Garden State Gangland

by Scott M. Deitche

  Longy also was involved in an unusual subgenre of the music industry: He controlled a company called Music by Muzak. The Al Capone of Newark was in charge of a Muzak company that supplied soothing vocal-free music to office, restaurants, and elevators throughout central New Jersey. The burgeoning gaming and music-machine business was emerging as a major business line, and racketeers were quick to size on the potential. One such company was the Runyon Sales Company.

  The company was started by Barney Sugerman and Abe Green. According to Barney’s son, Myron, “My dad and Abe Green (Longy’s guy) were the original partners. Doc Stacher got involved because they needed finance and connections. They eventually had a major jukebox, pinball, arcade games, vending machine operation. Everybody knew their name around the country. But my father was a better visionary and salesman than a businessman. In 1946 Doc Stacher sold his shares to Jerry Catena when Doc moved west to Los Angeles. And when my dad died in 1964 my mother was bought out by Abe and Jerry in 1966.”[12] As for Zwillman’s alleged involvement in the company, “The FBI thought that Zwillman had part of Runyon and that my dad was holding shares for him. I’m not sure if that’s the case.”

  Longy also owned half of a tobacco operation, Public Service Tobacco Company, in an industrial section of nearby Hillside, New Jersey. Zwillman had bought into the company in 1937. It was previously owned by Doc Stacher and Jerry Catena. Another owner of the company was Mike Lascari, longtime associate of Lucky Luciano. Zwillman defended his partner in testimony before Congress against accusations that Lascari was involved in the rackets. “He came to Jersey and worked all day and night on the Public Service thing,” insisted Zwillman. “Now certainly that does not spell out an underworld man who works 20 hours a day.”[13]

  The automobile industry was another business line that interested the enterprising gangster. He owned a number of General Motors dealerships, one of which sold over $375,000-worth of cars to the city of Newark in 1948 alone. Zwillman had a 97 percent stock holding in E&S Trading Company, a steel- and scrap-metal dealer, and in A&S Trading, which bought and sold automobile part and accessories, and even had a company that rented out washing machines for use in apartments and housing complexes. In addition to the companies held in his name, there were others he helped run from behind the scenes, including a movie-production company, a post office, and a railroad.

  It’s easy to apply the label gangster to Longy Zwillman if one looked strictly at the way he made his money before and during Prohibition. But his activities in legitimate business industries show a man who, if he decided to solely concentrate on business matters, may have been a successful entrepreneur or even CEO. There is a definitive dividing line when discussing and analyzing the activities of organized crime, especially older mob figures. There are those who started out as street gangsters and never really rose to anything greater than that. They were the low-level hit men, the workaday gangsters who would steal a couple thousand dollars, spend it, and then go steal more. Bookies, loan sharks, and fences were probably the next rung up on the ladder, but for the most part there was, and still is, a large portion of mobsters who did it because they like to thumb their nose at the law and had little to no aspiration to change. But Zwillman had a broader knowledge of things and was certainly more intelligent than most mobsters of his generation. Even the men he surrounded himself with (Catena) and associated with (Lansky) shared those traits. Zwillman had all the makings of a captain of industry.

  In addition to his forays into the business world, Zwillman’s work in the political realm continued as well. This was an area where he started back with the Third Ward Political Club, bringing politicians and elected officials under his wing and influence. In the run up to the 1949 New Jersey gubernatorial elections, Zwillman reportedly offered Democratic candidate Elmer Wene a campaign contribution of three hundred thousand dollars. In return Zwillman wanted say over who would be picked as state attorney, “because Zwillman does not want the Wene administration to hurt him.”[14] Wene declined the offer and did not end up winning the election, so Zwillman ended up saving his three hundred thousand. It wasn’t Zwillman’s first activity in the races for governor. In 1946 he was approached by Governor Hoffman’s office for help in securing the vote in Essex County.

