Joseph Valachi
Another of Salvatore Maranzano’s soldiers was Joseph “Joe Cago” Valachi. As a boy, Valachi was known for his ability to build makeshift scooters out of wooden crates. This earned him the nickname Joe Cargo, which was later shortened to Joe Cago. As a youth he had made the mistake of joining an Irish gang. This so displeased the Italian underworld that, while he was serving a prison sentence for theft, he was punished by a knife wound that ran under his heart and around to his back, requiring thirty-eight stitches. He got the message and, after he was released, joined the Mafia, starting as a driver. Then with the Castellammarese War, he got his chance to advance his criminal career. He rented an apartment in Pelham Parkway, overlooking that of Steven Ferrigno, one of Joe the Boss Masseria’s lieutenants. It was from there that Ferrigno and Al Mineo, another of Masseria’s lieutenants, were shot and killed by a team led by an assassin known simply as “Buster from Chicago”. Although he was with the two dead men, Joe the Boss once again escaped unscathed. For his participation in these killings, Valachi was “made” – he became a full member of the Cosa Nostra. He then ran a numbers racket, an illegal “horse room”, slot machines and a loan-sharking operation. During the Second World War, he made $200,000 out of selling gasoline on the black market. In 1960, he was convicted for selling drugs and shared a cell in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary with Vito Genovese. Convinced that Genovese was going to have him killed, he beat another prisoner to death with a length of iron pipe. Then he broke the omertà and became the first man to admit to membership of the Cosa Nostra. In 1963, he testified before Senator McClellan’s committee investigating organized crime. His testimony on the organization and activities of the Mafia were so detailed that the McClellan hearings became known as the Valachi hearings. Although the US Department of Justice banned the publication of his memoirs, they were used by journalist Peter Maas in his 1968 book The Valachi Papers. In 1972, the book was made into a movie of the same name with Charles Bronson playing Valachi. After surviving a suicide attempt in 1966, Valachi died of a heart attack at La Tuna Federal Correctional Institution in Texas in 1971. Until Valachi spoke out, the existence of the Cosa Nostra was a thing of rumour. He explained how, in 1930, after the Ferrigno-Mineo assassination, he was picked up by Frank (Chick) Callace, along with two members of his 1929 burglary gang, Salvatore “Sally Shields” Shillitani and Nick Padovano.
“Chick said, ‘Get ready. We’re going on a ninety-mile trip.’ He knew the way and did all the driving. Besides me, there was also Sally and Nicky. We were a little nervous and didn’t do much talking. We had an idea of what was going to happen.
“I never knew where we were when we got there, but the house was what you would call Colonial style. Anyway, it had two storeys and was painted white, and it was in the country. I don’t know whose house it was. What I don’t know, I don’t know. It was night, and I couldn’t make out any other houses nearby. I remember when we went in, Chick took us into a little room on the right. The ‘Doc’ – that’s all I know him by; he was with us for a while at the Pelham Parkway apartment – and Buster from Chicago came right in and started bullshitting with us for a minute about this and that. Then me, Sally, and Nicky were left alone. After a time some guy, I forget who, comes to the door. He waves at me and says, ‘Joe, let’s go.’
“I follow him into this other room, which was very big. All the furniture was taken out of it except for a table running down the middle of it with chairs all around. The table was about five feet wide and maybe thirty feet long. Now whether it was one table or a lot of tables pushed together, I couldn’t tell, because it was covered with white cloth. It was set up for dinner with plates and glasses and everything.
“I’d say about forty guys were sitting at the table, and everybody gets up when I come in. The Castellammarese and those with Tom Gagliano were all mixed up, so they are one. I don’t remember everybody. There was Tommy Brown – you know, Tommy Lucchese, I never heard anyone call him ‘Three-finger’ Brown to his face. There was also Joe Profaci and Joe Bonanno and Joe Palisades – real name Rosato – and Nick Capuzzi and Bobby Doyle and The Gap and Steve Runnelli and others too numerous to mention.
“I was led to the other end of the table past them, and the other guy with me said, ‘Joe, meet Don Salvatore Maranzano. He is going to be the boss for all of us throughout the whole trouble we are having.’ This was the first time I ever saw him. Gee, he looked just like a banker. You’d never guess in a million years that he was a racketeer.
“Now Mr Maranzano said to everybody around the table, ‘This is Joe Cago,’ which I must explain is what most of the guys know me by. Then he tells me to sit down in an empty chair on his right. When I sit down, so does the whole table. Someone put a gun and a knife on the table in front of me. I remember the gun was a .38, and the knife was what you would call a dagger. After that, Maranzano motions us up again, and we all hold hands and he says some words in Italian. Then we sit down, and he turns to me, still in Italian, and talks about the gun and the knife. ‘This represents that you live by the gun and the knife,’ he says, ‘and you die by the gun and the knife.’ Next he asked me, ‘Which finger do you shoot with?’
“I said, ‘This one,’ and I hold up my right forefinger. I was still wondering what he meant by this when he told me to make a cup of my hands. Then he put a piece of paper in them and lit it with a match and told me to say after him, as I was moving the paper back and forth,‘This is the way I will burn if I betray the secret of this Cosa Nostra.’ All of this was in Italian. In English Cosa Nostra would mean ‘this thing of ours’. It comes before everything – our blood family, our religion, our country.
“After that Mr Maranzano says, ‘This being a time of war, I am going to make it short. Here are the two most important things you have to remember. Drill them into your head. The first is that to betray the secret of Cosa Nostra means death without trial. Second, to violate any member’s wife means death without trial. Look at them, admire them, and behave with them.’
“I found out later that this was because sometimes in the old days if a boss fell for a soldier’s wife, he would have the poor husband killed, whether she liked it or not. Now I was told that this wasn’t an everyday thing, but once is enough. Right?
“Mr Maranzano then says, ‘Everybody up. Throw a finger from zero to five.’ So all the guys around the table threw out their right hand at the same time: Some of them had no fingers out; some had two or three, the limit, naturally, being five. When all the fingers are out, he starts adding them up. I forget what it was. Let’s say they came to forty-eight. So Mr Maranzano starts with the first man on his left and keeps counting around the table, and when he got to forty-eight, it fell on Joe Bonanno, also known as Joe Bananas. When Mr Maranzano saw where the number fell, he started to laugh and said to me, ‘Well, Joe, that’s your gombah’ – meaning he was kind of my godfather and was responsible for me.
“So Joe Bananas laughs too, and comes to me and says, ‘Give me that finger you shoot with.’ I hand him the finger, and he pricks the end of it with a pin and squeezes until the blood comes out.
“When that happens, Mr Maranzano says, ‘This blood means that we are now one Family.’ In other words, we are all tied up. Then he explains to me how one member would be able to recognize another. If I am with a friend who is a member and I meet another friend who is a member, but the two of them don’t know each other, I will say, ‘Hello, Jim, meet John. He is a friend of ours.’ But like if the third guy is just a friend and not a member, I would say, ‘Jim, meet John. He is a friend of mine.’
“Now the ceremony is over, and everybody is smiling. I’d say it took about ten minutes. So I move away and leave the chair for the next man, who was Nicky, and there is the same routine. After him it was Sally’s turn.
“Then they take the knife and gun from the table, and Mr Maranzano orders the food to be brought in. I didn’t see no women, and I didn’t go into the kitchen to look. I figured it was no time to be nosing around. The men around the table who were members brought the food in on big platters. First came the spaghetti aglio ed olio. Next there was chicken, different kinds of meat, I think also veal. There was a lot of whisky and bottles of wine in those straw baskets, but nobody was drinking much. During the meal Sally, Nicky, and me, being the new members, talked among ourselves – mostly about how great it was to be in the Mob and how we were going to put all our hearts into the ‘trouble’.
“After the coffee Mr Maranzano got up and said, ‘We’re here together because Joe Masseria has sentenced all the Castellammarese to death. At the same time you other guys started at your end because he had Tommy Reina killed without justice. So now we are all one. We’re only a few here, but in a month we’ll be four or five hundred. We have to work hard. The odds are against us. The other side has a lot of money, but while they’re enjoying themselves, we’ll eat bread and onions. You all will be placed in different apartments around the city. We will have spotters out on the street. These spotters will have the telephone number of our main headquarters. Headquarters will have each of your numbers. When a call comes in from the Bronx, for instance, that somebody has been spotted, the apartment we have in the Bronx will get a call. And when that call comes, you have to respond as fast as you can. Each of you new members will be placed with someone who knows what the enemy looks like. Of course, you have been given a picture of Masseria. He’s the most important one. I also want to tell you that the business at Pelham Parkway has got them confused. They don’t know how we found out about the meet they were having, and that’s in our favour. Already they don’t know who to trust. We must concentrate on getting their main bosses, and we must get Masseria himself. There will be no deal made with Joe Masseria. The war will go on for ten years if we don’t get him.’ ”
Throughout the rest of 1930 and into 1931, the Castellammarese War raged on, and before the bloodletting was over, some sixty bodies would litter US streets. Although nationwide in scope, the crucial battle was waged in New York City between the Maranzano and Masseria forces . . . Finally two of Masseria’s most trusted sidekicks, Charlie “Lucky” Luciano and Vito Genovese, secretly turned against him. In return for their promise to have Masseria killed, Maranzano agreed to halt the war.
Masseria literally never knew what hit him. He was invited by Luciano to dine one afternoon in a Coney Island restaurant called Scarpato’s. From all accounts Joe the Boss, surrounded by trusted aides, had a fine time during the meal – the last one he ever ate.
(Case No. 133 of the 60th Squad, New York Police Department, notes that at about 3.30 p.m. on 15 April 1931, Giuseppe Masseria, also known as Joe the Boss, last known residence, 65 Second Avenue, New York City, while sitting in a restaurant at 2715 West 15th Street, in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, was shot in the back and head by unknown persons who escaped.)
Thus Salavatore Maranzano, always a shadowy figure as far as the police were concerned, became the undisputed chieftain of the Italian underworld in America. His ascension to power also marked the organization of the modern Cosa Nostra:
“Mr Maranzano called a meeting. I was just notified. I don’t remember how, but I was notified. It was held in the Bronx in a big hall around Washington Avenue. The place was packed. There was at least four or five hundred of us jammed in. There were members there I never saw before. I only knew the ones that I was affiliated with during the war. Now there were so many people, so many faces, that I didn’t know where they came from.
“We were all standing. There wasn’t any room to sit. Religious pictures had been put up on the walls, and there was a crucifix over the platform at one end of the hall where Mr Maranzano was sitting. He had done this so that if outsiders wondered what the meeting was about, they would think we belonged to some kind of holy society. He was just hanging around, waiting to speak, while the members were still coming in.
“Joe Profaci had given me Mr Maranzano’s pedigree. He was born in the village of Castellammare and come over here right after the First World War. He was an educated man. He had studied for the priesthood in the old country, and I understand he spoke seven languages. I didn’t know until later that he was a nut about Julius Caesar and even had a room in his house full of nothing but books about him. That’s where he got the idea for the new organization.
“Mr Maranzano started off the meeting by explaining how Joe the Boss was always shaking down members right and left. He told how he had sentenced all the Castellammarese to death without cause, and he mentioned the names of a half dozen other members and bosses who had suffered the same thing.
“Well, some of these names I didn’t know or never ever heard of, but everybody gave him a big hand. He was speaking in Italian, and he said, ‘Now it’s going to be different.’ In the new setup he was going to be the Capo di tutti Capi, meaning the ‘Boss of all Bosses’. He said that from here on we were going to be divided up into new Families. Each Family would have a boss and an underboss. Beneath them there would also be lieutenants, or caporégimes. To us regular members, which were soldiers, he said, ‘You will each be assigned to a lieutenant. When you learn who he is, you will meet all the other men in your crew.’
“Then he tells us how we are going to operate, like if a soldier has the need to see his boss, he has to go first to his lieutenant. If it is important enough, the lieutenant will arrange the appointment. In other words, a soldier ain’t allowed to go running all the time to his boss. The idea is to keep everything businesslike and in line.
“Next he goes over the other rules. The organization, this Cosa Nostra, comes first, above everything, no matter what. Of course we already know that death is the penalty for talking about the Cosa Nostra or violating another member’s wife, but he goes over it again anyway. He tells us now that death is the penalty for telling wives anything about the outfit and also that an order going from a boss to a lieutenant to a soldier must be obeyed or you die.
“Now there are other rules where death ain’t the penalty. Instead, you are ‘on the carpet’ – meaning you have done wrong and there is a hearing to decide your case. The most important one is that you can’t put your hands in anger on another member. This is to keep one thing from leading to another. Remember, we are just getting over our trouble, and that’s what Mr Maranzano talked about next.
“ ‘Whatever happened in the past is over,’ he says. ‘There is to be no more ill feeling among us. If you lost someone in this past war of ours, you must forgive and forget. If your own brother was killed, don’t try to find out who did it to get even. If you do, you pay with your life.’ ”
The table of organization set forth by Maranzano was subsequently adopted by Cosa Nostra Families across the country. And out of this meeting came the five-Family structure in New York City, which still exists. The five bosses initially named by Maranzano to head them were Luciano, Tom Gagliano, Joseph Profaci, Joseph Bonanno, and Vincent Mangano. Valachi can recall only three of the underbosses selected at that time – Vito Genovese in the Luciano Family, Albert Anastasia in the Mangano Family, and Thomas Lucchese in the Gagliano Family. Valachi himself elected to join Maranzano’s personal palace guard even though he had entered the Cosa Nostra under the auspices of what was now the Gagliano Family.
The switch, he says, came on impulse. At the meeting Maranzano had announced, “As for those members who have been with me, there is going to be a split. Some of the group will go back to Tom Gagliano, and some will remain with me. If there is anybody who wants to remain with me, whether he was with me before or whether he was not, as long as he was with me during the war, he is entitled to come with me now if he wants to. The ones who want to come with me, just raise your hands.”
Annoyed because Gagliano had made no effort to recruit him privately, Valachi, as he puts it, “unconsciously” raised his hand. Then he saw two other Gagliano men, Bobby Doyle and Steve Runnelli, also raise their hands. Almost at once he regretted his move because of his unhappy experience with Runnelli in the Gambino shooting. But when Thomas Lucchese immediately tried to persuade him to change his mind and remain with Gagliano, he felt that to do so now entailed too much loss of face. “Why did you do what you did?” Lucchese demanded.
“Well, you didn’t tip me off. I figured I wasn’t wanted.”
“Let’s go see the old man and tell him you made a mistake.”
“No,” Valachi replied. “It’s too late. I won’t do anything. I would be ashamed of myself.”
On the plus side, however, he could comfort himself with the thought that he would be with Buster from Chicago and that he was at least rid of Salvatore Shillitani, who had decided to remain with Gagliano. Whatever other doubts Valachi might have had disappeared in the excitement of a huge banquet held in Brooklyn to honour Maranzano – in spirit and in cash. As a sign of their obeisance Cosa Nostra bosses throughout the United States purchased tickets to the affair. Even Al Capone sent $6,000. In all, according to Valachi, about $115,000 was collected. As representatives of various Families arrived at the banquet, each threw his contribution on a table. “I never saw such a pile of money in my life,” Valachi recalls. Afterwards he began rotating on duty with Maranzano as a chauffeur and bodyguard. But tranquillity in Maranzano’s reign was short-lived:
“Mr Maranzano’s legitimate front was a real estate company. The offices were in the Grand Central Building at 46th Street and Park Avenue. Around six months after Joe the Boss got his – that makes it around the first part of September – he ordered us not to go into the offices carrying guns, as he had been warned to expect a police raid.
“I didn’t like that order. One of the other fellows, I think it was Buster, said, ‘What do you mean?’
“ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just don’t like the idea. If something happens, we are helpless.’
“He said, ‘Talk to the old man about it.’
“Well, I was biding my time to do it, but I was waiting for the right moment. Mr Maranzano wasn’t somebody you just started telling what to do. Anyway, a couple of days later I was in the office, and he told me to come by his house in Brooklyn that night. It was on Avenue J, I don’t remember the number.
“I got there about nine o’clock. When I went into the living room, he was bent over bandaging a cut on the foot of his youngest son. I’d say the kid was around eight. Mr Maranzano got right to the point. ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘I hear you’re wondering why you didn’t get a bigger piece of the take from the banquet.’ He was right. All I was getting was my expenses and maybe $100 a week. To tell the truth, I was doing a little burglarizing on the side.
“He goes on to say, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll get your share, and more. But we are holding on to the money right now because we have to go on the mattress again.’ In other words, he is telling me we have to go back to war. You see, during the Castellammarese trouble we had to take mattresses with us as we were moving from one apartment to another. Sometimes we only had a minute’s notice, and so you needed a mattress to sleep on. That is our meaning of going on the mattress.
“I’m still listening as he explains why. He said, ‘I can’t get along with those two guys’ – he was talking about Charlie Lucky and Vito Genovese – ‘and we got to get rid of them before we can control anything.’ He talked about some others who had to go too – like Al Capone, Frank Costello, Willie Moretti from Fort Lee, New Jersey, Joe Adonis, and Charlie Lucky’s friend from outside the Cosa Nostra, Dutch Schultz.
“By controlling things, he meant the Italian lottery, which was very big then, the building unions, bootlegging, bookmaking, all that kind of stuff. Dutch Schultz, who was a Jew boss, had the biggest numbers bank in New York, and Charlie Lucky ran the downtown lottery.
“Gee, I wanted to say, who wants to control everything? You got to remember it’s just a few months since we are at peace. All I wanted was to make a good living. But naturally, I dared not say anything.
“Then Mr Maranzano tells me that he is having one last meeting the next day at two o’clock with Charlie Lucky and Vito. This is my chance to bring up the thing about no guns. ‘Gee,’ I said, ‘this is no time to be putting yourself in jeopardy. Suppose those guys know something’s in the wind?’ Well, he’s talking so much about what we are going to do and how big we are going to be, that he don’t pay much attention, but finally he tells me, ‘All right, call the office at a quarter to two to see if I need you.’
“I went home and spent the night tossing and turning. I got all kinds of reasons to worry. If something happens to Mr Maranzano, I’m finished too. I ain’t happy, but I got to go along. All I can do is wait to check in. That afternoon I called the office and this guy Charlie Buffalo, who is one of the members with us, answered the phone and said that everything was fine and that I don’t have to go down there. Right after that The Gap comes by – he had stayed with Gagliano, which is another reason why I should have – and says, ‘Hey, I’ve been looking for you. I got a couple of new girls over in Brooklyn. Let’s go over and spend some time with them.’
“I said, ‘Good idea. I have nothing to do.’ So we went over to Brooklyn and fooled around with the girls until about midnight, and the four of us decided to come back to Manhattan to eat. We went to this restaurant Charley Jones had on Third Avenue and 14th Street. When we are in the restaurant, I notice something funny is going on. First one guy, and then another, is walking in and looking us over. I said to The Gap, ‘Do you see what I see?’ He says, ‘Yes, I don’t know what it’s about.’ Now I go over to Charley Jones. He is no Mob guy, but he has connections and knows a lot. He whispers, ‘Joe, go home.’
“That’s all I have to hear. I said to The Gap, ‘What do you think?’ and he says, ‘We’ll break it up.’ So we gave the girls money to get back to Brooklyn. The Gap stayed with Charley, and I drove home alone. On the way up Lexington Avenue I stopped for a newspaper. I just put it down beside me on the seat. I was driving very slow and thinking. I just could not figure out what was going on. It’s hard to explain – I was worried, and I did not know what I was worried about. When I got home, I sent my kid brother out to put the car in the garage. Then I sat down in a chair and opened up the paper, and there it was. All about how the old man had been killed in his Park Avenue office that afternoon.
“The story had said that some men pretending to be detectives walked into Mr Maranzano’s outer office – it was kind of a waiting room – and lined up everyone who was there against the wall. Then two of the fake detectives went inside, where they shot him and cut his throat. The first thing I remembered was Mr Maranzano telling us not to carry guns in the office as there might be a police raid. Then I read that when the real bulls came, they found Bobby Doyle kneeling by the old man and had pulled him in as a material witness.
“Now I tell myself no wonder The Gap took me to Brooklyn. He must have known all about it and kept me out of the neighbourhood. You can imagine how I felt.”
The murder of Maranzano was part of an intricate, painstakingly executed mass extermination engineered by the same dapper, soft-spoken, cold-eyed Charlie “Lucky” Luciano who had so neatly arranged the removal of Masseria just months before. On the day Maranzano died, some forty Cosa Nostra leaders allied with him were slain across the country, practically all of them Italian-born old-timers eliminated by a younger generation making its bid for power.
Valachi immediately went into hiding . . . Doyle was finally released from custody after the Maranzano murder:
“All this time I am waiting for Bobby to come out, and now I find out what happened in the Park Avenue office. He explained to me that they were all sitting around in the outer office when these four Jews walk in and flash badges. I think one was with Dutch Schultz, but the others were really Meyer Lansky’s boys. Charlie Lucky could use them because his Family had sided with Lansky in his Jew war with Waxy Gordon. Anyway, Bobby said that what with all the yelling, the old man stuck his head out of the inner office to see what was going on, and one of the fake bulls says, ‘Who can we talk to?’ and the old man says, ‘You can talk to me.’ So two of them go in with him, and the other two keep an eye on the crowd.
“A long time after this I met one of the boys who went in with the old man. I met him at a racetrack. His name was Red Levine. I said, ‘I heard you were up there.’ Levine said, ‘Yes, I was there. He was tough.’ He told me the idea was to use a knife, so there wasn’t any noise, but the old man started fighting back, and they had to use a gun first.
“Naturally Bobby Doyle don’t know nothing about this as he was in the waiting room. All he knows is he hears a couple of shots, and this Levine and the other Jew boy come running out and tell everybody to beat it. But Bobby says he ran in to see if the old man still had a chance. That’s how come the cops picked him up.”
(New York City police records show that at 2.50 p.m. on 10 September 1931 one Salvatore Maranzano, male, white, of 2706 Avenue J, Brooklyn, was shot and stabbed to death in the office of the Eagle Building Corporation, rooms 925 and 926, at 230 Park Avenue. Perpetrators were four unknown men posing as police officers. Cause of death: four gunshot wounds and six stab wounds.)
After the initial purge of the Maranzano “faithful”, the massive bloodletting that had racked the Cosa Nostra was largely curbed. Indeed, according to Valachi, Luciano moved swiftly to reduce the special tensions that existed in the New York area by establishing consiglieri, or councillors, six men in all, one from each of the five New York Families, and the sixth representing nearby Newark; the function of the councillors was to shield individual soldiers from the personal vengeance of various lieutenants who might have been their targets during the Castellammarese War. The councillors, Luciano declared, had to hear the precise charge against a particular soldier before his death was authorized. If there was a tie vote, any one boss could sit in and break it. While the councillors were as often as not ignored, their formation at least projected an aura of the stability Luciano was bent on achieving.
Luciano also abolished the position of Boss of all Bosses, so dear to Maranzano’s heart; the fact of his power was infinitely more important to him than its formal trappings. And the organization of his own Family symbolized, to the naked eye at any rate, the final breakdown of the old Neapolitan versus Sicilian hostility. Luciano came from Sicily; his number two man, Genovese, was born in Naples. But most important by far was the way Luciano revolutionized the scope and influence of the Cosa Nostra in the US underworld. Shrewd, imaginative, and, above all, pragmatic, he abandoned the traditional clannishness of his predecessors and joined in co-operative ventures with such non-Italian criminal associates as Dutch Schultz, Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, Meyer Lansky, and Abner (Longy) Zwillman. At the same time, however, he carefully maintained the identity of the Cosa Nostra since, for Luciano, peaceful co-existence was merely a step towards total domination of organized crime.
None the less, to consolidate his power base, Luciano immediately had to justify his elimination of Maranzano to Cosa Nostra kingpins elsewhere in the country. “When a boss gets hit,” Valachi notes, “you got to explain to the others why it was done.” And to his amazement Valachi was told by Genovese that Charlie Lucky desired him to testify personally against Maranzano in Chicago, where Capone, although on the verge of being imprisoned for income tax evasion, was still a force to be reckoned with.
“Why me?” Valachi asked.
“First, because you are known to be close to the old man.” Genovese said. “And second, by being one of his soldiers, you gained nothing when he went. So why should you lie?”
Valachi begged off on the ground that he wasn’t eloquent enough for such a delicate chore and suggested that a more experienced member, like Bobby Doyle, be sent instead. Actually the battle-weary Valachi, ever cautious, feared that this sort of assignment held unforeseen perils should some new coup be in the making. However ill-founded his misgivings were, he made his point. Genovese agreed, and Doyle, delighted at the status he would gain from the trip, was dispatched to appear before, as Valachi describes them, “our friends in Chicago”.
