PROFESSIONAL KILLERS (True Crime)

by Gordon Kerr

  When a woman told Luciano, Lansky and Bugsy that she knew about the boy’s disappearance, trying to extort money from them to stop her going to the cops, the trio broke into her apartment and beat her savagely. Unfortunately, the police walked in on them and they were arrested. The woman was frightened enough not to show up in court, however, and the case was dropped.

  When Siegel bumped into the same woman eight years later in a bar, she made the mistake of telling him that they had been wet behind the ears back then and wouldn’t have known what to do with her, anyway. Bugsy decided to show her just how much he had grown up. He followed her home, dragged her into an alley and raped her. Again he was arrested and again the case never came to court.

  By 1919, the Bugsy and Meyer Mob was making its money from floating crap games, trade unions and robbery. They were working in partnership with Luciano and his henchman Frank Costello, and showed no mercy towards anyone who stood in their way. Luciano and Lansky were inventing a new kind of racketeering. Never before had Sicilians and Jews worked together in this way.

  But it was in the big time that their ambitions lay. They wisely put aside money from their robberies and their craps and protection rackets to be used at a later date to help them progress their ambitions. That money was invested in established bookmaking businesses and also found its way into the pockets of Lower East Side politicians and policemen who could provide them with protection to carry on their business.

  Gradually they began to be an irritant to the real Mob bosses uptown who wanted to elbow in on the action. Mafia don Joe ‘The Boss’ Masseria demanded tribute payments from them. Joe was a gangster of the old school and wanted the Bugsy and Meyer Mob under his control. Anyway, the money would come in handy in his bid to become capo di tutti capi (boss of bosses) following the imprisonment of the incumbent, Lupo ‘The Wolf’ Saietta. But Bugsy and Meyer were not ready to hand over their hard-earned business to Masseria, letting him know by wiping out his soldiers in a huge fight, sending Masseria a clear message that the Lower East Side was not up for grabs.

  When the Volstead Act became law in 1919 making the manufacture and sale of alcohol illegal in the United States, it was a red-letter day for racketeers everywhere, but especially for Luciano, Lansky and Siegel.

  Arnold Rothstein, a major player in New York’s organised crime world, was amongst the first to see the potential. He called in Luciano, Lansky and Bugsy and proposed that a bootlegging business be set up to provide good whisky for his high-class casinos. The operation involved Dutch Schultz, Longy Zwillman, Joe Adonis, Vito Genovese and Albert Anastasia, as well as the Bugsy and Meyer Mob.

  Siegel and Lansky opened a car and truck rental business in a garage on Cannon Street, Brooklyn, as a cover and Bugsy became the mainstay of the bootlegging business, driving shipments of illegal hootch or, better still, hijacking it from another gang. Needless to say, Meyer, never one to miss out on an opportunity, also made the rental business work and that, too, brought in cash.

  Their war with Joe Masseria continued and Bugsy and Lansky struck him a major blow when they ambushed a convoy of his trucks, carrying bootleg hootch, near Atlantic City. The booze was being transported from Masseria’s boats to Irving Wexler, also known as Waxey Gordon, another partner of Rothstein. This venture was not without danger for Bugsy and Lansky. Waxey Gordon was an important and powerful player, the boss of Philadelphia, and he would be far from pleased to lose his whisky. Masseria, himself, had an army of 200 men. In addition, they were also two-timing Rothstein who had forbidden the people working for him from stealing from each other. The consequences could prove to be fatal.

  The convoy stopped at a tree that Bugsy and his men had felled across the road and as soon as Waxey’s men climbed out of their cabs to move it, they came under fire. Three of them fell in the ensuing gun battle and when the survivors surrendered, they were beaten savagely. However, although Meyer Lansky was recognised by one of the beaten men, word never got back to Rothstein. Waxey did not want him to find out he was working with the Sicilians. Bugsy and Meyer lived to fight another day but Waxey, like Masseria, would not forget.

