Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Today, the only requirement is that a Mafia member be Italian.3 However, many non-Italians throughout the years, mostly Jewish (e.g., Meyer Lansky, Jacob “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Arthur “Dutch Shultz” Flegenheimer, Moe Dalitz, Jake Shapiro, Longy Zwillman, and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel), became very close “criminal associates” of Mafia families with considerable power. Writing in 1969, mob authority Ralph Salerno said that “a man like Meyer Lansky [the mob’s financial wizard, true name Maier Suchowljansky] is the equal of any family boss, and the superior of some.”4

  The FBI refers to the Mafia as La Cosa Nostra.5 “It’s not Mafia,” mob informant Joe Valachi told FBI agent James J. Flynn, who had gained Valachi’s confidence by friendly visits with him behind bars, in September of 1962. “That’s the expression the outsider uses…It’s Cosa Nostra.”6 Chicago mob members, however, refer to themselves as the Outfit or Syndicate,7 and Lucky Luciano’s biographer, writing in 1975, said Valachi was only referring to what the “Italian-American syndicate in the New York area” called itself. And even within the New York mob families, Sciacca quotes Luciano in the late 1950s telling a federal narcotics undercover agent, “I’ll tell you something, kid. There’s always been a Mafia, but it’s not like those sons-a-bitches tell it in the newspapers…The Mafia’s like any other organization, except we don’t go in for advertising. We’re big business, is all.”8 In any event, because Mafia, not Cosa Nostra, is the much more well-known term, I shall refer mostly to organized crime in this book as the Mafia, organized crime, or the mob.

  We also learned from Valachi, for the first time, the initiation rites for the Mafia. With a gun and a knife on top of a table at which are seated many Mafia members, the initiate is told, “This represents that you live by the gun and the knife and you die by the gun and the knife.” The initiate extends the finger he shoots with, and the end of it is pricked with a pin and squeezed until the blood comes out. He is told that “this blood means that we are now one Family.” The initiate is instructed to cup his hands. A piece of paper is put inside and lit with a match, the initiate being told to say, all in Italian, “This is the way I will burn if I betray the secret of this Cosa Nostra.” Referring to omerta, the vow of silence—never to “rat on” any member or any of the brotherhood’s activities—Valachi, who went through the rite when he joined the Mafia in 1930, said the initiate is told, “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.”9* It was believed that in the early years of the Mafia, an aspiring member of a mob family had to take part in at least one murder before he was accepted. But as long ago as 1967, one graying mafioso complained to a reporter for Life magazine, “Today, you got a thousand guys in here that never broke an egg.”10

  Today, because of endless federal prosecutions and members who found it to their clear advantage to break the vow of silence, organized crime is a shell of its former self. But in its heyday, in the 1920s through most of the 1960s, there were twenty-four, semi-independent “families” in charge of certain criminal activity in their respective geographical areas in the United States,† and the collective families were reported, in 1967, to be grossing around $40 billion a year from their illegal activities, far more than any major American corporation such as General Motors or U.S. Steel.11 Lansky himself acknowledged that the vast conglomerate of criminal enterprises he oversaw financially was “bigger than U.S. Steel.”12 In New York, the mob, among its many other activities, controlled the port (the nation’s largest) as well as the city’s garment industry (which produced most of America’s clothing).13 Indeed, for years the mob had a grip on Las Vegas gambling casinos, and in the 1930s made substantial but ultimately unsuccessful inroads into taking over Detroit’s auto industry and the big screen in Hollywood.

