Carmine the Snake

by Frank DiMatteo

  The Gallo crew and their environs were bigger than life itself, the future subject of a brilliant Bob Dylan song “Joey,” and my dad was one of them, hired because of his boxing skills—he once decked middleweight champ Emile Griffith while working as a bar bouncer—to be Larry Gallo’s bodyguard. (My mom says my dad also beat the shit out of Henry Hill one night in the Golden Door out near the airport. I asked her why. She said it was because Hill was an asshole.)

  Point is, my dad Ricky was hired as Larry Gallo’s bodyguard, but became a trusted member of the crew, good on any kind of job—any kind of job. If the Gallos had been able to give buttons, my dad would have been a made-man like that.

  But the buttons were in Joseph Profaci’s control, and membership was sealed because some of the bosses were selling buttons, which was not the Sicilian thing to do.

  Everything that happened back in those days, Ricky DiMatteo was there, and he knew Carmine Persico as a friend, a brother—and eventually as a snake. I’ve read—albeit in a Chicago daily—that Carmine was called Snake because he slithered out of tough spots. Bullshit. His moniker referred to the snake in the Garden of Eden. Cross Carmine Persico and he was quick to strike. Hell, life was war and he was quick to strike even those that hadn’t crossed him, those that were simply in his way.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Making His Bones

  October 25, 1957, Carmine pulled on the black glove and entered a Park Avenue barbershop, more front-page violence that put him on the gangster fast track . . .

  AT 10:18 A.M. ON THAT DAY, a fifty-three-year-old man reclined in a Manhattan barber chair, his face obscured by a hot towel. He was Albert Anastasia—controller of the waterfront, founder and, with Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Lord High Executioner of Murder, Inc. Statistics were unofficial, of course, but sixty-three murders were attributed to Murder, Inc. between 1931 and 1940. Of those, Anastasia was said to be responsible for thirty-six of them. Now, he relaxed, maybe even dozed a little, in barber chair number-four with his back to the door off the lobby of the Park Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Avenue and West 55th.

  At that moment, four men—the “barbershop quartet,” as they would become known—approached the Sheraton. One, Larry Gallo, took up a post on the sidewalk, just outside the hotel’s 55th Street entrance. The other three went in. Joe Jelly stood guard at the barbershop entrance, as Carmine Persico and Joey Gallo entered the barbershop.

  Carmine and Joey were in business suits. Each wore one black glove on his right hand, a bandana over the lower half of his face like an Old West outlaw, a fedora like the gangsters in Hollywood movies, and aviator sunglasses.

  They didn’t start firing right away. They were too cool for that. They circled a bit. Carmine used his gun to gently push the barber out of the way. The shooters positioned themselves so that one was on either side of Anastasia’s chair.

  * * *

  Anastasia was one of the original guys, a kid whose first smuggling job was getting himself ashore in New York in 1917. He was born in 1902 as Umberto Anastasio in the fishing village of Tropea in Calabria, Italy. He and his brother were working the crew of a ship crossing the Atlantic, jumped ship in New York and went to work on the Brooklyn piers, where over time the man now known as Albert came to control Brooklyn Local 1814, which repped longshoremen employed by stevedore companies. Ostensibly a dressmaker and milliner, the papers called him “The Mad Hatter,” after the Alice in Wonderland character. He was convicted of murder in 1921. It looked like his Mafia career would be a short one until he avoided the electric chair when a key witness abruptly returned to Italy. Anastasia was acquitted at the retrial. He was in the army during World War II, and after the war, rose up the ranks of the Vincent Mangano crime family, assuming the boss position after Vincent disappeared and his brother Philip Mangano was found shot to death in a Sheepshead Bay marsh.

  On the morning of October 25, Anastasia had been driven to the barbershop by his chauffeur-bodyguard Anthony Coppola, who stayed outside to “park the car” and never returned.

  * * *

  Anastasia now sensed the interruption, pulled the towel off his face, and had time to look around. He started to get up. He raised his left hand to protect himself and two slugs tore through it, one gun so close that it left powder burns.

