The Mob and the City

by C. Alexander Hortis

  FBI official Oliver “Buck” Revell recalled an extraordinary conversation that he'd had with Director Hoover on February 8, 1971. Hoover was welcoming Revell to his role heading up a new FBI assault on the Cosa Nostra. After some pleasantries, Hoover became reflective on his disbelief in the Mafia's existence. “We didn't have any evidence,” Hoover insisted. “Not until they held that hoodlum conference up in Apalachin, New York, back in ’57.”77

  These accounts can now be corroborated by the written words of Hoover himself. On December 30, 1970, Hoover sent an interoffice memorandum to his deputies asking them to read Ed Reid's 1969 book on the mob, The Grim Reapers.78 Hoover handwrote a revealing note at the bottom. The document reads:

  December 30, 1970

  Copies of the GRIM REAPERS have been sent to Mr. Gale and Mr. Rosen, with the message that Mr. Hoover wishes them to read it.

  hwg [Secretary Gandy].

  I have in mind that I was originally advised by Rosen that the Mafia or anything like it in character never existed in this country. I have been plagued ever since for having denied its existence. H79

  The “Rosen” to which the director referred in his note was Alex Rosen, assistant director of the General Investigative Division for thirty years under Hoover.80 Although Hoover may have been blaming Rosen unfairly, the note gives us a rare glimpse into Hoover's thinking on the Mafia. At some point, Hoover believed that “the Mafia or anything like it in character never existed in this country,” and he therefore “denied its existence.” He regretted his stance, feeling “plagued ever since” for his longstanding position.

  Still, how could Hoover have doubted the existence of the Mafia for so long? The Federal Bureau of Investigation should have investigated stories corroborating the existence of the Mafia far more seriously. “It's inexcusable for them to say they couldn't have been using that [intelligence] function to at least be aware of what the hell is going on,” said William Hundley, a top lawyer in the Justice Department.81 Nor is it satisfactory to blame Senator Kefauver's flawed hearings, as some have suggested, for the FBI director's refusal to acknowledge the Mafia. It is preposterous to expect Senate staff to prove a crime syndicate to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Had Hoover used some of the FBI's intelligence function to investigate the Mafia, it might have supplied the Kefauver Committee with the sources it needed. At a minimum, Hoover could have given more informative responses. Take the fine answer of a Bureau of Narcotics agent in 1957 to a Kefauver-inspired question about an international “head of the Mafia”:

  Senator Ives: I am curious to know where the head of the Mafia is today. What country? Sicily, still?

  Mr. Pera: Well, a study of their organization, as it exists, would indicate to us that it is a loose organization, that there is no autocracy in it, that it is composed of a group of individuals who discuss with each other what is mutually beneficial to them and come to agreement on lines of action that is mutually acceptable to them. 82

  8–1: Handwritten note of J. Edgar Hoover, 1971. (Courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation)

  Or take J. Edgar Hoover's own later description in January 1962: “No single individual or coalition of racketeers dominates organized crime across the nation. There are, however, loose connections among controlling groups in various areas through family ties, mutual interest, and financial investment.”83 Or in September 1963, when Hoover explained that the Cosa Nostra was “a strong arm of organized crime in America” but that there was other organized crime, too.84

  In fairness to Hoover, doubting the Cosa Nostra's existence was not a lunatic position in the 1950s. Before the Apalachin meeting and mob soldier Joe Valachi's public testimony of 1963, before the later flood of Mafia prosecutions (and even after), many people doubted the existence of the Mafia. “Regardless of what anyone else may say on the subject, there is no Sicilian Mafia, or simply ‘Mafia’ in the United States,” declared the historian Giovanni Schiavo on November 16, 1957, days after the Apalachin meeting.85 When FBI witness Joe Valachi testified before a Senate committee in 1963, he was attacked and belittled not only by fellow mafiosi, but by criminologists as well. In a 1969 essay titled “God and the Mafia,” the criminologist Gordon Hawkins mocked Valachi's testimony, claiming that evidence of the Mafia is “on examination to consist of little more than a series of dogmatic assertions.”86 But Valachi was a legitimate mafioso whose testimony was mostly right, and the esteemed criminologist was mostly wrong. Indeed, Valachi's testimony had already been thoroughly corroborated by multiple sources by 1969.87 Simply put, Mafia skeptics could not (or would not) accept that there were secret alliances of “families” dedicated to lives of crime and bound by common rituals and practices that operated in the United States.

