Top Hoodlum

by Anthony M. DeStefano

  The Blackwell family also bought property just across the inlet in Astoria and built a number of homes, including a colonial style mansion on Fulton Avenue that became a landmark for the village. It had long driveways, lush lawns, gardens, and a greenhouse. The location was known as “The Hill” because of its somewhat elevated land and was deemed a fashionable residential area. The property was just a few blocks from the Costello homes on Halsey Street and was reputed to be the oldest mansion on Long Island—which Astoria is technically part of.

  At some point in 1922 right after he got involved in bootlegging, Frank Costello made arrangements to start using the Blackwell Mansion, as the house was called, to store liquor in large quantities. In later years, Kessler remembered that he had the Costellos store up 3,000 cases of liquor, including 2,500 gallons of grain alcohol and 1,000 cases of whiskey he had shipped in at the mansion. The house had been outfitted by Costello with false walls to conceal the contraband. A number of Costello relatives used the Blackwell Mansion as a residence, apparently to guard over the cache of liquor. The location was right next to the home of a deputy police commissioner and the historic Dutch Reformed Church. What better neighborhood to operate from.

  But apparently Costello’s business at the mansion wasn’t unobtrusive enough. Neighbors complained to police about the incessant truck traffic and liquor activity at the mansion. In bucolic Queens of that time, the shady business was too much for authorities to ignore. So, on the evening of November 11, 1922, members of the district attorney’s staff and NYPD detectives raided the mansion at 157-159 Fulton Avenue. They were tasked with enforcing the state’s version of the Prohibition law, but in this case, they didn’t work with federal authorities on the scene.

  The police operation was something right out of an old gangster movie. According to newspaper accounts of the day, cops waited for three hours before anything suspicious happened. Then, about 8:00 P.M. two large trucks were driven through the large gates of the mansion’s side entrance, a location shielded by trees. The vehicles bore the markings of “Farm and Florist Supplies,” “Pork Products,” and “Window Shades.” It seemed like eleven men were on the property and around the trucks. A signal was given and an assistant district attorney, cops, and detectives rushed the building. Pandemonium then ensued.

  As described in the New York Evening Telegram: “A lookout blew a whistle and the eleven men, panic stricken, rushed into the building and attempted to bar the way of the police. The door was knocked off its hinges and with revolvers drawn the detectives ordered all the men to raise their hands. There were eight gathered in the room and a search disclosed the other three in the cellar, one of whom was inside an old furnace.”

  “Fist fights and scrimmages marked the invasion of the premises,” reported the New York Tribune in its version of the story. “Other short, sharp scrimmages happened in and about the old house when the eleven alleged liquor runners ran headlong into the advancing police column.”

  Things didn’t end when the police breached the mansion doors. Twice officers from a nearby station house had to be brought in as reinforcements as other men tried to recapture the liquor seized in the raid. There was plenty of contraband. At first cops only found a small number of bottles. But by tapping on the mansion walls they discovered recently constructed false walls that hid hundreds of cases of booze, some bottles still with their packing straw. The haul included what was described as “the finest scotch whiskey” and Spanish sherry. There was also whiskey that had been diluted in unlabeled bottles, a common tactic of bootleggers to get more out of the product. In all, cops estimated that the prevailing “bootlegger” prices of the seized product had a value of over $100,000, a stash that was better than many Manhattan millionaires had.

  Investigation revealed that the Blackwell Mansion liquor had arrived a week earlier by boat at the small Long Island town of Bayville, on the north shore about 42 miles as the crow flies from Astoria. The product had been trucked to Astoria, a standard practice by the Costello crew. There was so much contraband that the police used the two trucks seized at the mansion to transport the liquor to a local station house. Kessler would later admit that the booze seized at the mansion was his—at least in part.