Soon afterward Valachi, in partnership with Doyle, received his first tangible benefit as a member of the Luciano Family. Frank Costello, then a wily Luciano lieutenant, had long since forsaken muscle for political influence to advance his career. New York City was ideal for Costello in those days. Under the dubious reign of Mayor James J. Walker, he had “opened up” the town for slot machines and ran their operation.
Valachi and Doyle approached their own lieutenant, Tony Bender, and asked if there was a chance for them to have a “few machines”. Bender took them to the offices of a scrap company on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village which Vito Genovese used as his legitimate front. It happened to be a day when Luciano was present. When the door to the inner office was opened, Valachi suddenly felt himself being pushed in by Bender while Doyle, apparently suffering an acute case of cold feet, stayed outside. Luciano, in the grand manner, spoke not to Valachi, but to Bender: “What’s he want?”
“He wants some machines.”
As Valachi waited, nervously silent in the great man’s presence, he finally heard Luciano say, “Okay, give him twenty.”
This did not mean actual machines; Valachi and Doyle would have to finance that themselves. It signified that Valachi was entitled to twenty stickers supplied by Costello. In theory, while slot machines were nominally illegal, any enterprising soul could install one in the rear of a candy store, a pool hall, and so forth. In fact, if a machine did not have a Costello sticker, the colour of which was periodically changed, it was immediately subject to not only Mob action, but police seizure. Once, according to Valachi, a patrolman walking his beat in a Manhattan neighbourhood dumped, for whatever reason, a bottle of catsup down a “protected” machine and was promptly transferred to the far reaches of Queen’s. “Now,” Valachi reflects, “it don’t take too much to figure who had him sent out there.”
It was up to Valachi to place his own machines. He selected the area most familiar to him, East Harlem, and he and Doyle, as soon as they had them suitably installed, were grossing about $2,500 a week. Valachi hired the brother of his former fence, Fats West, to service the machines and pick up the money. Occasionally Valachi would play one of them himself, doubling or tripling its normal take to see if the extra amount was returned to him. Fortunately for young West’s health, he turned out to be an honest man.
Valachi derived just as much pleasure, if not profit, from being “recognized as a Mob guy” with connections. His first opportunity along these lines came when old Alessandro Vollero was paroled from Sing Sing after serving fourteen years for the murder of Giro Terranova’s brother. [According to Sing Sing records, Vollero was released on 28 April 1933.] Vollero, fearful that Terranova would seek revenge, sent an emissary begging Valachi’s help. “The old guy don’t know nobody now,” the emissary said, “but he hears you’re with Vito and them others. Can you straighten things out for him?”
Valachi remembered Vollero with fondness, promised to see what he could do, and discussed the matter with Vito Genovese. At first Genovese was reluctant to get involved in such ancient history – “When the hell did this happen, twenty years ago?” – but eventually he reported that Vollero could stop worrying. When Valachi relayed the good news, nothing less would do than for him to come to Vollero’s house for dinner. “It was really something,” Valachi says. “He had the whole family lined up to greet me. He called me his saviour. Well, we ate, and it was the last time I saw him. I heard later he went back to Italy and died in peace.”
Now twenty-six years old, newly affluent and respected, Valachi was ready to get married. His affair with his dance-hall mistress, May, had continued, but he discovered she had been unfaithful to him during his frequent absences in the Castellammarese War. “I told her that I’d stay on with her for a while,” he says, “but she could forget about anything permanent.”
True love began to bloom for him when he was hiding out in the Reina household and met the dead racketeer’s eldest daughter, Mildred. Then twenty-two, she would come up to the attic each afternoon to keep him company. And once out of hiding, he became a frequent visitor in the Reina home. But Mildred’s mother, brother, and uncles, as soon as they realized what was happening, did not cotton at all to the idea of Valachi as a prospective bridegroom. Romeo and Juliet had nothing on the tribulations endured by Joseph and Mildred. Before it was all resolved, their romance featured a foiled elopement, an attempted suicide, and, finally, the intervention of Vito Genovese himself:
“When I was in the attic, Mildred would come up the steps through sort of a trapdoor and talk to me. She told me that she had heard a lot about me. I asked her who it was that told her, and she said Charley Scoop, who was a guy I used to sell dresses to when I was out stealing.
“Then after everything was straightened out with Vito about the Maranzano business, I was invited back to the house for supper by her brother. I accepted and brought Johnny D along with me. All through supper Johnny kept kicking me under the table and whispering that Mildred is nuts about me and can’t help showing it. When we left, I told Johnny that Mildred was a beautiful girl, all right, but her family looked pretty strict to me, and I better not get mixed up with them. Anyway I figured I didn’t know how to act around her as I was only used to hanging around with dancehall girls. I was going to forget the whole thing, but this idea of finally settling down began to get to me. I tried going out with some of the nice girls in the neighbourhood. It didn’t work. They all looked bad next to Mildred.
“A couple of days later Bobby Doyle and me started talking about her somehow. Bobby knew the family pretty good. He even knew the old man before Masseria had him killed. Bobby told me that his wife, Lena, was saying that Mildred liked me a lot. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Mildred is okay, but that mother she’s got is a tough woman, and I think the brother is like the mother. I don’t even want to think about her uncles.’
“ ‘What are you worrying about them for?’ Bobby said. ‘It’s what the girl says that counts.’ I said I don’t know. After all, my people are from Naples, and they are Sicilian.
“Well, after one thing and another, Bobby’s wife tells me that Mildred wants me to speak to her brother about us. I said I wouldn’t. Finally Lena says that Mildred is willing to take off with me. By that she means that Mildred was ready to leave home to marry me. At this time I was living at 335 East 108th Street. The building had just been done over, and it had steam heat and hot water, and we had four rooms, so it was a place to stay for a while. I asked Lena how I would know when Mildred was home alone, and she says leave everything to her.
“When she gives me the word, I head for Mildred’s home. She is all packed and ready to go, but then her sister Rose says that she has to go, too, or they’ll beat her to death. After I heard this, I told Mildred to unpack. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll talk to your brother.’
“I was amazed when her brother said that it was all right by him to marry her. But the next thing I hear is that Mildred’s in the hospital. She had swallowed a bottle of iodine. I found out why. Her brother told her that I didn’t want anything to do with her. So now I know how they work. Her brother says okay to me and tells her just the opposite. Lena told me not to go up to the house, as there was a big commotion going on there. I told her maybe I better drop the whole thing, but she says, ‘A fine guy you are. Here she’s taken iodine for you, and you’re talking this way.’
“Well, I went down to see Vito at his office on Thompson Street next to that junkyard he owned and explained the whole mess to him. He told me he would pass the word around that he wants to see Mildred’s uncles about it. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I know what to tell them.’
“ ‘Will you let me know what happens?’ I asked.
“ ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, go about your own business and let me handle it. Don’t get into an argument with any of them. Don’t blow your top, as that’s just what they’re looking for you to do. I know those girls. They were brought up like birds in a cage. They’ve never been anywhere. The only place they let them go alone is to a neighbourhood show.’
“In a couple of days Vito called me and said that the Sicilians, meaning Mildred’s uncles, had been down. He said he told them that they should keep their noses out of this matter. If they are fit to marry their wives, Joe is fit to marry Mildred. If Joe ain’t fit, none of us are fit. Besides, he says, just so they know how he feels about it, he told them that he wants to be my best man. He told them that Charlie knows about it and feels the same way. By Charlie, of course, he meant Charlie Lucky.
“Then Vito said to me, ‘I’ll do even better for you. I’ll go up to the house and talk to the mother. Make an appointment for me.’ So I did, and Vito went up there and told her that he took full responsibility for me. That settled it, but the old lady still wasn’t ready to make things any too easy. Mildred and me would have to wait six months before the engagement could be announced. She couldn’t go out alone with me, and the only place I would be allowed to see her was at home and only on Sunday.
“To tell the truth, I almost gave up. When I would go up there on Sundays, Mildred and me would never have a chance to be by ourselves. After eating, all we could do was just sit there and talk. The old lady or the brother was always around. If Mildred and me got too close sitting on the sofa, they always had some phoney excuse to call her out of the room. I don’t know how I lasted until the engagement party. That’s when the wedding was set for 18 September 1932. Between the time of our engagement and the wedding, it was the same Sunday business, only now Mildred and her sister Rose were busy lining up bridesmaids, buying clothes, looking at apartments, and all that kind of stuff. Naturally, I was busy taking care of my slot machines.
“The party after the wedding was at the Palm Gardens on 52nd Street, right off Broadway. It was very large and cost close to $1,000 just for the hall. That was big money in them days; you must remember there were a lot of people in the streets selling apples. I got two bands so that everybody could dance without stopping. For food we had thousands of sandwiches and about $500 worth of Italian cookies and pastries. There was plenty of wine and whisky, even though it was Prohibition. I also got twenty-five barrels of beer as a present from one of the boys.
“Now this was when the Maranzano killing and all the trouble before that was still in everybody’s mind. There was a lot of friction right under the surface, so I had to weigh the invitations very carefully. But I must say it was a hell of a turnout of people either coming or sending money.
“Vito Genovese couldn’t make it to the wedding – I forget why – so he had Tony Bender represent him. But he made it to the party. Tom Gagliano and Tommy Brown were there. Charlie Lucky sent an envelope. Willie Moore, Frank Costello, Joe Bonanno, and Joe Profaci also sent envelopes. The Raos came in person. Doe from the old group that used to be with Mr Maranzano came, but Buster was dead by this time. Albert Anastasia and Carlo Gambino were there. So was Vincent Mangano, who was a boss then, but now has been missing for a long time. Joe Adonis sent an envelope. John the Bug came. So did Bobby Doyle, Tommy Rye, Frank Livorsi, Joe Bruno, Willie Moore’s brother Jerry, Johnny D, Petey Muggins, naturally The Gap, Mike Miranda, and all the boys with Tony Bender, which was my crew. It’s impossible to remember everybody’s name, but the hall was full.
“After all the expenses of renting an apartment and buying the furniture, even an Oriental rug, we had about $3,800 left over from the envelopes of money we got. The only thing wrong was that the apartment Mildred picked was on Briggs Avenue in the Bronx near Mosholu Parkway – in other words, just a stone’s throw from her mother.”
Despite this romantic interlude, it was back to business as usual. Soon after his marriage to Mildred, Valachi was handed his first contract to kill since joining the Luciano Family. In the Cosa Nostra a soldier like Valachi was not paid for such an execution; it was simply part of his job. He did not know the victim and was only vaguely aware of the reasons why he had to die. His lieutenant, Tony Bender, relayed the order. The information was fragmentary. The marked man was known as Little Apples, and Valachi never did learn his real name. Bender said that he was about twenty-two years old and frequented a coffee shop on East 109th Street. Bender mentioned in passing that two brothers of Little Apples had tangled with Luciano and Genovese several years before and were slain as a result. Apparently there was some concern that he would now attempt to avenge their deaths. Valachi did not press Bender for details; he really could not have cared less.
When a soldier is given a contract, he is responsible for its success. He can, however, pick other members to help him carry it out. Valachi chose Petey Muggins and Johnny D, both of whom joined the Luciano Family at the same time he did. Then he began hanging out in the coffee shop and eventually struck up an acquaintance with Little Apples. During the next two or three days Valachi would drop in periodically for coffee and more conversation with him. Meanwhile, he scouted out various locations for the killing and finally settled on a tenement a block away on East 110th Street. For Valachi’s purpose it was ideal. The ground floor was unoccupied, and there was no backyard fence to hinder a quick exit. His plan was first to station Muggins and Johnny D in the hallway and then to lure Little Apples to the tenement on the pretext that a crap game was going on in an upstairs apartment.
On the night of the hit, Valachi had arranged to meet Little Apples in the coffee shop. “Hey,” he said, “let’s take a walk. I hear there’s a big game going on up the street.”
“Great! I got nothing else to do.”
According to Valachi, he positioned himself behind Little Apples as they were entering the tenement and suddenly wheeled away. “I heard the shots,” he says, “and naturally kept walking down the street.”
(New York police records reveal that about 9.20 p.m. on 25 November 1932, a male, white, identified as one Michael Reggione, alias Little Apples, was found in the hallway of 340 East 110th Street. Cause of death: three gunshot wounds in the head.)
Valachi went straight home. “After all,” he recalls, “I was just married a couple of months, and I didn’t want Mildred to think I was already starting to fool around.”
Don Calogero Vizzini
On the night of 9 July 1943, the first of 160,000 Allied troops began landing on the southwest beaches of Sicily. After nearly a full week of fighting that yielded the city of Syracuse and not much more, General George S. Patton was given the task of advancing towards the city of Palermo. The Americans had to travel almost a hundred miles of heavily mined, single-lane highway and some 60,000 Italian troops stood in the way. Yet Patton’s men reached Palermo in just four days, with hardly a shot being fired. This lightning strike established General Patton’s reputation as America’s greatest general of World War II. It was, he said “the fastest blitzkrieg in history” and certainly the least costly. After breaking out of the beachhead, the casualties the Seventh Army suffered were negligible. All this was achieved with the help of the Mafia.
While the British and Canadian forces fought their way doggedly up the east coast of the island, facing an ill-equipped but determined enemy, the Americans had been assigned what seemed to be an even stiffer assignment. They were to take and subdue the central mountainous region. The key point in the German and Italian defensive line was the Mount Cammarata, just west of the towns of Villalba and Mussomelli. There was a mixed brigade of motorized artillery, anti-aircraft guns and 88mm anti-tank guns, plus a squadron of German panzers, including the latest Tiger tanks. The mountain caves and craggy outcrops had been used as a redoubt against invaders since Roman times and it dominated the two roads the Americans must pass down to reach Palermo. In command of the defence force was Lieutenant-Colonel Salemi, who was pessimistic about holding back the Americans, due to lack of air cover. But he was confident that he could delay the advance and make it very costly.
On 14 July 1943, a small American army plane was seen flying low over the small town of Villalba. The plane trailed a yellow banner with a large, black “L” on it. The pilot dropped a nylon bag containing a handkerchief in the same yellow material carrying the same initial “L”. It fell near the house of the village priest, Monsignor Giovanni Vizzini, brother of the local Mafia boss. It was picked up by Private Raniero Nuzzolese, an Italian soldier from Bari, who handed it over to Lance-Corporal Angelo Riccioli of the Carabinieri, then stationed in Villalba.
The next day, the plane returned and dropped another bag near the home of Don Calogero Vizzini. This time it had the words Zu Calò – “Uncle Calò” – written on it. The bag was picked up by Carmelo Bartolomeo, a servant in the Vizzini household, who delivered it to Don Calò, its intended recipient.
Don Calò was then one of the most powerful Mafia bosses in Sicily, some said the capo di tutti capi. Once a lowly Mafioso, Don Calò had established his fortune in 1922, before the Fascists came to power, when he led a band of disgruntled peasants who grabbed land from the absentee landlords. Every peasant got a plot, but Don Calò kept more than 12,000 acres for himself. He managed to survive the Mori crackdown, though he was kept under house arrest for his outspoken opposition to Mussolini. Then, in 1931, he was exiled, but when he returned in 1937 the whole town turned out to greet him.
When the bag was delivered to Don Calò he opened it and found inside another yellow silk handkerchief with the letter “L” on it. Silk handkerchiefs are a common means of identification between Mafiosi, the equivalent of a password. In 1922, an associate-member of the Mafia in Villalba named Lottò had committed a murder that he made no effort to conceal. This was a breach of all Mafia etiquette. The killing had been ill-planned and he had not sought permission. Arrest and conviction was assured. But to have left a “man of honour” to his fate would have damaged the reputation of the Mafia and resulted in a certain “loss of respect” for Don Calò. So Calò arranged for Lottò to be declared insane. He was confined in the asylum for the criminally insane at Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, near Messina, an institution that was conveniently under the control of the Mafia. Soon after he arrived there Lottò “died”, at least as far as the official records were concerned. A well-ventilated coffin was sent to the asylum to pick up the body and take it for burial – though, once outside the walls, Lottò simply climbed out of the casket. He was then given false documents and sent to the United States. When he arrived in New York, he was greeted by a group of Mafiosi who had been warned to expect him. He identified himself by producing a yellow silk handkerchief with the initial “C” on it. The “C” was for Calò. So when Don Calò received a yellow silk handkerchief with the letter “L” on it, he knew what it meant.
That evening, a young peasant nicknamed Mangiapane set off for the nearby town of Mussomelli carrying a letter from Don Calò hidden in his jacket. The letter read:
Turi, the farm bailiff, will go to the fair at Cerda with the calves on Thursday, the 20th. I will leave on the same day with the cows, oxen-carts and the bull. Get faggots for making the cheese, and provide folds for the sheep. Tell the other bailiffs to get ready. I’ll see to the rennet.
It was addressed to Zu Peppi – Giuseppe Genco Russo, the Mafia boss of Mussomeli who would succeed Don Calò as Sicilians’ capo di tutti capi – and Mangiapane was told to swallow the letter if he had a mala incontratura – an “unlucky meeting”. Couched in Mafia jargon, the message informed Peppi that Turi, the pezzo di novanta – leader of ninety – in the district of Polizzo Generosa to the northeast, would accompany the American motorized divisions as far as Cerda, five miles from the north coast of Sicily, while he himself would accompany the main body of troops – the cows – the tanks – the oxen-carts – and their commander – the bull. In his absence, Peppi was to do what he could to provide for the security and comfort of the Americans. The following morning, Mangiapane returned with a reply from Zu Peppi, saying that Liddu, his bailiff, has got the faggots ready.
Three days later, with the American front line still thirty miles from Villalba, a solitary jeep carrying two soldiers and a civilian made a dash across enemy territory to reach Don Calò. It too was flying a yellow pennant with a black “L” on it. Not far from Villalba, it took a wrong turn and ran into the Italian rearguard under the command of Lieutenant Luigi Mangano. One of the American soldiers was hit and toppled out on the road, while the jeep made a quick U-turn and made off the way it had come. Later Carmine Palermo, a local villager, approached the fallen soldier. Once he had ascertained he was dead, he took a leather case from the soldier. Inside was another nylon bag addressed to Don Calò. Again it swiftly reached the addressee.
That same afternoon, three American tanks clattered into the outskirts of Villalba. One hoisted a gold pennant with the ubiquitous “L” on it. A young officer climbed out of the turret and asked the locals in Italian with a Sicilian-American accent to fetch Don Calò.
In due course, Don Calò arrived. He was wearing, as always, a short-sleeved shirt with braces holding his trousers up over his large round belly. His hat was pulled down almost over his tortoise-shell spectacles and he carried his jacket over his arm. The Americans were surprised by the slovenly appearance and laconic manner of the bulky sixty-six-year-old, but it was not done for a Mafia chieftain to show off, either in their clothing or outward behaviour. Don Calò moved slowly through the crowds. Then under the guns of the tanks, without a word, he pulled the handkerchief from his pocket. With his nephew, Domiano Lumia who had returned from the US shortly before the outbreak of war, he clambered up on to the lead tank. He told Mangiapane to return to Mussomelli and report what had happened in Villalba to Zu Peppi. The American tanks then whisked Don Calò off to safety behind Allied lines. There he was made an honorary colonel in the US Army, though the GIs referred to him as “General Mafia”.
Colonel Salemi had gun batteries 3,000 feet up the San Vito mountain. They overlooked the valleys of the Tummarano and Platani rivers, which the Americans would have to pass through if they were to reach Palermo. Another motorized detachment occupied Mount Polizzelo, stretching as far as the Serra di Villalba and dominating the Vallelunga-Villalba-Mussomelli road, while German tanks were hidden in the pass of Cunicchieddi near Vallelunga. Together they barred the roads from Agrigento and Catania to Palermo. Salemi now waited for the inevitable.
However, when the roll-call was called on the morning of 21 July, two-thirds of Colonel Salemi’s men failed to report. “Friends” had visited during the night to persuade them to abandon their positions and avoid useless bloodshed. Soldiers who voluntarily laid down their arms were offered civilian clothes so that they could return to their families unmolested. Others were warned that certain ill-intentioned people might take advantage of the darkness and their superior knowledge of the terrain to seize them and hand them over as prisoners to the Americans. Later that day, Salemi himself was grabbed by the Mafia in Mussomelli and imprisoned in the town hall. At 4 p.m. a column of Moroccan troops under the command of General Juin, who had been halted at the village of Raffi, got a signal from the Mussomelli Mafia to advance. The battle of Cammarata had been won without a shot being fired.
Don Calò was away from Villalba for six days. During that time, Turi accompanied the American column up the road to Cerda, where it met the coast road from Messina to Palermo, and Don Calò travelled with the other claw of the pincer that encircled all the troops on the western slopes of Agrigento and Palermo provinces and cut off the whole of Trapani province. He left the column when it met up with the other claw at Cerba. This was the limit of his home province of Caltanissetta. Although he was considered overall chief of the Onorata Società , it was not considered good form to trespass on the territory of others. In any case, he had to get back to Villalba to organize the removal of all the Fascist mayors in the province and replace them with his own men. Don Calò himself was appointed mayor of Villalba by the American occupying force and the Carabinieri barracks in the town were named after him. A group of Don Calò’s closest friends cried: “Long live the Mafia! Long live delinquency! Long live Don Calò!” And the Americans granted them permission to carry firearms in case they had any more trouble with the Fascists.
Even without Don Calò, the initial “L” continued to do its job. Some fifteen per cent of the American landing force were of Sicilian birth or descent. They all carried American flags emblazoned with the letter “L”. Before the invasion the Mafia had helped smuggle Allied agents in and out of Sicily and Charles Poletti, the governor of Sicily after the occupation, had slipped into Palermo under Mafia protection long before the landings. During the invasion itself, the Mafia conducted numerous acts of sabotage behind the lines.
The “L”, of course, stood for Luciano, who was then serving a thirty- to fifty-year sentence on sixty-two counts of enforced prostitution and related extortion. Luciano had been born in Lercara Friddi, just fifteen miles up the Palermo road from Villalba. After Luciano used the Castellammarese War of 1930–31 to rub out the Mafia’s old guard in New York, he, Meyer Lansky and the other members of his gang took over the New York crime families with Luciano as the unofficial capo di tutti capi. They then ran the Mafia as a national syndicate or cartel.
In 1935, Thomas E. Dewey was appointed special district attorney in Manhattan. Seeking to make his reputation, he took on the racketeers using, sometimes, dubious methods. He went after Luciano on prostitution and extortion charges. Though the case was weak, in the highly charged atmosphere following the gang wars, forty-year-old Luciano was convicted and given what amounted to a life sentence. When World War II broke out, Luciano was in Dannemora, upstate New York, one of the toughest prisons in the system.
Dewey was planning to run for governor of New York State in 1942 as a stepping stone for his presidential bid in 1944. Luciano promised his support to Dewey if he would pardon him when he was elected. However, Luciano’s lawyer Moses Polakoff pointed out a flaw in this strategy.
“If you expect to get parole after Dewey becomes governor, just like that, you’re making a big mistake, Charlie,” he said. “He’d be impeached, that’s how serious a mistake it would be. It would kill his chances to be president, and he’s not going to jeopardize himself whether you give him political support or not.”
But Luciano had a plan. He had just received a letter from Vito Genovese, who had fled to Italy to avoid prosecution for the murder of fellow racketeer Ferdinand Boccia. By then Genovese had become a close friend of Mussolini and was living it up in Rome.
“He made a lot of contacts down in Sicily with guys whose names I gave him before he left,” said Luciano. “The most important thing was that in Sicily my name was like a king. Vito said that Mussolini was really pourin’ out shit on Americans, but as far as I was concerned, down in Sicily they thought of me as a real number one guy. And that set me to thinkin’ how I could give Dewey a legitimate excuse to let me out.”
Luciano had read in the newspapers how the US Navy were worried about the large number of Italian migrants who worked in the New York docks. By the end of 1941, with the US at war with Italy, they had divided loyalties. There was a danger of sabotage on the waterfront. The Navy also feared that dockworkers might be giving the enemy details of movements of shipping. Between 7 December 1941 and 28 February 1942, German submarines had sunk seventy-one merchant ships off the east coast. There were strikes in the docks and vital war supplies were being stolen. However, the Mafia controlled the longshoreman’s union. So the security of the docks was in Luciano’s hands and releasing him to guarantee it could even be seen as a patriotic gesture. But what Luciano needed was a frontpage story to bring home to the American public the ever-present danger of sabotage.
On 7 December 1941 – the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor – the American authorities seized the French luxury liner SS Normandie which was tied up in New York harbour. Their intention, after making the appropriate deal with the leader of the Free French, General Charles de Gaulle, was to convert the liner into a troop ship. However, Luciano’s enforcer and head of Murder, Inc. Albert Anastasia had other plans. He set fire to the Normandie.