  In 1950 the congressional Kefauver Committee, established to investigate organized crime, turned its attention to Longy and subpoenaed him to testify before the Senate. He did, though he did his best to give as little information as possible, pleading the Fifth numerous times. When pressed about his moniker as the “Al Capone of New Jersey,” Zwillman replied, “That, Mr. Senator, is a myth that has been developing for a good many years, and during the time when I should have had sense enough to stop it, or to get up and get out of the state, I did not have sense enough.”[15]

  He also delivered a prepared statement to the senators quizzing him.

  It is, and has been, my intention in coming here as a witness to answer every proper question to the best of my ability but without waiving any rights which I may have under the Constitution and under the law.

  If I understand the scope of this committee’s function correctly, it is to investigate organized interstate crime. Therefore, one might conclude that I was called here either on the assumption that I have some facts concerning such crime or that I myself are [sic] engaged in interstate crime. However, when one considers the nature of the questions asked of the witnesses who preceded me, and one has followed their appearances here, one wonders whether he is only a witness when he appears here. I have a feeling that this committee, or in any event one of more law-enforcement agencies of the government, are seeking to implicate me in federal offences. I know that many enforcement agencies of the government have for a long time been engaged in an extensive investigation of my affairs and those of my business associates and even my friends and relatives for many years.

  My attorneys have been told, directly by responsible officers of the government, that they have a suspicion and feeling that I have committed federal crimes and that they seek to prosecute me . . .

  . . . I have come to the conclusion that it would be impossible for an average person, not trained in the law, and who has been actively engaged in many businesses and endeavors over a period of years, particularly in association with other people, to be fully aware of all the federal laws which might govern or control these matters . . . These and other factors contribute to my fear that the answers to some of the questions which may be put to me may tend to incriminate me.[16]

  The Kefauver Committee, in turn, had this to say about Zwillman: “Like Frank Costello in New York, Zwillman exercises his influence in New Jersey in a manner that makes detection almost impossible. He makes it a practice never to attend any public function, and he avoids wherever possible having his name appear openly in any financial transaction.”[17] Zwillman told the committee when asked if he was going legitimate that “From that period of 1935 or 1936 up, I have been trying, Mr. Senator. I am trying . . . trying hard.”[18]

  The Kefauver Committee did not put Zwillman alone on the spot. It pulled open the curtain on the existence and depth of organized crime in America. Zwillman just happened to be one of the more notable people who testified. The experience rattled him and would continue to plague him through the 1950s. Just as Longy thought he had put his gangster image behind him, it was right back in the headlines—and now on television—something he hadn’t had to contend with back in during Prohibition days.

  While Longy was trying to erase the stain of Kefauver, two of his associates were busy building their own empires. The first, Ruggerio Boiardo—aka Richie “the Boot”—had risen out of the same Newark streets that had produced Zwillman, though Boiardo had grown up in the First Ward, the heavily Italian neighborhood that hugged to bend of the Passaic River where it turns north. The close-knit neighborhood was the epicenter of the Italian community in Newark, though few vestiges remain today. Like Zwillman, Boiardo had cut a Robin Hood–type persona i
n the neighborhood. Seeing himself as merely a backer of gambling and bootlegging, and eschewing violence and prostitution—not to mention drug dealing, which was starting to become an issue in the United States at the time—Boiardo entrenched himself in the neighborhood.

  Boiardo started his criminal career as a member of a gang led by the Mazzocchi brothers—Dominic, John, and Frank. When Boiardo moved to align himself with the Mazzocchi brothers in 1925, they were big players in the bootleg liquor scene of the First Ward. They operated the Victory Café and a billiards parlor. The brothers and the Boot also “ran alky cookers in the city. One of the most profitable, said to be owned by the Boot, was located in the back of a tenement house on Wood Street in the First Ward.”[19] These still operations were common in many parts of the country though they could be dangerously combustible, not unlike the meth labs of today. In October of 1927 the still exploded with two men inside, Sam Angelo and Carmine DePalma. The blast shook buildings for blocks around, with reports that “The walls, doors, windows, and ceilings of the garage were shaken and almost shattered.”[20]

  By 1928, the Boot was looking to form his own gang and opened up his own speakeasies. His move toward independence from the Mazzocchi gang did not go over well with the brothers, especially since he took some of their own men with him. The Boot was expanding while the Mazzocchis were suffering. This type of disparity in the racket inevitably led to conflict. The Boot furthered angered the brothers by setting up his own headquarters, the Richie Association, just up the street from the Victory Café.