  But enough about Hoover. Let us look at the events in the Mafia that changed his mind: the events of 1957, the mob's terrible year.

  The Volcano.

  —Joe Bonanno on New York in the 1950s, A Man of Honor (1983)

  They had been hunting Frank Costello at night. On the evening of Tuesday, April 30, 1957, Costello, the boss of the Luciano Family, was out on the town with his pals Anthony “Little Augie Pisano” Carfano and Frank Erickson. That same night, a police detective was conducting surveillance at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in an unrelated matter when he recognized Costello walking into the hotel bar.

  The detective then spotted something else: two other men were surreptitiously trailing Costello's party. The lawman decided to keep an eye on them. When Costello left the Waldorf Astoria to stroll around midtown Manhattan, the two suspicious men were following him again from a distance. The police detective did not have enough to go on though, so he filed the observation away in his memory. Within days, the detective would learn the full implications of what he had seen.1

  In the spring of 1957, the New York Mafia was fat, prosperous, and growing. The Mafia families controlled key union officials and held influence over businessmen in major industries. They were the top crime syndicates in Gotham, and they were the dominant heroin traffickers in America.

  By Thanksgiving 1957, the Cosa Nostra would be in disarray. Internal conflicts would erupt into the public at a level unseen since 1931. Two Mafia bosses would be violently deposed, an underboss murdered while grocery shopping, and the wiseguys exposed to new scrutiny. Nineteen fifty-seven was to be the mob's annus horribilis.

  Drawing on previously unpublished sources, this chapter re-creates the Mafia assassinations of 1957 and explores the underlying causes of the conflict. The unraveling of the mob leadership in the fifties revealed flaws present since the origins of the modern Mafia.

  THE HUNTING OF A MOB BOSS: FRANK COSTELLO AND VITO GENOVESE

  The men hunting Frank Costello were sent by his own underboss, Vito Genovese. He was a treacherous man to have as an underboss. He had little hesitation about arranging the deaths of mafiosi he had known for decades. Genovese soldier Joe Valachi testified before Congress that he executed hits on Steve Franse and Eugene Giannini on the direct orders of Vito Genovese. Genovese tried justifying his role in the 1951 murder of Willie Moretti, the longtime underboss of the Luciano Family, who the Commission thought was talking too openly about the Mafia. “It was supposedly a mercy killing because he was sick,” Valachi recounted. “Genovese told me ‘The Lord have mercy on his soul, he's losing his mind.’”2

  Vito Genovese could make deals with anyone—and then promptly double-cross them. Take Genovese's machinations with Fascist Italy during the Second World War. Genovese plied Fascist officials with enormous cash tributes amounting to $250,000. He even received a personal decoration from the dictator Benito Mussolini. After the Axis powers fell, Genovese weaseled his way into the confidences of the United States Army occupation authorities. He promptly betrayed their trust by becoming a black marketeer of diverted American gasoline supplies.3

  Because of Genovese's ruthlessness, stories arose whenever people died around him. For example, rumors swirled when Genovese married Anna Vernoti
co on March 30, 1932, only two weeks after her first husband Gerard Vernotico was found murdered. “Associates believed Vito had her husband strangled to death so that he could marry her,” writes Selwyn Raab in his book Five Families. Left out of the story is that a New York court had already granted Anna's petition for a divorce in January 1932, which was due to become a final judgment ninety days later in April 1932. Genovese would have been risking a murder charge to save a few weeks. In fact, Genovese was not a suspect in the case. Rather, the police believed that Gerard Vernotico, a gangster with a lengthy record, was killed by other racketeers.4

  Genovese has also been blamed for the death of Pete LaTempa, a witness in the homicide case against Genovese for the 1934 murder of Ferdinand Boccia. LaTempa died from a drug overdose while in protective custody on January 15, 1945. “The city medical examiner reported that the pills LaTempa swallowed were not the prescribed drugs and contained enough poison to ‘kill eight horses,’” asserts Raab. This is not accurate. The toxicology report found prescription barbiturates in his system. Investigators discovered that LaTempa had received a prescription (from a doctor with the district attorney's office) for Seconal—a barbiturate. Moreover, LaTempa had previously attempted suicide by hanging on December 6, 1944. Based on this evidence, the district attorney ruled LaTempa's death a suicide. In short, Vito Genovese's record is sordid enough without repeating demonstrably inaccurate stories.5

