Kingpin

by Richard Stratton

  The old man’s cell is spotless. It has the look and feel of a monastic chamber. More than once I have passed by and seen him down on his hands and knees with a rag polishing his tile floor so it shines like it has been varnished. Everything he owns, all his personal property, is put away. His three pairs of shoes are lined up beneath the tightly made bunk. On his desk there is only a calendar, fetish of the imprisoned, and a framed photograph of his grandchildren. I expect Joe has a letter or some cards he wants me to write for him. His arthritis is even worse than it was when I left for New York. Now, he says, when he tries to write, his hand seizes up and becomes a claw. His handwriting has been reduced to a childlike scrawl.

  But no, the old man says he only wants to ask me a question. Joe invites me to sit down at his desk while he perches on the edge of the bunk. He leans in close and tells me sotto voce, with sibilant echoes of Marlon Brando in The Godfather, that he appeared before the parole board the last time they came to the institution, and the panel of examiners who reviewed his petition for parole had recommended that he be released.

  “That’s great, Joe,” I tell him.

  “No.” He shakes his head. “The national board … they denied me,” he whispers. “Told me to bring it all. Here, look at this.” And he hands me an official document.

  It is a notice from the National Parole Commission. I read where, indeed, the local examiners who interviewed Joe recommended that he be paroled “for humanitarian reasons” and noted his “advanced age, strong family ties and exemplary institutional record.” But the national commissioners overruled the local board and denied his parole on the grounds that it would “depreciate the severity” of his offense. Joe goes on to say this was his third time appearing before the board. “I been locked up twenty-three years,” he continues, “never had a shot, nothin’. But they don’t wanna lemme go. My brother died in prison. They want that I should die here, too.”

  I’m not surprised. Joseph Stassi, also known as Joe Rodgers and Hoboken Joe, though not as well-known as some of his more famous peers, is an organized crime figure of major international and historic significance. Now in his early eighties, he’s also the oldest convict in this prison, perhaps in the entire federal system. Joe keeps to himself. He doesn’t associate with the other Italian Mafia goodfellas. He doesn’t talk to most of the other prisoners. He’s respectful but aloof with staff. He never discusses his case with anyone. He’s a solitary figure in this land of diminished individuality as he goes about refining his daily routine, striving to live long enough to get free and die in the world of the living.

  He’s up early every morning and sits in the TV room to watch the news on CNN before the rest of the convicts arise. I see him already dressed in his immaculate, creased khakis, his powder-blue fly fisherman’s cap, and black, soft leather shoes. As soon as the compound opens for breakfast, Joe makes his way to the chow hall, where he eats some bran cereal, then he goes out and walks around the compound until work call to help move his sluggish bowels. I’ve studied him over the years of close cohabitation. He doesn’t smoke; he’s lean and healthy except for the arthritis in his hands and beginning scoliosis in his spine. Stassi has the raspy voice of a crime boss who has ravaged his vocal chords yelling orders and curses at his underlings. Because of his age and the arthritis, he’s been given a medical exemption from work and spends his days mostly in his cell. With my new unit orderly job and our side-by-side cells, I now spend much more time in the old man’s company.

  We became close in the way one makes friends in the penitentiary—guardedly at first, through forced communal existence and what amounts to a kind of intensified familiarity. In prison, one lives in closer contact with strangers than one abided with members of one’s own family. There they are, the other convicts, for months and years on end, the same men every time you turn around: in the toilets, in the showers, in the lines and at tables in the mess hall; in the lines for commissary or at the laundry; in the TV rooms; on the weight pile or out walking in the yard; in lines or signed up on lists to use the telephone. We are all trapped together in here. It’s like living in a hall of mirrors; we even begin to resemble one another. Day in and day out, Joe and I see more of each other than do most married couples.

  Before now, what little I knew about Joe Stassi’s status in the ranks of organized crime I learned from observing the other wiseguys, even those who were said to be capos or bosses, as they afforded Joe the utmost in penitentiary currency: respect. An associate with the Gambino Family confided that Joe was a don, a boss, and more—a kind of mafia ambassador at large who was there when it all began and was the go-between with the Jews and the Italians. Joe’s letters home to his wife and to his son, Joseph Junior, who lives in the Dominican Republic, and the cards and letters he dictates and I transcribe to his other correspondents, are void of personal information. I heard from the prison grapevine that he is doing time for heroin trafficking, and that his case may have had something to do with the infamous French Connection heroin importation conspiracy.