  The American Mafia’s power and wealth has always been hidden, peripheral, and surreptitious. Not so with its Sicilian ancestors. “By the beginning of the nineteenth century,” Italian author Michele Pantaleone writes, the Sicilian Mafia “was already a criminal organization interwoven into the country’s political and economic life…More efficient than the police, [it] penetrated deeply into all aspects of the town’s life.” Indeed, the Mafia’s reach was so extensive that in many Sicilian villages even disputes involving crimes among nonmembers would be mediated, for a fee from both parties, by a mafioso, and “no one dared to call in the police when there was Mafia intervention.” When Don Calogero Vizzini, the leader of the Sicilian Mafia, died of natural causes in 1954, “his funeral was…attended by many local and provincial authorities and politicians…For eight days the municipal and Christian Democrat offices were closed, and black crepe banners hung from the windows.”14

  The only American mobster who even remotely approached this type of acceptance in the community was, of course, Capone in Chicago. During Prohibition, when he was providing alcoholic beverages to a citizenry with unhappily parched palates, he was cheered at Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park, and for at least one local election, the city fathers sent an emissary to Capone at his fortress-like headquarters on the top three floors of Chicago’s downtown Lexington Hotel to ask him if they could have a free election without the corrupting influence and muscle of his organization. Mob historian Frederic Sondern writes that when Capone returned to Chicago in March of 1930 after serving ten months in Pennsylvania for carrying a concealed weapon, “he was welcomed home like returning royalty by cheering crowds and many of Chicago’s principal officials.”15

  Although the American Mafia continues to decline, the Sicilian Mafia, though not as violent as it once was, is flourishing and has literally been accepted by the Italian authorities as a fact of life. This was no more demonstrated than when Pietro Lunardi, the minister of infrastructure for Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said in 2001 that the Mafia was a reality that “we have to live with.” As indicated, the Sicilian Mafia, from its origins, had always been a part of the social and economic fabric of Sicily. But what caused it to temper its violence in recent years was the rage by all of Italy against it when it blew up the car driving the crusading anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone from a Palermo airport in 1992, killing Falcone, his wife, and three police bodyguards. Two months later, Falcone’s associate and the chief prosecutor in Palermo, Paolo Borsellino, was murdered by a car bomb, along with five bodyguards, as he arrived for a visit with his mother outside her apartment building. The crackdown by an enraged nation culminated in the arrest the following year of Salvatore “The Beast” Riina, the Sicilian boss of bosses. His successor, Bernardo “The Tractor” Provenzano, made a wise decision to cut down on the violence against non-mafioso citizens and public figures, but after more than forty years on the run, thirteen of which he was the boss of bosses, in 2006 Provenzano finally ran out of luck. On April 11, he was arrested in his then hideout, a dilapidated farmhouse in the countryside outside the Sicilian town of Corleone. Law enforcement and Mafia experts believe that Provenzano’s arrest was not a crippling blow to the still powerful and well-organized Sicilian mob.16

  Speaking of Corleone, no Mafia clan was more violent than the one in Corleone, the mountain town south of Palermo that was immortalized in the 1969 Godfather movie when writer Mario Puzo gave the town’s name to his “godfather”* (Don Vito Corleone, played by Marlon Brando), where judges, police officers, recalcitrant politicians, and fellow mafiosi were routinely murdered. But today, though the Mafia’s grip on Sicilian economic life is still strong, fear of the Mafia by non-mafiosi is nowhere near what it once was, including in Corleone, per Antonio Iannago, the town’s deputy mayor.

  According to Eurispes, an Italian think tank in Rome, the Italian Mafia, mostly concentrated in Sicily but existing throughout the country, took in profits of about $123 billion in 2004, approximately 10 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product, mostly from drug traffickin
g, protection money, and corruption payoffs in big business, construction deals, and public works projects. With respect to protection money, it is estimated that 80 percent of Palermo’s merchants pay protection money, known as the pizzo, more than ever before, but in smaller amounts. The slogan is Pagare tutti, pagare meno, meaning “everyone pays less, but everyone pays.” And no merchant reports the payoffs to the police. “The Mafia doesn’t even need to threaten anymore. People look to the Mafia and seek it out for favors,” says Enrico Bellavia, a Sicilian journalist and author. Bellavia says the situation has evolved to the point where people in Sicily don’t even ask themselves whether the Mafia is a bad organization. They just see it as a staple in their lives—indeed, “a force that can [often] resolve their individual needs.”17