  Ten shots were fired. Three struck him in the head, one in the hip, two in the hands. Four caught nothing but barbershop. Anastasia swung his arms like a boxer on his last legs before collapsing at the barber chair’s pedestal. He ended up dead on the floor on his back between chairs two and three.

  The shooters—one described as five-foot-five, the other five-eight—retreated to the street, climbed into an American-made car the size of a boat, and fled with a squeal of tires down West 55th Street.

  The manager of the next-door flower shop, Constantine Alexis, said he was returning from the nearby Mermaid Room when he heard six or more shots in three flurries. One shot, pause, two or three shots, another pause and then two or three more shots. He saw “five or six” men run out of the hotel. Some went out the Seventh Avenue exit, and others ran out the 55th Street exit. Alexis said that not all of the fleeing men were shooters. A few were frightened barbershop customers running for their lives.

  Arthur Grasso owned the shop and was head barber. When Anastasia came in for his regular trim, Grasso himself made sure to take care of him. (In 1997, the barber chair in which Anastasia sat was curated! It was a primary display in New York’s Gershwin Gallery, surrounded by classic photographs of mob hits. In 2011, it went on display at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas.)

  Alexis ran into the shop, and recognized the body on the floor as that of Anastasia. He knew him because he used to buy flowers. Things were so still. The customers had fled. The barbers stood frozen. The only sound and movement came from the manicurist who let out one short conclusive scream before slumping over in her chair.

  Along the same corridor that led to the barbershop was a luggage shop owned by Joseph March, who was entering the hotel and ran into several men running out. One still had a little shaving cream on his face.

  One running man stumbled and fell to the floor on his back. While he was down he screamed, “They’re going crazy in there! They’re shooting!”

  Virginia Nelson—the red-headed owner of The Red Headed Woman, a hotel dress shop—was first to call police.

  * * *

  This was not the first time the Sheraton hotel had been the scene of mob violence. Twenty-nine years earlier, on November 4, 1928, Arnold Rothstein, the gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series (Black Sox scandal), was severely wounded by gunfire during a poker game at the hotel, then known as the Park Central. Rothstein lived for two more days in a Manhattan hospital but never gave up the guys he saw shoot him.

  It also wasn’t the first time someone had tried to kill Anastasia. The previous attempt was in 1951 when he defied an order to get out of town or die. He didn’t die, escaping when he was tipped off. Fifty-seven-year-old racketeer Willie Moretti was sitting down for lunch at a Cliffside Park, New Jersey, restaurant called Joe’s Elbow Room. He was with a handful of other men joking loudly in Italian. At 11:28 A.M., shots were fired, and when the smoke cleared Moretti was on his back on the restaurant floor with bullet holes in his head and face. The story is that Anastastia would have been dead also if he’d been at the lunch, but there was plenty of reason for mob bigs to want Moretti out of the way.

  Anastasia was a lucky man. He evaded every hit attempt and beat five different murder raps. But his luck ran out with Carmine Persico and the barbershop quartet.

  The hit was big because Anastasia was big. Some speculated that the killers were paying homage to assassins of old, their black gloves being symbolic of the ancient Black Hand murders.

  The Anastasia hit stemmed from events in the spring of 1957 when, in an attempt to expand his gambling turf, Anastasia sent a gunman to bump off Frank Costello in the foyer of his apartment house at tony 115 Central Park West, but managed to give hi
m only a new permanent part in his hair.

  Talk about punishing the victim: Costello had a neat groove through his scalp, yet was later jailed for contempt when he refused to testify regarding the meaning of a gambling slip with numbers on it found on him when he was shot.

  When Anastasia heard the hit on Costello had failed, he knew his own life expectancy was not good. He only hoped that they’d hit him, and not members of his family. He prayed the target wouldn’t be his son, Albert Jr., who was only twenty-two.

  Albert Sr. pumped up security after Costello was shot. Three men now guarded him, and his wife and son had full-time guards as well. The pressure was getting to him. The Saturday before his death he’d been spotted at Jamaica Racetrack tearing up a handful of $100 losing tickets. He looked old. Asked what was wrong, he said he was worried about his family.

  His Fort Lee, New Jersey, home was built like a fort, a palatial structure with a ten-foot fence around it, and two killer Doberman Pinscher dogs roaming the grounds. Inside on the evening of his assassination, Mrs. Anastasia was sedated.

