Chapter Eight

Putting a Contract on Hitler

In prison in Great Meadow, Lucky Luciano liked to follow the progress of the war. On one wall of his cell, he stuck a huge map of the war zone in Europe and noted every victory and every setback. He became a great fan of the aggressive General George S. Patton and raged at General Eisenhower for not giving him more control of the fighting.

By early 1943, Luciano was getting as impatient as Soviet leader Josef Stalin for the Allies to open a second front. As he saw it, the sooner the war was over, the sooner he would be out of jail. With a lack of action in Europe, Luciano finally ran out of patience. He summoned two of his top hit men – Tommy Lucchese and Joe Adonis. ‘I told ‘em somethin’ hadda be done with this guy Hitler’, said Luciano. ‘I said that if somebody could knock off this son of a bitch, the war would be over in five minutes.’ The Mafia hit men looked serious, looked at each other – then laughed. Luciano hit the roof:

What the hell are you laughin’ at? We’ve got the best hit man in the world over there – Vito Genovese. That dirty little pig owes his life to me and now it’s time for him to make good on it. He’s so fuckin’ friendly with Mussolini and that punk son-in-law of his, that Count Ciano, he oughta be able to get close enough to Hitler to do it.

A prison guard rushed over to the cell to see what the noise was all about. Luciano was beside himself. Why not kill Hitler? The Mafia could get to anyone. Then, suddenly, he too saw the funny side and calmed down. His suggestion was not the first time a Mafioso had considered assassinating top Nazis.

Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was the other half of the ‘Bug and Meyer mob’ – the Jewish gang formed by Meyer Lansky in the Lower East Side. Working together in their teens, they carried out contracts for bootleg gangs and made their own pile from smuggling liquor. As Lansky became more of an administrator of crime, Siegel liked to carry on with the killing. When Lansky linked up with Luciano, Siegel became a main hit man for him and was another part of the team that killed Joe the Boss.

Siegel was a dynamic personality with film-star looks and when he was sent to California in the late 1930s to take care of business for Luciano and Lansky, it was no surprise he started moving in celebrity circles. He mixed with Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, George Raft, and Cary Grant. One of his many glamorous girlfriends was Countess Dorothy Taylor di Frasso.

Countess di Frasso was the heiress to a fortune created by her father in the leather business. She had married a penniless Italian count and they had an open relationship, with her spending much time in California while he lived in Italy. In 1938, she decided to invest some of her fortune in a new explosive material called ‘Atomite’. Bugsy Siegel witnessed a test of this material in the desert and thought ‘if I’d only had some of this stuff in the old days’.

The countess contacted her husband in Italy who thought that Mussolini might well be interested in buying this new weapon. In fact, Il Duce so much liked the sound of it that he sent the countess an advance of $40,000 and invited her to demonstrate it in Italy. Di Frasso travelled with Bugsy Siegel and they stayed at her husband’s family home – Villa Madama – just outside Rome. Unfortunately, when the day came to test the new explosive before Mussolini and his ministers, the button was pressed and there was only a wisp of smoke. The failure angered Mussolini who demanded his money back. He also punished di Frasso by expropriating part of her husband’s villa.

As Siegel and the countess nursed their wounds, they noticed new guests of Mussolini arriving at the Villa Madama – senior Nazis Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels. The Jewish Siegel took an instant dislike to the arrogant Nazis. He had fought street fights with their kind – Bund members – in New York. ‘I saw you talking to that fat bastard Goering’, he told his lover. ‘Why do you let them come to our building?’

‘I’ve known him for a quite a while’, she said. ‘I can’t really tell him to stay away if he wants to come down here on a social call.’

‘I’m gonna kill him’, snarled Siegel, ‘and that dirty Goebbels too.’

‘You can’t do that’, the Countess panicked.

‘Sure, I can’, reasoned Siegel. ‘It’s an easy set-up the way they’re walking around here.’

The countess said that if Siegel did that then her husband would be shot too – by Mussolini. Siegel relented on his proposed double murder, but if they had been carried out – along with Luciano’s contract on Hitler – then the Mafia might really have changed the course of World War II.

