Published 2014 by Prometheus Books
The Mob and the City: The Hidden History of How the Mafia Captured New York. Copyright © 2014 by C. Alexander Hortis. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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Cover photo of Paul “The Waiter” Ricca, Sylvester Agoglia, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, and Meyer Lansky used by permission of the John Binder Collection
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Hortis, C. Alexander, 1972–
The mob and the city : the hidden history of how the mafia captured New York / by C. Alexander Hortis.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61614-923-9 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-61614-924-6 (ebook)
1. Mafia—New York (State)—New York—History. 2. Organized crime—New York (State)—New York—History. I. Title.
HV6452.N72H67 2014
364.10609747’1—dc23
2013049314
Printed in the United States of America
Foreword by Dr. James B. Jacobs
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Godfather vs. New York History
PART 1. NEW YORK CITY THROUGH PROHIBITION
1. A City Built for the Mob
2. Prohibition and the Rise of the Sicilians
PART 2. TAKING GOTHAM: THE 1930S AND ’40S
3. The Mafia Rebellion of 1928–1931 and the Fall of the Boss of Bosses
4. The Racketeer Cometh: How the Mob Infiltrated Labor Unions
5. The Mafia and the Drug Trade
6. The Mob Nightlife
PART 3. THE MOBBED-UP METROPOLIS: THE 1950S
7. The Lives of Wiseguys
8. Mouthpieces for the Mob: Crooked Cops, Mob Lawyers, and Director Hoover
9. The Assassinations of 1957
10. Apalachin
Conclusion: New York's Mafia
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
The book you are about to read is an important contribution to New York City history and, given New York's importance, to the urban history of the United States. I take much delight in it because Alex Hortis was my student and coauthor at New York University School of Law in the late 1990s.
Much has been written about the Mafia and about New York City's Mafia families. However, Hortis shows that much of what has been written is wrong. Perhaps the greatest contribution of this highly readable tome is its debunking of many Mafia myths, for example, that Mafia members did not deal in drugs and did not inform on one another. His revisionist history of the so-called Castellammarese War is one of the most impressive achievements of this meticulous primary-source-based history.
In attempting to integrate New York City's Mafia history with the city's demographic, social, economic, and political history, Hortis is absolutely on the right track. He begins by showing that the evolution of the Mafia in New York is very much a story of ethnic succession. The Italians did not invent organized crime, but they brought it to a new level. Italian immigration followed both Jewish and Irish immigration, and Italians followed both of those groups into rackets like drugs, gambling, and labor racketeering. But the Italian mobsters were not nearly as monolithic and ethnocentric as other writers have assumed. Their intra- and intergroup relations were complex and important. Their ability to forge coalitions and overcome factionalism was utterly necessary for their remarkable successes.
Hortis presents a fascinating look at Mafia members’ social lives, particularly their participation in New York's nightlife at the most famous nightclubs like the Copacabana (owned by Frank Costello), where they rubbed shoulders with famous sports figures, entertainers, businessmen, and politicians. People went to the Copa to meet and be seen with the Mafia bosses; this tells us much about how Mafia members were regarded by and integrated with the city's elite. Also fascinating and new (at least to me) are Hortis's accounts of Mafia members’ ownership of gay bars and clubs and the participation of some mobsters in the gay scene.
The Mafia carried on the role of its Jewish and Irish predecessors, connecting the underworld (especially the world of vice) with the upperworld (business and labor). Hortis does a great job documenting and explaining how Italian-American organized crime members infiltrated or strong-armed their way into many New York City union locals. They used labor power to attract employer bribes or to extort employer payoffs. They then leveraged their union power to create and police employer cartels. And they took business interests in many companies that participated in the racketeer-ridden industries. The history of New York City's economy, especially in construction, seaborne and airborne cargo, and wholesale food markets is thoroughly permeated by the influence of the Mafia.
Hortis also provides some tantalizing clues as to the influence of the Mafia in politics. There is no question about the fact that the Mafia was highly integrated into Tammany Hall. Mob bosses contributed money and other forms of support to their favored politicians. In return, they obtained a good deal of immunity from interference with their illegal activities. Even after the demise of Tammany, mob bosses continued to be power brokers who exercised influence over politicians and political events. Much of their power stemmed from their positions in the unions.
The beginning of the Mafia's decline can be traced back to the early 1970s. After the 1972 death of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI reinvented itself, changing from an internal security (anti-subversives, anti-Communist) agency to a modern-day law enforcement agency. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the FBI had settled on control of organized crime as a target worthy of the attention of the nation's most important and competent law enforcement agency. Since then, federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies have decimated the Mafia's ranks. Yet remnants of the Mafia continue to exist and continue to engage in many of the rackets that Hortis documents in this tome.
