*The Button Guys mafia membership chart presented after the story depicts the known membership of Joe Beck DiPalermo’s Prince Street Crew between the 1950s and 1980s. We name 18 “inducted” soldiers and another 46 hoodlum associates who were known members of this notorious Cosa Nostra faction. We also included a photo gallery with sixteen mugshots.*
One of the New York Mafia’s longest serving members — as well as one of its most notorious and dangerous — was a skinny, nerdy-looking little hoodlum by the name of Joseph “Joe Beck” DiPalermo. But mere looks can sometimes be deceiving.
Born in 1907 and raised in Lower Manhattan’s Little Italy neighborhood, DiPalermo was a devout and unrepentant criminal, voracious drug dealer and vicious assassin.
As a teenager, he became associated with the old Gaetano Gagliano Family, eventually becoming a formally inducted soldier. Years later, after Gagliano died and was succeeded by Gaetano (Tommy Brown) Lucchese, he was elevated to the rank of capodecina, becoming one of the Lucchese Family’s most important crew leaders.
Since the 1920s forward, DiPalermo’s stock-in-trade had always been robbery, alcohol bootlegging, counterfeiting U.S. currency, armed thefts and burglaries, the smuggling and wholesale distribution of hard narcotics like heroin and cocaine, the manufacture and sale of other drugs like quaaludes, extortion, credit card fraud and more. With all of his activities underwritten by terrorism and murder.
An Accomplished Assassin
In fact, judging from his background, it appears that Little “Joe Beck” was so proficient at terrorizing and killing people, that from time to time members of other Families requested his assistance in one gangland murder or another.
Case in point: In January 1943, when he and his close buddy and boyhood friend — the equally notorious Carmine “Lilo” Galante — were commissioned to assassinate the famous anarchist, labor organizer and anti-fascist Carlo Tresca.
In the early 1960s, in a case of mistaken identity, Genovese Family soldier Joe Valachi turned informant after he murdered a man in the prison yard he mistook for Joseph (Joe Beck) DiPalermo, whom he believed had be given a mob “contract” to kill him.
Often Imitated. Never Duplicated. Button Guys of The New York Mafia...There's Only One!