  Some time ago another convict loaned me a book entitled Gangster #2: Longy Zwillman, the Man Who Invented Organized Crime. The Zwillman book contains several photographs of some of the most powerful gangsters of the early twentieth century, among them the founding fathers of the American La Cosa Nostra, Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Frank Costello. There is also a photo of Zwillman with a group of well-dressed, tough-looking men seated at a table laden with glasses and bottles in a nightclub, and in the company of some glamorous women, including Abner Zwillman’s girlfriend, the actress Jean Harlow. Sitting next to Zwillman is a man identified as Joe Rogers. In a caption under the picture—the only reference in the book to the mysterious Mr. Rogers—the author notes Rogers ran Zwillman’s numbers racket in Union County, New Jersey. There is another stunning blond seated next to Rogers—who, I later learn, is Joe’s wife, and a former Miss America.

  The Zwillman book intrigued me not only for the photo of Joe, but also for its history of the bootlegging industry in New Jersey during Prohibition. It chronicles Abe Zwillman’s rise from a pushcart vender selling fruits and vegetables in the streets of Newark to becoming one of the most respected and influential organized crime figures of the era. Zwillman stole Jean Harlow away from Howard Hughes. He got Harlow a two-picture deal and himself half interest in Columbia Pictures by giving his old gambling associate, Harry Cohn, five hundred thousand dollars in cash to buy out Cohn’s brother, thus establishing the mob as a major player in Hollywood. Zwillman and other mobsters corrupted public officials high and low. They swung the 1960 Presidential election for Jack Kennedy by buying votes in Illinois and West Virginia. When called to testify before the McClellan Senate Committee hearings on organized crime, Zwillman supposedly opted out and ended his remarkable career and his life by committing suicide, allegedly hanging himself in the basement of his West Orange, New Jersey, mansion.

  When I ask Joe if that is he in the photo, fifty years younger and seated at the table with the beautiful blonde and the Syndicate royalty, he allows that it is; he goes on to confide that he loved and looked up to Abe Zwillman like an older brother. Joe says Zwillman was always impeccably dressed and groomed; he prided himself on his dignified outward deportment. “Abe was a perfect gentleman,” Stassi remembers. “And charitable, he ran soup kitchens for the poor during the Depression. He had a million friends, from the highest to the lowest. He would have Catholic bishops and Jewish rabbis in his home for dinner.”

  “Do you believe he killed himself?” I ask him.

  Joe shrugs; he’s noncommittal. “I was in Havana at the time. Knowing Abe, it’s hard for me to understand.” And he shakes his head, pulls on one of his wrinkled earlobes as though trying to hear some faint voice from his past. As an afternote, he adds, “The Jews made the Mafia. Without the Jews, the Italians couldn’t wipe their ass. The Jews were the ones that done the real work.”

  Joe’s Italian, of Sicilian ancestry, but he claims his closest u
nderworld allies were all Jews: Meyer Lansky, Zwillman, Ben Siegel—known to those who didn’t know him as Bugsy—and a New Jersey bootlegger named Max Hassel who took the young Stassi under his wing and made him his protector. By “the work” Joe says, he means the series of hits carried out in the early thirties by the mostly Jewish killers of Murder, Inc. Those killings, of the Mustache Petes who controlled the Black Hand (as the early Mafia extortion rackets were known), opened the way for the modern mob to take control of bootlegging during Prohibition under the planning and leadership of the affiliated East Coast bosses known as the Big Six: Lansky, Zwillman, Siegel, Costello, Joe Adonis, and the Boss of Bosses, Charlie “Lucky” Luciano. Joe says he knew them all.

  Given my elevated status as the jailhouse lawyer par excellence in the joint, Joe has decided to invite me to look into his case to see if I might be able to cast a ray of hope upon his bleak future. “Bring it all” for a man of Joe’s age could easily mean dying in prison.

  “I’m not gonna say nothing,” he tells me. “I’ll just let you look at my papers, an’ then you tell me if you think there’s anything you can do. I want you to be honest, Richie. I know you will be, that’s why I’m askin’ you.”

  Joe’s papers consist of copies of documents from his Bureau of Punishment central file—his “jacket” in convict-speak. I learn Joe was arrested on a fugitive warrant in Florida, indicted in Corpus Christi, Texas, for conspiracy to import heroin from Sicily, allegedly smuggled to Mexico and then into the US across the border at Laredo. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to eighteen years. Seven years later, while serving time at the penitentiary in Atlanta, Joe caught a new case. He was charged in a conspiracy to import heroin from Sicily through France to Montreal and into New York with a French national—who was also doing time in Atlanta—a conspiracy facilitated on the street by Joe’s younger brother, Jake, as part of several major heroin cases that grew out of the French Connection investigation. Joe was taken back to New York, held at the MCC, tried again, convicted, and given an additional thirty years to be served consecutively to the eighteen he was already serving, for a total of forty-eight years. All his direct appeals on both convictions and sentences were denied. His Rule 35 motions were also denied. After doing sixteen years, the mandatory minimum one-third on the forty-eight, he became eligible for parole. He waited until he had twenty years in on the sentence before first going in front of the parole board. He was denied “due to the serious nature of the underlying offense.”

