Pietro Peter Matranga

In the early years of the 20th century, Los Angeles was a city of burgeoning opportunity, but also of violent underworld rivalries. Pietro “Peter” Matranga, a 35-year-old man of Italian heritage, was a central figure in one of the city's most powerful crime factions. A fruit merchant by trade, he was married to Andriana Fusco and was a father to four children: Frances, George, Samuel, and Paul, the youngest born just two months before his father's death. The Matranga family, originally from an Arbëreshë community in Sicily, controlled criminal enterprises in the Plaza area, the heart of the city's Italian-American community, through extortion and violence. Their dominance, however, was violently contested by a rival faction led by Joseph Ardizzone.

The feud between the Matranga and Ardizzone families had simmered for over a decade, marked by a series of brutal killings. The violence escalated in late 1917. Just six weeks before Pietro’s death, his cousin and predecessor as faction leader, Rosario “Sam” Matranga, was ambushed and killed by a shotgun blast as he pulled his car into his garage on November 5. Police believed that both Sam and Pietro had been targeted for breaking the mafia’s code of silence by providing information to law enforcement about their underworld enemies. This cooperation made them marked men in a war where information was as deadly as any weapon.

On the evening of December 18, 1917, Pietro Matranga was walking home in the Boyle Heights neighborhood. As he made his way along Eastlake Avenue, heading toward his house at 1520 Biggy Street, a large green automobile with a black convertible top pulled up beside him near the intersection with Henry Street. Witnesses saw Pietro approach the car and speak for several minutes with the driver. The conversation appeared friendly, with Pietro casually resting a foot on the vehicle’s running board. When the talk concluded, he turned and took a few steps to continue on his way home.

In that moment, the seemingly peaceful encounter turned into a deadly ambush. A second man, who had been hiding in the back seat, rose with a shotgun and fired twice into Pietro’s back. He fell to the ground, mortally wounded, as the second blast tore through nearby fences and shattered the window of a house at 808 Eastlake Avenue. The green car, a six-cylinder vehicle according to one witness, sped away down Biggy Street toward downtown. Pietro was struck by ten slugs in his back and shoulders but clung to life for a short time.

Rushed to County Hospital, Pietro was questioned by police detectives. Convinced that he knew his killer's identity, they pressed him for a name. But adhering to the code of omertà even in death, he refused to speak. Before he succumbed to his wounds, a cousin visited him at his bedside. Investigators surmised that Pietro passed the name of his killer to his relative, ensuring that vengeance would be sought outside the law. His death officially occurred on December 22, 1917, marking a significant blow to the Matranga family's standing in the Los Angeles underworld.

The investigation immediately focused on Mike Marino, an ally of the Ardizzone faction who was also known as Mike Rizzo. Police suspected Marino was the gunman in the green car, responsible not only for Pietro's murder but also for the killing of Sam Matranga weeks earlier. Law enforcement searched for Marino, but he was never arrested or charged for the crimes. The Matranga family, however, did not wait for official justice.

The violent cycle of retaliation continued. After an attempt on his life in November 1918, Mike Marino was shot and killed in February 1919. It was widely believed that the Matrangas were responsible for his death, finally delivering the revenge that detectives had anticipated at Pietro's deathbed. While this act may have settled a score, it did not reverse the Matranga family's fortunes. The long and bloody war with the Ardizzone faction had taken its toll, and their power in Los Angeles continued to decline. The case of Pietro Matranga's murder was never officially solved by police, but it was closed by the street justice that governed the era.