  Skirmishes started with incursions on one another’s turf, followed by the hijacking of liquor shipments. Things took a turn on the night of August 19, 1929, when two Mazzocchi men, Agostino Dellapia and Vincenzo Follo, were chased by Boot gunmen right past a police station, where they were shot. Dellapia was shot twice in the chest, twice in the stomach, and once in the back and died soon after arriving at City Hospital. Follo never made it; he’d been shot three times in the chest. The following year, Frank Mazzocchi was shot in front of the Victory Café. He’d been talking with friends in a car when “another machine drew abreast of the party and Mazzocchi dropped under the [hail] of bullets.”[21] He was rushed to the hospital with four bullet wounds but died, after refusing to talk to police. John Mazzocchi was killed in March of 1932 with a gunshot to the back of the head. Thereafter the remnants of the gang were no longer a threat to Boiardo.

  But Boiardo identified a potential rival across town: Longy Zwillman. Boiardo suspected Longy might have aligned himself with the Mazzocchis. Boiardo’s reasoning was that Longy was smart enough to see how quickly the Boot had been engulfing existing liquor and gambling operations and so it was only a matter of time before he came knocking at the Third Ward’s door. According to sources, Zwillman started the salvo when he sent his men to capture three Boot soldiers and literally kneecap them, hitting them so hard in the legs that they were crippled for life. There was another story of two Boot hitmen who had decided to visit Zwillman at the Riviera Hotel, dressed as women. The young men were taken upstairs to Zwillman’s room, where they were “unmasked” and threatened. Longy reportedly told them, “I’ll give you a number. You tell Boiardo if he doesn’t call it in twenty-four hours, you’re all dead. My people will clean every one of you rats of the streets of Newark. Now, get out of here.”[22] It’s unknown whether those were Longy’s exact words or if the story is even totally true, but it’s become part of the lore of the Boiardo-Zwillman war. What is known is that the two men decided to make peace.

  The meeting took place at the Nuova Napoli restaurant in October of 1930. The “peace banquet,” as the newspapers called it, lasted for three days and was a feast of food, wine, women, and discussion over sharing the Newark rackets and working together rather than apart. Zwillman had the backing of Lucky Luciano and many of the major New York bosses. Zwillman showed up the second day of the event and was accosted by reporters who wanted to take a photo of Longy shaking hands with the Boot. Such was the prestige of the bootlegger in Newark in those days. Whereas paparazzi in Hollywood were fawning over movie stars like Jean Harlow (who would later date Zwillman), the Newark press corps hung on every word, every sighting, every event in the never-ending saga of the rumrunners, bootleggers, and racketeers that populated the city. Strengthened by the popularity of gangster movies, the pop-culture connection between wiseguys and the public was apparent even in these early years. While many would look at it as glorification of criminality, the fact is that if nobody had bought the newspapers the press wouldn’t have covered the event. Same went for the movies of the day: Gangster films brought in the crowds at the box office. And so reporting about a peace meeting between two of the city’s biggest crime lords was just another scoop.

  Zwillman left the meeting certain that peace had been achieved. But events unfolded that challenged the success of the meeting. Boiardo was stepping out of his bulletproof limousine in front of his apartment at 242 Broad Street in Newark on November 26, 1930, when machine-gun fire tore through him, eleven bullets ripping through his head and body. The Boot was rushed to City Hospital where he miraculously survived, though he was in dire shape. Papers of the day dramatically reported that the “overlord of First Ward gangdom, whose dominions he sought to widen, lay near death today, victim of foes who raked him with shotgun fire as he stepped from his bullet-proof automobile.”[23]

