So the man who ordered Maranzano’s killing, Meyer Lansky, took up his assassinated rival’s theme of cooperation, saying: ‘Crime has moved out of the ghettoes and become nationwide.’ Lansky and his contemporaries, ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Vito Genovese, made themselves millions by adopting a new, more ‘businesslike’ approach to organised crime. As Luciano explained: ‘The world is changing and there are new opportunities for those who are ready to join forces with those who are stronger and more experienced.’
So what happened to these Mafia ‘modernisers’? The previous chapters took us through the blood-stained years to World War Two and highlighted the influence of the original infamous foursome – Luciano, Lansky, Siegel and Genovese – who formed a strong family bond that enabled them to survive that violent era. Extraordinarily, after a lifetime of corruption, torture and violent death, three of the four died of natural causes. The fourth was murdered on the orders of his supposed long-term ‘friends’.
The nickname ‘Lucky’ certainly applied to the Sicilian-born Salvatore Lucania. As one of the most – if not the most – powerful men in organised crime, his influence over the US underworld still holds. The first person to challenge the ‘old Mafia’ by breaking through ethnic barriers and forming a network of gangs, he created a national Syndicate that controlled organised crime long past his imprisonment, banishment and death.
Having genuinely helped the American war effort, albeit to his own benefit, the 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. He lived in Rome for a while but grew restless and in 1946 he sneaked into Cuba, travelling in a most circuitous route – by freighter to Venezuela, then by plane to Brazil, on to Mexico, doubling back to Venezuela, and finally landing by light plane near Havana, where he took up residence on a private estate. He had chosen Cuba because Lansky was already established as a major investor in gambling and resorts under the island’s corrupt regime. He also wanted to be closer to the United States so that he could resume control over Cosa Nostra operations and eventually return to the American mainland. Meanwhile, couriers were set up to keep him supplied with money.
In December 1946 Luciano and Lansky issued an invitation to leaders of US organised crime to meet him in Havana. The supposed reason was to hear visiting singer Frank Sinatra perform but the real reason was to discuss the expansion of Mob operations in Cuba and Las Vegas and into international drug supply. The week-long conference was held at the Hotel Nacional, where Luciano came face to face for the first time in a decade with his old ally, Vito Genovese. A year earlier, Genovese had been extradited from Italy to New York to face trial on an old murder charge but in June 1946 the charges were dismissed and he was free to return to Mob business. Now his former subordinate tried to persuade Luciano to let him run all his East Coast operetions while Luciano remained in exile. His answer was unequivocal:
‘There is no Boss of Bosses. I turned it down in front of everybody. If I ever change my mind, I will take the title. But it won’t be up to you. Right now you work for me and I ain’t in the mood to retire. Don’t you ever let me hear this again or I’ll lose my temper.’
The Havana conference rebounded on Luciano. He had made his presence there so public, by dining at nightclubs and fêting Frank Sinatra, that the Cuban authorities could no longer turn a blind eye to his presence in the capital. Before his empire-building in exile could begin, American pressure on Cuba’s President Fulgencio Batista forced Luciano’s dispatch back to Italy – ignominiously on a Turkish freighter bound for Genoa. On his return he was arrested by Italian police and locked in jail until a judge freed him on stiff parole conditions.
Over the next few years, Luciano was arrested and rearrested several times but always managed to win his freedom. He was, however, placed under curfew at his Naples home, required to report to the police weekly and barred from leaving the city without permission. From 1948 he shared his home with Igea Lissoni, an Italian nightclub dancer 20 years his junior, whom he later described as the love of his life. Although he had affairs with numerous other women, the couple stayed together until Igea’s death from breast cancer in 1959.
Despite the restrictions placed upon him, Luciano managed to orchestrate a massive expansion of his Cosa Nostra operation, mainly by introducing fresh drug routes to the United States. In October 1957 he gathered 30 American and Sicilian Mafia leaders for a summit in a Palermo hotel to plan a massive smuggling and distribution system for the flooding of the American market with vast quantities of heroin and cocaine. The cruel aim was to lower the price of these hitherto ‘elite’ drugs in order to create a market in blue-collar urban communities.
