The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  Lieut. John Schick of the 20th Precinct said the gunman let the Lennons pass him and enter the building’s passageway before shooting the singer. Lieutenant Schick said the man called out “Mr. Lennon” and then pulled a gun from under a coat and started firing.

  The police said the suspect stepped from an alcove and emptied several shots into Mr. Lennon who then struggled up six stairs and inside the alcove to a guard area where he collapsed.

  Employees at the Dakota said someone resembling the alleged assailant had obtained an autograph from Mr. Lennon earlier in the day.

  Chief Sullivan said the suspect had been seen in the neighborhood of the Dakota for several days.

  An eyewitness, who only gave her first name, Nina, said that she had approached the suspect after the shooting. “I asked him what had happened and he said, ‘I’d go away if I were you,’” she said.

  THE MOB

  Mafia’s Code in New York

  May 16, 1893

  ALIENS WHO PLACE BUT SLIGHT VALUE ON human life have hitherto found easy entrance through the port of New York, and many of them have carried with them the criminal habits and propensities acquired in the haunts of bandits and the home of the vendetta. It is for this reason that the newspapers have to record so many shooting and stabbing affrays among persons of Italian nativity.

  While an Italian was wandering in the streets of Brooklyn yesterday morning with some of the contents of a Mafia carbine in his body, another Calabrian was hiding in ambush for an intended victim in Harlem, as he would have done in his native country to avenge a real or fancied slight.

  John J. Brennan, a young mechanic who lived with his family, had been assaulted last month by Filipo Vetro, an Italian laborer residing in First Avenue, between 112th and 113th Streets, which region is part of the district known as “Little Italy.” The assault grew out of his paying court to an Italian girl who was wooed by Vetro also.

  Brennan’s impulses are American, and he followed them by procuring a warrant for the arrest of Vetro.

  Vetro’s impulses are dominated by the traditions of the Mafia. His arrest was an insult that cried for retaliation, and, finding out what Brennan’s habits were, he decided to “get even” with him in true Palermitan style.

  Crouching in 115th Street, near First Avenue, the swarthy assassin was not disconcerted when he saw that his rival was accompanied by a friend, Frank Albert of 329 East 111th Street.

  As Brennan was about to pass the doorway in which the Italian was concealed, the latter sprang out and shot him in the thigh. He could doubtless have put another bullet into a more vital part had not Albert grappled with him.

  Here the razor came into play. One slash of it across Albert’s head produced a deterrent effect. Vetro attempted to escape, but a policeman who had heard the shot intercepted him. Brennan’s wound, although not serious, was severe enough to necessitate his removal to the Harlem Hospital. Albert went home after an ambulance surgeon had dressed a long cut on his head.

  Abe Reles Killed Trying to Escape

  November 13, 1941

  ABE RELES, SQUAT, BULGY-JAWED INFORMER against the Brooklyn murder ring, climbed out on a window ledge on the sixth floor of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island boardwalk, fully dressed but hatless. Strong wind from the gray sea tugged at his long, crisp black hair and tore at his gray suit.

  Reles let two knotted bedsheets down the hotel’s east wall. He let himself down to the fifth floor. One hand desperately clung to the sheet. With the other Reles tugged at the screen and at the windows of the vacant fifth-floor room.

  The strain was too much for the amateur knot. Reles plunged to the hotel’s concrete kitchen roof, a two-story extension, 42 feet below. He landed on his back, breaking his spine.

  Detectives assigned to the hotel guard insisted Reles was asleep when they looked into his room at 6:45 a.m. and again at 7:10 a.m.

  The detectives were not sorry to see Reles dead. He had been arrogant, surly, unclean in his habits. An internal condition accompanied by frequent hemorrhage, which he took no trouble to conceal, heightened their distaste. He had boasted from the witness stand that in 10 years as an executive in the murder ring he had killed or helped to kill 10 men, yet he seemed delighted when his testimony sent five former companions-in-arms to the death house.

  There were rumors that Charles (Buggsy) Siegel, West Coast head man for the combination, had persuaded Mrs. Reles that if her husband could get away from the police, the West Coast group would give her $50,000 and help Reles get out of the jurisdiction. But some of the detectives were inclined to shrug this theory off.