“It was a great idea and I didn’t figure that it was really gonna hurt the war effort because the ship was nowhere near ready,” said Luciano. “Besides, no American soldiers or sailors would be involved because they wasn’t sendin’ ’em noplace yet . . . Later on, Albert told me not to feel too bad about what happened to the ship. He said that as a sergeant in the Army he hated the fuckin’ Navy anyway.”
On 9 February 1942, the Normandie went up in flames. Early the following morning, she capsized and the newspapers were full of stories about the need to prevent further disasters on the New York waterfront. Under the prompting of Frank Costello – born Francesco Castliglia in Calabaria before emigrating to the US at the age of nine – Italian political leaders pledged the loyalty of the Italian immigrants to the American flag. Even Italian and Sicilian gangsters, they said, though criminals were above all patriotic Americans who would rally to the flag in times of crisis. As the Mafia was deeply embedded along the waterfront, the Navy came up with “Operation Underworld”, a government-approved plan to get organized crime to support the war effort.
The Office of Naval Intelligence put a young reserve officer named Lieutenant Charles R. Haffenden in charge of the operation. He got in touch with Dewey’s office, who put him in touch with Luciano loyalist Joseph “Joe Socks” Lanza, who was the tsar of the Fulton Street fish market. Every boat that landed fish there paid him $100 and every truck that hauled fish away paid him another $50. No one had a stall there without his say-so and he exercised such tight control, through intimidation and murder, that he could even run the fish market from a prison cell in Flint, Michigan, when imprisoned in the Federal penitentiary there for conspiracy in the 1930s.
Lanza agreed to meet Haffenden at a park bench outside Grant’s Tomb on upper Riverside Drive at midnight on the grounds that being seen talking to someone in uniform could cause problems for him. When Haffenden asked for his help, Lanza said that he would give him all the help he could in the fish market, but for help in the docks and along the rest of the waterfront he would have to speak to Lucky Luciano, currently an inmate at Dannemora prison. This was exactly what Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky had told him to say.
Dewey’s office then put Haffenden in touch with Moses Polakoff. He suggested that, instead of setting up a meeting directly with Luciano who was still bitter with the authorities over his arrest and conviction, they should first have a meeting with one or two friends of Mr Luciano’s who might help talk him round. So on 11 April 1942, Commander Haffenden and Murray Gurein from Dewey’s office had breakfast with Moses Polakoff and Meyer Lansky in a hotel dining room on West 58th Street overlooking Central Park.
The following day, Luciano was called to the warden’s office at Dannemora to take a “confidential” telephone call. It was from Frank Costello who told him that the government wanted him to do them a favour and a guy from the Navy wanted to ask him some questions.
“Listen, Frank, I’m not talkin’ to anybody to do favours,” said Luciano. “If they’re so anxious to see me, let ’em bring me down to New York. I don’t feel like doin’ favours while I’m up in this dump.” As he said this, Luciano said he “kinda smiled at the warden, because I don’t want him to think it’s nothin’ personal”.
Frank asked him to hold on. When he got back on to the phone, Costello said that he was with guys from Dewey’s office who said that they would arrange to have him transferred to Sing Sing for the meeting. A few days later, the transfer came through.
“It was like goin’ from Siberia to civilization,” said Luciano. “I got a very nice cell all to myself, a clean one with hot and cold running water. I even had decent toilet paper for the first time in six years. A little thing like that can mean a helluva lot when you’re shut up in jail.”
That afternoon, he was called into the lawyer’s room where Lansky had laid out a spread of all Lucky’s favourite food from New York delicatessens. Frank Costello was also there, along with Haffenden and a man from Dewey’s office. They had to wait until Luciano had finished eating before they got down to business. Haffenden asked if he would be willing to use his influence to help.
“Why are you fellas so sure that I can handle what you need while I’m locked up in the can?” Luciano asked.
Haffenden said that he had it on “very good authority” that anything Luciano said would be acted on where it counted. Eventually Luciano agreed and, while Haffenden went off to phone Naval Intelligence, Luciano got to talk to Dewey’s representative.
“We put it right on the table,” said Luciano. “I said that the way I figured it, after Wilkie beat Dewey for the Republican nomination in 1940, Dewey hadda win the governorship of New York in order to get in line for another shot at the nomination. Costello chimed in and said that he’d already gotten word that the Republican big shots had agreed to push Dewey for president . . . I repeated my promise that Dewey would get all our support and we would deliver Manhattan, or come damn close, in November, which would mean he’d be a shoo-in. Then, as soon as he got into office, he hadda make me a hero. The only difference would be, a hero gets a medal, but I’d get parole.”
If Dewey did not agree to this deal immediately, Luciano would swing his support against him. Even if he became governor, when the Republican party were building him up to run for president, Luciano would start a campaign for a new trial by smearing Dewey. He would tell the newspapers that Dewey had got witnesses to perjure themselves, that he had put words in their mouths, that he had bribed them to give false testimony. Although he had tried these tactics in an attempt to get an appeal before, with Dewey running for president, a lot of the big newspapers would print all the dirt they could get on him.
While Dewey’s representative went to deliver Luciano’s message to his boss, Luciano, Lansky and Costello discussed whether a deal with Dewey would allow them a bigger corner of the market in meat and gasoline now that rationing had been introduced. While he waited for Dewey’s reply, Luciano refused any more meetings with representatives of the government. Eventually, Polakoff returned with Dewey’s reply. He had agreed in principle. But that was not good enough for Luciano. He insisted that he be released on unrestricted parole so that he could go back to New York and pick up the reins of his empire. Dewey said that he could not do that. He could only grant Luciano his freedom once he had won the governorship. Even then, Luciano would have to agree to be deported to Italy and remain in permanent exile from the United States. Dewey wanted Luciano out of the way when he ran for president.
For Luciano, this meant that he would have to stay in jail until the war was over. He could hardly be deported to an enemy nation. To seal the deal, Luciano agreed to pay Dewey $90,000 – $25,000 straight away to his “secret campaign fund” and $65,000 to be delivered in cash, in small bills, when he got on the boat. Luciano later checked and found that the $90,000 never showed up in Dewey’s books or tax returns. Nor did it show up in his campaign funds. The money had simply been pocketed.
Luciano was better than his word. As well as stopping sabotage on the docks, Operation Underworld led to the capture of eight German agents who were landed from a U-boat in June 1942. They were carrying explosives, $170,000 in cash, maps and plans for a two-year campaign against munitions plants, railroads and bridges all down the East Coast.
However, Lucky Luciano denied helping in the invasion of Sicily. So did the government.
“As far as me helpin’ the Army land in Sicily, you gotta remember I left there when I was, what – nine?” he said. “The only guy I knew real well over there, and he wasn’t even a Sicilian, was that little prick Vito Genovese [a Neapolitan]. In fact, at that time the dirty little bastard was livin’ like a king in Rome, kissin’ Mussolini’s ass.”
However, Luciano himself had boasted that he had given Genovese the names of a lot of contacts in Sicily, which he later used to run drugs into the United States. And Luciano’s name was big enough for the single letter “L” to save hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives.
Dewey was elected governor in 1942, and served three consecutive terms from 1943 to 1955. He won the Republican nomination for the presidency twice, but lost to the incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 and, against all predictions, to Harry S. Truman in 1948.
In 1946, Governor Dewey granted Luciano executive clemency and he was deported. But he was not out of pocket. Though he had given Dewey a $65,000 going-away present, Meyer Lansky gave Luciano a suitcase containing $1 million on the dockside. They later got together in Cuba, where they ran drugs into the US. Luciano died in Naples in 1962. His body was returned to New York to be buried in the family vault in St John’s Cemetery, Queens.
Lansky fled to Israel in 1970 to avoid prosecution for tax evasion, but returned and was eventually acquitted. In 1979, the House of Representatives Assassinations Committee linked Lansky to Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who killed John F. Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. He died in 1983 and is buried in an Orthodox Jewish cemetery in Miami.
Don Calò went on to set up a sweets factory in Palermo with Lucky Luciano. It was thought to be a front for heroin trafficking. As mayor of Villalba, Don Calò allowed the Communists to hold a rally there, but when the Communist leader spoke out against the poverty of the peasants there, Don Calò shouted out: “It’s a lie.”
Gunfire broke out and bombs were thrown. Eighteen people were wounded. Don Calò and his cohorts were arrested over the incident. The court proceedings dragged on for fourteen years. Due to various amnesties, pardons and remissions, few of the accused served more than a couple of months in jail.
Seventy-seven-year-old Calogero Vizzini died of natural causes at his home in Villalba with the trial still going on. Thousands of peasants, politicians, priests and Mafiosi turned out for his funeral. The town of Villalba was plunged into mourning for eight days. Over the entrance to the cathedral hung a panegyric which concluded with the words: “He was an honest man.”
Don Calò himself had once told a journalist: “When I die, the Mafia dies.”
He was wrong.
Vincent Teresa
After Joe Valachi broke the omertà in 1963, he was followed by Vincent Teresa who testified to the Senate in 1971.With a long career as a swindler and a thief, he was the lieutenant of New England crime boss Raymond Patriarca. In the early 1970s he agreed to be a Federal witness against several Mob figures, including Meyer Lansky who was wanted for income-tax evasion. In exchange for his testimony, he got fifteen years knocked off the twenty-year prison sentence he was serving after being convicted of stealing securities. During his testimony he told the Senate investigating committee that he had begun his life of crime at fifteen and, over the years, he had milked “suckers” of millions of dollars. One of his most lucrative operations, he said, was organizing gambling junkets to London, Las Vegas and the Caribbean. Along the way he would augment his fees by using loaded dice to mulct his rich clients. After testifying in a series of Mafia trials, he was relocated to the West Coast and given a new identity under the name Charles Cantino. He then helped write two books, My Life in the Mafia, published in 1973, and Wiseguys, published in 1978. In 1977 he was invited to go to Australia to give evidence to a citizens’ committee on drugs and gambling, but he was deported when he arrived because on his visa application he had said he had no criminal record. He died of kidney failure in Seattle at the age of 61 in 1990.
At 10.10 a.m. on 25 October 1957, a short, squat Sicilian hustled his way through the lobby of Manhattan’s Park Sheraton Hotel and entered the barber shop. He nodded to barber Joseph Bocchini and slipped into his chair for a shave.
Outside on Seventh Avenue, obscured by the milling crowds, two men stepped from a sedan and strode briskly behind a casually dressed workman who was walking towards the hotel. A man nodded at the doorway as the workman went in, followed by the two strangers. The workman paused briefly in front of the barber shop, pointed a newspaper at Bocchini’s chair, and disappeared into the hotel.
The two men reached beneath the collars of their coats to pull handkerchiefs tied around their necks up over their noses. Drawing guns from their coat pockets, they walked into the barber shop towards the unsuspecting figure relaxing in Bocchini’s chair. At 10.20, the quiet barber shop erupted in screams and shouts as shots echoed through the room. The man in the chair dived for the floor, but eleven bullets ripped into his body. Then one of the gunmen stood over the bleeding man and applied the coup de grâce, a bullet in the back of the head. Lying in a pool of blood before eleven startled witnesses who could never identify the assassins was Albert (The Executioner) Anastasia, the vicious chief of Murder Inc., and the boss of what is now known as the Carlo Gambino crime family.
Anastasia was a victim of his own speciality. For a quarter of a century he had coldly arranged the murders of hundreds of victims with no more emotion than if he were ordering a plate of spaghetti. Fear was his weapon and the source of his power. It was also his downfall. For it was the fear of his cunning and wolf-like savagery that prompted five crime bosses of Cosa Nostra to plan Anastasia’s murder. Anastasia was too dangerous and uncontrollable to let live.
The murder of a crime boss involves secrecy of the highest order. It involves promises, compromises, deals and trust between the plotters, whose lives depend on the loyalty of their co-conspirators. The mastermind of this conspiracy was New Jersey boss, Vito Genovese, whose life Anastasia had threatened. Genovese arranged communication between the bosses through his trusted aide and underboss, Anthony [Tony Bender] Strollo. In later years, Strollo was to fall from grace and become a victim of Genovese’s cunning himself.
Murders at this level also require an inside man, a person close to the victim whom the victim trusts and confides in. Such a man was Carlo Gambino, Anastasia’s own underboss and closest confidant. Gambino’s role was to arrange for the absence of Anastasia’s ever-present bodyguard, Michael [Trigger Mike] Coppola, during the assassination. He was also assigned to win the approval for the murder from the boss of another crime family, the father-in-law of his daughter, Thomas [Three-Finger Brown] Lucchese. Gambino, an ambitious man who preferred a modest demeanour to the flamboyant violence of his boss, Anastasia, was amply rewarded for his treachery. He was confirmed as the new boss of the Anastasia crime family a month later at the famous Appalachin barbecue attended by more than sixty crime bosses.
Though the conspiracy was put together by Tony Strollo, acting for Genovese, the actual planning of the murder fell to a gang of young toughs headed by Lawrence and Joey Gallo. The Gallos headed the assassination squad for the Brooklyn Mob, and it is believed that during their careers they were responsible for 500 or more deaths. (Lawrence Gallo died of cancer in 1968, and Joey Gallo was killed in April, 1972, after the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate crime leader Joseph Colombo; he was gunned down in Umberto’s Clam House in New York by two men he knew and had trained as gunmen.) The Gallos had handled many murder assignments for Anastasia himself and were close to Anastasia, having grown up with the Anastasia family.
But the Gallos had become even closer to Carmine [The Doctor] Lombardozzi, an Anastasia soldier who was a key man in the conspiracy against Anastasia and who, like Carlo Gambino, was to be elevated for his role in it. The Gallos had frequently worked for Lombardozzi as enforcers in his vast loan-shark rackets. Lombardozzi knew first-hand about their resourcefulness as killers.
The Gallos were daring but not foolhardy. They understood the danger of an attack on Anastasia. They knew that the men assigned to pull the trigger would have to be men whom Anastasia would not recognize, and so they ruled themselves out and all of their regular companions as well. They decided to ask Raymond Patriarca for the use of Jackie [Mad Dog] Nazarian, an expert in murder, as the leader of the assassination team. And they chose one of their own hangers-on, a little-known but vicious enforcer named “The Syrian”, to be the back-up gunman on the hit. The Gallos themselves would be present at the scene of the hit, though well hidden, keeping track of Anastasia and making sure everything went smoothly.
“The contract to murder Anastasia involved a lot of people. They were people Anastasia trusted, people he didn’t suspect. They were also people who were afraid he wanted to take over the whole Mob, become the boss of bosses.
“People I worked with in The Office told me Tony Strollo approached Raymond Patriarca for the gunman they needed. The New York boys wanted a gunman that Anastasia wouldn’t know as well as a guy that wasn’t afraid to hit him. Most of New York’s hitmen were scared to death of Anastasia. Strollo phoned Patriarca who conferred with the other bosses involved. Then Strollo sent the Gallos to Providence for a meeting with Patriarca. Patriarca assigned Nick Bianco to act as the liaison between Nazarian and the Gallos. Bianco came from Brooklyn and he knew what Anastasia looked like. He was also close to the Gallos. He was a punk at the time, but now he’s a captain, a boss with the Colombo crime family.
“The idea of importing gunmen from other mobs isn’t new. Anastasia used to send out assassins all over the country to handle hits for other mobs. Today, every mob has its own assassination squads who are available for lend-lease assignments. Whether you go to Chicago, New York, Montreal, Newark or Boston, they have assassination squads made up of men who get a regular weekly salary just to be ready for the day a hit is needed. The members of the squad are hand-picked by a boss. Their talents always include three things. They are experts with a variety of guns and other weapons. They are cool under pressure. They also have no emotion.
“I remember there was one guy I heard about who worked for Anastasia’s old Murder Inc., who is typical of what I mean. They called him Ice Pick Barney. His technique was as cold and as calculating as they come. He and other men assigned on a hit would force their victim into a men’s room. Then Ice Pick Barney would pull out his ice pick and, while the others held the victim, he’d put the ice pick through the victim’s eardrum into the brain. The pick left a tiny hole and would cause very little bleeding. They’d wipe away the blood that trickled from the ear, but the bleeding in the brain would cause the guy to die. When a doctor examined him, he’d rule the victim died from a cerebral haemorrhage. They’re a special breed, the assassins. They aren’t like the average made guy. Every made guy, every member of the Mob, has to make his notch . . . kill someone on assignment. For some it’s tougher than for others. But for a rare few, it’s a well-paid profession. They handle killings as though they were selling insurance.
“In New England, The Office had its own assassination squad. There was an average of a dozen solid guys who Patriarca could count on to go to the wall for him. They got paid well . . . a regular salary from The Office. Joe Barboza, while he worked for Patriarca during the Irish gang war, got $900 a week just to be available for hits. That was their salary, but they had the right to pick up more money loan-sharking or counterfeiting or whatever they wanted to do as long as it didn’t interfere with their main job of killing.
“Rudy Sciarra is a good example of what I’m talking about. He is a short guy, ruggedly built with a rough face and light curly hair. He’s a stone-cold killer, but in other ways he’s a nice guy. Sciarra was big in the credit-card racket. He had a guy with a machine who could print counterfeits of American Express cards. Everyone in the New England mob used Sciarra’s cards. He sold them for $100 apiece to Mob-connected people, but I got them for $15 apiece because I was working for Henry Tameleo. I used the cards in cabarets, men’s stores, hotels and motels, and to transport stolen cars to Florida and California. I thought nothing about running up a $2,000 tab at the Fontainebleu in Miami when I was entertaining a group at a Frank Sinatra show The head waiter knew what was going on. He didn’t care. I’d give him $150 to $200 in tips.
“When Sciarra wasn’t hustling cards or shylocking, he was out on hits. One of the jobs he had to handle was Nazarian, the guy who hit Anastasia. Now sometimes being a professional hitman means that if you handle a job like the Anastasia hit, you become a big man in the Mob. That’s what happened to Nazarian. He became a big man . . . too big. He was a miniature Anastasia. He threatened to kill anyone who stood in his way. Patriarca became afraid of him. Everybody on the street was afraid of him. Nazarian was a savage. That’s why they called him Mad Dog. He once strangled a witness [Edward Hannan] slowly with bailing wire and dropped him on the city dump so everyone would know he was garbage – because the guy had decided to testify about seeing Nazarian kill George [Tiger] Balletto at the Bella Napoli Café in Providence. There were twenty-two witnesses to the Balletto killing, but only this one guy decided to talk. Nazarian could have killed him quick, but that wasn’t the way he did things. He twisted that wire real slow, tortured the poor slob because he enjoyed it.
“But Nazarian wasn’t happy just being Patriarca’s top gun. He was making a fortune, but he figured he should be a boss. He bragged about killing Anastasia, then he threatened Patriarca. Patriarca did what he had to do. He assigned Sciarra and Lou [The Fox] Taglianetti – he was Patriarca’s boss of gambling in Rhode Island – to get Nazarian. That took a lot of guts, Nazarian was a whiz with a gun. He could smell a bad deal a mile away. But he never suspected Taglianetti. He was a boss, the last guy he’d think would go out on a hit. That’s why it worked so beautifully. That’s why most Mob hits work so well. The victim never expects to be killed by the people who kill him. So on 13 January 1962, they hit Nazarian as he left a crap game in Providence. He was hit by five slugs, but even as he was dying he tried to choke Taglianetti.
“Assassination squads have a variety of roles. They keep discipline in the Mob where they work. They handle local hits when they’re needed, and they protect the boss when he’s in danger. They’re also sent out to do other jobs for other mobs. There’s no charge for the service . . . it’s a favour from one boss to another. That’s where Patriarca made his mistake during the Irish war. He didn’t use the assassination squads from other mobs to whack out the people who were causing all the trouble. He hired guys that weren’t made members, like Barboza, to do the dirty work. You can’t trust people from the outside. They don’t live by the same rules that made people do. Barboza didn’t. He killed for the hell of it whenever he lost his temper. He became as hot as a pistol to the Mob. What Patriarca should have done was import hitmen from other mobs to come in and clean the troublemakers out right from the start.
“Our assassins had done the same thing for other mobs. They were used in the Gallo-Profaci gang war in the 1960s to whack some people. I know they were sent to New Orleans to handle a job for Carlos Marcello, the boss down in Louisiana. I don’t know who the target was, but I know they had a contract down there. I remember one case where our assassins . . . I don’t know which ones were used . . . were sent to whack out a guy called John [Futto] Biello in Miami.
“Biello was a captain in the Genovese mob. I remember Tameleo telling me that Biello had been a friend of Joseph Bonanno’s and that Bonanno had told Biello that he was going to take over the New York mobs by whacking out some of the bosses. Biello was a treacherous bastard. He was one of those who tipped off the bosses about what Bonanno was planning to do. Then, when the Mob kidnapped Bonanno and held him while the old dons decided what to do with him, Biello was one of those who voted to have Bonanno whacked out. At any rate, Bonanno never forgave Biello for his treachery.
“That was a Bonanno philosophy . . . never forget. Tameleo told me one day how Bonanno advised him to put people who rubbed him wrong to sleep. ‘Don’t let the guy know how you feel,’ Bonanno told him. ‘Just keep patting him on the shoulder. Every time you see him, notice what a nice day it is. Pat him on the back. Tell him he looks good today. Sooner or later this guy will find a hole in his back when your time is right. Be patient. Never let anyone know you’re laying for a guy because that guy will turn around and lay for you. Always be a diplomat. Make the guy think you’re his friend until the right time comes, the right setup, and then you make your move like a tiger.’
“That was what Bonanno did with Biello. He never let him know there were any hard feelings. Then it happened. It was in March 1967, and I was in Florida with Cardillo and some other people. A friend of mine called Fungi phoned me up one day. We’d known each other for years and were good friends. Fungi was one of Bonanno’s lieutenants. ‘You want to go out with me?’ Fungi asked. ‘I got to go pick up the boss at the airport. Joe B is coming in.’
“I didn’t ask questions. What the hell did I know? So I went. Bonanno came in on an American Airlines flight from Arizona. I’d met him twice before and he looked good. He got in the back seat of Fungi’s car and we drove to the Dream Bar in Miami, a place that was owned by Pasquale Erra, a Genovese soldier. About a half hour later, Patsy [Erra] came in and walked over to our table. Joe Bonanno got up and the two of them walked over to a corner table, had a couple of drinks together and talked in each other’s ear. Then Bonanno came back and told Fungi to take him to the airport so he could catch an eleven p.m. flight back to Arizona.
“It was either the next day or two days later [18 March 1967] when I read in the paper that they had found Biello’s body with four bullets in it in a car left in a municipal parking lot at 71st Street and Bonita Drive, Miami Beach. The car was a rental obtained under a phoney name. Now Biello was a big man. He had interests in a record company and he was the hidden owner of the old Peppermint Lounge in New York and another in Miami that made a bundle out of the twist craze. He was a millionaire with a lot of influence, but he was still a walking dead man as far as Bonanno was concerned. Bonanno had a lot of friends in the Mob even though he was put on a shelf and kicked out of the rackets in New York.
“He still runs things in Arizona and Colorado and some other places. Don’t think for a minute he doesn’t. Bonanno’s still a big man, but he doesn’t sit with the bosses any more.
“After I read the paper, I bumped into Fungi again and he told me that the reason Bonnano had come to Miami was to arrange to have Biello put to sleep. I said: ‘Look, Fungi, I don’t want to hear about it.’ I left and went back to Rhode Island. I had an obligation to tell Patriarca what happened right away. Particularly since I’d been with Bonanno. I told Patriarca: ‘Fungi told me that Joe B put the X on this guy . . . he gave him the kiss of death.’ Patriarca looked at me for a moment, then he said: ‘Yeah, well, forget about it, Vinnie. Things will iron themselves out.’
“I didn’t understand what he meant until later. I found out that it was Patriarca’s assassins who were sent to Florida to handle the job. Patsy Erra set it up because he was a guy that Biello trusted. That shows you what I mean. In the Mob you can’t trust anyone. Bonanno was as treacherous as any guy there ever was in the mob. He was always looking to get ahead by stepping on somebody else.
“Probably the best assassination squad in operation was the one in New Jersey under Joe Paterno. Frank [Butch] Miceli was in charge of that one with Frank [The Bear] Basto. They went anywhere on a hit. One of the jobs they handled was Willie Marfeo. That was a job that Patriarca did go out of town to have handled.
“Marfeo was a bookmaker, an independent who worked on Federal Hill in Providence. He and his brothers started running an illegal dice game on the Hill and they weren’t kicking in to Patriarca or Tameleo. Now Patriarca was paying for police protection for that, and here this Marfeo was running games in competition with Patriarca’s boys and at the same time reaping the benefits of Patriarca’s protection. Patriarca told Tameleo: ‘Go down and tell these clowns we want a cut. Either they give us a piece or they’re out of business.’