Siegel was not the only Jewish gangster who wanted to do his bit for his country and his people. Dave Berman built a gambling syndicate in Minneapolis and became a mobster associate of Bugsy Siegel when he invested a million dollars in a Las Vegas hotel. But at the age of thirty-eight in 1942, he was happy to give it all up to go and fight the Germans. He wanted to ‘kill ten Nazis for every Jew’. Berman was turned down by the US Army as being too old and a convicted felon, but he joined the Canadian Army and was wounded in action in Italy, receiving an honourable discharge in 1944.

Vito Genovese – Luciano’s chosen hit man for Hitler – was sixteen when he first came to the Lower East Side from Naples in 1913. He got friendly with Lucky Luciano and together they embarked on robberies and burglaries. When Luciano graduated into more organised crime, Genovese followed him, running brothels and selling heroin.

Heroin was a relatively new drug in the 1920s. Invented in 1874, when it was synthesised from morphine by the chemist C. R. Alder Wright in London, the drug was then marketed from 1898 by Bayer Pharmaceutical in Germany. Heroin was, until the company let it lapse, a Bayer trademark, just like Aspirin. Bayer had tested it on their workers. They loved it and said it made them feel ‘heroic’, hence the trade name. Heroin was sold as a cough medicine and a highly effective painkiller. By 1899, Bayer was producing a ton of heroin a year and exporting it to twenty-three countries. It proved especially popular in the United States, but then reports came through of users becoming hopelessly addicted to it.

It became a recreational drug in New York and all along the East Coast where some users – ‘junkies’ – collected junk metal to sell to support their habit. Bayer stopped making heroin in 1913. The following year, the use of heroin without prescription was outlawed in the US and in 1919 doctors were banned from prescribing it. By then, there were thousands of addicts and both Jewish and Italian gangsters stepped in. By 1925, Luciano and Genovese were New York’s chief suppliers of smuggled heroin.

Intriguingly, an FBI memorandum of 28 August 1935 quotes a Bureau of Narcotics circular saying that Lucky Luciano accompanied another gangster called Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond to Weimar Germany in the summer of 1930.

It was believed [said the FBI] that a conspiracy existed to smuggle narcotics from Europe into the United States. Diamond was arrested in Germany and deported, and the statement was made by the Narcotic Bureau that they believe the resulting publicity disrupted the plans of Diamond, Luciana [sic] and the other associates . . .

Three years later Hitler and his Nazis may well have disrupted the plans themselves.

In the Castellammarese War, Vito Genovese supported Luciano’s strategy and was one of the four hit men who shot dead Joe the Boss. With the death of Maranzano shortly after, Genovese shared in the crime boom enjoyed by Luciano and his associates.

In 1932, Genovese met an attractive woman called Anna Petillo Vernotico – but she was married. Weeks later, her husband was found strangled. Both his killers were later eliminated. Genovese was ruthless and would kill anyone to get what he wanted. With the arrival of Thomas Dewey, the heat was turned up on New York’s leading gangsters and Genovese made contingency plans for his escape. He put hundreds of thousands of dollars in a Swiss bank account and reestablished contacts with criminals in Naples.

In 1937, with Luciano sent to jail, and accusations of murdering a fellow mobster, Ferdinand Boccia, hanging over him, Genovese fled to Italy. As a senior American mobster with lots of money to spread around, he became close to the Fascist regime and even friendly with Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s young foreign minister and son-in-law. It was Ciano who advocated the Fascist alliance with Hitler and signed the Berlin – Rome Axis agreement in 1936. But Hitler’s invasion of Poland, conducted without consulting Italy, infuriated Ciano and he tried to take Mussolini out of any military commitment. Events overtook them both with the fall of France, and Mussolini decided to enter the war on the German side on 10 June 1940.

Fascist party secretary Achille Pisani introduced Genovese to Ciano and the count encouraged the American gangster to invest some of his fortune in an electricity power plant in Nola near Naples. This investment was used to put pressure on local businessmen to deal with him – or face losing their power. Genovese also donated $250,000 to raising a Fascist Party building in Nola. In return for this generosity, the mobster was made a commendatore – the highest rank that could be held by a civilian in Fascist Italy.