James B. Jacobs
Warren E. Burger Professor of Law
New York University School of Law
Researching this book was terrific fun. The book was built on primary sources, so I must first acknowledge the archivists. I am particularly grateful to Leonora Gidlund, Marcia Kirk, Kenneth Cobb, and Dwight Johnson of the New York Municipal Archives; William Davis of the National Archives in Washington, DC; Michael Desmond of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library; Keith Swaney of the New York State Archives; Ellen Belcher of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Mattie Taormina of Stanford University; George Rugg of the University of Notre Dame; Lori Birrell of the University of Rochester; Michael Oliveira of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives; and Patrizia Sione and Kathryn Dowgiewicz of the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives. Special thanks to Chris Magee for locating cases at the National Archives at Kansa
s City. I also appreciate the help of the staffs of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
New and old friends contributed to this book. Christina M. Gentile was my Italian-language translator, and Ted Pertzborn was the graphics artist for the maps. I received support and assistance from Ryan Artis, John Binder, David Critchley, Josh Dowlut, Mario Hortis, Jacqueline Janowich, Meirong Liu, Will Meyerhofer, Arthur Nash, Lennert van't Riet, and Nathan Ward. I would also like to thank Greg Cross, Chris Mellott, and Colleen Mallon, my former colleagues, for allowing me to work part-time while completing the book. My agent Scott Mendel is the best consigliere anyone could have in the publishing world.
Prometheus Books is a wonderful place for authors. Editor-in-Chief Steven L. Mitchell improved the book with his editing. Grace M. Conti-Zilsberger designed the beautiful cover. Thanks also to Brian McMahon, Lisa Michalski, Mark Hall, and Melissa Raé Shofner.
My high school teacher Mr. Gerald Gerads first turned me on to history, and Professor Peter Rachleff introduced me to primary-source research. Professor James Jacobs of New York University School of Law, the nation's foremost scholar on the mob, started me on the path to this book back in 1998. He has been extraordinary generous over the years. This book could not have been finished without Thomas Hunt and Richard Warner. Tom Hunt contributed his eye for detail and shared sources from his own book DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime. My honorary coauthor Rick Warner read the entire manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions.
Above all, I thank my parents, Bati and Linda, Mom and Kent. They have shown me the meaning of unconditional love.
When the cell doors clanged shut on Giuseppe Morello, Ignazio Lupo, and dozens of their men in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary in 1910, their gang should have just dissolved into the streets of New York City. The Morello Family was just another struggling band of rogues, its modest numbers cut in half by convictions for a reckless counterfeiting scheme that had drawn the ire of the United States Secret Service.1 The Sicilians were small fish in New York's underworld. The Irish mob enjoyed natural ties to the docks and police force; African-American gangsters held sway in black Harlem and San Juan Hill; and Jewish organized crime was far stronger throughout the city.
Then, improbably, the mafiosi reconstituted themselves and returned with a vengeance. By the late 1930s, they evolved into the Cosa Nostra (“Our Thing”), the top syndicate in Gotham. By the 1950s, the Mafia families had grown to include two thousand “made men” and thousands more criminal associates entrenched throughout the economy, neighborhoods, and nightlife of New York.2
The remarkable story of how the modern Mafia actually took power on the streets of New York remains largely hidden. Mob books gloss over this formative era with superficial “rise of” chapters that rehash dubious anecdotes from secondhand sources about the purported machinations of the bosses. Telling the Cosa Nostra's early history, however, requires digging up primary sources in archives. Moreover, the narrow obsession with the bosses (the “godfathers”) neglects the soldiers (the “button men”) who ran the rackets on the streets.
Mob history has been blurred by eighty years of Mafia mythology as well. America's greatest filmmakers have created indelible images of the mob, from Howard Hawks's Scarface to Martin Scorsese's gangster epics to Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy. They have been joined by “prestige dramas” such as The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire. Mafiosi themselves have influenced the narrative. Al Capone in the 1920s, Joey Gallo in the 1970s, and John Gotti in the 1980s all manipulated the media. In his 1983 autobiography A Man of Honor (a bestseller that's still in print), Joseph Bonanno painted a romanticized portrait of himself as a benevolent “Father” who fought Americanized mobsters trying to pervert his noble “Tradition.”3
This is the first full-length book devoted specifically to uncovering the hidden history of how the street soldiers of the modern Mafia captured New York City during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. While discussing the Prohibition era of the 1920s, this book argues that the key formative decade for the Mafia was actually the 1930s. The book covers such hot topics as: Who actually founded the modern Mafia? Who shot Albert Anastasia at the Park Sheraton barbershop? And who exactly was present at the 1957 meeting of the Mafia in the town of Apalachin, New York? At the same time, the book goes beyond traditional mob topics as well. It not only documents who shot who, but explores how and why the Cosa Nostra emerged in Gotham.4
This revisionist history cuts through thickets of Mafia mythology with a machete of primary sources. It draws on the deepest collection of primary sources—many newly discovered—of any history of the modern Mafia. The primary sources include, among others, trial transcripts, investigative hearings, mayoral papers, personal memoirs, labor union records, and surveillance reports of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. These are complimented by internal files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the National Archives or obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. All of the quoted conversations in these pages are real and taken directly from primary sources. I supply extensive endnotes that allow readers to see the evidence for each chapter. This is an authentic history.5
Contrary to its image, the Mafia was not primarily the product of Sicilian intrigue among the godfathers. As we will see, mob bosses had limited control over these lucrative crime franchises. Rather, the Cosa Nostra was forged by the street soldiers as they adapted to the unique conditions of twentieth-century Gotham. They captured New York City by becoming part of it.