  But where were Frank and Edward Costello? Federal investigators years later would say definitively, as did Kessler, that the Blackwell Mansion operation was part of the Costello smuggling venture. However, of the eleven men arrested that night the Costello brothers were not among them. Nevertheless, the group of men arrested included four brothers of the Aloise family, the family of Costello’s mother Maria. Those arrested included Frank, age fifty-seven, and what The New York Times said where his four sons: Edward, twenty-eight, Michael, sixteen and Jack, twenty-four, and Joseph. The New York Evening Telegram identified one of the man simply as Jack, twenty-four-years-old, as actually being a cousin of the others. The Aloise connection indicated Frank Costello’s ties to the bootlegging set up. He always relied on family for help in what he did and in fact used a Jack Aloise—which one isn’t clear—as his driver in later years. Some of the Aloise family members gave the Blackwell Mansion as their address to police.

  The case took a strange twist when one of the Aloise men, identified in newspaper accounts and court records as John Aloise, claimed that he owned the mansion and that all the liquor seized was his personal property, having purchased it prior to Prohibition and that he was keeping it for his friends. A local Queens judge was incredulous with Aloise’s explanation, saying that he found it hard to believe that a laborer like Aloise had the means to buy and stockpile so much liquor. The jurist wryly noted that Aloise must have a large circle of friends to need so much alcohol and trucks to move it. The court, noting that the Blackwell Mansion was nothing more than a “whiskey warehouse in which people lived,” refused to return the booze to Aloise. There was some speculation that the court might order the local sheriff to take the alcohol and distribute it to a local hospital—for medicinal purposes of course.

  But an appellate court overruled the trial judge and said Aloise could have the stock back only to have the Court of Appeals agree with the trial judge, depriving Aloise of the stockpile. Aloise had his attorney try and present new evidence that he had the wherewithal to buy such a large quantity of alcohol, but no records could be found saying whether he succeeded.

  With many in the city suspicious that bootleggers had corrupted cops and federal Prohibition agents, one result of the Blackwell Mansion raid was a libel lawsuit brought by NYPD Commissioner Richard Enright against a city magistrate and a state assemblyman after they indicated that some of the liquor seized had been diverted to police precincts. Enright, who was dogged by police ineffectiveness in the area of Prohibition enforcement, lost the lawsuit. The litigation was an odd postscript to the Blackwell raid and ultimately contributed to Enright, considered a good commissioner, resigning from his job in 1925. The mansion itself had its own peculiar fate. In 1926, it was sold to a builder who razed the structure and cleared the property to put up nearly two dozen homes. There were other Blackwell mansions in the area and many also suffered the same fate.

  Clearly, Frank and Edward Costello’s involvement with the Blackwell operation and Kessler showed the extent to which he and his brother were cooperating with the big-name bootleggers. Kessler was no small-time player in the booze market. As federal agents poured over his checkbook and bank accounts, they found leads into corruption of police and others tasked with stopping bootlegging. In one case, the agents noted a $100,000 loan to a coat manufacturer whose chief executive had until retiring been a government Prohibition enforcement official. Checks were also found to police officials.

  “Because of the large sums which are mentioned in the drafts [checks] the authorities seem convinced that they are on the scent of a liquor ring powerful enough to buy any amount of protection,” blared the New York Tribune in one story. Just how large was soon uncovered when a Manhattan federal grand jury indicted thirty-three p
eople, including six suspended Prohibition agents, as well as Kessler and his associates. However, neither Edward Costello nor his brother Frank were named as defendants. The main charge centered around the use of forged customs permits and other documents to purloin thousands of cases of whiskey and hundreds of cases of champagne from the Republic Storage warehouse months earlier. The case showed the extent of Kessler’s dealing and the money he was earning when he made withdrawals from twenty-seven bank accounts of over $4 million, using various fake names.

  When it came time for Kessler to go to trial a year later in November 1923, prosecutors called Edward Costello—but not Frank Costello—as a witness. The newspapers called Edward an “Astorian,” meaning he lived in that section of Queens. Prosecutors were intent on showing that a $20,000 bond issued in the mythical name of “Frank J. Sullivan” was to mask the purchase of some of the stolen liquor. For dramatic effect, the government brought six cases of the Auld Scottie whiskey to court and stacked it near the jury box. Edward explained that a $5,800 check given him two years earlier by Kessler was to allow him to buy two trucks to add to his fleet of equipment he kept at Halsey Street. Checks that Edward said he gave to Kessler since that time were for payments on the trucks, although he explained that the money went to another man—not Kessler. Whatever the story, investigators knew that the Costello brothers were in league with Kessler.

