fought between the upstart Sicilian Mafia, Charlie Wall, and his loyalists.
With Vaglica’s stature in the Mafia, his killing was a significant notch in the belt of the Wall faction. But it was not the end of the killing. And though Wall’s group seemed to take the upper hand with the death of Vaglica, the streets of Tampa would run red with gangster blood for years to come.
Scott M. Deitche is an author specializing in organized crime. He has written seven books and more than 50 articles on organized crime for local and national publications. He has been featured on the History Channel, A&E, Discovery Channel, AHC, C-SPAN and Oxygen Network. In addition, he has appeared on dozens of local and national news shows, as well as more than 40 radio programs. His latest book is Hitmen: The Mafia, Drugs, and the East Harlem Purple Gang. For more information about Scott, click HERE