Luke Monzelli was a lieutenant in the Carabinieri who had been assigned to follow Genovese during his time in Italy:

Vito Genovese obviously received his award because of his sizable contribution to the Mussolini monument at Nola [said Monzelli]. Mafiosi do all kinds of good works in Sicily. They build orphanages. They offer scholarships to children of the worthy poor. They do many favours for the clergy.

Quite properly they expect their deputies in Parliament to see to it that they are recognised in the New Year’s list which is similar to that made up every year for the Queen of England who distributes titles to esteemed subjects . . .

However, Luciano disapproved of Genovese’s association with the Fascists, saying:

When the war started he [Genovese] didn’t have to live in a country that was an enemy of the United States; there was plenty of safe places for a guy with money. But he was just rotten greedy . . .

We heard Vito had gone big into junk. Anythin’ that easy for him was hard to pass up, even if it meant betrayin’ his own country.

Luciano claimed that Count Ciano was a cocaine addict and was so hooked on Genovese’s supply that he even flew the gangster to Istanbul in his private plane to secure a batch of drugs, bringing it back to refiners in Milan. Genovese set up his own drug-trafficking route that included flying heroin over to North Africa and then shipping it eventually to America from there. This was fine when Rommel and his Afrika Korps were in command of the area, but Genovese was furious when the Allies won the war in North Africa and closed off this route.

To ingratiate himself further with Mussolini, Genovese decided to help him with a problem faced by the Fascists in New York since the 1920s – Carlo Tresca, editor of the virulently anti-Fascist newspaper Il Martello.

It drove Mussolini nuts [said Luciano]. So what does that prick Genovese do? He tells Mussolini not to worry about it, that he, Don Vitone, would take care of it. And, goddammit if Vito don’t put out a contract from Italy on Tresca . . .

The contract went first to Tony Bender who passed it on to an ambitious Brooklyn hoodlum called Carmine Galante. On 11 January 1943 at 9.40 p.m., the 68-year-old Tresca had just left the office of his magazine at 96 Fifth Avenue. He wore a big black hat and long flowing cloak and was accompanied by a fellow political exile, Giuseppe Callabi, when suddenly a dark saloon pulled up on the curb. ‘A man got out’, said the New York Times report, ‘and fired three shots at close range at Tresca. Then the assassin jumped back into the automobile and it fled, going west on Fifteenth Street. Mr Callabi took cover.’ Tresca was shot in the head and back. He stumbled a few steps towards his attacker, then collapsed in the gutter on Fifth Avenue near the north-west corner at Fifteenth Street.

The New York Herald Tribune described the scene in more detail:

The Fifth Avenue intersection was dark in the dimout. There was little traffic, and few people were about. As Mr Tresca and Mr Calabi [sic] turned the corner onto Fifth Avenue the killer suddenly materialized in the dimout, whipped out a gun and shot four times.

Two bullets went wild, but one struck Mr Tresca in the head, passing through his cheeks, and another lodged in his back. He fell into the Fifth Avenue gutter, the oversize hat he customarily wore dropping beside him, and was dead when Mr Calabi bent over his friend.

The assassin ran across Fifteenth Street to a waiting car, which sped away towards Union Square. When the police arrived, they found an empty revolver cartridge near the body and then 100 feet away, behind a row of trash cans, they found a fully loaded .38-calibre Colt revolver. Did it belong to a second assassin waiting in the shadows or was it Tresca’s?

Tresca had carried a gun back in 1931 to protect himself against Fascist assassins but accidentally shot himself in the leg. Ironically, back then, Tresca celebrated the Mafia as anti-Fascists. In return, Sicilian bootleggers threatened New York Black Shirts with dire retribution if they touched Tresca. The full story was told in the New York Herald Tribune:

In 1931, when Mr Tresca was leading an anti-Fascist movement among Italians here, he was approached by an ex-bootlegger who told him he had been paid to assassinate him. The bootlegger was a fugitive from justice and needed money to return to Italy. If Mr Tresca would give him the money, he said, he would forget about the murder.

News of the threat got back to the local Mafiosi who knew that Tresca was much valued by the Mafia back in Sicily who liked his anti-Fascist stance. So a mobster called on Tresca and invited him to a conference of local hoods. When he entered the room, the would-be assassin was on his knees, trembling. The hoods told him to kiss the hand of Tresca and never threaten him again. For the moment, Tresca was under the protection of the Mafia.