At this stage, Frank Costello, aided by the ‘muscle’ power of Albert Anastasia’s murderous Mob enforcers was still Luciano’s acting chief in New York. But Vito Genovese had not foresaken his ambition to take over as Boss of Bosses. He was backed by Carlo Gambino, a turncoat member of Anastasia’s crime family.
In May 1957 Genovese ordered the assassination of Costello outside his apartment block but the hitman he hired to do the job, Vincent Gigante, botched it and, although slightly wounded, the target survived. Shortly afterwards, however, the thoroughly rattled Costello conceded control of what became – and is still today known as – the Genovese crime family.
Infuriatingly for him, Luciano was far removed from the action and could only watch from exile Genovese’s attempts to carve up his old empire. And a significant blow to his prestige was the murder of his ally Anastasia on the orders of Genovese and Gambino.
Albert Anastasia had enjoyed an eventful and succesful, though hideously bloody career since falling in with Luciano and Lansky. Having run Murder Incorporated during the pre-war era, Anastasia appeared to take a ‘sabbatical’ from crime during World War Two and in 1942 joined the US Army, attaining the rank of sergeant and subsequently being rewarded with American citizenship. In 1948 he bought a dress manufacturer in Pennsylvania and appeared to be a respectable member of the community. In 1951 the Senate summoned him to answer questions about organised crime but he refused to answer. By then Anastasia was back at his old game: murder.
Anastasia had long been under-boss of the Mangano crime family, run by brothers Vincent and Philip. But he was distrusted by them because of his closeness to Luciano and Costello. In early 1951 both Vincent and Philip went missing. Vincent was never seen again but his brother’s bullet-riddled body was found dumped in Brooklyn. It was assumed that Anastasia had ordered them both to be killed.
With Costello’s support, the Commission confirmed Anastasia’s accession as boss of the renamed Anastasia family. But his growing power became too much of a threat to his principal New York rivals, including Genovese, two of whose henchmen followed him to his barber’s shop in a smart Manhattan hotel on the morning of 25 October 1957. With a warm towel draped over his face, he did not see the two gunmen position themselves behind the barber’s chair. After the first volley of bullets, Anastasia appeared to try and fight back against his killers – but he was lunging at the gunmen’s reflections in the mirror in front of him. The image of a victim covered in bloodied white towels shocked America.
With Anastasia safely out of the way, Vito Genovese now believed himself to be the top boss in the Cosa Nostra. In November 1957 he coordinated what became known as the ‘Apalachin Conference’, a Syndicate ‘summit’ of more than 100 Mafia leaders from as far afield as Canada and Italy, at which he expected to be named Capo di Tutti Capi. A local state trooper keeping watch on the conference location, the home
of Joseph ‘Joe the Barber’ Barbara in Apalachin, New York, checked the licence plates of the visitors’ limousines and reported the suspicious behaviour to his superiors. A road block was set up and many of the Mafia hierarchy were hauled off. Fifty-eight high-ranking mobsters were arrested and the Cosa Nostra subjected to numerous grand jury summonses. Genovese was blamed for the fisasco and it was an embarrassment and loss of prestige from which he never recovered.
His enemies could now hit back. Genovese’s former ally Carlo Gambino deserted him and, with Costello, flew to Sicily for a meeting with Luciano. An elaborate stitch-up was arranged. A narcotics deal was set up in New York – and the plotters ensured that Genovese was heavily implicated in it. They then tipped off the police.
Having eliminated Anastasia along with other rivals, Genovese had savoured the fruits of power for only a year before being jailed in 1959 for drug smuggling. From prison, he continued to control the activities of his crime family, even arranging for his top aide, Tony Bender, to be assassinated because he believed him to have played a part in the drugs plot. Genovese had served ten years of a 15-year sentence when he was found dead from a heart attack on 14 November 1969.