“So Tameleo went to see Marfeo, who was a wise punk. Marfeo said he’d pay, but a week went by and nothing was kicked in. Tameleo went back. ‘Look, Willie, this is your last warning,’ he said. ‘Either we get a piece; you knock the game off, or you’re in a whole lot of trouble.’
“Marfeo just smiled at Tameleo. Then he slapped Tameleo in the mouth. ‘Get out of here, old man,’ he said. ‘Go tell Raymond to go shit in his hat. We’re not giving you nothing.’
“Tameleo was trembling with fury, but he kept his cool. His voice was soft, but as cold as steel. ‘Mister,’ he said, ‘go pay your insurance. You’re a dead man.’ He walked out. When he came back and told Patriarca about what happened, Patriarca went wild. He was so mad he was almost crying.
“ ‘Why didn’t you shoot him right then?’ Patriarca shouted.
“ ‘I didn’t have a gun,’ Tameleo answered. That’s when Patriarca decided to import some outside hitmen. He knew Marfeo would be looking for one of Patriarca’s men and would be careful. Marfeo wouldn’t be expecting an import.
“Before you call in outside guns to handle a job for you, you’ve got to have the whole hit planned to a T for them. You provide the guns, the cars, the best location for a hit and the escape route. Patriarca and Tameleo took care of everything. Then a contact was made with Joe Paterno and Miceli showed up at The Office for a conference. A few days later [13 July 1966] Willie Marfeo was eating pizza with some friends in a place called the Korner Kitchen Restaurant in Providence. A guy he’d never seen before walked in, made everyone in the restaurant lie down on the floor and pushed Marfeo into the phone booth. He closed the door and then he let go with four slugs that went through Marfeo’s head and chest, killing him. That was in broad daylight. The guy escaped in the morning crowd and nobody saw anything. Nobody ever saw anything if they knew what was good for them in Providence.
“That wasn’t the end of the problem. Two years later, Marfeo’s brother, Rudolph, started threatening Patriarca. He was going to get even for his brother’s death. This time Patriarca didn’t go to New Jersey to handle the job. He used his own assassination squad, Sciarra and Maurice [Pro] Lerner. Lerner was something special. He had worked with John [Red] Kelley and me and Billy [Aggie] Agostino on bank jobs and later he worked with Kelley on some of the big armoured-car robberies. He was a college kid who’d played some professional baseball. You’d never in a million years have pegged him for being a hitman. But he was. He was the deadliest assassin ever to come out of New England. I remember one time he had to kill a guy who’d been screwing the mob. He knew the guy would answer the door when he knocked. For ten minutes before he knocked, Pro practised a swing with a baseball bat so he would groove his swing to exactly the right angle. When he knocked and the guy opened the door, Pro hit him with one swing and smashed his face in, killing him on the spot. “Patriarca needed someone to plan the job because Rudy Marfeo was very careful. It seemed like he was always protected and never followed a particular routine. Pro suggested Red Kelley, and Patriarca bought it. When it came to smarts, nobody could beat Kelley. He planned a job like he was putting a Swiss watch together. He used to set up armoured-car jobs like ducks in a shooting gallery. He’s got the patience of a saint. Kelley studied Marfeo for weeks. Marfeo didn’t know him and Kelley had a way of blending into the crowd so you’d never know he was there. He found out there was one time every day when Marfeo visited a particular grocery store. The next thing he did was plan a route from a golf course to the grocery store. Timing was everything in this job and he timed everything on the route over and over and over again. He knew exactly how long it would take to reach the store and how much time they would have to get at Marfeo when they arrived. He even figured how long it would take to drive in traffic on the escape route. He ran practice runs until everyone was sick of them. Then he went to New York, got a sawed-off shotgun and a carbine and some Halloween masks. He even got special Double O buckshot shells because they’re best for killing at a short distance. On the day of the hit, he waited with a couple of friends at a golf course for the guys who were to handle the job. So no one would notice them, Kelley and his friends were dressed in golf caps and Kelley bounced golf balls in the parking lot. Then he met with Lerner, John Rossi and Robert Fairbrother who were to handle the actual hit. They caught Marfeo and a friend of his, Anthony Melei, cold at the grocery store and gunned them down at the exact moment Kelley said they should.
“I think Patriarca should have used Miceli’s crew on that one. Lerner was a great hitman, but if he’d used Miceli, they wouldn’t have needed Kelley to plan the job. Miceli would have worked it out himself rather than have an outsider, a guy who wasn’t made, plan a job.
“Miceli and Basto had a fantastic operation going. Their squad had ten men in it and they got a regular $500 a week, but that was only a fraction of what they made. They had the best counterfeit business going in the country. There wasn’t anything Miceli and his gang couldn’t provide. They printed phoney postage stamps, passports, drivers’ licences, stock certificates and cash like it was confetti. New Jersey is the biggest centre of counterfeiting in the country. Not only that, but in New Jersey you could buy just about any kind of gun you wanted from Miceli’s group . . . machine guns, hand grenades, mines. I think he could have supplied you with a tank if you needed it. In fact, that’s how I got in trouble another time with Jerry Angiulo . . . handling some of Miceli’s counterfeits.
“It was in 1963.I had a chance to buy queer $20 bills from Miceli for ten cents on the dollar. I took a couple of samples back to show Patriarca and Tameleo. We met in a hotel in Rhode Island and I went into the men’s room with Tameleo and showed him the queers. They were beauties. I told him I could move over a million dollars’ worth overnight and sell them for twenty cents on the dollar.
“ ‘Look, kid,’ Tameleo said, ‘we don’t want any part of it, but you got our okay. Just do one thing. Make sure none of these flood any of our card or crap games and stay away from the racetracks. Don’t you pass them!’ No problem. All I was going to do was sell them to a contact. In three days, I unloaded $500,000 in queers in the Boston area and made myself a quick $50,000 profit. The next thing I know is that I get a call from Sal Cesario, Angiulo’s strong-arm, to come to Jay’s Lounge for a sit-down. So I went to the bar and I saw Smigsy, Jerry’s brother. I asked him what Jerry wanted to see me about. He said he didn’t know, but told me to go downstairs to the cellar.
“Now the cellar of this place is really something. Wall to wall carpeting, a private apartment for Angiulo and in one main room where you entered there was a table about twenty feet long with all kinds of chairs around it. Joe Russo, another of Angiulo’s musclemen, told me to sit at one end of the table. I waited about fifteen minutes and out comes Angiulo. I remembered it like it was yesterday. He had grey silk pants on . . . black patent leather slippers . . . a black velvet smoking jacket with an ascot and a cigarette with a holder. He looked like George Raft, the actor, in a gangster movie. So he walked up to the other end of the table, looked down at me and said: ‘Oh, so you’re the kid.’
“ ‘I’m the kid?’ I said. ‘Geez, Jerry, you’ve known me for years. What do you mean, I’m the kid?’
“ ‘Don’t you lie,’ he snapped. ‘You brought in some queer twenties into the city.’
“ ‘I’m not lying to you,’ I said. ‘Sure I did . . . why?’
“Now he’s talking like he’s in an old Al Capone movie. ‘You may not walk out of this joint alive tonight,’ he said.
“ ‘Whoa . . . take it easy, Jerry,’ I answered.
“ Now you shut up,’ he shouts. Suddenly he’s wild, loud, raving like a lunatic. ‘You’re in a lot of trouble . . . you may end up in a box. Your money has flooded all the crap games and the racetracks and we got a lot of beefs from the law and everybody else.’
“ ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘I got an okay from Raymond and Henry to bring the stuff in.’ By now there’s a dozen guys in the room. I don’t have a chance and I know it.
“ ‘From who?’ he shouts. ‘I’m the boss here.’
“ ‘I got it from Raymond and Henry,’ I said. ‘Here . . . here’s Raymond’s phone number. Call him.’
“So he sends one of his brothers out to call Patriarca and about twenty minutes later he returns and whispers something in Jerry’s ear. Angiulo turns to me and shouts: ‘GET OUTTA HERE. Don’t come back and keep outta my sight.’ He didn’t mention it, but Patriarca told him I had the okay. I don’t know how the stuff hit the games and tracks. The people I dealt with were told to move the money in other places.
“A creature of habits on the street is a complete fool. It can only lead to disaster for him eventually. A man who takes the same road home every night, goes to the same nightclub at the same time every night or the same restaurant, or leaves his office at the same time each day, is a perfect mark for assassins. That’s one thing very few Mob guys learn. Change your routine every day. Never do the same thing twice in a row. You’d think they’d learn but they don’t. There’s always one habit, one routine they follow and that’s what can nail them.
“There are other things that help assassinations to come off so successfully in the Mob. The favourite technique in setting up a guy for a hit is through the use of guys you do business with regularly. They might call you up and ask you to meet them at a particular location to look at a trailer-load of hijacked goods they have for sale. They might ask you to meet them at a nightclub or at a house. When you get there . . . wham, bam, you’re dead.
“Joe Palladino tried to set me up one night. We’d had a few beefs at Chez Joey’s, our nightclub on Cape Cod, but I didn’t think it was anything serious. I was home in Medford that night, one of the rare nights I got to be with the family. I was lucky to see Blanche in the morning before I went to work. I used to be on the street eighteen to twenty hours a day, seven days a week. It was a helluva way to live with a family, but that’s what happens in the Mob. For a hustler, a money-maker, there’s virtually no time for home life. At any rate, it was two a.m. and there was a knock at the door. Blanche and I were in bed at the time. I said to Blanche: ‘There’s something wrong. I’ve had this feeling following me all night.’ It was that sixth sense of mine working again. Like extra-sensory perception. I could sense danger. Many times I knew something was going to happen. I just felt it . . . and things would happen. This was one of those times.
“I went to the door and it was Joey Palladino. ‘Vinnie, I got a couple of broads down at the club,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to come down. We’ll have a real ball.’ Now I just knew he was lying even though he’d come up with broads at the last minute before. I agreed to go. I went back to the room and got dressed, telling Blanche there were some problems at the club that I had to take care of. But before I went I got a gun from the dresser drawer. I don’t normally carry a gun, but this time I had a bad feeling. As we drove to the club, I asked Joey why he’d decided to come at this hour. ‘They’re terrific broads, Vinnie,’ Joey said. ‘I thought you’d enjoy it.’ When we got there I saw Bobby Daddieco standing near the bar, stone-drunk. Bobby and I had had a beef over something minor and I’d forgotten about it. But when I walked into the place, Bobby pulled a gun out and pointed it at me. He was planning to shoot me. I fingered the gun in my pocket. It was pointed straight at his gut, but I tried diplomacy first. Daddieco and I had always been close, so I started reasoning with him. I found out Joey had been working on him all night, convincing him that I was out to kill him and the only way to handle me was to kill me first.
“ ‘Joey tells me you think you’re a real big shot,’ Daddieco said. ‘You’re supposed to be smarter than I am, a big wheel with Providence.’
“I told Daddieco what a punk Palladino was. We talked for an hour. Palladino hadn’t realized how close Daddieco and I were. We ended up beating the hell out of Joey for trying to set me up for a hit. But if I hadn’t had my wits about me, if I hadn’t sensed danger, I’d have been set up by a guy who was supposed to be a friend and killed by another so-called friend.
“Friends are only one of dozens of ways Mob assassins use to set you up. Many times it’s a guy’s girlfriend. She may not be willing, but they’ll make her do it. They’ll threaten her life, or her kids, or her parents. Then she’ll call the boyfriend and tell him to meet her at a restaurant or a motel or her apartment at a certain time. The assassins will just lie in wait in the dark, whack the guy over the head, carry him to a car and take him someplace where they’ll whack him out.
“Sometimes you have some nuts in the Mob who think up pretty weird ways to kill a guy. Take Nicola Giso, an old made guy from Boston who used to be close to Joe Lombardo. Giso had lost respect in the Mob in the early 1960s when he’d taken $100,000 of Lombardo’s money and blown it with Ralphie Chong in New York. The old dons of the Mob had a round-table on whether or not they’d let him live. They agreed to but he had to pay every nickel back with interest. Because of that Giso tried everything to stay in the good graces of Tameleo and Patriarca. He was in Providence one day at Patriarca’s office when a discussion came up about what to do about Angelo DeMarco, a two-bit hood who was going around Boston calling Patriarca a fag and threatening a lot of Mob people.
“DeMarco was an animal, a part-time hitman crazy enough to make a try on Patriarca himself. Patriarca and Tameleo decided DeMarco had to be hit and Giso piped up that he had a good way to do the job. He and DeMarco were pretty close and he said he could get him to meet him in a restaurant for coffee. ‘I’ll sit down with him,’ Giso said, ‘and when he isn’t looking, I’ll put some poison in his coffee. He’s too tough to get any other way.’ Tameleo called Giso a stupid son-of-a-bitch. He said if Giso ever tried anything like that he’d have him killed. Later on Tameleo had two of the assassination squad catch DeMarco. They left him on the city dump in Everett.
“Now if it’s a guy on the lam from the Mob, there are other things used to help the assassin. The Mob has a terrific intelligence system . . . probably better than most police departments. I don’t care where you run to hide, as long as you have to work, the Mob is able to find you. They had a connection with someone in the US Social Security office who could check records for them. As soon as the victim used his social security card and . . . you can’t work at a legitimate job without one . . . bang, the word got back to the Mob where the victim was working. In a matter of hours the hitman was on his way to case the area and set up the murder.
“They had other ways too. They have doctors. If there is something basically wrong with the victim, like a defect, a scar, a special allergy or a history of a particular disease that needs special treatment, the Mob used connections it had with various medical associations and doctors to check around the country to find the guy with the problem they knew he had. It might take months, even years, but the Mob has so many doctors on the hook, putting their money out with the Mob on loan-sharking, that they had a built-in intelligence system.
“Doctors are big with the Mob. They have so much buried money, money they don’t report to the tax boys. They want that money to work for them, but if they invest it legitimately, the tax men will find out. So they invest it with Mob people. In Boston, there were dozens of doctors who provided money to Mob guys for loan-sharking. The doctors got one per cent per week return on the money they gave the Mob and the Mob made another four per cent a week on their money. There were other doctors that Mob guys had set up in compromising situations with broads or queers and they used that to blackmail them. Still others fronted at nightclubs for Mob people or in other business enterprises. Anything to get that under-the-table money that Uncle Sam can’t find out about. Doctors are bigger crooks than Mob people, at least the ones I’ve met and know about.
“Beyond the doctors, the Mob had the cops. They could and do use crooked cops to check anything out anywhere in the country. If the FBI was keeping a guy under wraps that the Mob wanted to hit, they’d use the cops to try and find out where he was hidden. They’d have a high-ranking cop contact the FBI and say they wanted to question the victim for suspicion of a robbery or a burglary. The FBI was too cute for them on this. They knew better than to deal with local cops when they had an informer stashed. They’d just tell the local cops that they didn’t have him under their control any more . . . that the Justice Department had taken him over. The FBI would never give local cops a flat no. They’d just waltz the cops around the yard a few times. But even without information from FBI files, the Mob could reach into police files all over the country, even in honest departments, to find out about a guy. All you needed was one crooked cop asking for information, and they had hundreds on their payroll. They still do.
“What they can’t get from cops, they get from crooked probation and parole officers who keep track of guys freed from jail on parole. These people usually have a good line on where a guy they’ve once handled has gone. For the right price, there were guys on probation in New England who would finger their mother. The Mob knew that and used them.
“Don’t ever underestimate the Mob. They’re smart. They’ll run a victim down through insurance company checks. Everybody has insurance, even a guy on the lam. He’s got a car, or a house, or life insurance or boat insurance. Whatever it is, it has information on where he is or what he does in the application for the insurance. When he fills out that application, the Mob’s guns can nail him. They have hundreds of insurance offices of their own and they start making checks on a target by saying he owes them back premiums or they have to find him to pay off an award. Whatever the reason, if the sucker bought insurance, he’s as good as dead.
“The same thing is true of drivers’ licences or car registration. They can check through paid-off people they’ve got in state licence bureaus to find out if a guy took out a new licence in a neighbouring state or anywhere in the country for that matter. And if you think that’s bad, think about this. If you’ve got kids, they have to go to school. Once they do, if they’re using the same name, the Mob can trace you through transferred school records. That’s why an informer has to change his identity completely as well as his appearance if he wants to stay a step ahead of the assassins. Very few make it. Sooner or later they find you.”
But according to Vincent Teresa, life in the Mob is not all murder and mayhem. There is fun to be had too:
“When a Mob guy owns a club, it’s a guaranteed success . . . they draw business and broads and entertainers like flies. Don’t ask me why, but people seem to want to come to a Mob place. Maybe it’s the excitement of mingling with mobsters. Maybe it’s something else. Outside of the general public, the Mob guys generate business themselves because they do other business in the club. Take the Ebbtide. It was a goldmine. I operated my loan shark business there. I set up hijacks, bought stolen goods, arranged for stolen stock deals. When I was at my table, maybe forty or fifty guys would come in with their dates to see me. A guy would come to my table, sit down, have a few drinks. Maybe we’d talk fifteen or twenty minutes. Then he’d go to his own table and buy drinks and dinner for himself and his girl. He’d also pay for the drinks at my table. Now this would go on from seven at night till two or three in the morning. So the club had a guaranteed, steady flow of customers. After a guy met with me for business, it was rare for him to get out of the club without running up a tab for $100.You multiply that by forty and you’re doing $4,000 a night business just from people coming to see me. That’s the way most Mob night-spots operate. That’s why they always make money.
“A lot of people came because the girls flocked to places like the Ebbtide. The girls were usually waitresses, secretaries or clerks looking for a night of fun. They loved to be near Mob people. I guess it was the thrill of danger and violence and doing something they knew was wrong. They were all young. Any girl over twenty-three was an old maid. Most of them were eighteen or nineteen years old and they’d do anything we wanted them to. They’d draw the men like flies, the middle-aged men who were lucky to get to their wives once in six months. Now they’d come to the club for a good time and the first thing they ran into was some eighteen- or nineteen-year-old dressed in tight pants, wiggling her tail around, rubbing up against him. Man, he doesn’t want to know anything after that. He’s a setup, a target for a score. We’d get him up tight with one of those young chicks and before you knew it, Mr Middleage was willing to do anything to bed that broad. We’d get him laid and take him upstairs and knock him out in a card game.
“The Ebbtide was a rock-and-roll place. There had to be ten girls to every guy in the place, and all the girls were just dying to be recognized. They liked to walk into a place and have some Mob guy say, ‘Hi, Barbara,’ as though they were somebody. They didn’t care what you asked them to do as long as you were a Mob guy who gave them a little recognition. If we wanted them to go to bed with a guy – to blow his pipes – they’d do it without question. They couldn’t care less. They didn’t get money. They didn’t ask for it. All they wanted was recognition. Every now and then, when one of them did you a favour, you’d give them a gift. Maybe, I’d have a load of stolen dresses upstairs. ‘What size you wear, Julie?’ I’d ask. ‘Go upstairs . . . tell Richie I said to give you a couple of dresses and slacks.’ That was a big thing for her. Or if some creep was bothering one of them, they would come walking over and say: ‘Vinnie . . . that guy is bothering me.’ So I’d walk over to the clown and tell him: ‘Julie’s a friend of mine. You go off and mind your business or get out of here.’ Now Julie felt very important. It was all a bunch of bullshit. I couldn’t have cared less if that guy killed Julie or whoever. But by keeping on the right side of her, by using a little diplomacy, I could call on her to take care of some sucker I was setting up for a score. “Girls weren’t the only people who went nutty over Mob guys. Entertainers are worse. They want to be around Mob people because they know the Mob controls the better places. So they come in, they get cosy with you and then they ask your help in getting them a spot at a place like the Mayfair in Boston or the Copacabana in New York. It was good for our business to have them. We paid them the union scales and for the top names we paid top dollar. But a lot of them were compulsive gamblers and they’d end up losing what they had coming in salary. Like Fats Domino. He was a helluva entertainer. He’d play at the Ebbtide maybe three times a year at $12,000 a week and he’d end up owing us money. I remember one night he ended up not only owing us his salary, but we took his diamond cufflinks as well. We’d take him upstairs and knock him out of the box in a rigged dice game. He never knew what happened. We did the same with Lou Monte at Chez Joey’s. I think we paid him $11,000 a week. He’d wind up losing it in a crap game. I felt sorry for him. His kid had an incurable disease and he went all over the world to try to find a cure for him. Lou was a nice guy.
“Some of the entertainers used us. That used to boil me. They’d use us, move up to the top and then ignore you. Like Jerry Vale. Jerry began playing The Frolics, a club owned by Chickie Spar. It became a regular appearance. He was great. Jerry knew all of us. We packed the place for him. But when he got well known and he was working places like the Copacabana in New York or the Ed Sullivan television show, he didn’t remember anybody. I bumped into him one night at the Copa in New York City. He ignored me as though he didn’t know me. I pulled him aside. I said: “I don’t want to embarrass you, now . . . but do I embarrass you by saying hello?” If he’d said anything, I’d have given him a whack in the mouth. All he said was that my face slipped his mind. How could my face slip his mind? He’d seen it every day for months.
“Dean Martin was different. He came to the Mayfair at the recommendation of some of his friends from Ohio. He was just getting started, but he was a barrel of laughs whenever you saw him and he never forgot a face, never forgot to say hello to you no matter where you were. He’s just a nice guy and a helluva entertainer and everybody liked him for it.
“The only guy the Boston Mob couldn’t stand was Frank Sinatra. Let me tell you a story about him. This was before he made the big time again with that picture, From Here to Eternity. He was begging for spots to sing at then. The Palladinos let him do his stuff at the Copa in Boston and they paid him a good buck for it. He did all right, not sensational, but all right. Then he went to Joe Beans and asked if he could borrow some money. He told Joe that he could deduct what he borrowed the next time he came in to play the club. He said he’d be back to play the club in about a month after the movie came out. Joe was glad to help out. Then the picture came out and it was a smash hit. Sinatra paid Joe back what he owed him but he never came back to play the club like he promised.
“Sinatra has a helluva lot of talent, but he’s got no class. He picks his spots to be a tough guy with people. I’ve been in his company in Florida two or three times and I don’t like the man. He was close to Sam Giancana, the boss of Chicago. He’s always talking about the Mob guys he knows. Who gives a damn, especially if you’re a Mob guy yourself? He’s very boisterous, loud, but I know Mob guys who idolize him, like Butch Miceli. He used to stick close to Sinatra like glue, and he carried a phone book around with Sinatra’s private number on every page.
“Now Sinatra’s a big man. Don’t get me wrong, he’s earned his reputation as an entertainer. He’s a real showman on stage. But he’s got a lot of Mob friends as well as friends in all walks of life. I don’t begrudge him a thing and one thing, he doesn’t forget his friends either. But I get a big kick out of these phoney politicians that gravitate around him, like flies. Look at Spiro Agnew, or before they knew better, President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby. They used him to help them raise money. Then they turn around and say they’re great fighters against corruption. They criticize other people for being with Mob guys. They’re hypocrites. They don’t criticize Sinatra for the people he knows.”
Aladena Fratianno
The third of the triumvirate of informers condemned by Joe Bonanno was Aladena “Jimmy the Weasel” Fratianno. As acting head of the Los Angeles crime family, he was the highest-ranking mafioso to become a Federal witness. Born in Naples, Fratianno was brought to Cleveland as a baby. They lived in the Murray Hill-Mayfield Road district then known as Little Italy or simply the Hill. As a child, he began stealing from fruit stands and earned his nickname “the Weasel” from outrunning the police. Working for the Mob in Cleveland, he established a reputation as a hitman. In 1947, he joined the Los Angeles family and claimed responsibility for at least eleven gangland slayings under Los Angeles crime boss Jack Dragna. Following the death of Dragna in 1956, he rose through the ranks until, in the 1970s, Fratianno learned that the Cosa Nostra had put out a contract on him. For his own protection he turned state’s evidence. From December 1977 to August 1987, Fratianno was the Justice Department’s star witness, fingering such notorious Mob bosses as Frank “Funzi” Tieri, Carmine “Junior” Persico and the head of his own former crime family, Dominic Brooklier. As a paid informant Fratianno was sheltered by the Federal witness protection programme, which provided him with financial support, bodyguards and a series of phoney identities But in 1987, Fratianno’s government caretakers cut off his living allowance, on the grounds that the Federal witness protection programme “was never intended to be a retirement plan for former mobsters”. The Justice Department claimed that Mr Fratianno could take care of himself He made money by charging hefty fees to appear on TV crime documentaries and as an expert witness in underworld trials. He collaborated in the writing of two autobiographies: The Last Mafioso with Ovid Demaris and Vengeance is Mine with Michael J. Zuckerman. He died in in 1993 after suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease.
It had taken him thirty-three years to arrive at this moment. Early that evening he was brought to a winery on South Figueroa Street and now he waited in a small, dimly lit room for the final act to be played out.
