Siegel, Meyer and Luciano formed a firm friendship, reinforced when Siegel saved Lansky from beatings and when Lansky helped Luciano organise his rackets to the best financial advantage without interference from the tax authorities. It could hardly be said they were ‘life-long’ friends, however, for two of them would end up sending a hitman to ‘rub out’ the third. But the years following the World War One were boom times for the trio.
Their key to untold riches came on 17 January 1920. When the Prohibition law banning alcohol was introduced, the trio went into the bootleg booze business big-time, teaming up with tommy gun wielding thugs to ensure a constant supply of illicit alcohol to New York. Principal among their associates in the northern states was Alfonso Capone, who was fiercely loyal to Lansky and Luciano.
In 1927 the evil duo were joined by a third ruthless killer and future crime czar, Vito Genovese. Born in Naples in 1897, Genovese had been a friend and neighbour of Luciano since the former’s arrival in New York. A petty thief with only one arrest, for carrying a revolver, he too had graduated to organised crime while working under contract to Jacob Orgen. Despite the combined reputations of Lansky, Luciano and Genovese, the gang of three were still not the most powerful mobsters in New York. That accolade was being fought for between two old-style Mafia leaders, Salvatore Maranzano and Giuseppe Masseria, bitter rivals whose territorial battles had left as many as 60 of their ‘soldiers’ shot dead in a single year.
Individually, both Maranzano and Masseria tried to woo Luciano, Lansky and Genovese into their organisations, probably fearful of the trio’s growing power. They refused. By way of persuasion, Maranzano lured Luciano to an empty garage, where a dozen masked men lay in wait. Maranzano had him strung up by his thumbs from the rafters and punched and kicked until he lost consciousness. Luciano was repeatedly revived so that the torture could continue anew. Finally, Maranzano slashed him across the face with a knife. The wound required 55 stitches.
Unsurprisingly, Luciano told his tormentor that he had changed his mind and was now happy to join his Mob. Maranzano relented and offered him a role as his associate – but only if he would first dispose of his Mafia rival, Masseria. With little choice in the matter, Luciano agreed. In April 1931 he approached Masseria, pretending that he was now keen to join forces with him, and invited the Mafioso for a meal. They sealed the deal and toasted one another across the table at his favourite restaurant, Nuova Villa Tammaro, on Coney Island. When Luciano retired to the bathroom, four gunmen burst in. Masseria must have known his fate the moment he saw them. They were Vito Genovese, Bugsy Siegel and two other Lansky men, Albert Anastasia and Joe Adonis. Masseria was cut down in a hail of bullets as he tried to flee the restaurant.
Salvatore Maranzano was delighted with the result and paid due tribute to Lansky and Luciano for their handiwork. The 63-year-old Mafia boss could now claim to be the first true Godfather. After Masseria’s death, this elegantly dressed Sicilian, who had once trained to become a priest, called a meeting of the New York families in a hall where the walls were hung with crucifixes and other religious emblems. He drew up a constitution in which he proclaimed himself the effective ‘Capo di Tutti Capi’ of what he termed ‘La Cosa Nostra’.
These and other terms that are such an intrinsic part of the Mafia vocabulary were becoming familiar to the American public for the first time. Luciano and Genovese used this Mafia patois and their Jewish cohorts Lansky and Siegel were also fluent in it. But despite the traditional Cosa Nostra oaths of fidelity they all expressed, loyalty was not their strong point. The new Capo di Tutti Capi, Salvatore Maranzano, was the man who stood between the Luciano gang and the pinnacle of power in the US underworld. And in September 1931 Luciano settled his old score with him.
One morning four ‘tax inspectors’ called at Maranzano’s real estate agency on Park Avenue. His bodyguards kept their guns hidden as the four identified themselves as Internal Revenue Service investigators and demanded to see the books and the boss. Ushered in to his private office, they revealed themselves as ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, Albert Anastasia, Red Levine and Thomas ‘Three Fingers’ Lucchese. All four drew knives. Just five months after pronouncing himself Godfather, Maranzano was killed – stabbed several times and then shot for good measure. Over the next few days about 40 more of Maranzano’s team and their associates were systematically eliminated.
