Chapter Nine

Recruiting the Mafia

The decision to invade Sicily was made in Casablanca, Morocco, in January 1943. The decision makers were Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States. Roosevelt wanted the Soviet leader Stalin to attend the conference but he was busy overseeing the Russian defeat of a German army at Stalingrad. It was the turning point of World War II. Churchill had won his own victory over Nazi Germany in North Africa with the defeat of Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein two months earlier. ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory’, Churchill wrote later. ‘After Alamein we never had a defeat.’

With success developing also in the Pacific, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to carry on the momentum and launch their long proposed cross-Channel invasion of France. They had been ready to go a year earlier, but Churchill was cautious and argued they should land a force in North Africa instead. Roosevelt agreed. This time, at Casablanca, the US Chiefs of Staff pushed again, impatient to win the war in Europe with a direct assault on Nazi Germany. Roosevelt knew that Stalin wanted a second front opened in Europe to take some of the pressure off his forces, but again, he came down on the side of Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff who argued for more time to build up the Allied forces. They preferred to assault the soft underbelly of Axis Europe by attacking Mussolini’s Italy.

The argument raged for the ten days of the conference. US Naval Commander-in-Chief Admiral Ernest King said that all US forces should be deployed in the Pacific if France was not to be invaded. Eventually, on the insistence of General George Marshall, it was agreed that a planning staff was to be set up to prepare for an invasion of France, but the operation would not take place until 1944. Churchill, Roosevelt, and the British Chiefs of Staff had won the debate.

It would be the last time that Churchill’s personal influence on Roosevelt would determine Allied strategy in the war. As General Albert Wedemeyer, chief of US Joint Staff Planners, summed it up: ‘One might say we came, we listened and we were conquered.’

In the meantime, once the Allied forces had taken Tunisia and won the war in North Africa, there was to be an immediate invasion of Mediterranean Axis territory. But where exactly should they strike? Churchill recorded his thoughts in his history of the war:

I was myself sure that Sicily should be the next objective, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff took the same view. The Joint Planners, on the other hand, together with Lord Mountbatten, felt that we should attack Sardinia rather than Sicily, because they thought it could be done three months earlier . . .

I remained obdurate, and, with the Combined Chiefs of Staff solid behind me, insisted on Sicily. The Joint Planners, respectful but persistent, then said that this could not be done until August 30. At this stage I personally went through all the figures with them, and thereafter the President and I gave orders that D-Day was to be during the favourable July moon period, or if possible, the favourable June moon period.

At the end of the Casablanca conference on 24 January, President Roosevelt addressed the press and told them ‘peace can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power . . .’ This meant that the Allied powers would only accept an unconditional surrender from Germany, Italy and Japan.

Churchill backed up this statement, but it has since been criticised for prolonging the fighting at the end of war. As a result of it, went the argument, German forces felt they had nothing to lose by carrying on fighting. This meant that Allied forces would face strong resistance from German forces in any invasion of Europe – and that included Sicily. Any extra-military assistance to help reduce the intensity of this resistance would thus be very much appreciated.

The US Navy always believed the main struggle of the war was in the Pacific and its leaders were irritated by what they considered distracting issues in Europe. This lack of interest in the European theatre of operations compounded a lack of intelligence in the Mediterranean area. Rear Admiral W. S. Pye made this clear in a speech to graduates at the Naval Training School in New York on 16 March 1944:

In the present war the situation in regard to intelligence differs greatly from the last war, particularly in the Pacific. In the Atlantic, too, especially in North Africa and Italy, we found that we lacked much information required for the most effective planning.

We should not be too critical because of the unavailability of such latter information, for up to three years ago or less, no one could have foreseen our need for information on the coasts of North Africa and Italy.

They had just not expected to be fighting in the Mediterranean. Traditionally, this sphere of influence belonged to the British and the Royal Navy. As a result of the decision at the Casablanca conference, US Navy Intelligence had to work hard and fast to gather the information needed for a successful invasion. Interestingly, Pye added another excuse for a lack of intelligence preparedness – snobbery:

A combination of a shortage of officers, the cost of a large intelligence organization and a feeling among many Americans that intelligence duty is somewhat akin to spying and, therefore, in time of peace is an undignified and unworthy occupation.

Despite these excuses, US Naval Intelligence set about the task of preparing for the invasion of Sicily – Operation Husky – with speed and imagination. The officers chosen for the mission came from the Third Naval District – the same men who had been helping Haffenden and MacFall secure the New York docks. The fact that both operations involved making contact with Italian-speakers from criminal organisations was no coincidence.

