Top Hoodlum

by Anthony M. DeStefano

  Gallucci, who also bore the sobriquet of “The Boss,” also had a reputation, burnished by reports in the newspapers, that he had significant political clout. The Herald in particular said he had long been the head of several political organizations. This made Gallucci in the eyes of some the “most powerful Italian politically” in the city. “His enemies said that his political activities gave him a certain measure of immunity from police interferences,” noted The Herald.

  At a time when criminals like Spinelli, Gallucci, and other bosses ran the rackets in East Harlem, dealing with bands of extortionists known collectively as the Black Hand or Mano Nero, Frank Costello was a mere babe in the woods at the age of fourteen getting up the nerve to pull his very first solo job. This was a period where everyone had to hustle in East Harlem and Frank had to grow up quickly. According to attorney George Wolf, Frank injured his leg while visiting his aunt Concetta’s farm in Astoria, then a semi-rural part of Queens. The doctor had asked that he stay at the farm in bed. But Frank knew that his mother was behind in the rent for the apartment and was getting screamed at by the landlady for payment. As related by Wolf in his book Frank Costello: Prime Minister of the Underworld, his future client one night boarded the ferry across the East River from Queens, limped to his apartment building in East Harlem and mugged the landlady, grabbing money she kept in her bosom and fled into the night. It was a reckless scheme and could have easily backfired.

  “The landlady recognized Frank,” said Wolf. “She cried out ‘Thief!’ and rushed to Frank’s mother’s door, which was on the first floor. Maria Saveria was stunned. “Your’re a liar, my son hasn’t been home since Sunday.” Sure enough, when police investigated, they in fact found Frank asleep with a bandaged leg at the Astoria farm.

  Frank was quite as successful in eluding the law in his next caper three years after mugging the landlady. Records show that on April 25, 1908, Costello had his first arrest for trying to shake down a coal merchant in the Bronx. Charges of robbery and assault were also thrown in. But in a hearing before a judge the case was dismissed, and Frank walked away scot free. Another robbery charge hit Costello in October 1912 when he was accused of trying to rip off money and jewelry from a woman named Philomena Sorgi who was a neighbor on 108th Street. The case bears significance because it appears to be the first time in court and police reports that Frank used the surname “Costello.” While the origin of the name has been a subject of speculation, 1910 Census records show that the similar name “Castello” found its way into the enumeration records as an alternate identification for the Castiglia family. This suggests that the family may have adopted a different name and told it to the Census taker, with things changing by the time Frank got arrested for the Sorgi robbery two years later when he used the spelling “Costello.”

  These arrests of Frank show that he was steadily becoming ensnared as a teenager in the lifestyle of a petty criminal. It was a dead-end lifestyle that held no future. FBI records indicated Costello irregularly attended two public schools in Manhattan and educationally made poor progress. At age fourteen, Costello said he dropped out of the educational system in the sixth grade and later in life was only able to show an educational level through academic tests of third or fourth grade, except for sixth-grade level on the “word meaning” test. Given the environment that surrounded him—parents preoccupied with making a living and an immigrant community where criminals were King and Queen—it is no surprise that Frank got into trouble. It was a surprise, given the mortality rate among young Italian men and women in the criminal subculture, that Frank didn’t himself wind up dead or seriously hurt. Aside from the gangs run by Spinelli and Gallucci, there were numerous other criminal combinations which affected Little Italy and they were responsible for a great deal of bloodshed, sometimes for the most insignificant reasons. The so-called “Navy Boys,” a group of Neapolitan men, worked primarily out of the Navy Street area of Brooklyn, while other combinations such as the Terranova brothers vied for power in East Harlem. Costello was reputed to have worked as a rent collector for big shot Ciro Terranova. Murders started to pile up, and the newspapers talked of a murder a week in East Harlem among the Italians.