Mussolini’s vendetta with Tresca went all the way back to the early 1900s when they had met in Switzerland as young Socialist exiles. They argued bitterly and their parting conversation went like this.

‘Well, Comrade Tresca, I hope America will make you over into a real revolutionist.’

‘I hope, Comrade Mussolini, that you’ll quit posing and learn how to fight.’

In America, Tresca became renowned as a revolutionary. His beard, spectacles, broad-brimmed hat and cloak made him the cartoonists’ epitome of the bomb-throwing anarchist. He was arrested thirty-six times and whenever there was a suspicious explosion, the bomb squad contacted him. ‘They ask me what I know’, said Tresca, ‘but I never know anything. So we have wine.’

Over 5,000 people attended Tresca’s funeral, a non-religious service held at the Manhattan Center on 34th Street. Both anti-Fascists and anti-Communists gave eulogies. At first, Communists were thought to be the most likely killers as, in recent years, Tresca had been attacking Stalin for his murderous hold on power. He had also banned Communists from entering the anti-Fascist Mazzini Society and the government’s Italian-American Victory Council. But Magistrate J. Roland Sala claimed, just two days after the slaying, that Tresca was assassinated unquestionably by an agent of Mussolini.

On the same day, the 35-year-old Carmine Galante was arrested and held as a material witness. A month later, when Galante was brought before Supreme Court Justice Philip J. McCook, he was told that he was continuing to be held because of a violation of his parole. The police needed more time to build a case. When the judge then said that his case would be heard by another colleague because he was joining the army, Galante shouted out: ‘I hope you mow down the Japs, judge.’

However, the police could get no direct evidence to link Galante with the murder and he walked free. They kept a phone tap on him for the next four years, but they still got nothing. Genovese was never prosecuted for ordering Tresca’s killing.

During the Herlands investigation, one witness, Charles Siragusa, claimed he had a source within the New York County District Attorney’s office who had received information that Lucky Luciano knew the identity of the three men who murdered Tresca. The source said that Luciano ‘offered to disclose the identities of these murderers in return for outright parole and permission to remain in the United States. Mr Dewey was alleged to have rejected this offer.’

Joseph Bonanno’s approach to war was different to that of Luciano and Lansky. Admittedly, he did not have to profess a patriotic interest in the war because he was not in a situation where he needed to work a deal with the US government. He maintained a low profile and spent part of the war period out of New York in Tucson, Arizona, where he lived quietly with his family for several winters. There, his main inconvenience was wartime rationing of food and gasoline and the commotion caused by his wife losing a coffee pot.

Bonanno’s view on the war was that it wasn’t his battle. In his old Sicilian world, nationalism was not favoured by men of Tradition. They had fought against Italian and other foreign rule for centuries. ‘Our fighting is personal, direct, man-to-man’, he said.

Bonanno registered for the draft at the start of the war but said he was not called up because he owned a dairy. In 1945, Bonanno became a naturalised citizen of the United States. At the citizenship ceremony held in Brooklyn, he was asked by the Federal commissioner: ‘If you become a citizen and have to fight against Italians, what will you do?’

‘My duty is to fight for my country’, he answered carefully.

‘But what if you are sent to fight in Italy?’

‘I would do my duty’, he insisted. ‘But in my heart’, he thought later, ‘I would feel bad about killing Italians.’

There is, of course, an inconsistency in this. Italians were foreigners to a Sicilian – and he did not mind killing them in a gang war either. What he really meant, in typical Sicilian style, was that he did not subscribe to fighting in any war on behalf of a nation. He fought only his private wars. In that, he most definitely maintained the tradition of old Sicily – an attitude left behind by other New World gangsters.

Joseph Valachi was a low-level Mafioso, serving as a ‘soldier’ to Vito Genovese. He functioned as a hit man and made money from loan-sharking and the numbers racket. When the war came, he was thirty-nine. The shift to a war economy had its effect on him along with the rest of the Mafia in New York. Many of his lower-end workers, ‘runners’, could earn more money working in war production factories and they drifted away from crime. With plenty of jobs and money around, the poorer members of the community stopped borrowing from Valachi and stopped playing the numbers lottery game.