  The first Mafia family in America was founded in 1875 in New Orleans by a group of Sicilian immigrants. Mafia author Thomas Reppetto writes that “the largest city in the South was a natural destination for Italians. New Orleans had been a terminus for Italian fruit ships since before the Civil War, and descriptions of the city had been carried back to the mother country by sailors and merchants who, by and large, preferred its climate to the colder and less predictable weather of Boston or New York.”18 In the early years in America, most mafiosi committed small crimes against each other. As one, perhaps apocryphal, story tells it, when the son of one such immigrant was told that his father had victimized his own fellow Italian immigrants, his response is said to have been, “Well, of course, it had to have been that way. My father didn’t know how to say stick ’em up in English. Who else could he rob?” But soon the Mafia, or “Black Hand,” as it was sometimes called in the early years because Mafia extortionists would leave the imprint of a black hand on their warnings, branched out from small crimes in the “Little Italy” sections of cities like New York and Chicago into major crime—mostly gambling, extortion, bootlegging, labor racketeering, and narcotics*—all over the nation. That has been its business since then. This business has only been successful, however, because of murder and the threat of it.

  Ironically, it was the religious and social conservatives, helped by fire-and-brimstone preachers like the colorful evangelist Billy Sunday, who launched organized crime in America and its biggest local gangster ever, Capone, into the really big time and filled its coffers as never before.† Their temperance movement led to the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 (it went into effect in 1920), which prohibited “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” in the United States. Prohibition, the effort to dry up America, was wildly unpopular, and the imbibing of alcohol, which knew (and still knows) no sociological or economic boundaries, demanded a solution. The Mafia came to the rescue by its illicit and highly priced sale of alcohol to thirsty Americans throughout the land. An inevitable concomitant to the circumvention of the Volstead Act (which implemented the Eighteenth Amendment and extended Prohibition by making it unlawful to “possess or use” alcohol) was the corruption of those who were supposed to enforce the ill-advised law. With payoffs to the police, West Fifty-second Street in New York, for instance, “was an almost unbroken row of speakeasies” that openly sold alcohol.19 The abysmal failure of the social experiment was memorialized by the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment.

  Throughout the years, New York City alone has been the home of five of the twenty-four Mafia families in the United States (currently the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese families), and New Jersey one. Each “family” (or borgata) is headed by a capo or boss or don, the second in command being the sotto-capo or underboss. A consiglieri or counselor is typically an elder member who serves as an adviser. A “crew” or “regime” of ten or so foot soldiers of the “family” is controlled by a midlevel boss referred to as a caporegima or lieutenant, whose job is to carry out the orders of the capo within the family. The Mafia members who perform the everyday business are called soldati, the soldiers or “button men” who are taking the initial step necessary to rise in the family.

  Before organized crime’s substantial disintegration in the 1980s and 1990s, the Mafia in the United States was controlled by a group resembling a board of directors, as it were, known as “the commission.” The commission established policy and settled all important disputes. Though not every boss of a mob family was on the commission, every member of the commission was a Mafia family boss.20 In Mafia leader Joseph Bonanno’s 1983 autobiography, A Man of Honor, he said that although Mafia leaders from around the country could sit on the commission, its most important members, and the only permanent ones, were the heads of the five New York City mob families.21 The commission is no longer believed to exist.22

  “The commission” and the “national crime syndicate” (in which organized crime went national under a corporate-like umbrella) were created by Mafia capo de tutti capi (boss of all bosses) Charles “Lucky” Luciano (true name, Salvatore Lucania). Mob historians give different years for the birth of the commission and crime syndicate, most saying they took place at a meeting of mob leaders in Chicago in 1931. But Luciano’s biographer says the year was 1933 and it was at a mob meeting at a Park Avenue hotel in New York City. The distinguishing feature about the national syndicate is that it included racketeers and gangs who were not Italian, and hence, not a part of the Mafia. Luciano felt there was strength in diversity and cooperation, and the Italian mob families, he proposed, would be willing to recognize a criminal organization in a city or area of the country in which they were not operating, and give them autonomy. However, disputes and territorial problems would inevitably develop and they would be resolved by the syndicate’s board of directors, which came to be known as the aforementioned national commission,23 and whose members were and remained exclusively Italian.