He must have been pleased to have survived his arch enemy ‘Lucky’ Luciano, who had already gone the same way. On 6 January 1962 he had been waiting at Naples airport for the arrival of an American movie producer planning to film the 64-year-old mobster’s life story. But Luciano’s luck had at last run out. He dropped dead of a heart attack in the airport lounge. Italian narcotics agents who, unbeknown to Luciano, had been following him with an arrest warrant for drug offences witnessed his demise. The Mafia boss’s body was shipped back to the United States and buried in St. John’s Cemetery in New York’s Queens district. More than 2,000 mourners attended the funeral, Luciano’s friend Carlo Gambino giving the eulogy.
One of those publicly mourning his old friend was Meyer Lansky – but he was perhaps not as sorry as his feigned grief might have suggested. As the years of exile dragged on, Luciano’s formerly rock-solid relationship with Lansky had begun to falter because the Italian did not feel he was receiving his fair share of profits from the Mob. But there was little that Luciano could do about it – because by the early 1960s the names of Meyer Lansky and ‘the Mob’ were virtually synonymous.
The diminutive, soft-spoken 5ft 5in tall Russian Jew had been a driving force in forming the national crime Syndicate and became one of its major overseers and bankers, laundering funds through foreign accounts. He developed gambling operations in Florida and New Orleans and also in Cuba, where he arranged payoffs to President Batista. He also funded the early development of Las Vegas as a gambling mecca and sent out his own top aide and good friend ‘Bugsy’ Siegel to take charge of it.
When Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, Lansky switched his gambling operations to the Bahamas, nurturing cooperation from the government of the then British colony to build casinos. He also invested in casinos throughout the Caribbean and in London. He controlled hotels, resorts, golf courses and even a meat packing plant. But his operations were not all ‘clean’ businesses. He was also into narcotics smuggling, pornography, prostitution, labour racketeering and extortion.
The FBI estimated that by 1970 Lansky had salted away $300million in Swiss bank accounts. But that year he learned of plans to arrest him on suspicion of income-tax evasion and fled to Israel, seeking to remain safely there under the so-called Law of Return. This law, passed in 1950 by the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, grants any Jew the right to seek sanctuary in the country – but excludes those with a criminal past. After two years in Israel, Lansky was arrested and deported back to the US, where he was finally brought to trial on several indictments. However, because the principal witness, a loan shark named Vincent ‘Fat Vinnie’ Teresa, utterly lacked credibility, Lansky was acquitted of income tax evasion but convicted of grand jury contempt, a verdict overturned on appeal.
Indictments on other charges were abandoned in 1974 because of Lansky’s ill health. He lived quietly in Florida and little was heard of him until 1979 when the House of Representatives Assassinations Committee, ending its two-year investigation of the Warren Commission report, linked Lansky with minor Mob figure Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who killed presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (of which more in a subsequent chapter). Meyer Lansky died at the age of 80 of lung cancer in Miami Beach on 15 May 1983, leaving a widow and three children. He was buried in Miami in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony. By then, his fortune may well have exceeded $500 million but of course no one, least of all the US government, could tell with any certainty how much and where it really was.
So, of those four friends and partners from the rip-roaring Twenties, three of them – Luciano, Genovese and Lansky – who between them had ordered thousands of murders, all died of natural causes. The exception was the fourth member of that merging of Italian and Jewish gangsters, ‘Bugsy’ Siegel.
Benjamin Siegel hated his nickname, which he had earned early in life. He once said: ‘My friends call me Ben, strangers call me Mr. Siegel, and guys I don’t like call me Bugsy, but not to my face.’ Among the friends he was referring to, the closest and most long-standing was his trusted partner in crime, Meyer Lansky. And it was Lansky who ordered him murdered.
In the Thirties, Siegel had survived a number of attempts on his life. His car was once raked with machine-gun fire and on another occasion a bomb went off in the function room in which he was hosting a meeting with senior mobsters. He survived both attempts and extracted revenge on his would-be assassins. In hospital being treated for minor injuries from the bomb plot, he slipped out of his bed overnight to kill the bomber before creeping back in unnoticed – and with the perfect alibi.