Lieutenant Anthony J. Marsloe was appointed senior officer of a group of four Naval Combat Intelligence officers sent to North Africa in May 1943 to take part in Husky. A graduate of St John’s University Law School, Marsloe had served under MacFall in the District Intelligence Office from February 1942 and knew all about the contacts with Lanza and Luciano. He was one of the most ardent defenders of the policy of talking to the Mafia, as he told the Herlands enquiry:

Commander Haffenden’s theory was correct. Yes, the theory was correct because it neutralized the possible use of the underworld by the enemy; and the underworld was used as a possible means of obtaining information in order to aid our war effort.

Every available source of information which can be used to prevent, as well as to apprehend, those who are a potential or actual danger during an emergency or outbreak of hostilities is warranted by the unusual circumstances.

The other members of Marsloe’s team included three more officers from the Third Naval District Intelligence Office: Lieutenant Joachim Titolo, Lieutenant Paul A. Alfieri, and Ensign James F. Murray. Titolo was a practicing attorney who also served as Deputy District Director of the OPA in its battle against mobsters exploiting the black market in ration stamps. He also received a letter of commendation for his role in investigating the German saboteurs who landed at Amagansett, Long Island. Alfieri would serve as Chief Investigator of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor. All of them understood very well the workings of the New York underworld.

On 24 May 1943, Commander Haffenden became directly involved in the invasion effort when he was appointed Officer-in-Charge of ‘F’ section in the Third District Intelligence Office. It was also called the ‘Target’ section and was concerned with gathering strategic intelligence on Sicily and Italy.

This process had begun informally in the latter part of 1942 when Haffenden saw the value of gaining information from Italian-speaking New Yorkers now that American forces were to be fully engaged in the Mediterranean. Operation Torch landed over 50,000 American troops in North Africa in November 1942.

Numerous Italians of Sicilian birth or background and their relatives [said the Herlands Report] were enlisted to provide Commander Haffenden and his assistants information about the terrain, harbors, etc, of Sicily in anticipation of the Allied invasion there. Through these contacts and informants, the names of friendly Sicilian natives and even Sicilian underworld and Mafia personalities who could be trusted were obtained and actually used in the Sicilian campaign.

Commander Haffenden later told the Kefauver Senate Committee enquiry into organised crime that this was a substantial process involving 146 investigators gathering information from thousands of sources.

Marsloe described his own involvement in the research:

It is my recollection that B-7 Section, or Counter-Intelligence Section, as well as the Investigation Section, was engaged in a continuous search for logistic information concerning the enemy; and because of my personal knowledge of Sicily and the dialects of Sicily, from time to time various personalities, otherwise unidentified, were sent to me by Commander Haffenden. These men were interviewed and photographs, documents, or other matters of interest were taken and in turn given to Commander Haffenden . . .

Speaking to Commander Haffenden it was my understanding that this was part of the plan created by him and that these men in turn were being sent by his underworld contacts.

Meyer Lansky became involved in this process, taking numerous Italians to both the Astor and the Church Street HQs to meet Haffenden. ‘Prior to our attack on Sicily’, he recalled, ‘the conversations ran of their knowledge of the coastline and the contour of the land off the coast.’

Haffenden wanted to know about all the channels around the island and pulled out a big map for Lansky’s Italian contacts to comment on – pointing out their villages and what they knew about the surrounding landscape, as Lansky remembered:

The Navy wanted from the Italians all the pictures they could possibly get of every port in Sicily, of every channel, and also to get men that were in Italy more recently and had knowledge of water and coastlines – to bring them up to the Navy so they could talk to them.

Lansky brought in prominent refugees from the island, including a former mayor of a major Sicilian town. ‘He was brought through these gentlemen that visited Charlie Luciano’, said Lansky. ‘They solicited his assistance and he wanted to be of assistance and he was going to bring others. I brought him to the Naval Intelligence at 90 Church Street.’

Socks Lanza was also called in to help on this front, bringing in Italian-Americans with useful information about Sicily. One of these contacts was Vincent Mangano, who had run an import – export business between Italy and the US. Joe Adonis – one of the four killers of Joe the Boss – was asked to accompany Mangano to Haffenden’s office, so maybe there is a suggestion of some enforcement here. Lansky makes this more clear in his recollections:

Sometimes some of the Sicilians were very nervous. Joe [Adonis] would just mention the name of Lucky Luciano and say he had given them orders to talk. If the Sicilians were still reluctant, Joe would stop smiling and say, ‘Lucky will not be pleased to hear that you have not been helpful’.