This approach places the Mafia squarely back into New York history. It shows how the infamous “French Connection” heroin case was merely an offshoot of Mafia narcotics trafficking dating back to the dawn of America's drug war. It describes how the Cosa Nostra rode labor unions and business cartels to power during the New Deal. It shows why the Stonewall riots of 1969 were the culmination of the mob-run system of gay bars that dated to the 1930s. By replacing gauzy myths with historical evidence, we can see this extraordinary crime syndicate in a whole new light.
The scale and variety of New York City's economic activity makes it unique among the cities of America…. Its 7,835,000 residents occupy only 300 square miles and thus comprise the largest and most concentrated consumer market in the country…. It is the major gateway to America with almost half the country's exports and imports flowing through its harbor…. Although it has few giant industrial establishments, the city's multiplicity of small firms makes it the leading manufacturing city in the United States…exceeding those of Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles and Boston combined.
—New York State Department of Commerce (1951)
Is it not a fact that because New York is an island it is particularly vulnerable to pressure on the docks and trucking, with a great many people in a concentrated area? There is an enormous amount of money involved…. If you fail to deliver to a large store in New York, if no trucks deliver to them, you can pretty well squeeze them down in a couple of days and cause losses of hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars. Therefore, this is probably the most vulnerable area in the country to that type of pressure.
—Senator John F. Kennedy, McClellan Committee (1958)
Lost in books about the New York Mafia is New York City itself. Gotham has been reduced to an operatic backdrop for epic clashes between mob bosses, the FBI, and prosecutors.1 Although these conflicts are important, these books are missing half the story.
It is impossible to understand the rise of the Mafia without understanding historic New York City—a city very different than it is today. For the Cosa Nostra was in many ways a testament to New York's exceptionalism: to its tremendous economy and unique geography; to its voracious appetites and almost natural corruption. This book then is as much about New York and its peoples as it is about organized crime.
The Mafia saw unparalleled opportunities in New York City. New York had five thriving families, with another across the river in northern New Jerse
y. Although the Sicilian Mafia was powerful in the villages of Sicily, it never achieved the economic successes of the New York Mafia. The Sicilian cosche (clans) had few industrial rackets or labor unions because there was not much industry on their island. By contrast, the New York Mafia always had a bounty of goods and services ripe for the picking.
Our story begins in another city. When Gotham was a place that built things, between the 1890s and the 1950s, Lower Manhattan was the center of skilled manufacturing in the Atlantic world. Before SoHo became gleaming storefronts, its cast-iron buildings were filled with dirty factories, leather tanneries, and trucking companies. It was a city where nighthawks smoked in jazz clubs owned by gangsters who were paying off the police, and where entire neighborhoods spoke Sicilian or Yiddish, or with Irish lilts, or in the southern drawls of African-American migrants.
This chapter explores why this city fueled the rise of the Mafia in America.
THE PORT OF NEW YORK
It all began with the port. When ships entered the placid waters of Upper New York Bay, their crews marveled at one of the finest natural harbors on earth. Sheltered from storm swells by Long Island and Staten Island, it was an ideal haven. Its waters were deep enough for transatlantic vessels; its weather temperate enough to allow the harbor to be open year round with little ice or fog. From the open ocean to the Manhattan piers was only seventeen miles, compared to the hundred-odd miles ships had to travel inland to reach Baltimore or Philadelphia. The building of the Erie Canal in the 1820s linked the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, drastically reducing shipping costs for New York City. It made a superb port.2
As craft industries sprang up around the harbor, and the population mushroomed, New York City became an international center of commerce. The ambitious immigrants who made it to New York in the mid-to-late nineteenth century—principally the Germans and the Irish, then later the Jews and the Italians—filled the workshops and factories in Manhattan, making it a manufacturing powerhouse. The exploding population became a huge consumer market. “The consuming power of the population of the harbor, that is of New York, Brooklyn, Bayonne, Hoboken, Jersey City, and Newark, was an important fact making for commerce and further growth,” said a shipping expert.3
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