  Reporters hung out at the police station and watched the parade of underworld characters coming in for questioning. Little Augie Pisano was questioned. Little Augie was one of the usual suspects. A dapper dresser, he was known for his white felt fedora with black silk band, his finely tailored suits, and his shiny shoes. He was a Genovese capo, ran nightclubs, and was a man with a history and many real enemies. He would kill for Genovese, of course, but he freelanced as well. For a price he sometimes shot people for Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello. Before he was through, Augie would be arrested for murder six times, but each time they had to cut him loose. Augie was in charge of collecting the Genovese cut from New York’s garment district. Because of his garment-district status, Augie also controlled labor unions there, and may have used his muscle to rig a few city elections. He told cops he knew nothing about a hit on the Mad Hatter.

  Harry Stasser, Anastasia’s garment partner, came in for questioning, as did Anniello Ercole, who brought his lawyer with him. Others being grilled before dawn were a friend named Mike Mi-rant, and the victim’s chauffer Anthony Copolla.

  Investigators got nowhere. Nobody saw the shooters’ faces, and like Little Augie no one knew anything.

  * * *

  Anastasia made his bones popping Joe “The Boss” Masseria, a hit that proved to be a pivotal moment in mob history, one that established the mob leadership for a long time to come. Here was a guy who himself made his bones in spectacular fashion. Now graphic photographs of his body splashed across the front pages of the tabloids.

  Masseria had battled Sal Maranzano, in what became known as the Castellammarese War. Both men wanted to be capo di tutti capo. Sal was a visionary of sorts. He saw a world in which the families worked together rather than warring amongst themselves, thus increasing La Cosa Nostra power ten-fold. Masseria could have cared less about Maranzano’s Big Picture. Masseria had a Big Picture of his own, one in which New York City was all his, and he shared it with no one. The war went on for two years, lots of guys dead on both sides. Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano had a clandestine meeting with Sal in the Bronx Zoo. There, while feeding peanuts to the elephants, they came up with a way to end the war: ice Joe the Boss. It was Luciano who asked Joe to join him for dinner at Scarpato’s in Coney Island on April 15, 1931. The men ate and ate. The feast lasted for three hours. Luciano patted himself on his belly, belched and left the table to go to the can. As soon as Masseria was alone at the table, four gunmen—Albert Anastasia, Bugsy Siegel, Vito Genovese, and Joe Adonis—burst into the restaurant and aerated Joe the Boss. Joe tried to hide but couldn’t avoid the path of six bullets, at least one of which was fatal. Fourteen more slugs tore up the restaurant wall behind Masseria. Luciano came out of the rest room and left the restaurant before the police arrived. For the four gunmen, it wasn’t a silky-smooth getaway. When the getaway driver stalled the car, Bugsy slugged him. But Anastasia and the others escaped anyway. Killing without remorse.

  The hit on Anastasia, the world later learned, was Carlo Gambino’s idea. He’d gone to Joe Profaci and asked him to supply the hit team. Profaci figured Anastasia’s demise was to their mutual benefit and said OK. Now Anastasia was dead on a barbershop floor. It was Carmine Persico making his bones and doing it sensationally.

  As Carmine fled the murder scene, he had to have seen the pattern. He knew he was a potential target. He had a bullet hole in each leg to prove it. One day he might be the one getting whacked. Such was the Life.

  * * *

  Within minutes of the shooting—Carmine probably hadn’t even crossed the bridge yet—photographers from the major news outlets, and there were many back then in New York, began barging into the shop to photograph the body.

  Someone covered Anastasia’s ghastly head with a towel, but his still form remained a vivid sight. Even after police managed to keep members of the press outside the shop, spectators could still look in the window and see the belly-up body on the floor.

  It was the biggest mob hit in New York in thirty years, and you could watch the crime scene and initial investigation from the sidewalk along one of Manhattan’s most fancy stretches. Every few minutes another official vehicle would scream to a halt outside, and detectives, assistant D.A.s, and the boys from the press converged.