Jimmy Fratianno prided himself on his ability to remain calm under stress, but he could feel the excitement stirring through him. He locked the feeling inside, not wanting to share it with the other four candidates. He could hear the deep rumble of voices in the other room, the scraping of chairs, and he knew that many awaited his entrance. Standing room only, he thought, trying to lighten the feeling that was knotting his nerves.
Then the door opened and Johnny Roselli beckoned to him. “It’s time,” he said.
They walked down a short hallway and stopped before a closed door. Roselli squeezed his arm and smiled.
“Just a couple things, Jimmy. After you’ve taken the oath, go around the circle and kiss everybody and introduce yourself. Then join hands with the others. Are you ready?”
He nodded and Roselli opened the door. It was a large room and the pungent odour of fermented grapes was stronger here. There must have been fifty men in the room, many of whom he had met in the seventeen months he had been in Los Angeles. They were gathered in a circle around a long table, their faces grim, their eyes shadowed by the harsh lighting from bare overhanging bulbs.
Roselli led Jimmy to the head of the table where Jack Dragna was standing, a short, heavyset man with hornrimmed glasses, who reminded Jimmy of a banker. Tom Dragna, as usual in sports clothes, was on Jack’s left and Momo Adamo on his right.
“Jimmy, Jack Dragna’s the boss of our family,” Roselli said. “Momo Adamo’s the underboss and Tom’s the consigliere.”
Jack Dragna raised his hand and spoke to everyone in the room. “Everybody join hands,” he said.
On the table in front of where Jimmy was standing was a revolver and a dagger crossing one another. The next time Jack spoke was in a confusing mixture of Sicilian and Italian. He spoke rapidly and Jimmy tried desperately to understand what was being said to him in front of all these people.
What he was able to make out went something like this: “We are gathered here this evening to make five new members: Jimmy Fratianno, Jimmy Regace, Charley Dippolito, Louie Piscopo, and Tom’s son, Louie Dragna. Now, Jimmy, you are entering into the honoured society of Cosa Nostra, which welcomes only men of great courage and loyalty.
“You come in alive and you go out dead. The gun and knife are the instruments by which you live and die.
“Cosa Nostra comes first above anything else in your life. Before family, before country, before God. When you are summoned, you must come even if your mother, or wife, or your children are on their deathbed.
“There are three laws you must obey without question. You must never betray any of the secrets of this Cosa Nostra. You must never violate the wife or children of another member. You must never become involved with narcotics. The violation of any of these laws means death without trial or warning.”
There was more but, thirty years later, this was what Jimmy Fratianno remembered. The rest of the ritual sermon was a blur.
The next thing Jimmy heard was Jack Dragna asking him to raise the index finger of his right hand. He wondered at the request until Jack pricked his finger with a pin. A small bubble of blood burst forth.
When he looked up, Roselli winked at him. Still speaking in his Sicilian-Italian dialect, Dragna said, “This drop of blood symbolizes your birth into our family. We’re one until death.”
He paused a moment and then stepped forward and kissed Jimmy on both cheeks. “Jimmy, you’re now a made guy, an amico nostra, a soldato in our famiglia. Whenever you wish to introduce a member to another member he don’t know, you say, ‘Amica nostra.’ In English, you say, ‘This is a friend of ours.’ But whenever you introduce a member to someone who’s not a member, you say, ‘This is a friend of mine.’ ”
The ceremony was over. Jimmy turned and kissed Roselli. People began talking again and Jimmy was so excited that he could feel his legs tremble as he moved from man to man, kissing and shaking hands, being slapped on the back, hearing words of congratulation. He was now a member of an ancient and extremely exclusive society. It made him a special person, an inheritor of enormous power. It was something he had wanted as long as he could remember.
In a way, it was almost as though a carefully plotted script had delivered Aladena “Jimmy” Fratianno to that room. Born on 14 November 1913, in a small town near Naples, he was brought to the United States by his mother when he was four months old. His father, Antonio, was already in this country with relatives in Cleveland. In 1915, a daughter, Louise, was born, followed by another son, Warren, three years later.
Fratianno’s background was classical American Mafioso. Aladena, as Jimmy was christened, was one of thousands of Italian immigrants living in the Murray Hill-Mayfield Road district then known as Little Italy but also called the Hill.
At the age of six, he had seen three men mowed down by machine-gun fire in front of Tony Milano’s speakeasy and his reaction had been an awed, “Holy mother of Jesus!”
The conditions in Cleveland’s Little Italy were not all that different from those in the old country. Except, of course, that now the Italians were a minority, confined to a ghetto by their language and manners. They laboured long hours in menial, back-breaking work for minimal wages, their crafts for the most part forgotten in their desperate need to provide food and shelter for their large families.
Some, however, were self-employed and could hold their heads up with pride. Among them was Antonio Fratianno, who worked as a landscape contractor and was known as a serious, sober man, a good provider, but also the absolute autocrat of his household.
Aladena’s first memory, and one he never forgot, remembering it always with a pleasurable glow, was the horse and buggy his father had bought when Aladena was three years old. They lived on East 125th Street then, and he remembered how the neighbours had admired the buggy with the fringed canvas top. He loved that horse and buggy and the way the fringe would dance happily as the horse trotted down the street. He cried the day his father sold it, harder than he did when his father used the strap on him.
His father was strict and quick to punish. Although he was strict with Louise and Warren, he spared the rod with them, a fact not lost on Aladena, who grew even more resentful. The punishment gradually became a duel of willpower between two determined enemies. The harder he was beaten, the harder he became to handle. He grew obstinate and defiant, determined to have his own way and ready to defy all who contested him.
In school he was rowdy, getting into fights with other boys and teachers, until finally he was sent to Thomas Edison, which was known as a “bad boy” school. There he formed a life-long friendship with Louis “Babe” Triscaro, who later would become an important Teamsters official and the liaison between Jimmy Hoffa and the Cleveland Mafia.
Almost from the time he could walk, Aladena had been preoccupied with the importance of money. Besides having his own paper route at the age of six, he hawked newspapers at the No. 4 gate at the Fischer Body plant, and in front of the Hayden Theater evenings and weekends. At eleven he was working with his father, putting in a six-day week during summer vacations and all day Saturdays during the school year.
During this period he gained the cognomen that would stick to him for the rest of his life. There was a policeman who used to chase him whenever he stole fruit from sidewalk stands, which was often, and one day Aladena hit the policeman in the face with a rotten tomato. The policeman gave chase. People stopped to watch, and an older man said, “Look at that weasel run!” When making out his report, the policeman wrote down the nickname and it became part of his police record, following him wherever he went.
It was just prior to this incident that he had started calling himself Jimmy – Aladena sounded too much like a “broad’s name” – and the next thing he knew he was “Jimmy the We asel”. Although at sixteen he entered amateur boxing competitions as Kid Weasel, winning the Collingwood Community Center trophy in the lightweight division, his friends never used the nickname, at least not to his face.
His first experience with bootlegging was at the age of twelve. He was a waiter in a speakeasy owned by a woman called Bessie. For nearly two years he worked part-time for Bessie and saw so many drunks that it turned him against liquor. He would see men come in and drink their entire paychecks, money they needed for their families. At night in bed he would think, “God, people got to be crazy to get drunk.” It was the money part that bothered him the most.
His behaviour in school gradually improved and he transferred to Collingwood High School for the ninth grade, but a year later he caught cold, ignored it until it turned to pneumonia, and with a fever of 106 degrees lapsed into a coma. It was two weeks before he regained consciousness and when he did he found a priest giving him the last rites. As the priest touched his tongue with the Communion wafer, Jimmy opened his eyes and said, “I’m better.” Then he slipped back into his coma for another week.
By the time he opened his eyes the second time, the pneumonia had turned into pleurisy, which had created an enormous deposit of pus in his left lung and pleural cavities. It got so thick it was pushing his heart against his right lung. When all efforts to remove it with a syringe failed, Dr Victor Tanno decided that the only way to get at it was to remove a rib. Because of his weakened condition, ether was out of the question. They would use a local anaesthetic, but as Dr Tanno warned him, it would freeze the flesh but not the bone. With Jimmy strapped to a chair, facing the back of it, and held by his mother, Dr Tanno made the incision in his back and began cutting into the rib.
The memory of that pain would be with him all the years of his life. Fifty years later he could still remember how he had screamed and cursed that doctor, could still feel the teeth-gnashing pain of the saw cutting into bone, a pain so intense he felt blinded, his brain on fire, every nerve end begging for mercy, and he could still feel his mother’s arms around him, hear her cries as if they were coming from a great distance, echoing off the walls and pounding at his ears with his own cries and curses.
When the doctor finally cut through the rib and pulled it out, the pus shot out with explosive force. Dr Tanno laughed and said, “Look, nurse, it’s like an oil well erupting.”
He never returned to school. Although his grades had been below average, he was extremely quick with numbers, a talent that he had already put to practical use. At the age of fourteen, while hawking newspapers at Fischer Body, he had become acquainted with Johnny Martin, a gambler who operated games at Mike’s, a Greek restaurant across the street from the No. 4 gate. Martin, who had taken a liking to the boy, spent hours in a room above the restaurant teaching him all the cheating tricks he knew. He taught him how to shuffle cards, how to deal seconds, and how to mark them during a game by using a small piece of sandpaper hidden in the palm of the hand. Jimmy got so he could mark an entire deck in less than an hour. He learned to use shaded dice, to palm the third dice, to switch, and which numbers were winners and which losers.
By the age of seventeen he had become Martin’s partner at Mike’s, receiving an even cut of the winnings. Later Jimmy bought a portable crap table and began holding his own games at a friend’s house. Booking the game and using shaded dice, he would clear three or four hundred dollars in a matter of a few hours. This money was a far richer reward for less effort than the paltry wage he received from his father for driving a truck each day.
At eighteen he was charged with raping a twenty-five-year-old divorcee. Under cross-examination the woman confessed she had lied because she thought she could extort money from his father, and the case was dropped. But the charge of rape, like the nickname “We asel”, would become apart of his police record, a blemish irrevocable for all time.
A few days before his nineteenth birthday, on a cold moonlit night, Jimmy and a friend went ice-skating at Elysium Park. Jimmy could do just about anything on skates. He played hockey, was an agile figure skater, and could even dance on ice while wearing his long-bladed racers. This made him popular with the girls, which was all the incentive he needed to strut his stuff.
On this particular evening, he showed off for a girl who was with three other girls and five tough-looking Polish boys. When he was leaving the Elysium, the five boys attacked him. The next thing he knew fists and feet were coming at him from all directions. He tried to fight back, but he was pounded into the ground. He was groggily crawling around on all fours, when a heavy boot caught him square in the nose. Bone shattered, blood spurted out, and he flopped over on his back in time for the boot to catch the side of his nose. He rolled over on his stomach and tried to protect his face and head with his arms. He was vaguely aware of blows raining against his body but he was soon beyond pain.
He came to in a receiving hospital. The bridge of his nose was hopelessly crushed and they had to rebuild it with gristle taken from the lower part of his chest. After the operation, he was advised to return for plastic surgery when it had healed, but he never went back.
With the help of his friend, Anthony “Tony Dope” Delsanter, a husky six-footer, Jimmy went out looking for the Polish boys. He caught four of them, in the dark of night, when each was alone, and after knocking them to the ground, Jimmy had gone to work with a blackjack, breaking noses, knocking out teeth, fracturing jaws, and cracking skulls, even breaking the arm of the boy whose boot he suspected had broken his nose. All the boys required hospitalization and all needed many stitches in their heads. The fifth boy had moved away, but Jimmy continued looking for him for a whole year before he grudgingly acknowledged defeat.
For Jimmy, it was something that had to be done, a wrong that had to be righted, a vendetta in the best Italian tradition. While working the boys over with the blackjack, he had realized how easy it would be to kill. He had hit hard enough for that, he had thought at the time; it had not bothered him in the least. For Jimmy, it was an important realization.
When Jimmy was twenty, Jack Haffey, the boss of the 26th Ward, who worked as a state inspector on highway construction, confided to Jimmy that he had top political connections and if they worked together they could make some money. The first opportunity was a contract calling for 25,000 yards of fill for a reservoir. Jimmy’s father had two trucks, and Jimmy suggested that he lease six more. The state was paying fifty cents a yard and, with sideboards, they could load two and a half yards in their one-and-a-half-yard trucks. His father was interested until Jimmy told him it would cost $500 to get the job.
“I don’t want to get in no trouble,” his father said.
“You ain’t going to get in trouble,” Jimmy replied. “This guy’s a pal of the governor.”
“I don’t want to do nothing crooked.”
“Ah, forget it,” Jimmy cried. “I can’t make no fucking money with you. I’ll lease some trucks and do the job myself.”
The next day he became his own boss. He leased eight trucks and gave Haffey the $500 payoff. When the first truck arrived at the reservoir, Jimmy said, “Jack, measure this truck coming in. All my trucks are the same size.”
Haffey looked the truck over. “What do you think, Jimmy?”
“Three and a half yards, Jack. We’re stacking them up high.”
From then on, Haffey wrote down three and a half yards, which meant that Jimmy was making fifty cents extra on each load. With eight trucks making six and seven trips a day, it meant that he was earning an extra $25 to $30 a day, besides the ten cents a yard broker’s fee he was making from the truck owners.
About this time, Jimmy also started booking at the local racetracks and hanging around the clubhouse of the Italian American Brotherhood (IAB) on Mayfield Road. Run by Tony Milano (who would later become the underboss of the Cleveland family), the IAB was the hangout for all the local big shots, who sat outside in the summer, talking quietly among themselves and watching people walk by.
“Big Al” Polizzi was the boss. There was Johnny DeMarco and “Johnny King” Angersola, with his brothers, Fred and George. Jimmy also got to know the leaders of the Jewish mob, known as the Cleveland Syndicate. These men – Louis “Lou Rhady” Rothkopf, Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman – operated gambling joints in Cleveland, as well as in Newport and Covington, Kentucky, all with the blessings of Big Al’s Mayfield Road Gang. Others in the syndicate included Ruby Kolod, Sam Tucker, and, in later years, Lou Rhody’s nephew, Bernard “Bernie” Rothkopf, who would grow up to become president of the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. They also were involved in Buckeye Enterprises, which controlled various gambling concessions, and was the hidden link between the Mayfield Road Gang and the Cleveland Syndicate.
Even as a young boy, Jimmy had suspected that there was some kind of a secret Italian organization that was more cohesive and powerful than the Jews or Irish with whom they worked, but in those days the words Mafia or Cosa Nostra were never used even on the Hill. The only reference to any crime organization ever mentioned was “The Combination”. And it was The Combination which then controlled organized crime in Cleveland.
In 1934 Jimmy bought a two-year-old Marmon limousine and began chauffeuring customers from the East Side to The Combination’s gambling joints around Cleveland. Lou Rhody paid him seven dollars a load. Jimmy drove the limousine himself for a while and then hired a driver.
With money rolling in from the gambling, the chauffeuring and the trucking, he bought himself a new Chevrolet coupe and began having his clothes tailor-made. He wore a broad-brimmed Capone-style hat, alligator shoes, and carried a couple thousand dollars in his pocket. Life was sweet in the midst of the nation’s worst depression.
With more leisure than he knew how to handle, he turned to golf and met Bill McSweeney, a big, tough Irishman who broke heads for the Teamsters union when he was not belting golf balls out of sight. McSweeney’s boss was Tommy Lenahan, a man in constant need of head breakers because the Teamsters was a small, struggling union in those days.
Jimmy’s first involvement with the union was in their effort to organize the parking lots in Cleveland. With the “Neanderthal” McSweeney and others at his side, five-foot-nine Jimmy, who weighed a hundred-fifty soaking wet, would march into parking lots and throw muriatic acid on cars while his partners slashed tyres and broke windshields. The pay was fifteen dollars a day, plus ten dollars a day for every man Jimmy could induce to work for five dollars a day on his crew. During the Premier Aluminium strike, Jimmy had a crew of nine, recruited from the Hill, who fought against scabs and cops, both private and public, with lead pipes, baseball bats, blackjacks, and tyre chains.
Jimmy’s old friend from bad boy school, [Louis] Babe Triscaro, was also cracking heads on the picket lines. From the Premier it was on to the knitting mills around Seventy-ninth Street and Euclid Avenue. And from there to the transportation drivers, with special instructions from Lenahan as to whose head to break.
By the end of 1935, after an exhausting four months of hand-to-hand combat on picket lines, Jimmy came into his own. He went to Florida with the rest of the big boys on the Hill. That was the year The Combination opened The Plantation, its first gambling casino in Miami. He bought a new Oldsmobile, a flashy wardrobe, had $2,500 cash in his pocket, and some expertise in bookmaking.
Johnny Martin had long ago explained the fundamentals which had proved profitable at the local racetracks. Hialeah would be no different. “Booking at the track,” Johnny had told him, “is the easiest, safest way to gamble in the world. If you know what you’re doing, you’ll never lose a nickel. Just balance your book and never refuse a bet. Drop all the long-shots in the box – but when you go to the window don’t let the bettor know. The reason they bet with you instead of going to the window themselves is that they don’t want to reduce the odds. Get yourself a runner. And at night when you go to bed, pray that your bettors get their horses from the racing form and not from some fucking hot tips. Stay away from hot horses.”
On his first day at Hialeah, Johnny King introduced him to “Lucky” Luciano, who looked pretty relaxed for a man who was then the subject of the hottest investigation in New York history. Two of Luciano’s boys began giving Jimmy their action, going a hundred and a hundred, win and place, on each race, each selecting a different horse from the racing form. It could not have been more perfect. The meet was fifty-five days and in that time Jimmy took them for $24,000.
When he returned home, Jimmy started booking at the World Exposition, which had moved from Chicago to Cleveland. He made his headquarters in the midgets’ tent, most of whom were avid horse players. He liked their company, enjoyed their sense of humour, their ability to ignore the misfortune that had made them objects of curiosity. And they were good customers.
In the evening, Jimmy and his friends made the rounds of nightclubs, getting the best tables and hobnobbing with the owners, who showed their pleasure at meeting these rising Young Turks by introducing them to their friendly chorus girls. The friendliest girls, the ones who flattered their ego by never asking for money, were also introduced to James “Blackie” Licavoli, who was on the lam for the murder of Toledo beer baron Jackie Kennedy and his girlfriend. Blackie’s cousin, Thomas “Yonnie” Licavoli, and four others were serving life terms for his crime, while five others involved in the murder had evaded justice by going into hiding. It was through Blackie Licavoli, when Licavoli went to Pittsburgh to stay with Mafia boss John LaRock (née LaRocca), that Jimmy and Tony Dope met Frankie Valenti who one day would be the Mafia boss of Rochester, New York, and would, in these early years, teach Jimmy a few tricks.
At the French Casino Jimmy first met his future wife. He walked into the place, took one look at the hatcheck girl, and immediately sent for the owner to be formally introduced. She was eighteen and her name was Jewel Switzer. She was Irish and German, with blonde hair and big blue eyes, not exactly the kind of girl Italian boys brought home to mother in those days. On 1 August 1936, they drove to Bowing Green and were married. Two months later she was pregnant.
In the summer of 1936 Jimmy and his Cleveland friends discovered that it was a lot quicker and far more profitable to rob gambling joints than to run their own crooked game. Tony Dope Delsanter, who had spent time in a reformatory, was ready for a fast score.
Their first job was a poker game. Jimmy and Tony Dope walked in without disguises, pulled out revolvers, and ordered the nine men in the room to strip down to their underwear and face the wall. They got $5,800 in cash and some jewellery.
The LaRock-Licavoli connection set up the next score. Frankie Valenti had a swanky gambling joint picked out: They went in fast, with their faces obscured by silk stockings, and Jimmy and Tony Dope, who carried sawed-off shotguns, jumped on top of crap tables and screamed, “This is a stickup, against the walls, motherfuckers,” and two hundred people ran to obey their command. The take was $70,000.
It was the kind of easy score that encouraged them to try others. One was a customer of the Cleveland Trust Bank, which was just around the corner from the home of his parents on Earlwood Street. Every two weeks, this man, whom he had met at Mike’s, used to draw $25,000 from his bank to cash cheques at Fischer Body.
Jimmy had parked his brand new Buick, which was to be the crash car, on St Clair Avenue, about a hundred yards away, but with an excellent view of the bank. A friend, Hipsy Cooper, in the getaway car, was about fifty yards ahead of him, and both were watching as Valenti and Tony Dope held up the man at gunpoint as he emerged from the bank and ran down the sidewalk toward the corner of Earlwood where Hipsy was supposed to pick them up. Except that he was not moving. Jimmy gunned the Buick, pulled up alongside Hipsy, and screamed at him to get going. But Hipsy appeared to be in a state of shock. Cursing and threatening dire retaliation, Jimmy knew that he had no alternative but to use his own car to help his friends escape. The theory of a crash car is to obstruct whatever pursuit there may be of the getaway car, regardless of the risk involved.
Jimmy skidded around the corner. He knew his friends, fleeing on foot, would head down the alley behind the bank to Blenheim, take a right, run up Blenheim about ten houses, jump a fence and dash through back yards to his house. Jimmy hit the alley, slammed on the brakes, and threw the Buick into a spinning skid, coming to a stop sideways so that it completely blocked the alley. Behind him was the man who had been robbed, standing on the running board of a car he had commandeered to give chase. And behind him was a police car, with siren blaring.
Jimmy jumped out of his car and started waving his arms in an hysterical fashion. “They’ve got guns,” he cried. “They’ve got guns, I saw them, they’re armed and dangerous, duck down, they’ve got guns and they’re dangerous.”
“Get the hell out of the way,” the man on the running board screamed. “Let us through here.”
“Oh, my God, this is terrible. They’ve got guns,” Jimmy continued to cry, waving his arms like a man who has lost his senses.
“Get that car out of there,” a policeman, hanging out the opened window of his car, shouted as he waved his hand, signalling Jimmy to move out.
Jimmy jumped into his car, spun the wheel around, threw it into reverse, and slammed on the brakes inches from the other car’s front bumper. He threw up his arms in desperation, stalled the engine, turned the motor over with the ignition off, ground the gears, and finally roared out of the alley when he was sure that his friends had had ample time to reach his house.
They were sitting in the parlour, gulping steaming cups of coffee his mother had just served them, and they were livid. They wanted to kill Hipsy. “Where’s the cocksucker?” Tony Dope wanted to know. “He left us there to die.”
Valenti was angry but less emotional about it. “Where’d you get that cretino?”
“It’s his first score,” Jimmy said. “He panicked, froze at the wheel.”
“I’m going to kill that prick,” Dope promised.
“Fuck him,” Jimmy said. “Let’s cut it up three ways and forget him.”
Jimmy’s daughter Joanne was born on 24 June 1937, a beautiful, happy baby, but Jimmy had little time to spend with his family. Exactly one month later he pulled his last job for a while. The victim was Joe Deutsch, a layoff bookmaker who was too slow in paying off. When Jimmy called to ask why he had not been paid, Deutsch said, “ ‘Listen, punk, you’ll get paid when I get good and ready to pay. No sooner, understand.” Jimmy started screaming and Deutsch slammed down the phone in his ear.
For the next few days, Jimmy was like a demented man.
He told Tony Dope and McSweeney that he wanted to hurt Deutsch, and they suggested that they might as well get some money while they were at it. For a while they followed Deutsch as he made the rounds of his drops. Jimmy decided to use his Buick and Tony Dope stole some plates which they attached to the Buick’s plates with clothes pins painted black.
They struck at nine-thirty on a Saturday night at the downtown intersection of Ninth and Superior, with people five rows deep along the sidewalks. McSweeney was behind the wheel of the Buick and Jimmy and Tony Dope were in the back seat, each armed with a .38 revolver. When the light turned red, they were right behind Deutsch’s car. They jumped out of the Buick and came at Deutsch from both sides, with Jimmy on the driver’s side. They opened the doors and Jimmy said, “Joe, move over. Don’t make no dumb plays and you won’t get hurt.”
The moment Deutsch saw the guns, he began screaming for help. “Hit him in the fucking mouth,” Jimmy told Tony Dope as he tried to shove and push Deutsch out of the way so he could squeeze in behind the steering wheel. He heard the dull thudding of Tony Dope’s gun as it repeatedly smashed against Deutsch’s head. Blood spurted on Jimmy’s new grey gabardine suit and he screamed at Tony Dope, “Pull him away from me.” The light turned green and he frantically shifted into gear. He meandered up side streets, getting away from the commercial district, until they were on a quiet residential street.
Deutsch was unconscious and Tony Dope had cleaned out his pockets. Jimmy pulled to the kerb and McSweeney stopped behind them. While McSweeney removed the hot plates, Jimmy looked for a sewer to dump the plates and guns. But McSweeney had borrowed his gun from a friend and refused to throw it away. Instead he put it in the glove compartment, and with him behind the wheel, with Tony Dope at his side and Jimmy in the back seat, they decided to go to McSweeney’s house for Jimmy and Tony Dope to clean up and to divide the 1,600 dollars found on Deutsch, which was a long way from the 10,000 they had expected.