Valachi had invested some of his ill-gained money in a clothes-making factory and this won a contract to produce military orders. It was not enough for Valachi and he looked around for some other money-making scam. He considered selling heroin, but his potential partners were arrested trying to bring in morphine from Mexico. Instead, he found a new opportunity in exploiting the wartime black market in fuel ration stamps. ‘I thought it was penny-ante stuff’, he said at first. ‘Then I find out how them pennies can mount up.’

The owner of his local garage knew he was connected and asked him to get some ration stamps. Valachi met another low-ranking mobster called Frank Luciano (no relation to Lucky) and got 10,000 gallons-worth of stamps from him. As the middleman, Valachi made $189. It wasn’t a huge sum, but Valachi didn’t have to do much to get it. His next transaction with Frank Luciano was for ten times as much – and they struck up a partnership.

The ration stamps they sold had to be genuine. They could not pass off fakes as this was like handling counterfeit money and would attract too much attention. Instead, vast numbers of stamps were obtained by breaking into the local branches of the Office of Price Administration (OPA). This was generally left to gangs of burglars who passed the stamps on to the Mafia. Such an upsurge in the theft of stamps encouraged some OPA officers to put them in banks, but others joined the boom and sold them on to gangsters. At one time, it was estimated that some 250,000 gallons of gasoline a day was being diverted on to the black market. Eventually, the government had to issue a national appeal saying that the ‘lives of our boys in uniform depend on millions of gallons of gasoline.’

Valachi did not care about that. The money was starting to roll in. Sometimes, as the stolen stamps bore serial numbers, they were considered too hot and would be dumped by the mobsters on unsuspecting middlemen. In one day, stamps representing eight million gallons were shifted in such a way. The vast amount of stamps temporarily depressed the market and dealers lost a lot of money, but Valachi didn’t expect any of them to complain to the Mafia. By the end of the war, he had made over $200,000 from selling on black market stamps. ‘It was the best business I was ever in’, said Valachi, ‘some of the big dealers made millions out of it, and it lasted right up to when they threw the A-bomb on the Japs.’

One of the biggest ration stamp dealers was Lucky Luciano. He ran the business from inside his jail with the help of Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello. Apart from dealing in gas, they also cornered the meat market, as Luciano remembered:

Tommy Lucchese had taken over a lot of the restaurants that [Dutch] Schultz used to control, and the outfit was not only supplyin’ meat but we was sellin’ ‘em the stamps so they could buy it. Frank [Costello] told me we had a good lock on about 400 gas stations where we bought a piece in each one all the way from New York to Louisiana.

The extent of the secret war fought between the OPA and the gangsters ripping off ration stamps was finally revealed in August 1945 in a newspaper report. Counterfeit stamps had been detected early in the war by the use of black lamps and chemical tests. It was stolen genuine stamps that were the most difficult to trace. These stamps were taken from filling stations or distribution companies in which the fuel companies had deposited used stamps after pasting them on sheets, known as ‘bingo sheets’ in the black market. Said the report:

Some of the black market gangs – the cruder element – steamed the ration stamps off sheets which their men had stolen or bought them from free-lance thieves. These stamps became known as ‘steam-offs’ by Federal agents, who later spotted them on other sheets during routine inspections at the OPA ration currency verification center here.

Some of the cleverer mobsters got wise to this, understanding that the steam produced chemical changes in the stamps, which could be easily spotted by government experts.

One of the black market ‘master minds’ made use of the laws of physics to break the laws of rationing [quipped the reporter]. He knew the effect of extreme cold on the glue of the ‘bingo’ sheets would cause the stamps to pop right off the paper. Thus were ‘pop-offs’ born.

Household fridges were not cold enough for this operation and so mobsters rigged up freezers to make the stamps come off instantaneously. OPA investigators foiled this by discovering that the quick freezing made tiny changes in the dimensions of the stamps and so, with delicate measuring equipment, they could detect the criminal stamps. With such high-tech methods, the OPA claimed, over three years, to have saved an estimated 25,000,000 gallons of gasoline that otherwise would have gone to the black market. This victory was probably news to the Mafia who were more than happy with their profits from wartime ration stamps.

‘That was some business until the war was over’, said Luciano.