So a President who was popular with the general public was less so with certain elements in the Secret Service and the underworld. The Mafia, of course, never forgives or forgets. Neither had the CIA any reason to thank him. The FBI did not look kindly on the President either. The Bureau’s chief, J. Edgar Hoover, had long been hampered by the Kennedy brothers in his autocratic handling of the agency’s affairs. Attorney General Robert, with White House backing, clipped the wings of the all-powerful Hoover and earned himself an unforgiving enemy. Hoover’s agents collected every scrap of information about the private lives of every leading politician – and in the Kennedys’ case, the files bulged with scandal.
So when Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 and Jack Kennedy in 1963 (and when Robert Kennedy was also assassinated in 1968) conspiracy theories instantly flew. And the link was always the Mafia … the experts at carrying out contracts through ‘third parties’. Did the mobsters with ‘friends in high places’ murder Monroe and the President? The theories sound preposterous – until one realises that there’s nothing more preposterous than the US government and the Mafia collaborating in the invasion of another country. When it comes to the Mafia, the ‘impossible’ often happens.
CHAPTER 7
DEATH OF GODFATHERS – ONE PEACEFULLY, ONE IN A HAIL OF BULLETS
Carlo Gambino was the inspiration for the character of Il Capo di Tutti Capi (The Boss of All Bosses) in the movie The Godfather. Under the iron rule of this frail old man, the Mafia flourished through the post-war years. And thanks to his low-profile management of the Mob, by 1976 when Gambino died peacefully in his bed at the age of 73, the Mafia had apparently vanished into the woodwork.
His predecessor as Capo di Tutti Capi, Salvatore Maranzano, had attempted the transformation of the Mafia from a public killing machine to a quietly corrupt corporation way back in 1931. But if Maranzano had first voiced the new philosophy and Meyer Lansky later espoused it, then Carlo Gambino perfected it.
Gambino, born in Sicily in 1902, sailed to the US and entered illegally to join up with his relatives in the New York crime family headed by his brother-in-law, Paul Castellano. He began carrying out murder contracts while still in his teens and at the age of 19 became a ‘made man’ and was inducted into La Cosa Nostra. Between the world wars he followed the traditional criminal path of bootlegging, illegal gambling, protection racketeering, extortion and loan-sharking.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Carlo Gambino chose to stay low-profile. He lived modestly in Brooklyn. At the age of 30 he married his first cousin and they raised three sons and a daughter. His trademark was his meek physical demeanour, accented by a hawk’s beak nose, and his polite, paternalistic manner. He preferred to work things out with his rivals but would not hesitate to have someone ‘clipped’ when they stood in his way. The most public of his many contracted ‘hits’ was that of Masseria family boss Guiseppe, ordered by Gambino and Luciano in 1931.
In 1937 Gambino was arrested and convicted of tax evasion but got off with a suspended sentence. World War Two was a gold mine for him. He became a millionaire by bribing city officials for ration stamps, which he then sold on the black market. After the war, the softly-spoken Gambino forged an unlikely alliance with the murderous Albert Anastasia and together they planned the overthrow of New York’s Mangano family. Its leader, Vincent Mangano, vanished in 1951 in what was assumed to be a killing arranged by Anastasia and Gambino. In 1956 Anastasia appointed Gambino his underboss. He didn’t serve his master for long; the following year he ordered the barber’s shop assassination of Anastasia. One of Anastasia’s loyalists, James Squillante, followed his boss to the grave in 1960. Carlo Gambino now set about consolidating his power base.
In 1962 his eldest son Thomas married the daughter of fellow Mob boss Gaetano Lucchese in a union not only of two young people but of two burgeoning crime families. Rackets throughout New York were carved up between the ‘amico nostra’ – literally ‘friends of ours’.
After surviving his main rivals – Joe Bonanno was ousted by ‘The Commission’, Vito Genovese died of a heart attack and Tommy Lucchese of a brain tumor – Carlo Gambino became all powerful. Quietly, throughout the Sixties and into the Seventies, he built an empire that operated in New York, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas.
The Gambino family – with names like Carmine ‘Wagon Wheels’ Fatico, Carmine ‘The Doctor’ Lombardozzi, Joseph ‘Joe Piney’ Armone, Armand ‘Tommy’ Rava, Joseph Biondo, Aniello ‘Mr Neil’ Dellacroce and Joseph Riccobono – had between 500 and 800 ‘soldiers’ operating a $500 million-a-year business.