  The men he sent to the death house grew up with him. These included Harry (Happy) Malone and Frank (The Dasher) Abbandano, the first two members of the murder ring brought to trial by District Attorney William O’Dwyer. They are still in the death house, pending appeal. The second pair sent to the death house, chiefly through Reles’s testimony, were Harry (Pittsburgh Phil) Strauss and Martin (Buggsy) Goldstein, who had loafed on the same Brownsville corners with Reles. They died in the electric chair a few months ago.

  The fifth man was Irving (The Plug) Nitzberg, like the others a friend of Reles’s for many years.

  Anastasia Is Slain in Barber Shop

  By MEYER BERGER | October 26, 1957

  DEATH TOOK THE EXECUTIONER YESTERDAY. Umberto (Albert) Anastasia, master killer for Murder, Inc., a homicidal gangster troop that plagued the city from 1931 to 1940, was murdered by two gunmen. They approached him from behind at 10:20 a.m. as he sat for a haircut in the Park Sheraton Hotel barber shop at Seventh Avenue and 55th Street.

  The trigger-men fired 10 shots. Five took effect. The first two caught Anastasia’s left hand and left wrist. One tore into his right hip. The fourth got him in the back after he had come out of the chair and had stumbled into the mirror he had been facing as the barber worked. The fifth bullet caught him in the back of the head.

  Both killers had scarves over the lower part of their faces. They got away. The pistols used in the killing were dropped right after they were used.

  Eleven people besides Anastasia were in the shop when the gunmen entered—five barbers, two other customers, two shoeshine men, a valet and a manicurist. They fled screaming and shouting into the street, with the killers among them or right behind them.

  The police issued a 13-state alarm for two men in the murder. Although 100 detectives were thrown into the case immediately, the police had no positive motive for the killing. There was talk that Anastasia was trying to reorganize the remnants of old racket groups in town, and that the younger hoodlums would have none of his leadership.

  Anastasia strolled into the hotel barber shop at about 10:15 and called greetings to the help. He was dressed all in brown—brown shoes with rather an amateur polish, brown suit, a rather untidy brown tie.

  “Haircut,” he said, and he seemed to need one.

  The room, 35 by 28 feet, was filled with a customary hum. Arthur Grasso, the shop owner, was at the cashier’s stand near one of the doors leading from a hotel corridor.

  A minute or two later, Joseph Bocchino, who holds down Chair 4, plied the clippers from Anastasia’s left side. The door opened. The gunmen stepped in. Their weapons came out.

  One spoke through his scarf. He told Mr. Grasso: “Keep your mouth shut if you don’t want your head blown off.” The trigger-men moved behind Anastasia’s chair. Both men seemed to open fire at once.

  Joe Gallo is Shot to Death In Little Italy Restaurant

  By ERIC PACE | April 8, 1972

  JOESPH GALLO, THE MAFIA FIGURE KNOWN as Crazy Joe, was assassinated early yesterday as he celebrated his 43rd birthday in a restaurant on Mulberry Street. The police said they knew neither the identity nor the motive of the killer who also wounded Gallo’s bodyguard in a gun battle that spilled into the narrow streets of the Little Italy section.

  But Gallo’s sister, Mrs. Carmella Fiorello, sobbing over her brother’s body, reportedly said, “He changed his image
—that’s why this happened.”

  With Gallo was his bride of three weeks, the former Sina Essary, whom he had courted after being paroled last March from the Ossining State Correctional Facility, where he had served eight years for extortion. Since then he had been seen with Jerry Orbach, the actor, and other show-business figures and had let it be known that he was writing his memoirs with Mrs. Orbach.

  The Gallos spent the evening drinking champagne at the Copacabana. Then at 4 a.m. they drove to Little Italy and parked outside the restaurant, Umberto’s Clam House, which Gallo had never visited before. The party sat at two butcher-block tables at the rear, near a side door, eating “Italian delicacies.” Mr. Gallo had just ordered a second helping when the assassin strode silently in the side door.