  Vito Genovese moved on Costello in the spring of 1957 after sensing the boss's vulnerability. The sixty-six-year-old Frank Costello had grown tired of the mob's street operations. Costello once boasted of knowing “the better people and nothing but the better. I know some of the biggest utility men, some of the biggest businessmen in the country.”6 The “better people” apparently did not include the caporegimes in his mob syndicate, with whom Costello had weak relations.7

  The mob boss was having personal problems as well. He had suffered through recurring bouts with throat cancer, which turned his voice gravely. In the late 1940s (long before The Sopranos invented a mob boss in therapy), Frank Costello was seeing a psychiatrist in Manhattan.8 His disastrous testimony before the Kefauver Committee in March 1951, televised to a national audience, made him a target of law enforcement. In 1954, Costello was convicted of federal income tax evasion. His lawyers would spend years trying to overturn his conviction while he was out on bail.9

  9–1: Frank Costello, testifying before the Kefauver Committee, 1951. (Photo by Al Aumuller, courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection)

  11:00 p.m., Thursday, May 2, 1957, 115 Central Park West, Manhattan: The Attempt on Frank Costello

  On the evening of Thursday, May 2, 1957, Frank and his wife Loretta went to see friends at the elegant L'Aiglon Restaurant. The dinner party included Mr. and Mrs. Al Miniaci, president of Paramount Vending, with whom Costello did business; Mr. and Mrs. Generose Pope, the publisher of Il Progresso, the Italian-language newspaper of which Costello was a longtime backer; and William Kennedy, owner of a modeling agency. After dinner, the group strolled down East 55th Street to the Monsignore Restaurant, where they met up with Frank Bonfiglio, a Brooklyn businessman who Costello had known for decades.10

  Despite his good spirits, Costello's legal problems were weighing on him. He placed a call at about 10:45 p.m. to a Philadelphia lawyer. Frank returned to the table to apologize for having to leave early; he would be taking an 11:00 p.m. telephone call at home from his Washington attorney. His wife Loretta wanted to stay. So Costello left with Mr. Kennedy in a taxicab bound for the Upper West Side.11

  At about 10:55 p.m., the taxicab arrives at Costello's upscale co-op apartment complex overlooking Central Park. The boss gets out of the cab and walks into the building's lobby. Then, a black Cadillac pulls up behind the parked cab. A hulking thug gets out of the Cadillac and rushes into the lobby.12

  “This is for you Frank!” he shouts. Costello reacts, turning toward the shout. In a split second, a freakish bullet grazes the skin beneath Costello's right ear, furrows under the hair of his scalp, and exits, smashing into the marble wall of the foyer. Feeling a sting and the blood pouring down his neck, Costello staggers to the leather couch in the lobby. “Somebody tried to get me,” Frank cries. The doorman and William Kennedy then took him to Roosevelt Hospital.13

  Don Vito Rallies the Caporegimes

  The gunman's macho shout may have saved Costello's life. The doctors who treated his wound at the hospital concluded that Costello had turned his head at the very last moment. So instead of the bullet shattering his skull, Costello walked away with a flesh wound.14

  According to underworld sources, the gunman who botched the assassination was twenty-nine-year-old Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, a husky former boxer who had become a mob soldier for Genovese. “The Chin wasted a whole month practicing,” mocked Joe Valachi, a fellow hit man for Genovese.15 The NYPD believed that Thomas Eboli, a caporegime close to Genovese, was driving the getaway car. Tommy Eboli's company put up $76,000 ($500,000 in 2013 dollars) as collateral for Gigante's bail.16

  Rather than trying to deny he was behind it, Vito Genovese proceeded to stage a coup d’état in the Luciano Family. The rank and file had little affection for their absentee boss. For all of Costello's ease around New York's power brokers, Genovese better understood that the real power in the mob was in its street crews. So while Costello was out hobnobbing with celebrities and politicians, Genovese was building loyalty among the caporegimes.

