In 1910, after the arrest of the head of the bosses Giuseppe Morello and his brother-in-law Ignazio Lupo known as the wolf, for the crime of counterfeiting and the subsequent conviction, a power vacuum was created at the top of the first Mafia family in New York. To fill it the mafia families elected D'Aquila, Salvatore meant Totò or Zio Totò who at that point was considered as the boss of the American mafia bosses. He was born in Palermo in 1873. He arrived in New York in 1904 as an importer of cheeses. D'Aquila began his career in the underworld as a soldier of Giuseppe Morello and Ignazio Lupo and operated in the Bronx.