  Women screamed and customers hit the floor as he started shooting. Mortally wounded, Gallo staggered out the front door as the killer kept firing after him. The killer fled out the back door, chased by the unknown man, who also kept shooting.

  Little Italy was in an uproar. Down Mulberry Street, Sal Lapolla, a liquor store owner, was philosophical about Gallo’s death. “These people, it’s their choice,” he said. “It’s their life they lead. It’s not our kind of life.”

  Gangland Killing Lures Gawkers To 46th Street

  By WILLIAM E. GEIST | December 18, 1985

  Passersby examine the area on East 46th Street where Paul Castellano was shot.

  “IS THIS THE SPOT?” JANET D’AMICO ASKED as she joined the crowd.

  “This is the spot,” said Akeem Reynolds, who seemed to be there for the day, “from now on.”

  There was no formal ceremony, but a patch of pavement in front of Sparks Steak House, on East 46th Street near Third Avenue, took its place in the annals of New York Mafia folklore yesterday as the place where Paul Castellano was murdered.

  That is outside the posh East Side eatery where “Big Paul” Castellano—reputed Mafia chieftain, kingpin, czar, capo di tutti capi and graduate of the infamous 1957 Apalachin, N.Y., crime caucus—was rubbed out in a hail of bullets as he stepped from a chrome-plated black limousine in his $200 loafers, elegant dark-blue mohair suit and fat, gold pinky ring.

  There were cries of anguish from regular patrons who believed that all the publicity would make the restaurant so popular that they’d never get a table again.

  A man who described himself as the owner of a restaurant in Manhattan remarked that he would have “dragged the body around the corner to my place” if he had realized the gangland killing would bring so much publicity. He looked upon the throngs and the television crews and said tour buses were sure to follow.

  Mike Cetta, who owns Sparks with his brother, Pat, and who spent much of the day being interviewed in front of the restaurant, said he was thankful the shooting took place outside, rather than inside, the restaurant. “We do not want to capitalize on this in any way,” he said. “Could you put down that we were named the best steak place in New York?”

  Shot by Shot, Ex-Aide to Gotti Describes Castellano’s Killing

  By ARNOLD H. LUBASCH | March 4, 1992

  SALVATORE GRAVANO, AN ADMITTED MAFIA underboss, gave a detailed and chilling account yesterday of the murder of Paul Castellano and several other slayings that he said were ordered or authorized by John Gotti.

  In his second day on the stand, Mr. Gravano, a crucial prosecution witness who turned informer four months ago, testified in a gruff, matter-of-fact voice. He said he and Mr. Gotti waited together in a nearby car while several of their associates gunned down Mr. Castellano, the boss of their crime family, and his close aide, Thomas Bilotti, on an East Side street on Dec. 16, 1985.

  Mr. Gravano said he sat beside Mr. Gotti, who drove a Lincoln sedan with tinted windows to the northwest corner of Third Avenue and 46th Street. He described himself as “a back-up shooter.”

  A car drew up alongside them and stopped for a red light, Mr. Gravano recalled. He said it was Mr. Castellano in another Lincoln driven by Mr. Bilotti.

  He said he used a walkie-talkie to notify the gunmen up ahead that “they were stopped at the light, the first car, and they were coming through.”

  When the light changed, the car with Mr. Castellano drove across Third Avenue and parked in front of Sparks Steak House, Mr. Gravano said. Waiting for the two men, he said, were four gunmen wearing “white trench coats and black Russian hats.” Mr. Castellano was shot first, he said, and Mr. Bilotti was getting out of the car when “somebody came up behind him and shot him.”

  Then, he said, Mr. Gotti drove slowly up to the murder scene.

  Mr. Gravano said he was told later that Thomas Gambino, a reputed Gambino captain who was Mr. Castellano’s nephew, entered Sparks Steak House moments later and encountered a reputed Gambino leader, Frank DiCicco, who had been scheduled to meet Mr. Castellano.

  “Frankie told him that your uncle just got shot, just go back to your car and leave,” Mr. Gravano said.

  Trash-Hauling Industry Linked to the Mafia

  By JOSEPH P. FRIED | April 20, 1993

  THE MAN WHO PROSECUTORS SAY HAS LONG controlled New York City’s private trash-hauling industry for the Mafia was indicted on federal racketeering charges. Federal officials described the indictment as the second blow in a week to the mob’s stranglehold on the industry in the New York region.