The new Mob magnates were now firmly in power. Luciano became the Boss of Bosses. His predecessor, Maranzano, had very conveniently formed the La Cosa Nostra code of conduct, set up ‘family’ divisions and structure, and established procedures for resolving disputes. Luciano now instituted the ‘National Crime Syndicate’, consisting of the major Mob bosses from around the country and the so-called ‘Five Families’ of New York. The Syndicate was meant to serve as a deliberative body to solve disputes, carve up and distribute territories and regulate lucrative illegal activities. The solely Italian-American Mafia had their own body, known as ‘the Commission’, which ruled all La Cosa Nostra activities.
In this way, by the early Thirties, the old-style trigger-happy Mafia leaders, derisively termed ‘Moustache Petes’, had largely been replaced. The Syndicate of crime families brought in accountants and corporate executives. They still needed those ultimate persuaders, the hired killers, but, in order to show the authorities that the Mob had cleaned up its act, the assassins operated at arm’s-length from the men in suits. Thus, under Luciano’s aegis, while one wing of the operation was labelled the National Crime Syndicate, the other became known in the press as ‘Murder Incorporated’.
The most feared hitman of this mercenary death squad was Albert Anastasia, one of the killers of both Masseria and Maranzano. Known as New York’s ‘Lord High Executioner’, he was founder member of Murder Inc., appointed by Luciano as a reward for his loyalty, along with second-in-command, union racketeer Louis ‘Lepke’ Buchalter. Together, they meted out death on contract for a quarter of a century.
Their ‘soldiers’, sometimes known as the ‘Brownsville Boys’, were predominantly Jewish and Italian killers who operated out of the back room of an innocent-looking candy store called Midnight Rose’s, in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighbourhood. The shop was owned by Louis Capone, no relation to Chicago’s Alphonse Capone but still a thoroughly nasty killer. From this base, Murder Inc. is estimated to have carried out between 900 and 1,000 gangland murders in the New York City area. Throughout this period, their boss, Albert Anastasia, remained largely untouchable, his business card claiming that he was a sales representative for a company called the Convertible Mattress Corporation.
Anastasia, born Umberto Anastasio in southern Italy in 1902, had arrived in New York illegaly just after World War One, jumping ship and taking a job on the Brooklyn waterfront. In 1921 he was sentenced to death for the muder of a fellow docker – but, when retried on a technicality, he had to be freed because all the witnesses had mysteriously disappeared. In 1928, by which time Anastasia had become a union leader in the corrupt Longshoremen’s International Association, he was charged with a murder in Brooklyn – and again freed when the witnesses either disappeared or refused to testify. In 1932 he was indicted on charges of murdering another man with an ice pick – but the case was dropped due to lack of witnesses. The following year he was charged with yet another killing – but again there were no witnesses willing to testify.
Anastasia’s more high-profile ‘contracts’ included the murder of top trucking union official Morris Diamond in 1939. That same year he organised the murder of Pietro Panto, an activisit trying to expose corruption in the 25,000-member Longshoremen’s union. When Panto refused to take a bribe to desist from his campaign against the intimidation and violence that kept the union’s members in line, he was kidnapped, brutally battered, then strangled. His body was later recovered on a farm known to be a Murder Inc. dumping ground in New Jersey.
Murder Inc. finally over-reached itself in 1941. A gun-for-hire gangster named Abe Reles was arrested on murder charge
s and admitted that he had been supplying Anastasia and Buchalter with hitmen for the past ten years. To save himself from the death penalty, Reles offered tesimony that put seven members of Murder Inc. in prison. He also offered information that could implicate Anastasia in the slayings of Diamond and Panto.
Fearful of prosecution, Anastasia offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who would ‘rub out’ Reles. In November 1941, the ‘squealer’ was being guarded by police at a Coney Island hotel during an ongoing trial. Despite his police guard, Reles was found dead on an adjacent restaurant roof. An official inquiry ruled that he had accidentally died while climbing down the building using knotted sheets.