  Bootleggers knew they were playing in a league filled with dishonorable business partners. It went with the territory. Liquor loads were “lost” and stolen all the time. There was no honor among the smuggling class and Frank Costello may have been one of the biggest culprits. Kessler himself recalled how in late 1922 or early 1923 some 500 cases of Scotch valued at $55,000 supposedly seized in the Blackwell raid had suddenly appeared on the market and were being sold in New York. The issue of the lost Scotch sparked an argument between Kessler and Costello in the lobby of the fashionable Ansonia Hotel, where Kessler was living with his wife.

  Kessler said he and Costello had to settle their dispute. But Albert Feldman, a bootlegging associate of Kessler, put a more dramatic spin on things when he told federal investigators that both men got into a violent argument at the Ansonia.

  “Kessler had accused Frank Costello of having disposed of a quantity of liquor belonging to Kessler,” remembered Feldman. “He [Costello] denied it, that he had only delivered the liquor according to the orders that he had from Kessler’s office.”

  Kessler insisted that he was going to hold Costello responsible for the missing liquor and upon hearing that Costello got angry.

  Feldman continued the story: “So Frank Costello got pretty excited and he pulled out a small, pearly handled gun, supposedly to shoot him . . . He pulled the gun out of his pocket and everybody in the group grabbed him and held him before he even had a chance to point at Kessler. They grabbed him with the gun and yanked him away, and of course the whole argument then broke up.”

  The legend of Frank Costello over the years was that after he spent a year in prison in 1915 for gun possession that he vowed never to be caught with a firearm again. That was why he was considered a statesman of the mob, one who preferred conciliation over violence. But if Kessler’s story about the gun is true, Costello not only packed a weapon but wasn’t above recklessly pulling it out in public, and risking another arrest.

  Edward Costello insisted that his dealings with Kessler had been legitimate. In describing himself, Edward noted that he had arrived in New York some thirty years earlier, which would have been around 1893, close to the time his father Luigi first arrived in the city from Lauropoli with him and his sisters. In another family wrinkle, Edward said that he and his father, who by the time he testified had been dead for well over a year, had been in business for years in Queens, likely referring to the old trucking business. But it was just a year earlier Edward said he had decided to leave trucking and focus his attention on real estate. When his testimony ended, and perhaps to burnish his reputation, Edward told the court that he would be donating the fee he earned as witness to a local Knights of Columbus center in Astoria.

  After nearly a month on trial, Kessler and ten others were found guilty of the bootlegging conspiracy. Among the others convicted was Morris Sweetwood and Kessler’s bookkeeper known as “Joe The Book.” Three of the Prohibition agents were acquitted. Kessler, who had been living in a hotel apartment and was said to be worth between $5 million and $10 million, had his bail revoked and was taken into custody. The same day news broke about the conviction, federal officials trumpeted the seizure of five loads of beer from Canada, which investigators believed was sent as part of a plan to flood New York City with enough of the beverage in time for Christmas. Kessler was sentenced to two years in prison and was sent off to the penitentiary in Atlanta where he was pampered with the equally unfortunate George Remus.

  Despite his near violent disagreement with Frank Costello about the 1922 Blackwell Mansion raid and the loss of his whiskey, Kessler made a deal with Frank Costello just before he was sent off to prison. It would, according to Kessler, turn out to be another chance for his bootlegging associate to cheat him.

  As Kessler would tell federal agents just before he was to go off to prison in Atlanta in 1923, Costello asked him for some money to continue with his own bootlegging. Kessler didn’t have the cash but instead provided Costello with up to 200 cases of liquor, which in the Prohibition market was as good as gold. The prison-bound bootlegger had done similar deals with others in the bootlegging market. Kessler expected to be paid back when he got out of prison in two years. He would be in for a big surprise.