  One of the first casualties to rock Frank’s world was Spinelli. It was around 6:00 P.M. on the evening of March 20, 1912, that Spinelli entered her stable to talk to the foreman when she was felled by two shots as she walked up a set of stairs: one through her right temple and the other through her neck. She died instantly. Witnesses said two assailants were involved and they reported that Spinelli’s partner in the stable, Luigi Lazzazaro, was seen opening a door to let them out.

  Speculation immediately arose that the killing was done in retaliation for an act of justifiable homicide committed by the dead woman’s daughter Nicolina. The young girl had stabbed to death a suitor she caught trying to break in to her mother’s safe. But years later it would turn out that a killer named Ralph Daniello, in a bid to curry favor with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, told prosecutors about numerous murders, including that of Spinelli. The prosecution dossier compiled with Daniello’s help stated that the old stable woman was murdered on orders of Gallucci, a man described as a person who got a percentage of the sale of stolen horses and artichokes. Gallucci had his eye on taking over Spinelli’s stable and so had her killed, according to Daniello.

  In the end Gallucci fared no better. He was constantly targeted as a marked man and while he survived assassination attempts the lifespan of his bodyguards was not good. Ten of them were reported to have died during bungled attempts on the life of their boss. Then on the night of May 17, 1915, things went differently. As Gallucci sat in the coffee shop owned by his nineteen-year-old son Luca at 339 East 109th Street, they were fired at by four men who suddenly entered the premises. Gallucci was hit in the neck and stomach while his son was shot twice in the abdomen. Gallucci’s men who happened to be in the coffee shop returned fire but apparently to no avail. Gallucci and his son initially survived their wounds but soon succumbed to the injuries.

  Gallucci’s funeral on May 24 drew a crowd of an estimated ten thousand, about a third of them, police estimated, were people who were his enemies. Cops heard rumors that Gallucci’s wife was also targeted for murder as part of some convoluted plot to make sure his $1 million horde of cash from his rackets would revert to New York State since he would have been left with no surviving heirs. Over a hundred detectives were at the Gallucci home for the funeral, lining the stairways and surrounding his coffin, mingling with the crowd and guarding the widow. Fearing a problem with the original ostentatious funeral plan for 150 carriages convinced the family to cut things down to fifty-four. A twenty-three-piece band led the funeral procession, which went off without a hitch. When things were over, Mrs. Gallucci didn’t go back home because of all the threats.

  There was always someone to jump into a power vacuum in Little Italy, and after Gallucci’s death, the Morello family seemed to be in a position to profit. The Morellos, which had numerous alliances through marriage with other gangsters, took over Gallucci’s rackets, according to Daniello. This didn’t stop the fighting, and for years to come, the existing Italian mobs—the early forerunners of what was to become the modern American Mafia—would devolve into bloodshed.

  Frank Costello and his brother Edward survived this fractious time in East Harlem because they didn’t really pose a threat to anyone. They were following the paths of losers, destined to become petty criminals. Frank ran crap games on the street in East Harlem. Edward wasn’t the brightest even though he was the oldest and should have been more mature. But they had some things going for them. Frank could read the signs of the street well. He was described as being taciturn, a quality that likely kept him out of trouble in an environment where the wrong word could get a person killed. He also cultivated a desire, said historian Selvaggi, to make lots of money as a way of helping his mother and all the poor, miserable people he lived with have a better life. He could see from what
happened to Spinelli and Gallucci that friendships were an elusive quality in the gangster life. Even when surrounded by friends, bosses could be killed. The old adage that it paid to keep the friends you trusted close but your enemies even closer became clear to Costello.

  Gallucci’s life also likely impressed Costello for another reason. The old boss had cultivated political connections. Politics and its bedfellows could provide an additional armor of protection because of the way police and judges could be influenced. All Costello had to do was hear the buzz on the street about Gallucci’s friends in high places to know the strength of that kind of protection, beyond what the barrel of a gun might provide, was very important. As will be later shown in Top Hoodlum, Costello took the concept of political influence and protection to a level none of the old bosses of East Harlem could have imagined.