Most New Yorkers, however, firmly believed that Anastasia had had Reles murdered – a view reinforced the following year when another informer was found dead. Like Reles, a Murder Inc. associate named Anthony Romeo had been arrested and was willing to implicate Anastasia in several murders. However, in June 1942 his body was discovered in Delaware. He had been beaten before being shot several times.
The silencing of informers was very much in Murder Inc.’s interests but the removal of unco-operative criminal cohorts or commercial rivals was also a money-making activity. It was, as the character Don Corleone says in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, ‘not personal – it’s strictly business’. Those gory bits of ‘business’ might often be ordered by – but seldom if ever witnessed by – the Mob leader who always maintained a low profile, Meyer Lansky.
Lansky, the so-called ‘Mob’s accountant’, had become the main money manipulator for the Mafia barons from the early Thirties. His expertise was much needed. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, a principal source of income dried up and new forms of investment had to be found. Loan sharking, the numbers games, protection rackets and vice kept the money rolling in but new areas of exploitation were needed. The growing drugs market was one of the most potentially lucrative, and the Mafia built up European and Far Eastern connections to supply it. Another was legal gambling, with the golden boom in casino towns like Las Vegas, Reno and Atlantic City. The third main route away from the Mafia’s tawdry roots was into the labour movement. Trade unions were cynically milked for the funds that could be misappropriated and, more importantly, for the ‘muscle’ they could lend to any extortion situation where a strike could prove costly.
Despite being Jewish in a predominantly Italian society, Lansky, the wily diplomat, helped maintain peace within the crime Syndicate. He helped fuse the rival Mafia families scattered around the nation into a ‘federal’ unit. Autonomous in their own area, they nevertheless came together to seek agreement on major policy issues – and it was Lansky’s advice that they often accepted. He persuaded them of the logic of maintaining a low profile, that the days of street warfare were over. Any such ‘contracts’ could be left to Murder Inc. As he became increasingly trusted as an ‘independent’ Mafia advisor, more concerned with money-making than internal power struggles, his associates allowed him to invest their ill-gotten gains in respectable industries and in the gambling havens of Las Vegas, Cuba and the Bahamas.
Lansky looked after his known interests too, of course. Following Al Capone’s 1931 conviction for tax evasion, Lansky saw that he too was vulnerable and, to protect himself, transferred his illegal earnings to a Swiss bank account, the anonymity of which was assured by the 1934 Swiss Banking Act. He eventually even bought an offshore Swiss bank, which he used to launder money through a network of shell and holding companies. Lansky made billions for the Mafia and an estimated personal fortune of $300 million.
An associate, Joseph Doc Stacher, once said of Lansky and his partner Luciano: ‘They were an unbeatable team. If they had become President and Vice-President of the United States, they would have run the place far better than the idiot politicians.’ Unluckily for ‘Lucky’ Luciano, the partnership was broken up in 1936 by government prosecutors. In June of that year, Luciano was convicted on 62 counts of prostitution and other vice offences and received a sentence of between 30 and 50 years in state prison.
Vito Genovese briefly became acting boss of Luciano’s gang but, after being indicted for a 1934 murder, he was forced to leave the country – Frank Costello now replaced him as acting boss of the Luciano crime family. Genovese fled to Naples in 1937, his expatriation cushioned by an estimated $2 million that he had salted away in secret Swiss bank accounts. A vociferous supporter of Mussolini, having contributed generously to fascist funds, he further helped out the Italian dictator’s family by becoming the main drug source for his son-in-law, Count Ciano. It is also said that, to impress Mussolini, he arranged the murder of a newspaper editor who was a fierce opponent.
Genovese switched sides hurriedly when the tide of war changed and offered his services to the occupying American forces. He pinpointed black-market operations in post-war Italy and helped close them down – but then quietly resurrected them with his own men in charge. His Italian Connection came to an end when he was extradited back to the US in 1945 to face an old murder charge. It failed to stick after the principal witness was shot dead and Genovese returned to New York – with an ambition to take over the Luciano family and become the Mafia’s Capo di Tutti Capi.