  Business was booming by 1920 and Siegel, Lansky and Luciano moved into Chicago after sending Brooklyn mobster Frankie Yale to put a bullet in the head of the city’s boss, ‘Big Jim’ Colosimo. Johnny Torrio and Al Capone, who took over there, were reluctant to get into the bootlegging business and invited Bugsy and Lansky and Luciano to do it. Profits were split and everyone was happy.

  From about 1927 to 1931, the warring factions in New York went head to head and the Castellamarese War, as it came to be called, between Masseria and Sal Maranzano would define organised crime in America for decades to come. When Luciano changed his sympathies and went over to Maranzano’s side, he did so on the understanding that he would deal with Joe Masseria once and for all.

  On 15 April 1931, he invited Masseria to Scarpato’s Restaurant in Coney Island. Towards the end of the meal, Luciano excused himself and went to the gents. As he closed the door, four gunmen burst into the room, guns blazing. They were Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Joe Adonis and, leading the charge as ever, Bugsy Siegel. Masseria was hit six times and another 14 bullets lodged themselves in the restaurant walls.

  Charlie Luciano completed his rise by rubbing out Sal Maranzano. After all, if he had not killed Maranzano, Maranzano would have killed him. That was the way it worked.

  In 1934, when Dutch Schultz was being hotly pursued by New York City Prosecutor Tom Dewey, he lost the empire he had built since his days in the early Bugsy and Meyer Mob. The new man in charge was Bo Weinberg, another alumnus of the gang and the man Bugsy had recruited to kill Sal Maranzano on Luciano’s behalf. Dutch was, understandably, furious. He explained his problem to Bugsy who offered to help his old friend.

  Bugsy invited Weinberg to dinner but, on the way to the restaurant, stopped his car on a dark, empty street. He got out, went round to the passenger side, threw open the door and began beating Weinberg with his pistol. He then pulled a knife and stabbed the dazed Weinberg, a schoolboy friend, in the throat. Bugsy was nothing if not meticulous in his killing and, having learned that intestinal gases often made a corpse float, he made sure he stabbed him in the abdomen to release those gasses. After that, it is likely that Bo ended up in the East River, but no one knows as his body was never found.

  Not long after this, Waxey Gordon, by this time in prison, decided it was time to get even with Bugsy and Lansky. He hired the Fabrazzo brothers who planted a bomb in the fireplace of the Bugsy and Meyer Mob’s Grand Street hideout. But Bugsy spotted the device and managed to throw it out of a window just before it exploded, escaping with only minor injuries. It did not take him long to catch up with the perpetrators. Andy Fabrazzo’s body was later found in a sack in North Jersey and his brother Louis was gunned down in Manhattan.

  The third brother, Tony, had not been involved in the hit, but just in case, he threatened to write his memoirs which would be delivered to the police in the event of anything happening to him. The Mob was concerned, but Bugsy decided to take matters into his own hands. First of all, he set about creating an alibi for himself.

  In autumn 1932, he told his friends that he was ill and exhausted and in need of rest. He admitted himself to a local Catholic hospital and for the first few days lapped up the treatment. One night, however, he told a nurse he was going to bed early and did not want to be disturbed.

  As soon as she left the room, so did Bugsy, by the fire escape, a couple of pillows stuffed under the covers to deceive anyone looking in into thinking he was still in bed. He met a couple of his guys and they drove to Tony Fabrazzo’s house. When Fabrazzo came to the door he failed to recognise them, although he should have, given that he had acted as back-up when Bugsy had shot Vincent ‘Mad Dog’ Coll in a phone booth. Bugs wasted no time. He gunned down Fabrazzo in front of his mother and father.

  The murder was a bad call, however. Fabrazzo’s friends knew Bugsy had done it, even tho
ugh he had his alibi. Added to this were the facts that Dewey was beginning to turn his beady eye on the Bugs and Meyer Mob and, in the years following the killing, cracks began to appear in Bugsy’s friendship with Lansky. Bugsy was sick of playing second fiddle to the much smarter and more plausible Lansky. Four years after Fabrazzo’s death, he was in trouble.

  The Syndicate met to discuss him and could have been forgiven for deciding he was becoming too much of a liability. Instead, they decided to give him a break and send him out to the West Coast where the Mob’s influence was nowhere near as great as in the east.