  Costello’s destiny was shaped by the way his street activity brought him into contact with another young, ambitious, but poor Italian immigrant named Charles Luciania, who would become known later as Charles “Lucky” Luciano. What put Luciano apart from the other young men was his ecumenical approach to crime. He became close to two Jews, Ben Siegel and Meyer Lansky, the latter of whom Luciano called “the toughest guy, pound for pound, I ever met in my life.” Along with Costello, Luciano, Siegel, and Lansky formed a gang of four who eventually grew to a crew of twenty denizens from the East Side and East Harlem, pulling small bank jobs and stealing from stores and warehouses.

  While he was a product of the streets of East Harlem and was involved with Luciano in small thievery, Frank Costello did not succumb to the bloody follies that devoured his paisans. All around him young Italian men were killing and being killed. It was an on-going culling of the herd, which would set the stage for the great Mafia wars soon to come. Costello clearly was using his head, sizing up opportunities and looking for both legitimate and semi-legitimate opportunities. He also fell in love.

  CHAPTER TWO

  NO MORE GUNS, THANK YOU

  AS SEPARATED AS THEY MIGHT BE BY RELIGION, Italians and Jews had a unusual level of historical tolerance between them. Back in Italy in the early part of the twentieth century a number of Jews rose to prominent positions in the fledgling Italian government. In 1910, Luigi Luzzati became Italy’s prime minister and was thus the first Jewish person to head a government. A fellow Jew, Ernest Nathan, served for a number of years beginning in 1907 as the mayor of Rome. At least in the decades before Mussolini came to power and started an official policy of anti-Semitism, Jews and Italians in Italy got along rather well.

  Once in the United States, Italians and Jews who migrated to New York lived in separate communities. Depending on when they arrived, Jews concentrated in settlements on the lower East Side of Manhattan, while Italians such as the Castiglia family went to East Harlem while others settled in and around the Five Points and Chinatown area. Those settlement patterns changed over the years to include the other boroughs. But no matter where they chose to live, the numbers of immigrants were significant, totaling in the hundreds of thousands for both groups by the first decade of the twentieth century.

  But this influx spawned a backlash of prejudice that was often voiced by those in government. In 1895, Henry Gannett, chief of the U.S. Geological Survey, remarked in a book how Italians and Jews had flocked in large numbers to American cities, adding, “Hence it appears that the most objectionable elements of the foreign-born population have flocked in the greatest proportion to our large cities, where they are in a position to do the most harm by corruption and violence.” Faced with the various Italian gang wars and the rise of Jewish gangsters of the period, New York City police commissioner Theodore A. Bingham later stated in a 1908 article in The North American Review that as far as he could see alien Jews committed half of the crimes in the city, with the Italians accounting for 20 percent. Bingham later published a retraction.

  No matter what the anti-immigrant sentiment might have been, Frank Costello always liked Jews. He found a strange kinship in the foreign roots of the Italians and Jews he knew. Although he may not have known it, Costello’s feeling of connection may have been rooted in things deeper than affection. Modern DNA technology was recently used by Costello’s cousin Noel Castiglia of Maryland who discovered through sending a genetic sample to a laboratory that while there was an 83 percent statistical probability that his ethnicity was Italian, there was a 2 percent chance that he had Jewish background as well. Other relatives, Castiglia said, learned through testing that they had probabilities as high as 6 percent Jewish. Calabria had a long history of Jewish settlers, and Marchioness Laura, who founded the town of Lauropoli in the eighteenth century, is believed by some researchers to have herself been Jewish. So there just might have been a trace of Jewish lineage in Frank Costello’s genetic makeup.

  In early twentieth century New York, if the nativist sentiments regarded both Jews and Italians with suspicion and as criminals, that only seemed to increase the friendship Costello had for those who traced their heritage to the Twelve Tribes of Israel. From Costello’s point of view, Jews and Italians had a lot in common as newcomers. So in 1914, when Costello went to a dance in the Bronx and met Loretta “Bobbie” Geigerman, the pretty, dark-haired sister of his friend Dudley Geigerman, the relationship had great potential.