  The accused man, 74-year-old James Failla, has long been the head of the Association of Trade Waste Removers of Greater New York, the largest trash industry trade group in the city. The government contends that Mr. Failla is a captain in the Gambino crime family and has used force and threats of violence to divide up collection routes in a way that has given New York City the highest commercial trash-hauling rates in the nation.

  Mr. Failla was also charged with conspiring with John Gotti and others to murder another reputed mobster who was cooperating with prosecutors investigating the Gambino family. Mr. Gotti, who is in prison, is the head of the Gambino group.

  The private trash-collection industry in New York City reportedly takes in $1 billion a year in revenues, picking up garbage at office buildings, restaurants and other commercial sites in the five boroughs. The city’s Sanitation Department picks up garbage from private homes and apartment buildings.

  The indictment of Mr. Failla (pronounced fye-YAL-ah) follows last week’s indictment of Salvatore Avellino Jr., a reputed mobster said to be the long-dominant figure in Long Island’s private garbage-collection business. Mr. Avellino was indicted on charges of racketeering and murder in connection with racketeering. Law-enforcement officials say that Mr. Avellino is a captain in the Lucchese crime family.

  Mr. Failla, a white-haired man who walks with the aid of two crutches, pleaded not guilty before Judge Charles P. Sifton in Federal Court in Brooklyn. He was released after posting $1 million in bail. Investigators say that Mr. Failla is known in the underworld as Jimmy Brown, because of a penchant for brown clothes, but in court yesterday he was dressed in a blue sports jacket and blue slacks.

  Secretive Genovese Clan Seemed Almost Immune From the Law

  By SELWYN RAAB | August 29, 1996

  UNTIL THIS SUMMER, THE MAFIA’S MIGHTiest faction had seemed immune from prosecution. Even in the ultrasecretive world of the mob, the hierarchy of the Genovese crime family took extreme measures to evade surveillance and electronic eavesdropping.

  They used code names, such as uncle or the skinny guy, when referring to leaders. Rarely did they speak about criminal matters on the telephone or inside their clubhouse hangouts, preferring walk-and-talk sessions on busy streets. Genovese dons even distrusted their counterparts in the four other Mafia families in the New York area.

  Their secretiveness paid off. Unlike the other New York families—the Gambino, Lucchese, Colombo and Bonanno groups—the Genovese family was never undermined by turncoats, people who violate the “omerta,” the Mafia’s code of silence.

  Recently, however, the family has suffered three severe blows capped by a federal judge’s ruling
that the family’s reputed boss, Vincent (Chin) Gigante, is mentally and physically competent to stand trial in Brooklyn on murder and racketeering charges. The ruling against Mr. Gigante comes two months after federal prosecutors in Westchester County indicted 19 suspected Genovese members—including three men who were accused of being Mr. Gigante’s underboss, street boss and consiglieri—on separate racketeering and murder charges.

  Last week, New Jersey state authorities arrested 12 members of a powerful Genovese crew who were accused of infiltrating and defrauding the health-care industry in several states. And in June, Mr. Gigante’s brother Mario was indicted on charges that he masterminded a scheme to dominate the garbage-disposal industry in several counties north of New York City.

  Organized crime experts say that the Genovese family in recent years supplanted the Gambino family as the nation’s largest and wealthiest Mafia group. Law enforcement officials say it reaps millions in loot every year from its gambling, loansharking and narcotics operations and from labor racketeering and extortion in Port Elizabeth and Port Newark in New Jersey.

  “They may be in disarray but they are far from being out of business,” said Lewis D. Schiliro, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s criminal division in the New York region.

  “Alarming Alliance” of Mafia And Street Gang Is Broken Up

  By DAVID W. CHEN and DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI | December 19, 2007

  NEW JERSEY AUTHORITIES ON TUESDAY broke up what Attorney General Anne Milgram said was an “alarming alliance” between the Lucchese crime family and the Bloods street gang to supply drugs and cellphones to gang members inside a New Jersey prison.