Albert Anastasia

There is no gentle way to speak of Albert Anastasia, born Umberto Anastasio in 1902, and I will not try to soften it. He was one of the founding architects of the modern American Mafia, a boss of the operation grimly named Murder, Inc., and later head of what became the Gambino family. He ran New York's waterfront through the dockworker unions, and he ordered killings freely enough to earn names like The Earthquake and Lord High Executioner. In 1957 he was himself murdered, shot on orders from within his own world.

His Sun sat in Libra in the eleventh house, the placement of one who leads a tribe and reads the balance of a room, yet Libra's gift for fairness and negotiation was here bent entirely to the machinery of an organised gang. His Moon in Cancer in the ninth speaks of fierce loyalty to lineage and family. A Scorpio Ascendant lent the piercing, all-or-nothing survivor's mask.

I say this plainly: a chart describes temperament, the raw material a soul is handed. It never excuses a single choice. Anastasia chose cruelty, and the harm he caused was his own.