  Luciano emerged as the Mafia’s top leader in 1931 following the three-year Castellammarese War (so-named because most of the participants came from the region of northwestern Sicily near Castellammare del Golfo) between two New York City mob families, a deadly conflict in which many were killed, including the heads of both families, Salvatore Maranzano and Joseph Masseria.* Luciano ran his loosely knit but vast criminal empire from his luxurious suite at the top-of-the-line Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City, where he lived under the alias “Charles Rose.”24

  The commission, Luciano thought and others came to agree, could help avoid such bloody conflicts in the future.

  Luciano was born in 1897 near Palermo, Sicily, and grew up in the toughest section of New York City at the time, the Lower East Side near the Brooklyn Bridge. It was during this period that Luciano aligned himself with Meyer Lansky to form one of the most powerful and long-standing relationships in mob history.† Legend has it that, for a penny or two a day, “Luciano offered younger and smaller Jewish kids his personal protection against beatings on the way to school. If they didn’t pay, he’d beat them up. One runty kid refused to pay, a thin little youngster from Poland, Meyer Lansky. Luciano fought him one day and was amazed how hard Lansky fought back. They became bosom buddies after that.”25

  In addition to creating a national crime syndicate, Luciano made other changes among the six New York and New Jersey families, one of which endeared him to Mafia foot soldiers like no one before or since. Previously, a Mafia don could order the death of a low-level Mafia member for any reason at all, and no one could object, creating a state of fear and anxiety in the men. Luciano decreed that hereafter, the ultimate penalty could not be imposed unless the charges by the boss against the Mafia member were presented to a special judicial council consisting of a representative from each of the six families, and only the “court,” by a majority vote, could approve of the man’s death. (In the event of a tie, the boss of the family seeking the member’s death would have the deciding vote.)

  And then there was the old tradition of Mafia members greeting each other with a kiss. Loathed by most new members, Luciano changed the greeting to a ha
ndshake, satisfying the old-country “Mustache Petes” that this was a bad practice. “We stick out,” he said, “kissing each other in restaurants and places like that.”26 But there was one tradition Luciano was in no mood to tamper with in the least. Once becoming a member, one could not leave the Mafia. “The only way out is in a box,” he said.27Arrivederci Roma, yes. Arrivederci borgata, no.

  The mob, whose lifestyle has been romanticized with great commercial success in novels and on the big screen, and whose mythological culture of honor among thieves (“Code of the Underworld”) and genuine loyalty to family and respect for women and children have unquestionably forged a psychological connection to the American public (witness the enormous popularity of The Sopranos and mob films like the Godfather series, Goodfellas, Donnie Brasco, and many more),* saw its mostly uncontested salad days in America come to an end when Robert F. Kennedy was appointed attorney general by his brother, President John F. Kennedy, in January of 1961. Prior to that, the Department of Justice, which the attorney general heads, did not focus heavily on organized crime in America, although after the discovery of the mob summit meeting in the obscure New York town of Apalachin in 1957, RFK’s predecessor, William P. Rogers, did increase the size of the organized-crime section and attempted to instill some life into it. But little was being done. William Hundley, who took over the organized-crime section at the Department of Justice in 1958, was shocked to find “there was absolutely nothing going on in the Justice Department…There was only a couple of guys in the OC section clipping newspapers.”28