Organized Crime Figure. Known as “Joe Baker”, he was a top Captain to Joe “the Boss” Masseria during the Castellammarese War. On February 3, 1931, future mob informant Joseph Valachi, then a soldier loyal to Salvatore Maranzano, shot him six times while he was walking on a street in the Bronx. He died in the hospital two days later. A nephew of Ciro Terranova, Joseph Catania was given one of the largest funerals the Bronx had ever seen, with a procession over one hundred cars long with forty open cars to carry the flowers to the cemetery.

Giuseppe and Calogero became followers of their uncle Ciro Terranova and the Morello crime family. During Prohibition he took control of the Italian bread industry in the Bronx  and achieved some level of notoriety when it was revealed a judicial officer “had been friendly with Terranova and Joseph Catania for years and socialized with them…through the Tepecano Club“ and may have been a middleman in judicial corruption.

In 1930 two separate organized crime factions began attacking each other. Known as the Castellammarese War, it pitted mobsters allied to Salvatore Maranzano against those allied with Joe Masseria. Catania was allied with the latter, had been hijacking Maranano’s liquor trucks and ultimately was shot by Maranzano loyalists in front of a candy store in the Bronx on Feb. 3, 1931. His death may have been engineered to bring a speedy conclusion to the Castellammarese War, and he died two days later at Fordham Hospital in New York City. Terranova funded an elaborate funeral, with forty cars to carry the floral displays. He is buried at old St. Raymond’s cemetery in the Bronx.