Adonis arranged for many useful contacts to provide information on Sicily. On one occasion, he ‘sort of’ kidnapped a man who had been mayor of a village in Sicily. Mangano was said by Lansky to be the chief contact between the Mafia in the United States and its parent organization in Sicily. ‘Joe [Adonis] really worked very hard’, said Lansky, ‘to show he could be a patriotic American. He found some Italians we didn’t even know existed.’

Moses Polakoff was roped in as well and brought in his own Italian contacts. Those who only spoke Italian were passed on to Haffenden’s staff of translators. Lieutenant Marsloe was in charge of the linguistics sections. He spoke Italian, French and Spanish and understood the many Sicilian dialects that came up in interrogations.

Part-way through this project in January 1943, Socks Lanza was taken out of the team. He was arrested and sentenced to 7½ – 15 years for extortion and conspiracy. The main accusation was that Lanza was a ‘racketeer czar’ who had operated a shakedown scheme to get control of union funds. It came as a shock to other mobsters who thought their enthusiastic help for the war effort would shield them from such retribution.

When Socks Lanza stood before Judge James Garrett Wallace, nothing was said about his war work or even alluded to. His lawyer argued for leniency, saying he had been an asset to the community, but when he elaborated on this by mentioning his hard work on behalf of his union – the same union he wanted to loot – Judge Wallace broke in and said ‘He was an unmitigated nuisance to the community.’

It had been clear from the start that Lanza’s help would not be traded for leniency, but it left a bitter taste in the mouth of many of Lanza’s friends. By then, Naval Intelligence probably felt they had had the best of Lanza anyway. Lansky was convinced it was the work of Thomas Dewey – he had just become governor of New York and wanted to demonstrate his anti-Mafia credentials by sending to jail one of its leading figures.

Despite the removal of Lanza, the Navy’s work continued. Most mobsters had little alternative but to continue with their assistance, especially if they were connected with Luciano, as it was still his only chance of any reduction of his sentence.

Captain Roscoe MacFall, overall commander of the Third District Intelligence Office, was kept fully informed of the entire research procedure and commended Haffenden for his handling of it:

Prior to the landing of US forces in North Africa, and also subsequent to that time, the District Intelligence Office concentrated a considerable portion of its forces on the collection of strategic intelligence on the North African theatre and the Mediterranean basin . . . It was felt that, since Mussolini had been responsible for the expulsion of many Sicilians, persons of Sicilian origin, might be willing to aid Naval Intelligence.

This was a direct reference to Cesare Mori’s campaign against the Mafia in Sicily in the 1920s and how many of them had relocated to the United States. It was these people the US Navy wanted to speak to, said MacFall:

Haffenden would report quite frequently to me that he and the men under him were interviewing large numbers of persons of Italian birth, and that many of these informants came to Naval Intelligence through the instigation of Luciano.

All this information was recorded on the big wall map Lansky saw in Haffenden’s office. George Tarbox was the civilian artist responsible for charting the information. He produced a large map of Italy and Sicily, with transparent overlay drawings showing the information from numerous reports, all given reference numbers. When it was finished, it was three feet wide and four feet long and mounted in a wooden frame. This and other maps were later destroyed after the invasion.

A great deal of similar data [concluded MacFall] was sent to the headquarters of Naval Intelligence in Washington DC. While the names of certain classes of informants were then kept, such as banking house personnel and records, businessmen, etc, it was not deemed necessary or desirable to record permanently the names of underworld informants or persons coming through them.

Captain Wallace S. Wharton was on the receiving end of all this information in Washington. He was head of the Counter-Intelligence Section, Office of Naval Intelligence, and was particularly interested in potential sabotage and espionage activities in Italy. Haffenden visited him personally at least once a month, as Wharton recalled:

On the occasions when Commander Haffenden gave names to me, he told me that he had obtained these names from his contacts in the underworld. The names of the individuals in Sicily who could be trusted turned out to be 40% correct, upon eventual check-up and on the basis of actual experience.

Other crucial intelligence passed on by Haffenden to Wharton in Washington included the names of Sicilians who might be friendly to US armed forces in the event of an invasion. Throughout this research process, Luciano was regularly mentioned by Naval Intelligence officers as a helpful presence, guaranteeing the free flow of information from Italian-Americans. Luciano himself, however, denied the existence of this dimension of his wartime alliance with the US government:

As far as my helpin’ the government was concerned, then or even the following year when they said I helped ’em open up Sicily for the invasion by gettin’ the cooperation of the Mafia guys to help the American troops, that was all horseshit.