“We nearly got in the shit,” McSweeney said. “That sonovabitch screamed loud enough to wake the dead.”
Jimmy laughed. “As long as he don’t wake the Cops.”
Before he could finish the sentence they heard a siren. Seconds later a squad car pulled alongside and a policeman waved them to the kerb.
They waited in the Buick as two policemen approached from both sides of their car. The officer on Tony Dope’s side played a flashlight on Jimmy in the back seat.
“What happened to you, buddy?” he asked.
“I was in a little fight at the poolroom,” he said, with a note of apology in his voice. “They’re taking me home so I can clean up.”
“Oh, yeah? Get out of the car, all of you.”
What happened next was inevitable. They found McSweeney’s gun and later they found Deutsch, who refused to identify his assailants, but the police lab matched the blood, and that was it.
The judge handed down ten-to-twenty-five-year prison sentences to all three. Jewel screamed when the verdict was pronounced and his mother and sister held on to each other and wept. There were tears in his brother Warren’s eyes when Jimmy turned to wave to his family, refusing to walk to the railing to touch or speak to them. His father’s eyes were dry as he stoically gazed at his son. He shook his head, once or twice, as if to say, “Why didn’t you listen to me,” but it was too late.
In 1937 the nation’s second oldest penal institution was the Ohio State Penitentiary. Its forty-foot high grey stone wall covered four square blocks in downtown Columbus, an awesome, soul-chilling sight. Passing through its massive steel gates at the age of twenty-three, Jimmy knew he would have to spend some of the best years of his life behind that forbidding wall. For the first time in years, he felt weak and powerless, vulnerable in a world that could crush him like a bug.
All that he had to draw succour from was the advice an old con had given him: “Jimmy, remember one thing when you walk through that gate. Once you’re in that joint, you’re going to do that time. Nothing can stop that. So do good time. Learn how to relax. Forget your family, forget your friends on the outside. Pretend they don’t even exist. Don’t worry about nothing. Don’t count the days, throw out the calendar. Sleep all you can and dream about sexy movie stars. When your pecker gets stiff in the night, think about Jean Harlow and whack it. Stay away from punks. There’s nothing they can do for you that you can’t do with your palm. Get involved in prison activities. Keep your nose clean but don’t take no shit from nobody. Grab a club and break their fucking heads in a minute. That way nobody’s ever going to fuck with you again. When you don’t know what to think about, try to imagine what you’re going to get for breakfast or dinner or supper. Get involved in team sports. Don’t worry about cockroaches or bedbugs and rats.
“Face up to the reality of prison life. Don’t talk to screws, you’ve got nothing to say to them. They’ve got nothing to do with what happens to you in there. Remember that it’s the cons that run the prison. They’re the clerks, they do all the paperwork, keep the files, assign the good jobs, the good cell blocks, they see that you get extra privileges. Screws don’t do nothing but watch. Go to school, you won’t learn nothing, but you’ll get to see other cons, for that joint keeps everybody under lock and key twenty-four hours a day.
“It’s a hard place and it’s killed lots of good men, young and old, but it can’t kill nobody that knows how to do good time. That, my boy, is the secret of surviving in that joint. Do one day at a time and let the outside world go fuck itself.”
Jimmy never forgot that advice, and recites it verbatim forty years later. It served him well through the many years of time he would do.
He soon learned that it really was the cons who ruled the prison, and that the most important one at the Ohio Penitentiary was Blackie’s cousin, Thomas “Yo nnie” Licavoli. Yonnie got Jimmy a job in the kitchen, a prize assignment, and had him transferred from a cell block to a dormitory. For the three years that he was there, Yonnie was his protector.
In the spring of 1940, Jimmy’s father brought him both good and bad news. The good news was that he had met a man who could get him transferred to the London Prison Farm for $1,500. The bad news was that Jewel, who had moved to Los Angeles with her parents, had divorced him. “She still loves you,” his father said, “but they made her do it.” Jimmy wanted to laugh – not that he was happy about the divorce, but because it was so unimportant at this point in his life.
There were no grey walls at the prison farm in London, Ohio. There was a cyclone fence, dormitories, freedom to talk, no marching to the dining hall, plenty of windows with no bars, and lots of fresh air and outdoor sports. From early spring to late fall, Jimmy spent most of his time playing softball. Warden William Amrine was a softball freak. He had an all-star team called Amrine’s Angels which played games all over the state and the players lived in the honour dorm. Jimmy made Amrine’s Angels his second year there. He was a good player, quick on the bases, slick with a glove, and the best line-drive hitter on the team. His batting average led the league for three consecutive years.
Not neglected, however, was his talent for gambling. Shooting craps on top of their bunk beds, without a backboard, Jimmy was soon an expert at a pad roll. By rolling the dice with the two sixes facing each other it was impossible to crap out on the first roll.
For a while Jimmy was the farm’s fire chief and he used to sleep days. Late one afternoon he reported on sick call.
Jimmy knew the doctor, who was a softball fan. He said, “Doc, this’s probably going to sound awfully funny to you, but I think there’s something wrong with me.”
“What’s the problem? Getting headaches?”
“Doc, I had four wet dreams this afternoon. I took four showers and scored four times for sheets. That ain’t normal.”
“I never heard of that,” the doctor said. “What have you been eating, for Christ’s sake?”
“Well, doc, when I get off work, I have a quart of half-and-half, a couple eggs, you know, and some vanilla extract, and I stir it all up like a milk shake.”
“My God,” the doctor said. “I’ve got to try that. Four? Are you sure?”
“I usually get a couple, you know, but never four before.”
“My advice is stop drinking that stuff until you get out of this place.”
The solution, Jimmy decided, was a three-day pass, which he arranged by having his sister send a telegram that his mother was too ill to visit him. Deputy Warden Jay Young accompanied him to Cleveland. Jimmy gave him a $250 bonus, free and clear of all expenses. When word got around the prison, officials began competing with each other for the privilege of taking him home. In all he had five three-day passes.
Jimmy was released from the prison farm on Washington’s Birthday 1945. A month earlier, he had found an opportunity to visit Yonnie Licavoli at the Ohio penitentiary and had told him of his plans to remarry Jewel and move to Los Angeles.
“Jimmy, if you go to Los Angeles, get in touch with Johnny Roselli,” Yonnie had advised him. “He’s in the federal joint at Leavenworth right now. He got caught in that movie extortion rap with some of the top guys in the Chicago outfit, but I hear they’re working out some deal to spring them. When he gets out, he’ll come to L.A., and you give him my regards. Tell him I’d appreciate it if he got you straightened out with the right people.” It would be two and a half years before Jimmy would finally meet Johnny Roselli.
Following his release from the prison farm, he went back to pulling jobs with Frank Valenti, trying to build up a nest egg for his California venture. To satisfy his parole officer, he managed canteens at three factories for Babe Triscaro who was now the business agent for the truckers’ local, with plush offices in the new Teamsters building.
Managing canteens looked like a legitimate job to Jimmy’s parole officer, but it was a black market operation and a gold mine. He sold nylon hose, cigarettes, liquor, food and gas ration stamps – anything that was hard to get. He bought from hijackers, burglars, and hustlers, and sold at mark-ups of two and three hundred per cent. From time to time, to improve his mark-up, he would personally venture into the hijacking business, with the deals set up by Teamsters officials.
Jimmy and Jewel were remarried before moving to Los Angeles in June 1946. Unknown to Jewel, Jimmy had nearly 90,000 dollars stashed in the truck of his new Buick, the money he had been collecting to launch his California career.
His first large-scale operation in Los Angeles was as a bookmaker at the Chase Hotel in Santa Monica. He rented a three-room suite on the third floor and opened a cigar stand in the lobby. He formed a friendship with Salvatore “Dago Louie” Piscopo and gradually became friendly with the Dragnas and some of their associates. Over pizza and coffee at Mimi Tripoli’s pizzeria on the Sunset Strip, and over some of the best Italian food in town at Naples, he met Giolama “Momo” Adamo, and his brother, Joe; Charles Dippolito and his son, Joe, who owned a vineyard in Cucamonga; Leo Moceri, who, like Blackie Licavoli years earlier, was on the lam from the Jackie Kennedy murder in Toledo; several Matrangas, Frank, Joe, Jasper, Leo, and Gaspare, who was not related to the other four and had once been the boss of Calumet City, Illinois, but now lived in Upland, California; Pete Milano, Tony’s son; Frank “Bomp” Bompensiero, who was from San Diego and was in partnership with Jack Dragna in a couple of bars in that city, including the Gold Rail; Tony Mirabile, also from San Diego, who owned dozens of bars; James Iannone, who under the alias of Danny Wilson had acquired a reputation as a muscleman but was in fact terrified of violence; Louis Tom Dragna, who was Tom’s son; Nick Licata and his son, Carlo; Frank DeSimone, who was an attorney; Sam Bruno and Biaggio Bonventre, both of whom always looked ready for action, and were; and Simone Scozzari, who years later would be caught at the Apalachin, New York, Mafia meeting with DeSimone and deported.
It was in September 1947 that Jimmy went to Dago Louie’s house to meet Roselli. He found him to be a gentleman in every sense, which pleased Jimmy because he had heard so much about this man from Yonnie and Dago Louie. Jimmy noticed that the cut of Roselli’s suit was far more conservative than anything he had ever worn. Everything was subtly colour-coordinated and Jimmy resolved to discard his own wardrobe which looked flashy and cheap by comparison.
Looking at Roselli only confirmed that old saying about not being able to judge a book by its cover. Some of the toughest guys he had known had often appeared more gentlemanly than the rough-looking punks who fainted at the sight of blood. Here was Roselli, looking like a man of distinction in his conservatively tailored suit, his blue eyes gently amused as he spoke in soft, modulated tones. Who would have guessed that as a kid he had been tough enough to make it with Capone at a time when tough guys were dying like flies. Later when Capone went to prison, Roselli took his orders from the new Chicago boss, Frank Nitti. Roselli was then dispatched to California, where his job was to protect Nationwide, then the only horserace wire service in the country. He also was a “labour-relations expert” in the motion picture industry, keeping an eye on Willie Bioff, who Nitti had placed in charge of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Operators. Then, in 1944, on the testimony of Bioff, the top hierarchy of the Chicago Mob was convicted for extorting a million dollars from the movie industry and sentenced to ten-year prison terms. Then, following his release from Leavenworth Penitentiary on 13 August 1947, Roselli had rejoined Jack Dragna in Los Angeles.
At this very moment, Roselli and his Chicago cohorts were the subject of a congressional investigation that charged they had been prematurely released from prison in a scandal that cast suspicion on the Justice Department and the White House.
But here he was, a month later, talking pleasantly in Dago Louie’s parlour. The contrast and subtlety of it made a deep impression on Jimmy. Having paid his dues, Roselli could sit back and live on his reputation. The organization would take care of him. He would never want for money or power. He had it made. That was what Jimmy wanted, what was missing from his life, what made him feel like he was standing still. He needed that feeling of accomplishment, to be separated from the multitude of hustlers he worked with every day, the punks of the world. Roselli was a gentleman, a man of respect, and Jimmy Fratianno was a hustler in search of an identity.
Later in the evening, Dago Louie excused himself and Jimmy had an opportunity to relay Yonnie’s message about straightening him out with “the right people”. When Roselli asked if he knew what Yonnie had meant, Jimmy said, “Johnny, I’ve been wanting this since I was a kid. I knew the Italians on the Hill had something special going for them, but it’s so fucking hard to crack.”
Roselli smiled. “That’s right, Jimmy, and that’s the way it should be. When you get the wrong guy in there, you’ve got to clip him. There’s no pink slip in this thing.”
Following the initiation ceremony at the winery, Jimmy and Roselli went to Dago Louie’s house to celebrate. Roselli lifted his glass and offered a toast to the two men he had sponsored. “Amici nostra,” he said, “may we all live long and prosperous lives.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Jimmy said, laughing happily.
“Christ, that was really something tonight.” He paused and looked at the two men. “You know, Johnny, this’ll probably sound crazy; but for a while there I felt like I was in church.”
RoselIi nodded gravely.
“I felt like Jack was going to make me a fucking priest.”
“Well, Father Fratianno,” Dago Louie said, “how about a blessing?”
They laughed and both started asking Roselli questions at the same time.
“Hold it,” he said. “Why don’t I lay it out for you guys. You know, tell you what you should know about our thing.” He paused and looked at them. “You are soldiers. In the old days they called you ‘buttons’.” This is a special kind of army. It’s made up of a boss, the commanding general; an underboss, who may or may not be important, depending on the family situation, but most times he’s there to back the boss’s play. The consigliere’s the adviser, the guy who’s supposed to know all the ins and outs of the organization. Then there’s capiregime, captains or skippers; and finally, soldati. . . See, it’s really an army of captains and soldiers.
“But there’s soldiers and then there’s soldiers. It’s like a democracy, some are more equal than others. Certain soldiers carry more respect than others. But any soldier, no matter who he is, carries the power of the organization with him wherever he goes in this country. And no other family can touch him without the approval of his boss. See, all families, no matter how big or how small, have separate but equal power. Oh, yes, going back to what Jack was saying about made guys. Whenever made guys get together to talk family business, everybody that’s not made has to leave the room no matter how much they’re trusted.
“Now, the commission. It’s made up of the bosses from ten families. The five New York families, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. The point is that these bosses don’t have an ounce more power than any other boss. It makes no difference whether the boss is Tommy Lucchese, who’s on the commission, or Jack Dragna, who’s not. The power is equal. The only purpose of the commission is to settle disputes that come up between different families. It has nothing to do with the business of individual families. If Jack wants to clip somebody in his family, or somebody else in his territory, he clips him. He don’t need the commission’s permission. This is his country and he runs it any damn way he sees fit. No other family can fuck with him here. If they do then it’s a problem for the commission.
“Let’s say we have a problem with Colorado. Jack would go see Joe Batters (né Anthony Accardo) in Chicago. He’s the arbitrator for everything west of Chicago. He straightens it out. That’s what the commission’s all about. All bosses on the commission also have equal power. There’s no boss of bosses, never has been. That’s all bullshit. Some bosses, maybe because they are older and wiser, command more respect than others, but that’s all.
“Now you also hear a lot of bullshit about being paid for hits. Forget it. That’s against the rules. You kill when you’re given a contract by your skipper or sometimes it might come directly from the boss. If you’re given the contract, you’ve got to do the hit. Most soldiers are under skippers. And it stops right there. Take Bompensiero in San Diego. He’s the skipper down there and he runs the show in that town. He takes orders directly from Jack, but his soldiers take their orders from him. If Bomp says you clip somebody, you do it. You don’t ask no fucking questions. You’ll never make money doing work for the family. That’s just part of your responsibility as a member.
“But there’s another angle to this. The fact that you’re a member gives you an edge. You can go into various businesses and people will deal with you because of what you represent. See, you’ve got all this power. Nobody fucks with you. We’re nationwide. We can get things done nobody else can. And that means you can make a pretty good living if you hustle.”
Richard Kuklinski
Richard Kuklinski was not a Sicilian or an Italian. His father was Polish; his mother Irish. He came from the projects of Jersey City. His father was an alcoholic who beat his children savagely. Richard’s older brother died as a result of these beatings. Kuklinski himself took to torturing cats. He claimed that his own first murder victim was Charley Lane, a gang leader in the projects. At the age of fourteen, he beat Lane to death. After disposing of the body, he tracked down the other members of Lane’s gang and beat them to within an inch of their lives. He came to the attention of the Mob when he started selling pirated pornographic films to the Gambinos. A large man, they used him as a debt collector and he built up such a fearsome reputation that they employed him regularly as a hit man. He claimed to have killed over a hundred people, including the Gambinos’other feared executioner Roy DeMeo and Teamster’s boss Jimmy Hoffa, whose disappearance in 1975 remains an enduring mystery. Experts in the field have expressed doubts about both these claims, but there is no doubt that he was an habitual killer. In 1988, he was convicted of five murders and given two life sentences. In 2003 he pleaded guilty to murdering New York police detective Peter Calabro which earned him another thirty years. He admitted to Calabro’s murder in the second of two HBO documentaries made about his life. He also participated in the writing of two biographies The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer with Anthony Bruno in 1993 and The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer – quoted here – by Philip Carlo in 2007. In the books, he lists the many ways he liked to kill – using firearms, including a miniature derringer; ice picks; hand grenades; crossbows; chain saws; and a bomb attached to a remote-controlled toy car His favourite weapon, he said, was cyanide solution administered with a nasal-spray bottle in the victim’s face. He gained his nickname “Ice Man” from his practice of freezing the bodies of his victims to disguise the time of death. He claimed to have kept Hoffa’s body in the freezer of a Mister Softee ice-cream truck for two years. He also claimed to have lived the “all-American family” life in suburban New Jersey with his wife Barbara and their three children, but Mrs Kuklinski told author Anthony Bruno that her husband had tried to smother her with a pillow, pointed a gun at her, tried to run her over with a car and, on three occasions, hit her so hard that he broke her nose.
Carmine Genovese was out of jail and needed another man killed, though this time, he told Richard, the mark had to suffer before he died and the body had to “disappear”.
“This guy,” Carmine said, “did something to a friend of mine’s wife. Something very disrespectful. You make sure he suffers, understand? Do it good and I’ll pay you double . . . OK?”
“OK, sure, no problem,” Richard said. He did not ask what the man had done, why he had to suffer. That was irrelevant, none of his business.
Again, Carmine gave Richard a photograph of the mark, and the address of the place he worked, a used-car lot on Raymond Boulevard in Newark. In the picture, the mark was standing in the lot next to a woman who looked kind of like him.
“You do this right, I pay you very well, capisce?”
“Capisce,” Richard said.
“Maybe you can bring me a little piece a him so I can see for myself and tell my friend how he suffered.”
“A piece of him?” Richard repeated, a little confused.
“Yeah, so I can show my friend.”
“How big a piece?” Richard asked.
“Not so big. Maybe like his hand . . . some toes, OK?”
“Yeah . . . sure, OK,” Richard said. “No problem. I aim to please.”
“Good,” Genovese said. They shook hands. The contract was sealed. Glad Carmine was giving him another “piece of work”, Richard left his place, his mind suddenly filled with the job before him. This was, he would later reveal, the part he liked the most: the stalking of a victim. Richard instinctively knew how to do this, and he looked forward to it. Clearly, Richard had grown into a psychotic sadist, one who had discovered a way to hurt and kill people and get paid for it. Life was good.
It was a sprawling used-car lot. Colourful flags were strung across it every which way. Richard quickly found the mark. He was tall and thin and was often walking about the lot with customers. He even went on test drives with people. Before Richard made any kind of move, he surveyed the place for two days, found out when the most people were there, when the mark arrived and when he left. When Richard had a clear plan in his mind, he parked his car a few blocks away, on a quiet street lined with broken-down warehouses. There were fewer people shopping for cars about 11 a.m., just before lunch, and that was when Richard walked on to the lot, straight up to the mark, a friendly smile on his high-cheekboned face. It was late March, the weather had become mild, Richard wore a baggy jacket. In one pocket, he had a .38 derringer; in the other, a jawbreaker – a kind of cosh consisting of a piece of solid lead the size of a cigarette packet encased in black leather with a short, thin handle – perfect for knocking people unconscious with one blow. Smiling, Richard told the mark he needed an inexpensive car quickly, that his car had been stolen and he needed wheels for work.
“Something reliable,” he said. “I’m not handy with engines, and I don’t want to get stuck, somewhere at night,” he explained, his face suddenly grave. Richard was, in fact a consummate actor. He had natural ability, no doubt acquired on the street, to look someone square in the eye and lie through his teeth.
“Got the perfect car for you,” the mark said, and led him over to a two-door Ford. Richard looked it over carefully, kicked the tyres.
“Can I take it for a spin?” he asked.
“Of course,” the mark said. “Let me get the keys.” He walked into the little office on the left. Richard had set the trap; soon he’d spring it. They piled into the car. Off they went. Richard drove a few blocks, talking about how well the car handled, then headed directly towards his car. Completely unaware of what was about to happen, the mark was no doubt calculating his commission. Richard pulled up to his car and stopped, said he wanted to check under the Ford’s bonnet.
“Is that OK?” he asked politely, smiling.
“Sure, no problem. Got nothing to hide here, clean as a whistle.” The mark was caught up in the moment, having no idea about the hatchet, rope and shovel in the boot of Richard’s car. Richard slid out of the Ford and opened the bonnet. The mark, of course, followed. As he was looking down at something Richard had pointed to, Richard struck him with the jawbreaker just above the ear. He went right down, out cold. In seconds, Richard put him in the boot of his car, taped his mouth shut with industrial duct tape and tied his feet and hands behind his back. Calm and cool, Richard got to the freeway and drove south to the Pine Barrens, desolate forests that were perfect for what he had in mind. This was where he had disposed of Charley Lane – the projects’ bully – so many years ago. Richard had already scoped out a good spot, where he hid his car behind a thick stand of pines. Here he opened the boot, dragged the panic-stricken mark from his car and tied him to one of the trees, his back tight up against it. Richard took a length of rope, forced it into the mark’s mouth and tied it tightly to the rough pine tree, forcing the man’s tongue up against the back of his rapidly constricting throat. The mark was crying now, trying to talk, to beg, to plead, but he made only muffled unintelligible grunts. He seemed to know why this was happening, as if, in a way, he had expected it. At this point, Richard actually told him that he had to suffer before he died. He went back to his car and retrieved the hatchet and shovel, very much enjoying the whole thing.
He made sure the mark saw the hatchet and shovel, watched the reality of their meaning in Richard’s enormous hands sink in. The man began to scream, to try to break free, but it was impossible. He wet himself, a thing Richard would see many times in years to come. Richard proceeded now to smash the mark’s ankles and knees with the hatchet. Then he chopped off his fingers, one at a time. Richard stepped back to see the degree of pain the mark was suffering. He’d been planning to take fingers back to Genovese as proof of suffering, but he suddenly got a better idea, as he put it . . .
When Richard had finally killed the mark, he dug a hole in the pine-needle-covered ground, threw what was left of the hapless man into it, retrieved the proof Genovese had asked for, and returned to Hoboken, carrying it in a plastic bag he’d brought along, listening to country music as he went.
He found Genovese at home.
“Did you do the job?” Genovese asked.
“Yeah, it’s done,” said Richard.
“You bring me something good?” Genovese asked.
“Sure did,” Richard said, amused, placing the bag on the kitchen table.
Curious, Genovese looked inside, and there was the mark’s head. A big smile spread over Genovese’s large, round face.
“Son of a bitch! Beautiful . . . you did good, son of a bitch.” Genovese said, realizing he had found a rare man in this giant Polack. “Very good! Molto bravo . . . molto bravo!” he added.
“Want me to get rid of it?” Richard asked.
“No . . . leave it here. I want to show it to my friend. Did he suffer?” asked Genovese.
“Yeah, he suffered good,” Richard said, and Genovese paid him 10,000 dollars cash on the spot for, he said, “a good job well done”.
The cash in his pocket making a pleasant bulge, Richard left Genovese, knowing his reputation as an efficient contract killer was assured.
Richard still frequently thought about killing his father, Stanley. He’d start thinking about him, remember the brutal, callous treatment he’d meted out, get all mad inside and want to beat him to death. On several occasions, he actually went to a bar near the projects where Stanley hung out, looking to put a bullet in his head, but his father wasn’t there.
It was like a spur-of-the moment thing, Richard explained. He was lucky because when I was looking for him he wasn’t around. Even now, I mean sitting here and talking about him, I regret a lot not capping him – the prick . . . the sadistic prick!
Stanley never realized how close he’d come to being killed by his second son.
Joseph, Richard’s younger brother, was also extremely violent, and in frequent difficulties at school, always getting into trouble, stealing things, drinking excessively. Richard wanted to reach out to him, give him advice, put some money in his hands, but he loathed his mother so much by this time that he wouldn’t even go near their apartment any more.
After being given the head of the car salesman, Carmine Genovese took a shine to Richard. Carmine had a lot of money on the street, and he began to use Richard as his chief collector and enforcer, or bagman. Had Richard been Italian, Genovese would surely have sponsored him for induction into the family, but he was Polish, so that could never happen. Still, Carmine gave him a lot of work. Richard was collecting money for him from people up and down the East Coast. He was reliable, honest and very violent when necessary – sometimes too violent. Richard was always knocking on Carmine’s door with brown paper bags of money in his hand. He never stole a dime from Carmine; indeed, he never even thought about it, which only made Carmine that much more fond of him. Everyone who borrowed money from Carmine Genovese knew the ground rules out of the gate and paid it back quickly, as agreed. Nor to do so, everyone also knew, could be fatal.