As we shall see in the next chapter, things did not go entirely Vito Genovese’s way. Neither was organised crime a passport to a peaceful old age for fellow family members Albert Anastasia and ‘Bugsy’ Siegel. On the other hand, Meyer Lansky continued to live a charmed life. And ‘Lucky’ Luciano lived up to his name too.
Luciano must have thought his luck had finally run out when he was jailed for up to 50 years for vice offences. But six years later, in November 1942, he got a visit from his old friend Lansky. The arch fixer told him that he had done a deal with US naval intelligence officers who were concerned that information about Allied convoys was being leaked by pro-Mussolini Italian immigrants working on the New York waterfront. The fears seemed to have been confirmed by the burning of the French liner Normandie at its moorings in New York. So many fires had broken out at the same time within the ship that the US Navy, which was due to use Normandie to carry troops and supplies to Europe, was certain Italian saboteurs were to blame.
Naval chiefs were willing to offer Luciano a move to a better prison if, from his cell, he would cooperate with a special intelligence unit to flush out Italian spies and saboteurs. The jailbird, through Lansky, improved the deal to win the promise of early parole and possibly complete freedom after the war. At least one other Mafia man was immediately freed from jail at Luciano’s request. He was Johnny ‘Cockeye’ Dunn, who was responsible for the no-questions-asked removal of two suspected German spies. Apart from keeping peace on the waterfront, the team was also credited with locating an enemy submarine off Long Island. Four German spies were captured as they came ashore and, under interrogation, revealed a North American network of Nazi agents.
Even more valuable to the Allied cause were Luciano’s contacts with his homeland. Before the invasion of Sicily by British, Canadian and US forces in 1944, Luciano sent emissaries to local Mafia leaders urging that all help be given to the Americans. Four Italian-speaking US naval intelligence officers joined up with the Sicilian Mafia and successfully raided German and Italian bases for secret defence blueprints. Later, in Rome, the Mafia foiled an assassination attempt against Britain’s General Sir Harold Alexander and, as a footnote to history, seized Mussolini’s entire personal archives.
The American authorities kept their part of the bargain and in 1945, within a few months of the war in Europe ending, Luciano was freed from jail. New York’s Governor Thomas Dewey, a former special prosecutor of organised crime who got Luciano jailed in the first place, granted commutation of sentence and had him deported to Italy. His comrade in crime, Lansky, was there to bid him farewell, with a contribution of half a million dollars to help him start his new life. From an ocean’s distance away, Luciano continued to hold sway over his American Syndicate until – like Lansky and Genovese, his two principal p
artners in a lifetime of corruption, torture and murder – he died of natural causes.
CHAPTER 3
‘WISE GUYS’: OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF MOBSTERS
‘Mafia-speak’ has slyly insinuated itself into American culture. ‘I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse’ is the instantly recognisable saying of Don Corleone, as portrayed by Marlon Brando, in The Godfather. But there are many other titles, words and phrases that are less well-known outside the Italian underworld. Since the street talk of the Mafia is a language unto itself, here are some of the favourite expressions, plus an explanation of the organisation’s hierarchy, followed by some of its leaders’ pithier language.
When a young hopeful is accepted into the Mafia, he becomes a ‘Wise Guy’ or he has become ‘straightened out’. Later, after he is appointed a fully-fledged or ‘made’ member of his particular Mafia ‘family’, he could become a ‘Capo’ (captain) heading a crew of ‘Soldiers’, the lowliest rank. Hundreds of criminals who have not been invited by families to join their inner ranks of ‘made’ members are nevertheless linked with the Mafia as ‘Associates’. Some are in influential or powerful positions with companies and government agencies.
The Mafiosi themselves refer to their crime family as ‘La Cosa Nostra’, which means ‘our thing’ or ‘this business of ours’. Collectively, they like to refer to themselves as ‘Men of Honour’.
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