The Gambinos became the dominant family in Manhattan. They ran the Longshoremen’s union, thereby controlling all goods entering New York by ship. The unions at the city’s airports were also under their influence. However, Godfather Carlo avoided the lucrative but high-profile drugs trade. His warning ‘Deal and Die’ meant a death sentence to any family member dealing in heroin or cocaine.
It was a strangely moral stance for someone who had ordered the deaths of an untold number of enemies. Thomas Eboli was one murder attributed to him. The drug racketeer owed Gambino $4 million and, when he failed to repay, was sprayed with bullets from a passing truck as he sat in his car in Brooklyn in 1972. The same year, the Godfather’s 29-year-old nephew ‘Manny’ Gambino was kidnapped and, despite a ransom being paid, murdered. Irish mobster James McBratney was suspected of being one of the kidnappers and the order went out for him to die slowly and painfully, in a manner befitting his crime against Carlo Gambino. The three-man hit squad, including a new protégé named John Gotti, found their man in a Staten Island tavern and, perhaps fortunately for him, was swiftly dispatched when he tried to flee.
Carmine ‘Mimi’ Scialo’s end was less swift. A member of the Colombo family, the drunken Scialo verbally abused Carlo Gambino in a restaurant in 1974. Gambino remained calm, as he always did, and uttered not a word in retaliation. Soon afterwards, however, Scialo’s body was found at a Brooklyn social club – semi-encased in the cement floor.
There were many challenges to Gambino’s authority, particularly as he became old and frail, but he survived them all. While the Mafia had supposedly abolished the title of ‘Boss of Bosses’, Gambino’s position afforded him all the powers such a title would have carried. He was the undisputed head of the largest, wealthiest and most powerful crime family in the country and was the leader of the Commission, a position only previously held by ‘Lucky’ Luciano.
Carlo Gambino died of a heart attack in October 1976 at the age of 74. He had given explicit orders that his brother-in-law and cousin, Paul Castellano, take over the family. But many of his associates and underlings believed his loyal under-boss Neil Dellacroce should have had the top job. The dissension split the family in two.
Gambino’s legacy was not what he had hoped. His mission to transform the Mafia from a high-profile killing machine into an invisible corporate entity remained incomplete. In fact, the Seventies and early Eighties saw some of the most public instances of Mafia violence. Over the same period, ordinary Americans received, through police crackdowns, media investigative reporting and a few revelatory court cases, an insight into how little had changed in the murderous minds of the Mafiosi.
The most sensational example of this was a very public assassination that had been set in motion by Carlo Gambino himself. Shortly before he died, the ailing Godfather had happily given his seal of approval to the elimination of a deadly rival. It was vengeance from beyond the grave that remained outstanding for three years until the contract was finally executed on a man who had boasted: ‘No one will ever kill me, they wouldn’t dare.’
Carmine ‘Cigar’ or ‘Lilo’ Galante, who saw himself as the new Godfather following Gambino’s death, was a brutal, old-time Mafioso of the Bonanno family. In his youth, he had been a vicious triggerman, carrying out contracts in grisly fashion many times. But now he was to become the target. His brazen bid to become Godfather and
seize control of the New York narcotics market had angered other Syndicate leaders. And his aim of rubbing out all gangland opposition was drawing unwelcome attention from US lawmakers.
In July 1979 Galante was finishing lunch on the patio of Joe and Mary’s Italian restaurant on Brooklyn’s Knickerbocker Avenue. He had enjoyed a plate of spaghetti and meatballs with side orders of salad and fruit. Dining with him were Leonard Coppola, a Bonanno capo, and restaurant owner Giuseppe Turano, a cousin who was also a Bonanno soldier. Also sitting at the table were Galante’s Sicilian bodyguards, Baldesarre ‘Baldo’ Amato and Cesare ‘Tall Guy’ Bonventre.
The cigar-chewing mobster was sipping his sixth glass of Chianti as two black limousines drew up outside. He looked to his bodyguards – but they had set him up for the contract murder. Three men, neatly dressed but wearing ski masks, strolled calmly from the cars into the eating-house and opened fire with a whole arsenal of shotguns and automatic weapons. They didn’t even give their quarry time to scream. The 69-year-old mobster tried to rise from his chair but was cut down in a hail of bullets. He died with his cigar still grotesquely clenched between his teeth. His two associates were also killed. As the gunmen sped off, the bodyguards walked away unharmed.