  Bugsy arrived in California with his wife and kids and bought a $200,000 mansion in the upmarket area of Holmby Hills. He began moving in elite circles, hanging out with George Raft, an old friend from Williamsburg who had become a major movie star. Raft was a ticket for Bugsy into the high-octane world of Hollywood’s movie stars and starlets. With his suave good looks, he began to occupy the gossip columns, being seen attending parties and premieres. He fell for a French actress, Ketti Gallian, and romanced a whole parade of starlets, including Jean Harlow.

  But he was also busy during the day. He saw the unions as a big opportunity for the Mob, especially the extras union. Without extras the studio bosses had no movies and if they wanted extras, they had to pay Bugsy. He hit on actors too, sidling up to them at parties and telling them that if they wanted their next movie to happen, it would cost ‘$10,000 for the extras’.

  In 1939, Harry ‘Big Greenie’ Greenberg had gone on the run when Tom Dewey had set his sights on him. The Syndicate wanted him killed because he knew too much and Lepke Buchalter, Bugsy’s old boss in Murder Inc., asked Bugsy to help an associate, Allie Tannenbaum, to make the hit. But Bugsy, against the advice of all his friends, wanted to be directly involved in the contract.

  Doc Stather writes: ‘We all begged Bugsy to keep out of the shooting. He was too big a man by this time to become personally involved. But Bugsy wouldn’t listen. He said Greenberg was a menace to all of us and if the cops grabbed him he could tell the whole story of our outfit back to the 1920s.’ In truth, though, Bugsy wanted to be part of it just because he enjoyed killing.

  The hit had problems from the start, but eventually ‘Tick-Tock’ Tannenbaum made Murder Inc.’s first hit on the West Coast. Later, Bugsy was arrested and acquitted for the murder of Greenberg, but in the course of the trial his reputation was torn to shreds, his sordid past exposed for the world to read about in the Californian papers.

  His work on the West Coast also involved illegal wire services that gave the results of races before they were actually announced. He was making $25,000 a month from it but, inevitably, the Syndicate back in New York told him it would take the profits from now on. He told them to keep their hands off and, with that, probably began the process that would lead to his eventual elimination.

  He had one last hurrah, though.

  Las Vegas, back in the early 1940s when Bugsy first visited it, consisted of no more than a couple of dude ranches and resorts. It was searingly hot in summer and in the middle of nowhere. It did have one thing going for it, though. In 1931, the Nevada legislature had legalised gambling to raise revenue. In the 1940s, it also legalised off-track betting on horse races. That was what interested Bugsy. And opening a legitimate casino in Vegas had unheard of potential for making money for the Mob.

  Siegel called his casino-hotel the Flamingo. It would be Las Vegas’s most luxurious hotel by some way and it was hoped would bring customers down from the swanky watering holes in Reno. His dream was an oasis in the desert to which gamblers from both coasts would flock for fun and the finest entertainment.

  But the Flamingo project had an inauspicious start. It was difficult and expensive to get building materials to and from Vegas and Bugsy, a gangster after all and not a construction expert, lost control of it. Materials would be brought in the front gate and driven straight out the back to be delivered again, and paid for again. The million dollars he had initially obtained from his Mob friends grew to six million. Lansky, Luciano and other investors became uneasy. Some had even used their own savings, persuaded by Bugsy’s vision of quick profits and untold riches.

  By 1946, the Flamingo had still not opened and Bugsy was asking for more and more money. Finally, at a Havana conference on 22 December that year, attended by the biggest names in the gangster pantheon – Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Joe Bonnano, Albert Anastasia and Joey Adonis, amongst others – Lansky dispensed some bad news. Bugsy had been skimming from the cash provided by the Mob for the Flamingo. He was thought to be depositing it in Swiss bank accounts, ready to flee if all did not go according to plan. The Syndicate turned to Lansky for his opinion on what they should do. Lansky reluctantly told them that Bugsy had to be hit, a motion passed unanimously by the assembled mobsters. The contract was given to Charlie Fischetti but Lansky provided his old friend with a stay of execution, persuading the conference that the contract should be delayed until after the opening of the casino – Boxing Day – to see what happened. Who knows, he suggested, it might even be a huge success and they could get Siegel to pay back the money.