It would be easy for me to say there was somethin’ to all that, like people have been sayin’ for years and I’ve been lettin’ ’em think, but there wasn’t. As far as me helpin’ the army land in Sicily, you gotta remember I left there when I was, what – nine? The only guy I knew really well over there, and he wasn’t even a Sicilian, was that little prick Vito Genovese. In fact, at that time the dirty little bastard was livin’ like a king in Rome, kissin’ Mussolini’s ass.

This contradicts an earlier statement in which Luciano quoted Vito Genovese’s letters to him, saying ‘the most important thing he said was that in Sicily my name was like a king . . . in Sicily they thought of me as a real number one guy. And that set me to thinkin’ how I could give Dewey the legitimate excuse he would need to let me out.’ Clearly, he had considered his reputation in Sicily as a source of leverage with the US government.

Meyer Lansky had yet another view of Luciano’s involvement:

Lucky came up with a plan that I thought was pretty wild, but I passed it on to Haffenden . . . He wanted to join up with the invading army. He thought he could go in as an ordinary soldier and be a kind of liaison or scout. He said he was ready to go with the first troops.

He thought his presence would guarantee Sicilian cooperation. He didn’t want anybody to think he was just trying to get out of prison; he was ready to risk his neck to prove his point. He said he was prepared to be parachuted into the island . . .

Lansky laughed at that – he had a vision of Luciano landing on top of a church. He toned down Luciano’s proposal but he did put it to Haffenden, saying maybe they could land Luciano by submarine. Haffenden took the idea to Washington but said his superiors turned it down. In fact, Captain Wharton later testified that such an offer had been made:

Haffenden told me that Luciano was willing to go to Sicily and contact natives there, in the event of an invasion by our armed forces, and to win these natives over to the support of the United States war effort, particularly during the amphibious phase of an invasion.

Wharton said that Haffenden argued strongly for Luciano to go to Sicily, saying he could go to Governor Dewey and get him to pardon Luciano, releasing him to travel to Sicily via a neutral country such as Portugal. He also claimed that Luciano suggested the best place to invade Sicily was the Golfo di Castellammare, near Palermo, home to many leading Mafiosi.

Wharton considered the idea but later rejected it. He commended Haffenden’s enthusiasm and imagination but sometimes felt his ideas were not always balanced by good judgement. Naval Intelligence was happy with the information they were getting from Luciano and didn’t want to attract any more attention by releasing Public Enemy No. 1 from prison on a secret mission. That was certainly Lansky’s take on why such a mission was rejected.

In the light of this bizarre proposal, why then did Luciano deny any involvement in the projected invasion of Sicily? It may well go back to his realisation that if he was released from jail he would be deported to Italy, and he didn’t want anyone over there viewing him as a collaborator with a foreign invader – however friendly that nation might be.

That Frank Costello might have been trying an alternative route to get Luciano out of jail was revealed by Federal Narcotics Agent George White. He testified to the Kefauver Senate Committee enquiry into organised crime in 1950 that he had been approached by a drug smuggler called August Del Grazio. He claimed he was acting on behalf of two attorneys and Frank Costello. Del Grazio told White that Luciano was a principal member of the Mafia and had many useful connections in the Italian underworld. ‘The proffered deal’, recalled Senator Kefauver, citing White’s testimony, ‘was that Luciano would use his Mafia position to arrange contacts for undercover American agents and that therefore Sicily would be a much softer target than it might otherwise be.’ Luciano’s price was to be his parole and that he would then go to Sicily to make the arrangements.

Lansky denied the involvement of either of these two gentlemen in the ‘Luciano project’. ‘I never knew of George White’, he said, ‘and I still don’t know of August Del Grazio.’

In May 1943, after several months preparing for the invasion of Sicily, it was time for Haffenden’s task force to leave the desks of New York and join the soldiers in North Africa. Marsloe recalled:

Commander R. Thayer came to New York and spoke to me concerning a mission to be made up of selected personnel having intensive law-enforcement background and experience with particular emphasis on Italy – language qualifications – to land with the combat troops and perform certain essential services.

With just two hours’ notice, he left for Washington for further briefing. Marsloe was joined by Titolo, Alfieri, and Murray – all young naval intelligence officers keen to trade the streets of Manhattan for some real action abroad. Two other linguist officers travelled with them. They spent two days in Washington studying reports and on 15 May they flew via Newfoundland and Iceland to Scotland, and then on to the Mediterranean. In North Africa, at Mers-el-Kebir, they were given intensive commando training with the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the US Army. They were also brought up to date with all the latest information on Sicily. ‘We were the beneficial recipients of intensive indoctrination in North Africa from sources such as American and British monographs on the area’, recalled Marsloe.