The Galante assassination was a Mafia ‘classic’. The contract had been farmed out by the Commission to friendly Mafiosi in Connecticut, who provided the killers as a favour. This is a Cosa Nostra trademark. To confuse the authorities and hostile gangsters alike, the actual executioners are often ‘imported’ from out of town. The trail is sometimes covered once again when those who put out the original contract have the executioners rubbed out afterwards. Dead men tell no tales.
A string of murders during that period of modern history horrified an American public who believed such violence had ended in the lawless Twenties and Thirties. The headlines, however, proved that the Mafia’s rules had not changed. In short, it is difficult to join the organisation unless, of course, you’re close family. Getting out, though, is very easy indeed: you become dead.
The typical Mafia execution remains a few clean bullet holes in the head. Unwanted personnel, even Godfathers, are disposed of in this fashion. But there are nastier ways of disposing of the greedy, the talkative, the disloyal and the rebellious. By Mafia tradition, those undesirables were killed slowly and painfully. Some were garrotted, others cut to pieces with chainsaws or crushed to death in various ways.
Quite often, a cryptic message would accompany the rubout. A traitor’s genitals would be cut off and stuffed in the corpse’s mouth, for instance. In 1961 Giuseppe ‘Joe’ Profaci, founder of what is now known as the Colombo family, put out a contract on a member of a rival gang. Ten days after hitman Joseph ‘Jelly’ Gioielli disappeared, his bosses, the Gallo brothers, received the man’s clothes wrapped around a fish. Translation: ‘Jelly sleeps with the fishes’.
Joseph ‘Crazy Joe’ Gallo had been celebrating his 43rd birthday with a slap-up meal at famous Umberto’s New York Clam House when he was ‘clipped’ in 1972. When he assassinated Gallo, the lone gunman – later revealed to be out-of-state hitman Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran – broke an unwritten Mafia rule: you don’t blow a man away in front of his family. With him at the restaurant that night were his bride of three weeks, former dental assistant Sina Essary, and her ten-year-old daughter Lisa, as well as Gallo’s sister and a number of friends.
The furious gun battle spilled into the street, leaving Gallo, New York’s most feared hitman, dead and his bodyguard, Peter ‘The Greek’ Diapioulas, wounded. The Gallo brothers had been responsible for shooting down rival don Joe Colombo at an Italian-American rally at New York’s Columbus Circle a year earlier. At least a dozen men died in the ensuing feud between Gallo and Colombo factions of the old Joe Profaci family.
The violence was not restricted to New York. In Chicago, the infamous Momo ‘Sam’ Giancana was executed in 1975 by three hoods who burst into the kitchen of his suburban home. The 67-year-old was shot in the mouth, with another five bullets to the neck.
In Kansas City, the Spero brothers were wiped out one by one during their ten-year war with the reigning Civella gang. Nick was executed in 1974 and stuffed into the boot of his car. Michael was gunned down in a bar five years later. Joseph was wounded at that time but died when an explosion tore apart his warehouse in 1980. Carl was shot in the back when his brother Mike died. Paralysed, he carried on the war from a wheelchair, but in 1984, as he was rolling towards his specially adapted car, the Civella boys blew up the whole parking lot.
The decade was marked by a rash of arsons at Mafia-owned restaurants in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York. In the smouldering ruins of Giuseppe’s Pizza joint in Philadelphia one day in 1977, police discovered two charred bodies. One was still recognisable: Vincenzo Fiordilino, a Bonanno capo from New York. How had he come to die in a Philadelphia cafe? Police pieced together the story. Fiordilino and his friend had just brought 200 gallons of petrol into the kitchen, intending to start a blaze, but the pilot light ignited it before the two could get out.
Vincent Papa, a Colombo capo who made himself a legend when he stole $100 million worth of drugs from the police in 1972, was stabbed to death in the exercise yard of the Atlanta Penitentiary six years later. That daring robbery became a smash-hit movie, The French Connection. But Papa had begun to parade himself. It’s called ‘showboating’ and if you do it within the Mafia, it usually gets you killed.
James Eppolito, a Gambino lieutenant, was running a bogus charity so successfully that the then president’s wife, Rosalynn Carter, endorsed it with an appearance in 1979. A picture of the two together appeared in newspapers and Eppolito had extra copies made, which he passed around among friends and business associates. Two weeks later he was dead. Hitmen Roy DeMeo and Richard DiNome had orders from the top. Then they, too, were rubbed out.