  So, although he did not know it, Bugsy’s fate would be decided by the success or failure of the Flamingo. Unfortunately, however, in spite of top-notch entertainment – George Raft, Jimmy Durante, Xavier Cugat’s orchestra, all big names back then – and the presence at the opening of movie stars Clark Gable, Lana Turner, Joan Crawford and many more, the Flamingo was an unadulterated flop. After the second day, the one-arm bandits were more or less silent and the gaming tables were empty. ‘We worked to 9 or 10 people a night for the rest of the two week engagement,’ the actress Rose Marie said. ‘The locals just didn’t come out to the Flamingo. They were used to cowboy boots, not rhinestones.’

  It was with a heavy heart that Lansky reported the troubling situation in Las Vegas and the Syndicate responded by demanding the fulfilment of the contract. Nonetheless, he gained another stay of execution and the Flamingo limped along until Bugsy closed it to enable the hotel part of his complex to be finished.

  It reopened in March and by May it had started to work, returning a profit of $250,000. But it was all too late for the Syndicate

  On 20 June 1947, Bugsy had just returned from having a manicure and a haircut. He felt good as he sank into the comfortable chintz sofa in his living room to read the papers. Things were getting better – his daughters were coming out to spend the summer with him and the Flamingo was finally proving him right. The money was pouring in.

  Outside, in the garden, Charlie Fischetti squeezed the trigger of his .30-06 Springfield rifle and the sound of gunfire shattered the hot Las Vegas evening.

  Vito Genovese

  As his ship slid into New York Harbour from Naples in 1912, did Vito Genovese even then, at the age of 15, staring at the Statue of Liberty and the high-rise buildings of Manhattan, conceive the burning ambition to climb to the top of the heap, and to achieve it by whatever means necessary? From humble beginnings, he clambered up the greasy pole until he looked down on all of them, the ones who survived his fight for success.

  When his family arrived in the New World in 1912, they quickly established themselves in the Queens area of New York, his father starting a small contracting business. For Vito it was not nearly enough, however. He was in a hurry to be someone and needed more excitement in his life. Soon, he moved out and went to live with relatives in the much more cosmopolitan and vibrant Little Italy in Lower Manhattan.

  He started hanging around with a bad crowd as a youngster and, aged 20, had his first brush with authority when he was sent to jail for 60 days for carrying a gun. It was 1917. It was a slight hiccup, but his relentless climb up through New York’s underworld had begun.

  He launched his Mafia career serving New York boss Giuseppe ‘Joe the Boss’ Masseria during the early 1920s, working mainly in bootlegging and extortion. However, what Genovese really brought Masseria was a propensity fo
r violence. Vito was afraid of nothing and no one. It was around this time that he met Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, the criminal visionary who would shortly become the lynchpin of the American Mafia, reshaping it at the end of the 1920s. While Luciano would become one of Genovese’s closest allies, the two men had a complex relationship and would never be what could be called friends.

  When Luciano organised the extermination of the old boss, Masseria, Genovese was one of the four gunmen who made the famous hit. Later that year, Luciano organised a hit on Salvatore Maranzano, the victor in the Castellamarese War that had split the Mafia for two years. With both Masseria and Maranzano dead, Luciano became boss of his very own crime family, appointing Genovese as underboss.

  According to those who knew him, Vito Genovese was not a man to be trusted. ‘Sly’, ‘devious’ and ‘cunning’ are words often used in conjunction with his name. Joe Valachi, the first Mafia man to turn informant, famously said: ‘If you went to him and told him about some guy doing wrong he would have the guy whacked. And then he would have you whacked for telling on the guy.’

  And he had no compunction about using violence to deal with his problems. After the death of his first wife, he fell in love with another woman who, unfortunately, happened to be already married. No problem for Vito – he killed the husband.

  In the 1930s, Genovese began to make serious money from the various rackets in which he was involved, but mainly from the Italian lottery which he had come to control. He invested this wealth in nightclubs in Greenwich Village.