So far, this story has focused on the American dimension of the relationship between the Mafia and Allied Intelligence – the so-called deal between Luciano and the US Navy to help the war effort. But, it must be emphasised, that the Americans were not the only nation willing to make a pact with the devil to win the war. So were the British.

One of the British reports that Marsloe and his team read was the 1943 Handbook on Politics and Intelligence Services for Sicily. It was prepared by the North African branch of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6). It was based on a variety of information sources, including the interrogation of Axis prisoners of war. Among a list of key Sicilian personalities mentioned in the report as possible contacts for the Allies was Vito La Mantia.

The British intelligence report described him as ‘head of a Mafia group, but escaped arrest at the time of Mori’s round-up through the refusal of his followers to speak’. The report described La Mantia as ‘very anti-Fascist and, if still alive, might supply valuable information: uneducated but influential: was last reported as the manager of a property belonging to the Mafia in Via Notabartolo, Palermo.’ Another influential Sicilian mentioned was a man called Le Pape. He was said to be a ‘leading lawyer of independent views: used to defend the Mafia; lives in Palermo.’ From this, it seems the British had no problem in making contact with leading Mafiosi in Sicily in order to help their invasion. This was not only an American idea.

In general, the same report was sceptical of the success of Mori’s regime in the 1920s. ‘As to the Mafia’, it concluded, ‘there are some indications that it was not completely destroyed by Mori’s savage purge . . .’

This was a view backed up by a report of 9 April 1943 prepared by the Joint Staff Planners for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was entitled Special Military Plan for Psychological Warfare in Sicily. The Joint Staff Planners (JSP, but also called Joint Planning Staff) were a new advisory organisation combining US military, naval and air personnel. They set out a plan to undermine Axis forces in Sicily.

The JSP analysis made much of the social connections between America and Sicily, referring to Italian-American veterans of World War I living in Sicily. ‘Links between Sicilians in America and their relatives in Sicily’, they said, ‘have been maintained through mutual assistance associations which customarily bear the name of the Sicilian town from which its founders emigrated.’ ‘There have also been reports of a resurgence of the Mafia’, said the JSP, defining it as a ‘secret organization for securing vengeance’. In the next sentence, the JSP mentioned a report of a whole Sicilian town that had revolted against the Fascists. So many had been involved in the unrest that the Fascists could not arrest them all. In their conclusion, the JSP said that ‘Sicilians are temperamentally susceptible to our psychological warfare agencies; they are war weary, and ferment for revolt exists.’

Their suggested lines of action included the organisation of dissident elements for active resistance. Their methods to accomplish this involved the infiltration of Sicilian-Americans onto the island to gather information on the condition of both the civilian and military populations, and to establish communications between Sicily and their headquarters in North Africa.

Some of the personnel required for this mission included Marsloe and his Naval Intelligence team, as well as others who had undergone selection and training in the United States and North Africa ‘with proper language qualifications for use in Sicily as organizers, fomenters, and operational nuclei in the conduct of guerrilla warfare.’ The JSP Special Military Plan for Psychological Warfare in Sicily gave further detail about preparing dissident elements in Sicily for active resistance. It described the ‘Establishment of contact and communications with the leaders of separatist nuclei, disaffected workers, and clandestine radical groups, e.g., the Mafia, and giving them every possible aid.’ That included ‘Smuggling of arms and munitions to those elements’, the ‘Organization and supply of guerrilla bands’, and the ‘Provisioning of active members of such groups and their families.’

The JSP, it appears, was strongly recommending the arming of Sicilian Mafiosi and would encourage them to carry out sabotage on bridges, railroads, roads, and military installations. In retrospect, it is a sensational admission, but at the time the Mafia were considered just another dissident element.

The JSP plan was sent for approval to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington DC. General George Marshall, chairman of the American Joints Chief of Staff, was at the top of the list for receiving the report.

In the light of the revelations contained in this secret plan, it cannot now be said that no one at the very highest level knew about US government proposals for collaboration with the Mafia. It was not just a US Naval Intelligence project engaged in at a relatively low level of command. It was understood and recommended by the very highest too – the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Special Military Plan for Psychological Warfare in Sicily was approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington on 15 April 1943. It was then passed on to the Commanding General, North African Theater of Operations, in Algiers – General Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The message was clear. The Mafia were to be deployed in the conquest of Sicily.