One age-old Mafia rule always applies: the old must make way for the young. Many stooping, white-haired dons, like Carmen Galante, seemed to forget that. And so, usually with the thumbs-up from the other bosses in the Commission, the Mob ‘retires’ its oldsters. A pension is out of the question.
Philadelphia chieftain Angelo Bruno was 69 when he got his ‘retirement’ in 1980. He was shot through the back of the head as he sat in a friend’s car outside his home. The body of an associate believed responsible for the murder was found a month later stuffed in a plastic bag, shot 14 times and littered with $20 bills torn in half, the Mafia sign that he had committed a greedy act.
Bruno’s successor in Philadelphia was Philip ‘Chicken Man’ Testa. His reign lasted exactly a year. He was blown to bits when a bomb, set off by radio control, shattered his home. Three years later his 28-year-old son Salvatore, who had vowed vengeance on the perpetrators, was himself blown away with two bullets to the back of the head.
The seven-year war between the Philadelphia Mob and the Bonannos and Gambinos in New York claimed the lives of no fewer than 209 members from the three families. It felt like a replay of the territorial wars of the Twenties.
Frank Piccolo, allied to the Gambino clan, was Connecticut’s most powerful mobster until the police nabbed him. He was due to stand trial for attempting to extort money from singers Wayne Newton and Lola Falana over a Las Vegas investment that had gone sour. Piccolo was the boss but he was also an embarrassment. Like Galante and others, 58-year-old Piccolo was now dead weight. Shadowed by his colleagues for days, he collapsed in a spray of bullets as he made a call from a public payphone in 1981. The three carbine-toting hoods then made their getaway in a van, chased by police and a handful of very brave local citizens. The van turned into a long wooded driveway near the home of two Piccolo henchmen, brothers Gustav and Francis ‘Fat Frannie’ Curcio, where the pursuers lost it. It had been the classic Godfather movie-type execution.
It seems that food and death often go hand in hand for the men of the Mafia. They dine and they die. Sometimes, like Carmine Galante, they die after their spaghetti and meatballs. Other tim
es, like Carlo Gambino’s successor Paul Castellano, they die before they dine. The seven torpedoes who gunned down Castellano just before Christmas 1985 hissed Sicilian curses at him as they fired. Castellano, who had been on his way to dinner at Manhattan’s Sparks Steak House died on an empty stomach. Killed with him was his bodyguard and would-be second-in-command, Thomas Bilotti.
Mafiosi are hit as an example to others. If their lives were ever spared, then the Cosa Nostra would disintegrate as each man looked to his own enrichment, rather than the Syndicate’s.
The men who do the dirty work have no conscience. Time and again it is apparent when they talk about it, as in the case of two US government witnesses of the time. Luigi Ronsisvalle, a New York hitman working for the Bonanno family, told a court that he killed 13 people, the first when he was just 18 years old. ‘That was a job,’ he said. ‘I no feel ashamed.’ Apparently the only thing he regretted was pushing heroin ‘which destroys hundreds and thousands of young American generations’.
Another ‘squealer’, Aladena ‘Jimmy the Weasel’ Fratianno, a Cleveland mobster who became acting head of the Los Angeles crime family, confessed to 11 murders but said he felt no emotion. One of the contracts was on his best friend, Frank ‘The Bomp’ Bompensiero, the most feared Mafia hitman in Southern California for more than 30 years. Killing fellow mobsters was Bompensiero’s specialty and his reward from the Los Angeles Mafia was to be made boss of San Diego. In 1977, however, it was discovered that ‘The Bomp’ had been an FBI informer for a decade. ‘The Weasel’ had no hesitation in organising the execution of his friend, and the 71-year-old hulking hood was gunned down outside his home by another hired hitman from out of town.
Afterwards ‘The Weasel’ Fratianno became an FBI informant himself and later gained a measure of fame – or infamy – by writing about the Mafia and giving TV interviews. He revealed the sort of casual language used in the course of a contract killing. ‘You know that fucking Bomp,’ said his killer, ‘he shit his pants when he saw me with the piece [gun]. He tried to give me a hard time.’ Fratianno wondered: ‘How tough a time can a guy with four slugs in his head give you?’
The World's Most Evil Gangs Page 8