For the most part, Richard enjoyed working for Genovese. He made money – most of which he pissed away. People respected him and showed him deference, and his reputation as a dangerous “mob-connected guy” spread all over Jersey. Nobody fucked with him. Even other Mob guys stayed clear of Richard Kuklinski. He became known as “the Polack”. That became his street name.
Richard took to carrying two guns and a knife whenever he went out. If he wasn’t armed to the teeth, he felt naked. He was fond of over-and-under .38 derringers, double-barrelled, with the barrels one on top of the other rather than side-by-side. They were so small that they could readily fit in the palm of a hand, and at close range they were lethal. Richard enjoyed killing up close and personal, and to kill someone with a derringer you had to be right on top of him; that is why, he said, he also enjoyed killing with a knife.
It’s intimate. You can feel the blade going in, the bones breaking, see the shock on the guy’s face and watch the lights go out.
When asked if he believed in God, believed that it was a sin to kill a human being, he said: The only God I believe in is a loaded pistol with hair trigger. Funny how, before I killed a lot of guys they’d call me God. ‘Oh God, no! Oh God, no!’ he said, smiling, amused by the memories.
Richard’s wife, Linda, gave birth to a baby boy whom they named Richard. Richard senior felt no love for or emotional attachment to his child. He was a natural extension of a sex act – nothing more. Richard didn’t even go to the hospital when Linda gave birth, nor did he help bring her home. He acted as though it were someone else’s child, not his; but it didn’t take long for Linda to become pregnant again.
Linda saw all of Richard’s weapons but never questioned what they were for. She knew how violent and psychotic Richard could be and acted as if she were blind. She knew too that if she questioned him, demanded information, he might very well explode and hit her. In this, Richard was a carbon copy of his father – the man he hated most in the world – but he did not, never would, hit his son, or strike any of the five children he would eventually have.
Richard was, for the most part, fond of children; he saw them as put-upon innocents and became enraged when he saw an adult hitting a child. One time, he beat the hell out of a man he saw hitting his kids in a parking lot; in years to come, he’d kill a friend of his because the man asked him to murder his wife and eight-year-old son.
I don’t kill women and I don’t kill children. And anyone that does don’t deserve to live, explained Richard. As cold and completely indifferent as Richard was to the suffering of men, he could not stand to see a child harmed. He also hated rapists – tree jumpers he called them – and was always on the lookout for sexual predators. He viewed them as vermin that need immediate eradication.
Richard was still taking trips to Manhattan’s West Side, where he killed anyone who got in his way, who was pushy or rude. He very much enjoyed killing aggressive beggars, usually so quickly that they didn’t even realize what had happened until they hit the ground.
One night, Richard came upon two burly, leather-clad men raping a young boy behind a red eighteen-wheeler parked close to the Hudson. He was walking along, admiring the way the lights on the Jersey side of the river played on the water, the giant piano keys of light they made, when he heard a plaintive cry, moaning and meaty thumps. He slowly walked round behind the truck, and there he saw the rape: a boy was being forced to fellate one man while the other sodomized him. The men were laughing. They were drunk. They were now in trouble. Richard pulled out a .38 derringer and without a word shot both the rapists dead.
“Thank you, mister, thank you!” the boy said, pulling up his trousers, wiping blood from his nose.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Richard said, and proceeded to cut open the stomach cavities of the two leather-clad men, silently cursing them, before dumping them in the river. Richard knew that if the stomachs were eviscerated, gases could not build up, so the bodies would sink and stay down.
He took great pleasure in killing these two rapists.
Richard had become addicted to killing people. After he committed a murder, he felt relaxed, whole and good – at peace with himself and the world. Richard was very much like a junkie who needs a fix to soothe the pangs of addiction. Murder, for Richard Kuklinski, became like a fix of pure heroin – the best high ever. And the NYPD never suspected that a huge man of Polish extraction from Jersey City was killing the men they kept finding. There were no witnesses, no clues; no one knew anything.
Retired NYPD captain of detectives Ken Roe told me: Back then there were no citywide records of homicides being kept, as there are today. The local precinct had a file, but that was it, and because most all these killings were of bums, people no one really gave a fuck about, there was no incentive to properly work the case. You see, because he was killing in all different ways, the cops didn’t think one guy was doing it. In a sense . . . in a very real sense, they were inadvertently giving him a licence to kill. Hell of a thing.
Richard’s mentor, Carmine Genovese, had another special job for him. A man in Chicago named Anthony De Peti owed Carmine 70,000 dollars and wasn’t paying as promised, had stories instead of the money. After Carmine explained the facts of life to him, De Peti promised he’d have the money in two days, “on Wednesday”.
“OK, I’ll send Richie to come and get it,” Carmine said, and called Kuklinski.
“You go to Chicago Wednesday. This guy is going to meet you in the lounge bar in the Pan AM terminal, give you the money he owes, seventy Gs, you bring it right back, OK?”
“OK.”
“Be careful. He’s slippery like a fuckin’ wet eel,” Carmine told him.
Richard enjoyed going out to Newark Airport and flying to Chicago. It made him feel like a successful businessman. These days, Richard sported a Fu Manchu moustache and long sideburns that tapered off at sharp angles just above his jaw line. Stern and forbidding to begin with, he looked even more scary and unsettling with the curved moustache and long, dagger-like sideburns. Already his hair was thinning on top, highlighting his high, wide brow and the severe planes of his Slavic cheekbones. He had, of course, a .32 and a knife with him, as well as one of his beloved derringers. Back then, there was no problem carrying weapons on to a plane.
Richard arrived at Chicago’s sprawling, very busy O’Hare Airport, went straight to the lounge, sat down and waited for De Peti to show himself, not expecting any bloodshed. This was a simple pick-up, he thought. He sat and looked around, wondering where the hell De Peti was, becoming a little annoyed. Finally, he stood up and walked all over the lounge, making certain every man there saw him. He was hard to miss at 6 ft 5 in and 250 lb. Nothing, no recognition from anyone. Hmm. He was about to call Carmine when a man who’d been sitting not ten feet away from him all along stood up and said, “Rich?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Anthony De Peti – ”
“Why the hell didn’t you say something? You saw me sittin’ here?”
“I wanted to make sure you were alone,” De Peti said.
Richard didn’t like that answer. It immediately made him suspicious. He looked at De Peti with a jaundiced eye.
“You got the money?” he asked.
“Yeah, right here,” said De Peti. He was a head shorter than Richard, though wide in the shoulders, with a long, narrow hatchet face and buckteeth. Hairs, like the antennae of an insect, protruded from his narrow nose. He handed Richard a black attaché case.
“But it’s not all there,” he said.
“How much is here?” Richard asked.
“Thirty-five. Half.”
“He’s not going to like that.”
“I’ll have the rest in a day or two.”
“Hey, buddy, I’m here now, and you’re supposed to have it all, here now. I gotta get on a plane back to Jersey soon. He ain’t going to like this.”
“I swear I’ll have it in a day or two.”
“Yeah, well, I gotta call him. Come on,” Richard said, and led De Peti over to a nearby bank of phones. Richard got Genovese on the line.
“You find him all right?” he asked.
“Yeah, he’s right here, but he don’t have it all.”
“Son of a bitch. How much does he have?”
“Half, thirty-five, he says. He says he’ll have the rest in a day or two. What do you want me to do?”
“Put him on the phone!”
Richard handed De Peti the phone. Smiling, De Peti explained how he’d have the money soon. “In a day, the most, I swear,” he proclaimed, making sure Richard saw his smiling face, like all was OK, no problem here – Carmine was his friend, what the hell? He gave the phone back to Richard as flight announcements boomed from a nearby loudspeaker.
“Yeah,” said Richard, not liking De Peti. Richard had an uncanny ability to read people, like some kind of animal-in-a-jungle thing, and he did not like this guy, did not trust him.
“Rich, you stay with him, don’t let him out of your sight. He says people owe him money, that he’ll definitely have the money real soon.”
“All right. What do you want me to do with what he gave me?”
“You hold on to that! Don’t let him out of your sight, understand?”
“Yeah,” Richard said, hanging up.
“See, I told ya,” said De Peti. “It’s all OK.”
“It’ll be all OK when you give me the rest of the money,” Richard said.
With that, they left the airport, and De Peti took Richard from bar to bar, looking for various people he could never seem to find. After ten hours of this, in and out of different bars, Richard was thinking this guy was trying to give him the slip, buying time De Peti could not afford. They ended up in a crowded place on the South Side called the Say Hi Inn. It was filled with a rough clientele. They ordered drinks. De Peti went to use the phone; Richard kept an eagle eye on him and saw him talking to a big, burly guy whose face was so pockmarked it looked like gravel. Richard clearly saw something he did not like in the big man’s eyes. In his right hand, in his pocket, Richard held the white-handled, chrome-plated .38 derringer. There were two hollow-nosed rounds – better known as dumdums – in the gun, bullets which spread out on contact, making horrific wounds. De Peti came back to the bar, drank some of his drink. “He’ll be here soon,” he told Richard.
“The guy with the money,” Richard asked.
“Yeah, guaranteed.”
Soon, though, Gravel Face made his way over to the bar. Purposely, he shouldered Richard, looking, Richard instinctively knew, to start a fight with him so De Peti could slip away. Richard slowly turned to him.
“You like your balls?” Richard asked.
“What? What da fuck?” the guy said.
“If you want to keep your nuts, get the fuck outta here,” Richard said, now showing him the mean little derringer pointed directly at his crotch, “or I’ll blow them both the fuck off here and now.”
Gravel Face turned and left. Richard turned to De Peti. “So you’re looking to play games.”
“No games – what’re you talking about?”
“If I start playing games, you are going to end up very hurt. I’m losing my patience. You think I’m a fool?” Richard asked.
“He’ll be here with the dough,” De Peti said.
But nobody showed up. The bar was closing. Finally, De Peti said they should rent a room in a nearby hotel, that he’d definitely have the money “in the morning”.
“In the morning?” Richard repeated.
“I swear.”
Reluctantly, Richard called Genovese, who said it was OK to wait. They checked into a nearby hotel. Richard washed up and, tired, lay down on one of the two beds, as did De Peti. But Richard was wary and sleep did not come easily. He didn’t know how long he’d been lying there, but he sensed, in his half-asleep state, movement nearby. He opened his eyes. As they adjusted to the dark, he could just discern De Peti skulking through the room, moving towards him, past him and to the window. De Peti slid it open and began to creep, snake-like, out onto the fire escape. In two swift movements, Richard was up, grabbed him and yanked him back into the room, where he pummelled him. Richard moved shocking fast for such a big man, which caught many people off guard. Richard turned on the light.
“You slimy motherfucker, you been playing me all along.” Richard kicked him so hard he moved across the floor. Oh, how Richard wanted to kill him, shoot him in the head and throw him out the window, but those luxuries were not his, he knew. This guy owed Carmine a lot of money, and Richard couldn’t just go killing him. Instead, Richard called Carmine in Hoboken.
“The fuckin’ asshole tried to fly,” he said. “I caught him sneaking out on the fire escape.”
“Son of a bitch. Put him on’a da phone!”
Blood running from his mouth, De Peti told Carmine that he was only looking to get some fresh air, not escape . . . certainly not trying to get away. “I swear, I swear on my mother,” he cried, histrionically holding his hand over his heart for maximum effect.
“Where’s the money?” Carmine demanded.
“Tomorrow, tomorrow, I swear!” De Peti pleaded.
Richard got back on the phone. Carmine said, “Give ’im until tomorrow. He don’t come up with the money, throw him out a window with no fuckin’ fire escape, OK?”
“OK,” Richard said. “Gladly.”
The next day, it was the same story, running around different bars and lounges, looking for various people who had the money. It was as if, Richard was thinking, De Peti was playing a shell game, a three-card monte shuffle. Again, De Peti went to use a phone. There was a door near the phone, and Richard could see De Peti eyeing it. He hung up, came back, said they had to go to a pizza place. They waited there an hour, and then went to two more bars.
Richard was tired of De Peti’s bull. “He’ll be here, he’ll be here,” he kept telling Richard, and no one showed up.
Pissed off, Richard took De Peti back to the hotel and, without another word, hung him by his feet out of the window. Begging, De Peti now said he’d get him “all the money”, that it was in a place he owned over on the South Side.
“You lying to me, I’ll kill you on the spot,” Richard promised.
“I ain’t lying, I ain’t lying,” he pleaded, cars and trucks and buses moving on the wide avenue ten storeys below.
Richard pulled him inside. “Let’s go.”
It was a kind of go-go place. Half-naked girls who had seen better days danced around, wiggling their breasts and shaking their ample asses in Day-Glo red lights. De Peti took Richard straight to a rear office, opened a safe hidden in a cupboard wall, grabbed a pile of notes, and gave him the thirty-five Gs.
“My God, if you had the money, all the time, why didn’t you just give it to me?” Richard asked, really annoyed now, anger rising in him.
“Because I didn’t want to pay,” De Peti admitted sheepishly.
That made Richard see red, his balls, as he described it, were all twisted already, and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“Really?” he said, smiling slightly, making the soft clicking sound out of the side of his mouth.
“Let me get one of the girls in here to clean your pipes out,” De Peti offered.
“Naw, that’s OK,” Richard said.
After counting the money, Richard suddenly pressed the little .38 derringer hard to De Peti’s chest and pulled the trigger. Boom. The report of the gun was muffled by De Peti’s chest and drowned out by the music coming from the club.
With a horrific hole in his chest, De Peti hit the ground hard and was soon as dead as a doorknob.
Calmly, Richard left the club, hailed a cab a block away, went to the airport and caught a flight back to Newark. As soon as he hit the ground, he went to see Carmine Genovese.
“And what happened?” Carmine asked as he opened the door.
“I got two things to tell you.”
“Yeah?”
“First, I got the money – all of it. Second, I killed him. All he did was play me,” Richard said, nor sure if Carmine would get mad. After all, he had killed a customer of Carmine’s after getting all that was due.
“Good, bravo. We can’t be letting these fuckin’ assholes play us for fools. That gets around on the street, we’re out of business. You did the right thing,” Carmine said, patting Richard on his enormous back. “You’re a good man, Richie. Mamma mia, I wish you were Italian. I’d sponsor you in a fuckin’ minute,” he said, and paid Richard well.
Carmine, a very rich man, tended – like most Mafia men – to be cheap and greedy. For them, nothing was ever enough.
Content, Richard soon left.
Back in Chicago, one of De Peti’s strippers discovered his body. The police were summoned. They questioned everyone in the club and got a vague description of a big man seen leaving the office.
Another unsolved homicide.
Tony Spilotro
In 1971, Tony Spilotro took over in Las Vegas. He had been associated with the Mob since childhood. His parents were from Bari in southeast Italy and ran a restaurant in Chicago that such celebrated gangsters as Frank Nitti and Sam Giancana used for meetings. From an early age, he got involved in petty crime. In 1962, he pleaded guilty to attempting to fix a basketball game. He became a debt collector for the Chicago Outfit, the local branch of the Cosa Nostra. With the Outfit’s enforcer “Mad” Sam DeStefano’s heavy mob, Spilotro was sent to kill two gangsters. He quickly gained notoriety when he crushed one of the victims’ heads in a vice. In 1963, he was “made” and assigned to bookmaking with his childhood friend Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. After running the mob’s betting operations in Miami, he was sent to Las Vegas. As he took control a series of murders took place. Victims were tortured and dumped out in the desert. In 1973, Spilotro was indicted for murder alongside DeStefano, but was acquitted after DeStefano was slain. The following year he was indicted a second time, this time alongside reputed Mob boss Joseph Lombardo. Again they were acquitted when a key witness was murdered. Things began to turn bad in Las Vegas for Spilotro when he was barred from entering casinos by the Nevada Gaming Commission. So he diversified into burglary and protection. The situation deteriorated further when his burglary gang were arrested and rumours circulated that Spilotro was sleeping with Rosenthal’s wife. The Outfit decided to have him killed. They lured him back to Illinois when Spilotro and his brother Michael were beaten with baseball bats, then burned alive in a cornfield. In his book Casino, Nicholas Pileggi – author of Wiseguy which was adapted for the screen as Goodfellas – used interviews with Spilotro’s enforcer Frank Cullotta and Bill Hall, the FBI agent who bugged him, to tell the tale of Spilotro’s time in Las Vegas.
When Tony Spilotro got to town in 1971, Las Vegas was a relatively quiet place. The bosses had been making so much money from their own illegitimate enterprises, such as illegal bookmaking, loan-sharking, and casino skimming, that there was a concerted effort by the Mob to keep the town clean, safe, and quiet. The rules were simple. Disputes were to be peaceably settled. There were to be no shootings or car explosions in town. Bodies were not to be left in car trunks at the airport. Sanctioned murders took place out of town or the bodies disappeared forever in the vast desert surrounding the city.
Before Tony arrived, Mob matters were so benignly administered that Jasper Speciale, the biggest loan shark in town, operated out of his Leaning Tower of Pizza restaurant, and his waitresses moonlighted as collectors after they finished work. The town’s petty criminals – the drug dealers, the bookies, pimps, even the card cheats – were operating for free. Las Vegas was an open city: mobsters from different families around the country needed no permission to wander into town, extort money from high rollers, work a credit seam on a casino, and go home. The kind of street tax imposed by the outfit back home was unheard of.
“Tony stopped all that,” said Bud Hall Jr, the retired FBI agent who spent years eavesdropping on Spilotro’s life. “Tony changed the way business was done in Las Vegas. He took over. The first thing he did was bring in some of his own men and impose a street tax on every bookie, loan shark, drug dealer, and pimp in town. A few, like a bookmaker named Jerry Dellman, resisted, but he wound up shot dead in a daylight robbery in the garage area behind his house. Nobody tried to hide the body. It was a message that there was a real gangster in town.
“Tony understood very quickly that he could run Las Vegas any way he wanted, because the bosses were 1,500 miles away and didn’t have the same kind of street ears in Las Vegas that they had back in Elmwood Park.”
“When Tony first moved to Las Vegas, very few people even knew who he was,” Lefty said. “I remember we had this really arrogant guy, John Grandy, in charge of all construction and purchasing. Nobody fucked with John Grandy. If people asked him for anything, he’d say, ‘Why the fuck are you bothering me? Get lost!’ I handled him with kid gloves.
“One morning Tony was coming in to see me. Grandy was there giving orders to three or four workers who were putting together some blackjack tables for dealers. He had a bunch of construction material in his arms, and he looked over and sees Tony coming up to me, and he says to Tony, ‘Hey, come here! Hold this! I’ll tell you what to do with it later.’
“I’ll never forget this. The stuff weighed about thirty or forty pounds. Tony was so surprised he held it a second before shoving it right back.
“ ‘Here,’ Tony said, ‘you hold it, not me. Who the fuck do you think you are? The next time you talk to me that way, I’ll throw you out the fucking window!’ Quote unquote.
“Grandy looks at me. I look at Tony. Tony is fuming. And Grandy does what Tony says. Grandy takes the stuff back and doesn’t say shit. Tony says he’ll meet me down in the coffee shop and he leaves.
“When Tony’s gone, Grandy says, ‘Hey! Who the fuck’s that guy? Who’s he think he is?’ I said, ‘The guy doesn’t work here. Never mind who he is.’
“But Grandy knows something’s wrong. He goes down into the casino and spots Bobby Stella and drags Stella to the coffee shop to look for Tony.
“ ‘Bobby, who’s that fucking guy over there? Who the fuck does he think he is?’ Grandy’s getting all riled up now.
“Bobby saw he was pointing to Tony and tried to calm him down. ‘Slow down. Take it easy.’
“ ‘What do you mean, “slow down”?’
“Bobby says, ‘That’s Tony Spilotro.’
“Grandy just stood there and said, ‘Holy shit! Holy shit!’ He apparently knew the name but not the face. He went right over to Tony and apologized four or five times. ‘I’m very, very sorry. I really didn’t mean to insult you. Things were a little bit busy and I didn’t know who you were. Would you accept my apologies?’ Tony said yeah and looked the other way. Grandy ran.”
Frank Cullotta got out of prison after doing six years for a Brinks truck robbery, and Spilotro flew to Chicago for his coming-out party. “I had ‘Free At Last’ on my birthday cake,” Cullotta said. “Everyone came and they all gave me envelopes, and at the end of the night I had about 20,000 dollars, but mostly it made me feel great that so many guys were with me and liked me. I was still on paper [on parole], so I couldn’t leave Chicago right away, but Tony said that as soon as I got off paper I was supposed to come to Nevada.
“By the time I got there, Tony was already running the town. He had everybody on the payroll. He owned a couple of guys in the sheriff’s office. He had guys in the courthouse who could get him grand jury minutes, and he had people in the telephone company to tell him about phone taps.
“Tony had the town covered. He was in the papers all the time. He had broads coming around in Rolls-Royces who wanted to go out with him. Everybody wanted to be around a gangster. Movie stars. Everybody. I don’t know what the fuck’s the attraction, but that’s the way it was. I guess it’s a feeling of power, you know. People feel like, well, these guys are hitters, and if I need something done, they’ll do it for me.
“He knew I was a good thief, and he said we could make good money. Tony always needed money: he went through cash fast. He liked to bet on sports and he never stayed home. He was a sport. He always picked up the cheque. No matter if there were ten, fifteen people with us, he’d always pick up the cheque.
“He told me, ‘Look, get a crew together. And, whatever you gotta fucking do with the guys, you got my okay. Just give me my end. You’ve got carte blanche out here.’
“I sent for Wayne Matecki, Larry Neumann, Ernie Davino, real desperados like that, and we started putting the arm on everybody. Bookmakers. Shylocks. Dope dealers. Pimps. Shit, we’d strong-arm them. Beat them. Shoot their fucking guard dogs. What did we care? I had Tony’s okay. In fact, half the time Tony’d told us who to grab.
“Then, after we’d rob them and scare them, they’d run to Tony for protection to get us off their backs. They never had any idea it was Tony who sent us over to rob them in the first place.
“We made good money turning over houses. It was all cash and jewellery. I’m talking about thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars in twenties and hundreds laying in dresser drawers. One time I found fifteen thousand-dollar bills next to a guy’s bed. Now, where the fuck am I gonna get rid of them? Thousand-dollar bills are hard to get rid of. Banks want your name if you try and cash them. So I pushed them at the Stardust. I handed them to Lou Salerno, and he shoved them in the drawer and gave me back fifteen grand in hundreds.
“How do you think I put up the money for my restaurant, the Upper Crust? I got the money in two days. Me and Wayne and Ernie hit two maitre d’s’ houses and got over 60,000 dollars. Maitre d’s take twenty-dollar bills from people looking for good tables all night. Well, we took the twenties back. One of the guys also had a 30,000-dollar Patek Philippe watch, and we sold it to Bobby Stella for three grand. Bobby gave it away as a present.
“We’d get our information from the casino people. Bell captains. The registration desk. The credit clerks. Travel agency people. But our best sources were the insurance brokers who sold the people the policies of the stuff we were robbing. They’d give us the information on everything. What kind of jewels the people had and how much they were insured for. Where in the house the stuff was located. What kind of alarm system. The people had to put all that info down on their policies when they got insured.
“If the doors and windows and alarm systems were a pain, we’d go right through the wall. Going through the walls was my idea. I invented it. It’s very simple. Almost all the houses out in Vegas have stucco exterior walls. All you need is a five-pound sledge to make a hole big enough so you can get in. Then you use metal shears to clip away the chicken wire inside the wall they use for lathing. Then you bang away a little more until you break through the interior dry wall, and you’re inside the house.
“You could only do this in Las Vegas, because the houses were stucco and they have high walls around them for privacy. People have pools and things outside, and they like to live private lives. Nobody knows their neighbours. Nobody wants to know their neighbours. It’s that kind of town. It’s the kind of place, if people hear a noise from the house next door, they tune it out. We did so many of these jobs that the newspaper started calling us the Hole in the Wall Gang. The cops never knew who we were.
“ ‘Mean fucking pigs,’ Tony’d say, proud of us. ‘Look what I have created out here.’
“We had it down. We’d be in and out of a house in three to five minutes tops. And whenever we did a job, we had a guy in a work car outside with a scanner picking up police calls. We even had a descrambler so we’d get the FBI. Tony gave us the descramblers and the police frequencies.
“But no matter how well we were doing, we always needed more money. Burglary money goes quick. We always had to divide it four ways – me and my two guys, and then Tony would always get his end. On a $40,000 job, Tony would get ten grand. For sitting home. He got an equal end every time.