  “When I met Bobbie it was like meeting one of my own people,” Costello would later tell George Wolf. “She didn’t talk Italian but the German dialect of her parents was foreign like mine. Bobbie and me got along great from the first, although neither of our mothers was too happy.”

  While certainly not unheard-of, intermarriage between Catholic Italians and Jews was an unusual pairing. Intermarriage creates all sorts of issues that suddenly swell to the surface or wait like time-bombs to explode among families later. There are questions about what religion children should be raised in and how to celebrate the holidays. In Costello’s case, he remembered that her parents Jacob and Cecilia, who had raised a total of eight children and lived on upper Park Avenue, thought that Loretta could do better than a dirt-poor Italian man with no prospects from East Harlem. Maria Costello had been hoping for a nice Italian girl for her son, he remembered.

  Despite any family trepidation about their union, Frank Costello and Loretta Geigerman got a marriage license on September 22, 1914. A day later the couple was married by Episcopal minister Rev. Thomas McAndless of St. Michael’s on West Eighty-eighth Street. It is likely that a Protestant clergyman was picked as a way of finding an officiant who was neither Catholic nor Jewish as a way of avoiding any religious antagonism among the parents. On the marriage certificate, Costello noted that he lived on West 117th Street and, although he never finished grade school, listed his occupation as plumber. Loretta, who on census records had the name “Lauretta,” recorded her address as being a few blocks farther west at 1968 Seventh Avenue. He would have been twenty-three years old and Loretta twenty.

  Though he claimed to have a legitimate occupation, Costello clearly in the period right after his nuptials was still very much into his criminal ways. We know that because on March 12, 1915, Costello was arrested for carrying a handgun in Manhattan as he left a barber shop. An observant cop noticed the weapon and started chasing Costello, who attempted to flee into an alley. Costello would later complain that the gun wasn’t found on him, a fact the judge handling the case agreed was true but quickly noted that was because the cops saw him ditch the weapon before they grabbed him.

  Costello already had a brief taste of jail while he waited for his case to be called in court on May 15, 1915, for a guilty plea before General Sessions Judge Edward Swann and was hoping the court would give him a break. Costello’s defense attorney admitted to Swann that the young man had not led an exemplary life but that now, as a married man, things could turn out better. He pleaded to the court for a short prison sentence. But Judge Swann didn’t like what he saw in Costello’s criminal records, even if he was never convicted of anything.

  “I have l
ooked him up and find his record is not good,” said Swann. “I have it right here from his neighbors that he has the reputation of a gunman . . . and in this case, he certainly was a gunman. He had a very beautiful weapon and he was prepared to do the work of a gunman.”

  “Will your honor give me another chance?” piped up Costello in desperation.

  “You have had chances for the last six years, and those chances have to cease some time,” replied Swann, referring to Costello’s earlier arrests for strong-armed larceny where he avoided convictions.

  Then, Swann sentenced Costello to a year in the penitentiary, noting that he could have given him seven years. Taken away, Costello did eleven months of his sentence in the prison facility on Welfare Island in the East River. They trimmed one month off his sentence for good behavior, and he hit the streets in April 1916.

  A lot had happened in Little Italy by the time Costello was released. Perhaps the most significant was the murder of Gallucci and his son two days after Costello was sentenced to prison. For the next year there were a host of other killings tied to the incessant wars between the Italian crime factions in East Harlem. But by being in the relative safety of a cell on Welfare Island, Costello was out of harm’s way even if there was any chance of his being drawn into any of the fighting. By being in prison, Costello finally had the time to think about his life and where it was going. Running around the streets with a gun, facing the real prospect of more jail time or even death, was not what he had in mind now.

  “That’s when I realized I was stupid,” Costello told his attorney George Wolf years later. “Carrying a gun was like carrying a label that said: ‘I’m dangerous, I’m a criminal, get me off the street.’ I made up my mind I would never pack a gun again and I never did.”