‘Bugsy’ felt himself safe from his many enemies when, in 1936, his friend Lansky sent him on a mission far away from the mean streets of New York. Prohibition had come to an end and the Mafia and their associates needed to replace their lost income. They decided to expand westwards, into California and Nevada, and on Lansky’s advice the Syndicate appointed Siegel as their emissary. This suited Siegel, who in 1935 had been indicted in New York for shooting a rival gang member, one of ‘Dutch’ Schultz’s men, and had therefore been advised by Lansky that he should leave town for a while. So his friend set him up with a $500,000 investment pot and sent him to Los Angeles to team up with local mobster Jack Dragna.
For the sharp-suited, high-living, celebrity-chasing ‘Bugsy’, California was a dream world. After two decades as Lansky’s second-in-command, he was king of his own sun-blessed domain. Siegel settled in Beverly Hills, renting a mansion and joining all the right clubs. In Hollywood, he was on first-name terms with stars like Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, but his greatest friend was actor George Raft, famous for his film gangster roles. He and Raft went on a gambling spree on the French Riviera – until Siegel got a cable from Lansky ordering him to ‘stop acting like a movie star’ and get back to work.
During this exotic period, ‘Bugsy’ seduced a string of starlets but his closest female companion was a millionairess divorcée, Countess Dorothy Di Frasso, who took the handsome newcomer under her wing. They travelled to Italy, where they met Mussolini, and launched an expedition to seek Spanish treasure on an island off Costa Rica – but after blasting the island with dynamite they returned empty-handed.
Siegel still had business interests back in New York and Lansky regularly remitted money to him. He was a heavy spender and a wild gambler, however, and he also had a very expensive new girlfriend, a spendthrift beauty named Virginia Hill, labelled by Time magazine as ‘Queen of the Gangster Molls’. Lansky had constantly to remind Siegel that his mission to the West Coast was, after all, to develop new revenue streams for the Syndicate, and he was ordered to start pulling his weight in the partnership with Dragna.
Jack Ignazio Dragna was an old-style Sicilian Mafioso who bootlegged in California through the Prohibition years and became boss of the Lo
s Angeles crime family after the unexplained death of the incumbent, Joseph Ardizzone, in 1931. He was to remain the ‘Capone of LA’, as the media labelled him, until his own death from a heart attack in 1956. Between them, Siegel and Dragna operated a string of illegal gambling houses and offshore casino ships, as well as drug smuggling operations and even a wire service. The money rolled in throughout World War Two, and in 1945 Lansky helped organise for Siegel a $3 million loan to build a casino hotel in Las Vegas – forerunner of the many monolithic emporia that were to make the desert town into a mobsters’ Mecca.
Siegel matched $3 million of his own money with the crime Syndicate’s stake and started building The Flamingo, a name chosen by his girlfriend, Virginia Hill. During construction, large sums were salted away into Swiss banks, some of them said to be in the name of Miss Hill. The gaping hole in the accounts did not go unnoticed.
At their Cuba summit in December 1946, when Siegel’s East Coast associates Lansky, Luciano and Genovese met with other leading gangsters to discuss Mob matters, the problem of the errant ‘Bugsy’ was raised. Lansky, who had once considered Siegel a blood brother, put the case for his friend and won him a reprieve. It was decided that Siegel be asked to repay with interest all of the Syndicate investment as soon as the hotel was open. If he failed to do so, then ‘Bugsy’ would be ‘retired’.
Siegel’s luck was out. He opened the Flamingo Hotel on 26 December 1946, with Virginia Hill at his side. The event was a disaster. Bad weather grounded planes in Los Angeles and few of the invited famous faces turned up. The grand opening fell flat, publicity was scant, interest dimmed and the punters stayed away. For two weeks Siegel struggled on. The casino alone lost more than $100,000 before he ordered it to be closed.
The World's Most Evil Gangs Page 5