“Sometimes, if we needed cash and things were slow, we’d do straight robberies. We took the Rose Bowl out like that. At that time the Rose Bowl was owned by the guy who owned Chateau Vegas, and Tony gives me all the information and then says, ‘You’re gonna need a guy with a clean face.’ So I imported a kid from Chicago with a clean face, a guy that nobody knew. We couldn’t use a known guy because we weren’t supposed to be doing robberies like this in the first place. If the bosses found out Tony was doing armed robberies in the middle of town, he wouldn’t have been here long. But nobody back home knew we were doing burglaries and robberies. That was our little secret.
“The old broad who ran the Rose Bowl and her bodyguard came out into the back parking lot just like Tony said they would, with a bag of money. She walks toward her car. The bodyguard is just standing there watching her. The new kid I brought to town walks right up to her, flashes a gun, and grabs the bag out of her hand.
“The guy she had watching her tried to be a hero, and my kid whacked him with the back of his hand and the guy’s on his ass. My kid was real rough. He’s in jail now on something else. He’s doing forty years.
“The kid runs the block parallel to the Strip. There’s a chapel over there. Ernie Davino was waiting for him. Larry Neumann was in the parking lot, right nearby, as a backup if the kid needed help. When the kid jumps into the car with Ernie, Larry has already gotten in back. And as they’re coming off the street, I’m coming off the street. We were four blocks away cutting up the money when we could hear the police just starting to show up at the Rose Bowl parking lot.
“Looking back I see how crazy we were. Here we were in Las Vegas with a million ways to make a dishonest buck, and Tony’s got us out here doing house burglaries and armed robberies and 7-Elevens. It was dumb.”
All booming industries create jobs, and the Spilotro operation was no exception. Within a year Spilotro was providing work not just for his own crew but for dozens of law enforcement officers who tailed him, bugged him, and attempted to ensnare him in elaborate stings. At one point, Spilotro was betting $30,000 a week at a bookmaking operation that was actually an IRS sting; he was attracted by the fact that it offered better odds than any other book in town. When the IRS agent operating the sting had the nerve to ask Spilotro for collateral, Spilotro greeted him with a baseball bat. “Do you know who I am?” Spilotro asked. “I run this town.”
Spilotro had moved his jewellery storefront from Circus to West Sahara Avenue, just off the Strip. The Gold Rush Jewelry Store was a two-storey building complete with platformed sidewalk and fake hitching posts.
“We got the necessary probable cause and dropped a mike in the ceiling of the back room of the Gold Rush,” said Bud Hall. “The front room was strictly for selling rings and wristwatches. Upstairs, Tony had anti-surveillance devices, telephone scramblers, battleship binoculars so he could see if he was being watched from a mile away, and shortwave radios that picked up police calls and were even able to unscramble the bureau’s frequencies. Tony got our frequencies through some Metro cops he had on his payroll. He also had an electronics expert from Chicago, Ronnie ‘Balloon Head’ DeAngelis, who would fly into town every few weeks and sweep the place for taps and bugs. We always got our best stuff right after DeAngelis left. ‘Balloon Head says the place is clean,’ Tony would proudly announce, and everyone would relax.
“Tony was a totally focused human being. He woke up in the morning knowing exactly what he was going to do that day. He’d get dozens of calls at the Gold Rush. He had all kinds of financial deals going on at the same time. He had different groups, hundreds of people, a million schemes, all of them in various stages of development. And even though most of them never panned out, he still had to put in a sixteen- to eighteen-hour day trying to put the deals together.
“It would have been difficult doing what Tony did if he had secretaries, a filing system, Xerox machines, and the free use of a phone. But Tony did it all off-the-cuff and kept it all in his head. The only things he ever wrote down were telephone numbers, and he used to write them down in the tiniest little handwriting that made them unreadable without a magnifying glass, and when we’d get ahold of them, we found he would transpose the numbers or write half or three-quarters of each number backwards.
“Listening to someone on a wire every day,” Bud Hall says, “is different than being around them all the time socially. It creates a strange relationship between the person listening and the subject. You’re listening to their lives, and pretty soon you’re inside their lives. I don’t mean that you get to like them, but you get to be able to tell by the sound of their voice what their moods are and where in the room they might happen to be. There are times when you can almost lip-sync what they are going to say before they say it. You come to know them so intimately that you almost become a part of the person.
“Tony was the smartest and most efficient mobster I had ever seen. I think he was a genius. His biggest problem was that he was surrounded by people who were always screwing up. That’s all we kept hearing him say over and over. He’d harangue his crew about their incompetence and how he had no choice but to do things himself if he wanted them done right.
“If you talked to him on the phone, all you had to say were three or four words and he would have digested the purpose of the call, and the call had better be about business and it had better be in his interest.
“Tony had no capacity whatever for casual conversation. He could be congenial. Cordial. Likeable. But you couldn’t waste his time. He lost his temper faster than anyone I ever knew. There was no slow burn. He went right from being nice to being a screaming violent maniac in a second. There was no way to prepare for him. I think the speed with which you were suddenly under attack was as terrifying as the thought of having Tony mad at you. However, once it passed, it passed. He forgot it. He went back to business.
“He lived a completely separate life from Nancy. They shared their son, Vincent, but that was about it. He slept in his own room on the ground floor of their house behind a locked steel door. When he got up in the morning, around ten thirty or eleven, Nancy stayed out of his way. He’d make his own coffee, and when he picked up the paper on the front step or off the walkway, he’d look up and down Balfour Avenue for surveillance.
“When he was ready to leave, there was no ‘good-bye’ or ‘see you for dinner’. He’d just get in his blue Corvette sports car and routinely go around the block a few times, checking for tails. It could take him forty-five minutes to drive the ten minutes between his house and the Gold Rush because Tony would automatically dry-clean himself of tails by driving through shopping centres, stopping at green lights, moving through red, making illegal U-turns, and then checking his rear-view mirror to see if anyone was following.
“After all that time I spent listening in at the Gold Rush and at his house, I decided that he had what we called in the marines ‘command posture’. When he talked, people listened. When he entered a room, he was always in charge. But in charge of what? That was his problem.
“One day we picked up that Joe Ferriola, one of the Chicago street bosses, was trying to get a relative a job as a dealer at the Stardust. Tony asked Joey Cusumano to take care of it. Cusumano, one of Spilotro’s top guys, hung around the Stardust passing Tony’s messages back and forth so much that many of the casino’s employees thought he worked there.
“A week passed and Tony got another call from Ferriola’s people that she was still unemployed. Tony had a fit. Cusumano checked back and found the casino wouldn’t hire her as a dealer because she had no experience and would have to go take a six-week course at dealer’s school.
“Tony then tells Joey to ask Lefty, who was pretending to be the Stardust’s food and beverage director at the time, to get the kid a job as a waitress.
“A few days later, Joey comes back and says that Lefty doesn’t want to hire her because he doesn’t think she’s good-looking enough to be a Stardust cocktail waitress, and besides, she’s got bad legs.
“Spilotro exploded and he did something he should have never done – he called the Stardust himself. He got hold of Joey Boston, an ex-bookmaker Lefty had hired, to run the Stardust Sports Book.
“Tony shouldn’t have called the Stardust himself, because now we at the FBI had a tape of Spilotro asking a top executive of the Stardust casino to get a job for a Chicago capo’s relative. That’s exactly what we had been waiting for. It made for the kind of direct link between the Mob and a licensed casino that neither side would ever want made public, the kind of connection that could jeopardize a casino’s licence and call into question just who really owns the casino and who might be serving as a front.”
Ferriola’s relative eventually went to work as a security guard at one of the other Las Vegas hotels. But the story of how Tony Spilotro, the most terrifying mobster in Las Vegas, could not manage to get a job at the Stardust for the relative of a Chicago capo did not help his reputation back home.
“I was around Tony all the time and he was always worried about people listening in,” says Matt Marcus, a 350-pound illegal bookmaker who took a lot of Spilotro’s action. “We’d be in the Food Factory on Twain Street, a place he had a piece of, and he’d communicate with body language. He’d lean back and shrug and twist his head and frown. He drank tea all the time. Not coffee.’ He always sat with the tea bag hanging out of the cup, leaning and shrugging and twisting and frowning. He was positive the next person passing by would be the FBI. He was always changing cars. The intel unit was always checking his licence plates. They’d go right up to the cars and take down their numbers.”
“Tony seemed to get a real kick out of matching wits with the FBI, but he wasn’t stupid,” Frank Cullotta said. “Whenever he had anything to say we’d go for walks in empty parking lots or on the side of the road in the desert. When you said something to him, mostly he’d just make faces, or frown, or smile and get across what he meant for you to do. Even when he did talk, he’d always cover his mouth with his hand, in case the feds were using lip-readers with binoculars.”
At one point, the FBI became so frustrated with its telephone taps and its once-promising Gold Rush microphone that they installed a surveillance camera in the ceiling of a back room behind Cullotta’s restaurant, where they suspected Spilotro was having some of his key meetings.
“We got a tip something was up there,” Cullotta said, “and we went up behind the false ceiling and tore it out. It was like a small TV camera and it said ‘United States Government’ or something, and its serial numbers had been scraped off. I got really pissed. I wanted to trash the damn thing, but Tony made us call Oscar [Goodman, Spilotro’s attorney] and give it back. I think he liked the idea of the feds coming over with their hats in their hands to get it back.”
When the FBI saw that over two years of electronic surveillance had failed to snare Spilotro, they sent an undercover FBI agent, Rick Baken, into the Gold Rush, using the name Rick Calise.
As part of the ruse, Baken had first curried favour months earlier playing cards and losing to Tony’s brother John. During their card games Baken let it slip that he was an ex-con and jewel thief who desperately needed cash and was looking to unload some stolen diamonds at a great price. The bureau had, of course, given Baken the backup necessary to verify his criminal past in case Spilotro checked. But even after meeting Spilotro, Baken found that Herbie Blitzstein, Tony’s gofer, always kept him away from a direct conversation with Spilotro.
After eleven months of this futile and dangerous undercover work, the feds became so frustrated that they tried a desperation move. Wearing a wire, as usual, Baken approached Spilotro directly and said that he had been picked up and questioned by the FBI and threatened with prison unless he talked about Spilotro’s illegal activities.
To Baken’s surprise, Spilotro suggested they visit his attorney, Oscar Goodman.
The next thing Baken knew, he was in a defence attorney’s office wearing a wire and pretending to be a crook. Goodman listened to Baken’s story for about fifteen minutes and gave him the names of several lawyers to call.
Goodman later had a great time playing up the incident just enough to make it appear as if the FBI had tried to violate the attorney-client privilege by eavesdropping on a potential defendant and his attorney.
As time passed, Spilotro spent less and less time with his wife, Nancy. When they were together, they fought and the FBI listened. She complained that he had lost interest in her. She accused him of affairs. He was never home. He never talked to her. In the morning, the FBI recorded the sound of silence as Tony made his coffee and Nancy read the newspaper. Then he would leave for the store without even saying good-bye.
Sometimes Nancy had to call him at work to relay a message; according to Bud Hall, Tony was always rude. “She’d say, ‘I don’t know if this can wait, but so-and-so called.’ ‘It can wait,’ Tony would say, sort of sarcastically, and just hang up. Or he’d say, in an exasperated tone, ‘Nancy, I’m busy,’ and hang up. He was never gentlemanly with her, and she’d whine to Dena Harte, Herbie Blitzstein’s girlfriend, who managed the front of the Gold Rush. Nancy would tell Dena whenever Tony beat her up or whenever she suspected Tony was fooling around with this one or that one, and Dena kept Nancy informed about what Tony was doing.
“There was one time when Dena called Nancy at home and said, ‘The bitch is here.’ Nancy jumped in the car and tore over to the place and started screaming at Sheryl, Tony’s girlfriend, calling her a no-good cunt right there in the middle of the store.
“We could hear the screaming on the wire, and then Tony comes out, and then we hear Nancy screaming for Tony to stop hitting her. He was really beating her up. We got worried that he was going to kill her. It was a mess. So we called nine-one-one and said we were in the Black Forest German Restaurant next door, and said someone was being assaulted in the Gold Rush. We couldn’t tell the cops who we were because at that point it looked like Tony owned Metro, and we didn’t want to blow our surveillance. The police got there in a few minutes, and everything calmed down.”
“Nancy had her life and Tony had his,” said Frank Cullotta. “Hers was mostly playing tennis and running around in white outfits. She had Vincent and Tony’s brothers and their families. Once a week Tony’d take her out to dinner or something. But she wasn’t afraid of him. She would scream and yell at him and drive him crazy.
“Once, he told me, she tried to kill him. They were having an argument over something and Tony knocked her across the room. She came up with a loaded thirty-eight cocked at his head. ‘I’ll kill you if you ever hit me again,’ she said. Tony said, ‘Nancy, think of Vincent.’
“ ‘I saw death,’ he told me after. ‘We talked until she put down the gun and then I hid all the guns in the house.’ ”
“Sheryl was about twenty, but she looked younger,” said Rosa Rojas, who was her best friend. “She was a Mormon from northern Utah, cute and fresh. When Tony first met her he used to call her his country girl. She was so naive that when he asked her out, she said she’d only go if she could bring her friend.
“Sheryl and I were both working in the hospital where he was going for his heart problem, which was how they met. They’d go to restaurants, but he never put the make on her. He held her at a distance for a long, long time.
“Before he got too close he found out everything there was to find out about her. He had Joey Cusumano ask about where she was from, who her friends were, how long she lived where she lived. He wanted to know everything he could know about her before he got involved or felt he could trust her.
“It was a long time before she knew who he was. She began to suspect something was strange, because every time they went out, they were tailed by cops in plain clothes. Tony’s brother told her that there were some legal problems and that Tony was being trailed because of the legal stuff. Tony used to tell us that we were going to read things about him in the newspapers, but he said the newspapers weren’t always right.
“It was only after a long time that Tony and Sheryl started going to bed together. He was a gentleman always. Very quiet. Very reserved. I would see him mad sometimes, but I never once heard him curse or use bad language.
“Eventually, he bought her a two-storey condo around Eastern and Flamingo, a two-bedroom place for about $69,000. It had everything. Refrigerator. Blinds. A washer-dryer. There was a garage and small patio and a sliding door that led into the downstairs, and upstairs they had the bedrooms and a large room that had all of the stereo and TV equipment you would want. That’s where they spent most of their time – watching ball games and listening to music.
“Tony was very generous. He used to leave $1,000 a week in a bear-shaped cookie jar in the kitchen. He never mentioned money and it was never mentioned that he was keeping her, but when he bought her a full-length mink coat Sheryl felt he had finally committed himself to her. She had really fallen in love with him.
“She didn’t know he was married for quite a while. When she found out, it was very hard. She believed the only reason she and Tony weren’t married was because Tony was a very strict Catholic and would have trouble leaving his wife. For a while, Tony even had Sheryl learning to be a Catholic. He gave her religious books to read. He knew the Bible.
“He never ever said anything bad about his wife. They had been married in the church and it was a difficult situation. On top of that, Tony loved his son. Vincent meant everything to him. Vincent was his soul. Tony would always get home at six-thirty in the morning so he could be there to make breakfast for Vincent. Sheryl said he would do that even if he was in bed at her place.
“Eventually, Tony bought a car for her. It was a new Plymouth Fury. It wasn’t a showy car.
“When Nancy found out what was going on, things got a little tough. Sheryl had stopped by the Gold Rush to see Tony. She was wearing a diamond-studded S necklace that Tony had given her, and when Nancy came in and saw Sheryl wearing the S necklace, Nancy went wild and she reached for it.
“I got there just at that time and I found the two of them wrestling on the floor. Sheryl managed to hold on to her S. Tony came out of the back room and broke up the fight so Sheryl and I could get away.
“In the end, when it was over between Tony and Sheryl, he wouldn’t return her calls. Sheryl was really crazy about him, but maybe she pushed too hard. He was having a lot of problems with the cops when they broke up, and maybe he was trying to spare her.
“His brother John used to tell her not to try and reach him. ‘Don’t call him,’ he’d say. ‘Spare yourself.’ But she’d see him making his court appearances on TV and she saw that he was gaining weight and didn’t look good, and she used to blame Nancy for not taking care of him. Sheryl used to make sure he ate the right food, and her refrigerator was always filled with fruits and salad and the kinds of healthy food that were good for people with heart problems.
“After she and Tony broke up she got a job doing cocktails at night. Tony wasn’t happy about it. But she had grown accustomed to his lifestyle. She needed the money. Then she got into dealing blackjack. She worked in the old MGM, at Bally’s. She had a prime shift and made excellent money. She started meeting high rollers. She wised up. She learned and started looking around for another rock to stand on.”
“One day we’re in the back of the My Place Lounge, in the parking lot, and Tony tells me to kill Jerry Lisner,” said Frank Cullotta. “Jerry Lisner was a small-time drug dealer and hustler.
“Tony said: ‘Frankie, you gotta take care of this guy. He rolled. He’s a rat.’
“I told Tony that Lisner would be hard for me, because I had just beaten him out of 5,000 Quaaludes and he and his wife didn’t trust me.
“And Tony got all mad. ‘I’ll go kill the motherfucker,’ he says. ‘Just get him over here.’
“I told him it wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it; it was that Lisner was worried about me. It would be hard to get close enough to get him.
“ ‘I want it done now!’ he said. ‘Now and quick!’
“That was all he said. He walked inside the joint. We were all being followed all the time, so I got in my car, went home and packed a bag, drove all the way from Las Vegas to Burbank airport in L.A., where I took the next flight for Chicago. Nobody even knew I had left town.
“In Chicago I got ahold of Wayne Matecki. We left the next night using fake names on a flight for Burbank, got in my car, and drove back to Las Vegas.
“We went from the airport to my condo, the Marie Antoinette, where I thought I’d take a chance and call Lisner. I say to myself, ‘Let me give it a shot. See if he’s home.’ He is. I say, ‘I’ve got a mark, a real good one. Somebody we can take for a lot of money.’ I tell him the guy is in town. I’m talking a great score.
“He tells me to bring the guy over. We use a work car where we’ve got a police scanner and a twenty-five-calibre automatic. I didn’t have a silencer so I made half loads – I half-emptied the bullets so they wouldn’t make as much noise.
“I left Wayne in the car with the scanner and I went inside. I told Lisner I wanted to talk with him before the guy came in. I want to make sure that there’s nobody in the house. I know his old lady works. I know he’s got two sons, but he was always complaining that they were pains in the ass.
“As we’re walking into the house I’m asking, ‘Are you sure nobody’s home? You positive? Where are your kids? Where’s your wife?’ He’s telling me that there’s nobody home, and I’m telling him I want to make sure before I bring the guy inside.
“We’re walking around inside and I say, ‘I hear a noise,’ and he’s saying it’s nothing. I looked out the living room toward the pool and I closed the blinds. We’re walking together and we’re coming out of the little den area and I pulled the stick out and popped him two times in the back of his head.
“He turns around and looks at me. ‘What are you doing?’ he says. He takes off through the kitchen toward the garage.
“I actually looked at the gun, like, ‘What the fuck have I got? Blanks in there?’ So I run after him and I empty the rest in his head. It’s like an explosion going off every time.
“But he doesn’t go down. The fuck starts running. It’s like a comedy of errors. I’m chasing him around the house, and I’ve emptied the thing in his head.
“I catch him in the garage. And as I catch him in the garage, he hits the garage door button, but I hit him before it goes down. I can see he’s getting weak. I drag him back into the kitchen.
“I’ve got no more bullets. I’m thinking, what am I going to do with this guy? I grab an electric cord from the water cooler and I wrap it around his neck and it breaks. I was going to the sink to get a knife and finish this thing when Wayne walks in with more bullets.
“Lisner is still gasping. He says, ‘My wife knows you’re here.’
“I emptied the gun into his head. In the eyes. And then he just went down, like he deflated, and I knew he was gone.
“Now I wanted the house to be clean. I had blood all over the place. Blood was all over him. My worry was that I’d leave a print in the blood somewhere on his body or clothes.
“I hadn’t worn any gloves because Lisner wasn’t dumb. He wouldn’t have let me through the door if he saw me wearing gloves. So I made sure I didn’t touch anything. The only thing I knew I touched was the wall, when I hit him near the water cooler. And there, right away, as soon as he went down, I wiped everything clean real fast.
“But there was the danger of my prints on his body, so I grabbed him by the ankles and Wayne opened the sliding door, and I dragged him to the pool and slid him, legs first into the water. He went in straight, like a board. Like he was swimming.
“I knew by soaking him in the pool the blood would dissolve and any of my prints on the body would disappear. I looked down as he floated there and I saw the blood starting to come up.
“Then Wayne and I looked through the house. I wanted to make sure the guy wasn’t recording my conversation with him in the house. I looked downstairs and Wayne went upstairs. I found his phone book and took it.
“We got back to my place and I took a shower with kitchen cleaner to get rid of any blood trace. Then we got rid of our clothes. We cut them into shreds, put them in a bunch of bags, and drove out into the desert, depositing them all over the place.
“Wayne took a taxi to the airport and went back to Chicago. I then drove by the Lisner house, but there was no activity. So I drove over to the My Place Lounge. As I was pulling up, Tony pulled up with Sammy Siegel.
“I asked him if he had a minute.
“We walked to the side.
“I said, ‘It’s done.’
“He said, ‘Done?’
“I say, ‘I just took care of it.’
“He said, ‘Did you get rid of everything?’
“I said, ‘Yeah. I put ten into him and I threw him in the pool.’
“He looked at me and said, ‘Fine. As of this day we’ll never talk about this again.’ We never did.”
“I was driving Tony to a place about sixty miles out of town for dinner, because between his heart and my licensing problems we didn’t want to be seen together in town. All the way out he’s telling me about how he’s under constant surveillance and how he’s just trying to make a living and live a quiet life. All I can do is ‘yes-yes’ him. Tony wasn’t telling me all this because he wanted an argument. He didn’t seem to put together the fact that he might have been making enemies of various people with the fact they would secretly pass the word around about what he was or wasn’t doing. I don’t think he understood, right or wrong, that when you’re as hot as he was, every cop in the state had your picture up on their bulletin boards. Later, his lawyers found that the federal strike force had pictures of Tony and his whole family, and friends, even their lawyers. The agents and prosecutors had Tony’s picture on a dart board and nasty comments written in under most of the snapshots. That’s what happens when you’re the target. There isn’t a cop in the state that doesn’t know who you are and isn’t looking to either put you in jail or shake you down.
“When we got to the restaurant outside town, two of his guys were already waiting. They had taken a booth in the back.
“We had just sat down when a guy comes over to the table. ‘Mr Rosenthal,’ he says, ‘let me introduce myself to you. I’m the owner of this property. I’ve seen your picture in the paper and I wanted you to know we’re all rooting for you. How’s the service? I hope you enjoy your dinner.’
“I told him everything was fine and thanked him, except I felt awful that he spotted me. Then, instead of going away, he turns to Tony. ‘And Mr Spilotray’ – he pronounced Tony’s name with an A – ‘can I introduce myself to you?’
“Tony stands up and puts his arm on the guy’s shoulder and sort of walks him about twenty feet away, just out of earshot.
“I can see Tony’s shaking the guy’s hand and I’m watching the guy’s smiling face and then I see he goes white and turns around and walks into the kitchen.
“When Tony sits down he’s all smiles.
“ ‘What the hell did you tell that guy?’ I asked him. “ ‘Nothing,’ he says.
“What happened was that Tony walked the guy away and said: ‘My name isn’t Spilotray, you motherfucker. You never saw me in your life. And Frank Rosenthal wasn’t here either. And if I hear you telling anything to anybody, this place is going to become a bowling alley and you’re gonna be in the fucking racks.’ ”
Spilotro was wired, he was tailed, he was harassed, he was arrested, he was indicted. But he was never convicted. In his first five years in Las Vegas, there were more murders committed than in the previous twenty-five. He was indicted in the murder of a Caesar’s Palace box man named Red Kilm, but the case never got to trial. He was suspected of killing Barbara McNair’s husband, Rick Manzi, who was involved in a drug deal that went sour, but nothing ever came of it. Spilotro would walk into court waving and smiling, with his lawyer, Oscar Goodman, as the television cameras ground away. Says Frank Cullotta: “The more reporters Oscar saw, the further away he’d park his goddamn car so he’d have more time to be interviewed. Tony swore by Oscar. In all the years he was out there, he never spent more than a couple of hours in jail waiting for bail. When I’d warn him about Oscar, who as far as I was concerned was a publicity hound, Tony’d just nod and chew on his thumb. He used to chew on the cuticle of his right thumb. If you looked at it sometimes it was all raw and chewed away.
Later on, when Oscar got rich, Tony’d look up at the big brick building Oscar built on Fourth Street and say, ‘I built that building.’ Like he was proud of it. But I never understood why Tony liked Oscar so much. The guy was a lawyer. He made a fortune off Tony. I could never trust a man who wears a fake Rolex.”