After getting started with some basic racketeering, Yale took control of Brooklyn's ice delivery trade by selling "protection" and creating monopolies.

Their gang became the first new-style Mafia "family" which included Italians from all regions and could work in partnership with other ethnic groups if it was good for business.

[citation needed] In addition to Capone, other gangsters who worked under Yale at one time or another included Joe Adonis, Anthony "Little Augie" Carfano, and Albert Anastasia.

Yale's top assassin was Willie "Two-Knife" Altieri, nicknamed as such due to his preferred method of dispatching a victim.

Recent research has called much of that into question and indicated that Yale's worst enemies were not the Irish waterfront racketeers but rival Italian crime families who were constantly jockeying for power in Brooklyn during the 1920s.

[15] The first known attempt on Yale's life occurred on February 6, 1921, when he and two of his men were ambushed in Lower Manhattan after they stepped from their car in order to attend a banquet.

Five months after Yale's injury, on July 15, 1921, he, his brother Angelo, and four men were driving on Cropsey Avenue in Bath Beach when another car filled with rival gunmen overtook them and opened fire.

This attack was believed to have been carried out in revenge for the June 5 killing of a Manhattan mobster named Ernesto Melchiorre, who had been murdered after a late-night visit to the Harvard Inn.

As the women exited the vehicle a carload of four gangsters rolled past, mistook Frank Forte for his boss, and shot him.

On November 10, 1924, Yale, John Scalise, and Albert Anselmi reportedly entered the Schofield Flower Shop and killed North Side Gang leader Dean O'Banion.

[18] In the early morning hours of December 26, 1925, White Hand gang boss Richard "Pegleg" Lonergan and a few of his men were attacked at Brooklyn's Adonis Club by a handful of Yale's men and a visiting Al Capone (Capone's son Sonny had just had an operation for a mastoid infection in New York).

Lonergan planned on leading his men into the club to attack the Yale crew as they gathered for their annual Christmas party.

According to author Patrick Downey, the Adonis Club shootings were most probably a spur-of-the-moment reaction to a drunken argument that Needles Ferry had engaged in with Capone and his companions.

In a last-ditch effort to mend the relationship with his longtime friend, Capone invited Yale to Chicago to view the Dempsey-Tunney heavyweight title rematch at Soldier Field on September 22, 1927.

[21] Distracted by a gang war with rival mobster Joe Aiello, a brief exile from Chicago, and the 1928 Republican primary election, Capone had to wait until the spring of 1928 to plan retaliation.

On July 1, 1928, a Sunday afternoon, Yale was in his Sunrise Club, located at 14th Avenue and 65th Street, when he received a cryptic phone call.

Refusing Joseph Piraino's offer to drive him, Yale dashed out to his brand new, coffee-colored Lincoln coupe and took off up New Utrecht Avenue, where a Buick sedan carrying four armed individuals stopped next to him.

A shotgun blast struck the Brooklyn gang boss on the left side of the head while a submachine gun bullet sliced through his brain.

Inside the car police found a .38 caliber revolver, a .45 automatic, a sawed-off pump shotgun and a Thompson submachine gun.

Police noted that at the time of murder, Yale was wearing a four-carat diamond ring, as well as a belt buckle engraved with his initials.

[24] Yale received one of the most impressive gangland funerals in American history, at which thousands of Brooklynites lined the streets to watch the procession.

Roughly half of Yale's men and territory were absorbed by the D'Aquila crime family, which was now led by Al Mineo, while the rest remained under Carfano.

Yale's murder turned out to be the first in a series of events that facilitated Masseria's attempt to consolidate all of New York's Mafia families under his control, which eventually resulted in the Castellammarese War.