  While patrol cars searched for the gunmen’s vehicle, beat cops near the hotel interviewed those who didn’t run away, including lightweight boxer Johnny Busso who was staying with his manager Andrew Alberti in a room at the hotel because Busso had a fight at the Garden that night. Minutes before the shooting, Busso and Anastasia ran into each other by coincidence and had a conversation in the hotel lobby during which the upcoming fight was discussed. The happenstance of the meeting was thrown into doubt by Alberti’s long association with Anastasia, which earned the boxer Busso a grilling in the immediate aftermath of the hit. Despite the distraction, Busso won his fight that night.

  Initial information gathered by the FBI indicated that the .38 and .32 caliber guns used in the Anastasia hit were being stored for pick-up in the hotel room occupied by Busso and Alberti.

  Two guns were found, a .38-caliber Colt recovered from the corridor outside the barbershop, and a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson located at the 57th Street BMT (subway) station.

  That early report of guns in the boxer’s room wasn’t good enough to cause Busso legal troubles, but the subsequent guilt-by-association investigation cost Alberti his boxing manager license and in 1962 he blew his brains out with a shotgun rather than give grand jury testimony against a compadre.

  * * *

  The first doctor on the scene was Dr. Robert Cestari of St. Clair’s Hospital who pronounced Anastasia dead. Dr. Cestari got on the horn with Chief Medical Examiner Milton Helpern. An officer was assigned to contact next of kin, who was Albert’s brother Tony, leader of Brooklyn’s longshoremen. This was accomplished, and Tony said he was on his way to the hotel. Additional barber sheets were eventually used so the body was covered completely.

  Police asked folks from the hotel if they had folding screens, and someone ran over to the redhead’s dress shop and returned with temporary walls that were placed around Anastasia’s body. This helped to disperse the crowd on the sidewalk outside the barbershop window.

  Tony Anastasio arrived on the scene at 11:17 A.M. He threw himself on the barbershop floor, his arms around the body. He yanked away the sheet so he could kiss his brother’s face.

  Strong men had to look away.

  The union leader began to weep uncontrollably. He had to be pulled out so Dr. Helpern could have the body transported to Bellevue Hospital morgue for autopsy. Later in the day Tony officially identified the body at the morgue. In the paperwork, he listed his brother’s occupation as “dress maker.” He was later seen stoically entering the West 54th Street police station to answer questions.

  At Bellevue, Dr. Helpern determined that either one of two bullets, one in the
back, one in the back of the head, could have been responsible for death.

  Anastasia’s body was buried in a $900 casket in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Spectators were few and for the most part silent, with the exception of widow Elsa, who sobbed uncontrollably.

  The FBI dug into the Anastasia hit and learned that the barbershop ambush had not been a spur-of-the-moment thing. Indeed, Anastasia had been under constant surveillance for months, and during that time it was determined that you could time Anastasia’s haircuts like clockwork—twice a month.

  * * *

  Doing a favor for Don Carlo could give the ol’ career a boost, and that was how it worked for Carmine Persico. Six months after the Anastasia hit, Carmine stood in a candlelit cellar beneath a Bensonhurst social club, surrounded by a half-circle of men with their heads bowed. He declared his presence in the holy night, the silent night, under the light of fire. The ceremony would seem familiar to anyone who’d observed the rites of freemasonry. Carmine proclaimed his allegiance to the holy society, took the pledge of omertà, and swore that he would also keep one bullet for himself—in other words, that he would rather blow his own brains out than dishonor his new family. He would be faithful to the family and understood the family in return would be faithful to him. He understood that he would burn in hell if he betrayed his friends. Carmine took his pledge with his left hand on a knife, while the celebrant, most likely Joe Profaci himself, pricked his finger to draw blood, and placed an image of the archangel Michael in Carmine’s upraised palm and set it afire (to demonstrate that Carmine, like the archangel’s image, would burn if he didn’t keep his solemn oath). When the ceremony was over, there was much joy. All of the men kissed Carmine on both cheeks, and shook the scorched hand of the youngest made man in family history. Carmine precociously received his button at the tender age of twenty-four. Fuckin’ kid. The amigos nostri retired to the upstairs bar where solemnity dissipated into a boozy cloud.