  Suspicion fell almost immediately on Zwillman, but in reality Longy would have had little to gain in hitting the Boot at that time, when the press had just fawned over the two men joining hands. It would have been a smarter move, had he indeed been looking to move in on the Boot’s rackets, to wait until the press coverage, and attention from the police, had died down. There were also many who thought the attempted hit on Boiardo was the responsibility of an associate of Dominic “the Ape” Passelli, another local crime lord who had been killed a few weeks earlier. Shot and injured on November 2, Passelli had gone to the hospital, where he asked for a private room for the night. Two gunmen strolled past the hospital’s information desk and found Passelli in his private room. They shot the Ape three times, killing him. And this is how gangsters Sam Monaco and Louis Russo came to be suspected of involvement in the Passelli murder. However, a nurse at the hospital later identified Jerry Catena as one of the men who had visited the Ape between the time he had been admitted and when the second wave of gunmen had killed him in his hospital bed. That Catena may have been involved in the Ape’s death places some suspicion in the Zwillman/Boiardo camp.

  With each passing day, and ultimately year, the ties between the Boot and Longy grew. Catena became close to the Boot as well, even serving as best man to Boiardo’s son, Anthony, at his wedding. Boiardo’s empire grew after he recovered from the shooting. One of his earliest headquarters was the Vittorio Castle, a spectacular Italian restaurant on the corner of Summer Avenue and Eighth Avenue, in the heart of the First Ward.[24] Opened in 1937, the restaurant was far grander than anything in the area. Billed on its menu as “The Home of Fine Italian Food and Wines,” the Vittorio Castle’s exterior was “an undulating flow of towers and sturdy Flemish bond brickwork, tall arch windows, and a canopied turret entrance, like a medieval citadel.”[25] The Boot’s business partner was Henry Abrams, a former boxer with a criminal record, like Boiardo’s, which prevented their applying for a liquor license. The solution was to transfer ownership of the restaurant to Boiardo’s son, Anthony “Tony Boy.” In time, the Vittorio became a popular eating establishment for local officials and politicians, celebrities and sports stars (like Joe DiMaggio), and many of Boiardo’s fellow Jersey criminals.

  As Boiardo’s stock rose, so did Jerry Catena’s. Zwillman’s right-hand man had been plucked out of the Ironbound section of Newark, along with his brother Eugene. Like Zwillman, Catena played the part of gentleman gangster. He was courteous, rarely used profanity, and dressed impeccably. He also shared Zwillman’s business acumen and became heavily involved in legitimate busine
sses throughout New Jersey. Catena amassed an extensive rap sheet through the 1920s and ’30s, with ten arrests ranging from gambling to bribery to grand larceny. He served time in Ann Reformatory, Essex County Penitentiary, and Rahway State Prison. To law enforcement, Catena’s profile rose right alongside Zwillman’s. The FBI considered Jerry Catena “a top hoodlum of the Newark office.”[26] As the 1940s and ’50s rolled on, Catena became business partners in some of Zwillman’s legitimate ventures and branched out on his own, primarily into the world of gambling machines and jukeboxes. Later Myron Sugerman, son of Zwillman and Catena’s contemporary Barney Sugerman, had this to say:

  Jerry Catena was the one who put the Bally gaming deal together. My father was the key player. He was the Bally distributor for New Jersey, New York, Connecticut. Bill O’Donnell, the general manager of Bally at the time, came and asked my father to introduce him to Catena. They had now the hopper that they were able to put into slots, and this would revolutionize the slot-machine business. Catena picked up the phone and contacted Sam Klein, owner of Stern Vending in Cleveland, Ohio, who in turn contacted the Jacobs family, owners of Emprise from Buffalo, New York. Together with Jerry Catena, Barney Sugerman, Abe Green, Irving Kaye, and Bill O’Donnell they bought the Bally factory out of foreclosure from the bank. That’s how they put the Bally deal together. They revolutionized the slot-machine industry and had complete control over it. But they were all forced out of the company when they went public because they all had criminal records.[27]