  “Never paid me,” Kessler testified years later about what Costello did to pay him back for the loaned liquor. “Everybody else I left money with—and it amounted to a lot of money—I gave one man $50,000; another man $40,000, everybody paid back,” said Kessler. “I asked him for it and he laughed it off and I forgot about it.”

  The Kessler case showed not only how much money was being made—and lost—in the bootleg trade but how closely smugglers worked together. The lesson wasn’t lost on Frank Costello and his brother and showed the value of making the right connections. True, if he wasn’t cheating his friends, Costello had been losing some loads to hijackers and Italian gangsters like Capone and Yale who themselves were involved in deadly feuds. But for Costello, making the right alliances was an important way of assuring his survival and prosperity in an illicit market that was rife with trouble and bloodshed.

  William Vincent Dwyer, known as “Big Bill,” was one of those larger-than-life characters on the New York scene in the 1920s. He was born and bred in the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan, which really served as a recruiting station for the gangs of New York. While working as a stevedore on the West Side docks, Dwyer saw early the potential of using warehouses to hide smuggled liquor. He brought in loads from Canada and Europe on a fleet of nearly two dozen vessels and employed hundreds and was soon anointed the new “King of the Bootleggers.” But, Dwyer didn’t just earn his reputation as a bootlegger. He was a sportsman of sorts, plowing his bootlegging profits toward the purchase of sports teams, notably some hockey franchises from Canada and later a football team he renamed the Brooklyn Dodgers, which played at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, the same venue for the baseball team. Dwyer also took over an old greyhound racing track and turned it into a regular horse raceway and bought a few more tracks around the country and in Canada.

  Dwyer worked out of an office at 1540 Broadway, the old Loew’s State Theater Building, a few blocks west of Costello’s operation on Lexington Avenue. With their competitors being knocked off by Prohibition agents, at some point Dwyer and Costello decided to work together, perhaps as early as 1921. The combination took things to a grand level. Both men controlled vessels and trucks to ship the liquor, while Dwyer had numerous warehouses in the city to store the merchandise. Costello also had his secret facilities such as the garages in Astoria and the Blackwell Mansion as well as hiding places on
the North Shore of Long Island. Sometimes, Costello used vessels painted and marked to look like those of the Coast Guard. Both men also paid off Coast Guard officials, cops, and others to make sure their product got through from Rum Row. While Kessler’s earlier operation was significant, the Dwyer-Costello alliance was believed to have dwarfed it, pulling in tens of millions of dollars a year.

  Costello and Dwyer were in league for at least three years, possibly four. They appeared to control much of the market in bootlegged liquor and were making astronomical profits. Dwyer’s outsized personality and sporting interests kept him in the public eye. Costello stayed out of the limelight. Sure, he hit the nightclubs on Broadway and appeared to be just another businessman. But Costello didn’t relish publicity. He liked staying off the radar. Yet either way, Dwyer and Costello wouldn’t stay out of trouble and it came for them in the form of an angry Long Island housewife.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A WOMAN SCORNED

  COMPARED TO THE FASHIONABLE STANDARDS of the Roaring Twenties, Mrs. Annie L. Case Fuhrmann was rather plain and frankly not much to look at, at least based on the newspaper pictures of her that survive. A flapper she was not. A stout, bespectacled lady with a square face and hair pulled back from her forehead, Mrs. Fuhrmann looked like a schoolmarm and a stern one at that. Still, the Greenport, Long Island, woman was married, and her husband Hans worked as a sailor and crewman on vessels that worked out of their hometown. Hans Fuhrmann was a lanky man with curly, sandy-colored hair with a handsome face. He bore a tattoo on his left hand. The couple had married in the summer of 1924.

  Things seemed fine in the Fuhrmann household. But then Hans Fuhrmann would disappear for long periods. During his absences, Annie Fuhrmann found that she had no money to run their household. When Hans did finally show up he was usually dead drunk on the near-toxic liquor concoction widely available and of no use to anybody, including his wife. Intoxicated, Hans didn’t even recognize Annie and would beat her up with anything he could grab, including milk bottles, bloodying her face, and breaking her glasses.