  Genovese tested that loyalty in the days following the botched attempt. “Vito called a meeting of all his lieutenants to condone his attempt on Costello's life,” describes an FBI report. “All of the lieutenants showed up at the meeting except Augie Pisano.”17 It was an impressive show of strength. “After the Costello shooting, his Family rallied around Genovese,” confirms Joe Bonanno. Genovese then made his move: “Don Vito” proclaimed himself boss of the Luciano Family and named Gerardo “Gerry” Catena as his underboss.18

  9–2: Vito Genovese, ca. 1934. (Courtesy of the New York Police Department)

  Genovese and his soldiers braced for retaliation. The man they feared the most was Albert “The Executioner” Anastasia, who was furious about the attempt on his longtime ally Costello. Anastasia polled the Commission to see if it would remain neutral if he went after Genovese. The Commission's members warned Anastasia that they would oppose him if he turned it into a wider conflict. They persuaded him to stand down.19

  The Trial of Vincent Gigante

  Frank Costello had had enough of the mob life. He was already preoccupied with his own legal and health problems. Waging a prolonged fight against Genovese was unpalatable. He decided to retire as boss.20

  Although police detectives believed that Costello had seen the gunman's face, he was completely unhelpful to their investigation. Costello insisted that he never had “an enemy in the world.” In response, a detective quipped, “Whoever this guy was, he had a very strange way of showing his friendship.”21

  The following year, in May 1958, Vincent “The Chin” Gigante went on trial for the attempted murder of Frank Costello. Gigante's criminal defense attorney Maurice Edelbaum exploited Costello's unwillingness to identify the shooter:

  “Do you know any reason why this man should seek your life?” Edelbaum asked.

  “None whatsoever,” replied Costello.

  ….

  “Tell us the truth,” Edelbaum demanded in theatrical fashion. “Who shot you?”

  “I'll ask you who shot me,” Costello replied with a sly smile. “I don't know. I saw no one at all.”

  The victim had rendered himself useless as a witness.22 That left the building doorman as the sole eyewitness to identify Gigante. Unfortunately, the star witness was completely blind in one eye and impaired in the other. Edelman destroyed the doorman's testimony on cross-examination.23

  Shortly before midnight, the jury returned its verdict: not
guilty. Loud applause broke out in the gallery; the defendant's wife Olympia and four children burst into tears.24 When the cheering stopped, Gigante was released by the court. The Chin walked over to Frank Costello, who was sitting in the back of the gallery. “Thanks, Frank,” said Gigante.25

  The Luciano Family was not the only one of the original five families wracked with strife during the 1950s. Even more severe problems were stirring in the old Mangano Family.

  MOB PATRICIDE: VINCENT MANGANO AND ALBERT ANASTASIA

  By 1951, Albert Anastasia had been the underboss to the Mangano Family for twenty years. The young Umberto Anastasio had come up under the tutelage of Vincent and Philip Mangano. Albert the Executioner was their enforcer on the waterfront, and he was underboss to their mob family. Albert once said that Vince Mangano was “like a father to him.”26

  After decades as their underboss though, resentments had arisen. Anastasia's ambitions were frustrated by the long tenure of the Mangano brothers. He was having a difficult time masking his contempt for Vince Mangano. “He always keeps surprises in store,” Anastasia sarcastically told a guest of his boss. For his part, Mangano was distrustful of Anastasia's close alliance with Frank Costello. “Mangano and Anastasia were at a stage where they feared one another,” recalled mob boss Joe Bonanno.27

  Vincent Mangano went missing in early spring 1951. Then, on April 19, 1951, the bullet-riddled corpse of his brother Philip Mangano turned up in a marsh in Brooklyn. The police sought to question Anastasia and his associates about the gangland-style hit. But nobody was talking to the police. The homicide of Phil Mangano was never solved. Vince Mangano's body was never even found.28

  The Commission wanted to know what happened to Vince Mangano. He was after all one of the original charter members. The Commission summoned Anastasia to a meeting. “He neither denied nor admitted rumors that he was behind Vincent's disappearance,” recalled Joe Bonanno, a Commission member. “However, he said he had proof that Mangano had been plotting to kill him” and that “if someone was out to kill him, then he had the right to protect himself.” His ally Frank Costello, as boss of the Luciano Family, backed up Anastasia's version of events before the Commission. Their message was clear enough. The Commission was not about to challenge them.29