  Now the National Commission has once again refused him, citing the nature of his crime, which strikes me as significant since major organized crime heroin cases are not uncommon. I feel certain there has to be more to the Parole Commission’s decision not to let Joe go.

  The old man’s convictions and sentences go back to the days before the Bureau implemented SENTRY, the computerized data management program the Punishment number crunchers use to compute sentences. I take pen to paper and start to do the math on Joe’s accrued good-time earnings to see exactly how much time he would be required to serve in order to “bring it all” and max out his sentence. Under the old sentencing laws in effect for those charged with crimes committed before 1987, there are two types of good-time a prisoner can earn: statutory good-time given by law at a rate of ten days per month and amounting to one-third of the total sentence if there are no infractions and losses of good-time, and meritorious good-time that can be earned at a rate of five days per month through one’s work assignment if recommended by the convict’s work supervisor and approved by his case manager. So it is conceivable, if one earns all of one’s statutory and meritorious good-time and does not have any taken away, that one could max-out a sentence in a little over half the time imposed. In Joe’s case, he should have been able to max-out in twenty-four years and change—if he got all his good-time. And with twenty-three-plus years already served, he should have been short only a few months of a release date, perhaps even eligible for release to a halfway house immediately.

  Here I find an anomaly. From the MCC after his conviction in the New York prosecution, Joe was shipped to the super-maximum–security penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. Once he arrived in Marion, it appears from the sentence computation sheets I review in his file, Joe was put in the Hole, and both his statutory and meritorious good-time were stopped and not resumed until years later when he was transferred to the federal prison in Talladega, Alabama. At Talladega, Joe served another half a dozen years, receiving all his good-time, before being transferred here to Petersburg.

  But the stint in Marion is out of the ordinary, and there is no explanation in the files as to why Stassi was sent to the super-max—the Alcatraz of its day—locked in the Hole, or why his good-time was suspended. Though he may not wish to speak about his case, to understand what took place, I have to inquire of the old man.

  “First of all, I never had nothin’ to do with narcotics,” Joe insists.

  Of course not, I think. Everybody in here is innocent, even if we are all guilty. I know it’s a lie, but let him profess it if he must. These wiseguys will never admit they are in the junk business. Kill a dozen men, yes; deal dope, no, never! Pure horseshit; but it’s not my business to point this out to the old man.

  “It’s that fuckin’ rat Bobby Kennedy who done this to me,” Joe claims.

  “Bobby Kennedy?” I say. “What does he have to do with your case?”

  “He was attorney general at the time. Kennedy made his special prosecutor, man name a’ Arnold Stone, come after me when I left out a’ Cuba after Castro took over. The father, Joe Kennedy, he hated me. We hated each other. I still hate the son-of-a-bitch. Bobby was convinced I knew something about who killed his brother Jack in Dallas. So they framed me.”

  I don’t believe him; this sounds far-fetched, and I can tell by the familiarity in the way he pronounces the word narcotics that Joe Stassi was in the junk business—at least for a time and probably not directly, through associates, perhaps using his younger brother, Jake, as his front man. After the heyday of Prohibition and once the mob was forced out of Cuba, as mafiosi went about looking for a new means of extraordinary illicit income, of course they were importing and distributing large quantities of heroin. They set up opium refining labs in Sicily. They established a worldwide network to smuggle and distribute processed heroin. Luciano was a junk dealer. As was Vito Genovese, godfather of the Genovese organized crime family with whom Joe was affiliated. The list goes on and on. Nearly all the major heroin dealers I met over the years were either American wiseguys or Sicilians, or they were closely associated with the Italian Mafia. But I’m not about to argue with the old man. It doesn’t matter; what I am looking into has nothing to do with his original convictions, only his time served. I need to know why he was sent to Marion and why they stopped his good-time.

  “Well, here’s what happened,” Joe begins. “While I’m in New York, at the MCC after I get convicted in front of Judge Knapp …” And he goes off on a tangent about Judge Knapp and the Knapp Commission’s corruption investigation of New York City’s police department until I bring him back to the subject at hand. “Anyway, one night these men try to escape … Italians. So they come to me first, of course. They were lookin’ for my permission. I tell ’em, ‘Look, you do what you gotta do. Just don’t involve me.’ You understand? I’m not lookin’ to escape climbing out through some hole they knocked in the side of the jail. Now they’re goin’ to climb down nine or ten floors to the street on a bunch of sheets tied together. It seemed crazy to me. But that’s their business, not mine. So they go out at night after lockdown. Turns out, right across the alley from the jail there’s an assistant DA workin’ late in his office in the courthouse. He looks out the window, sees these individuals climbin’ out, slidin’ down the sheets. He has a gun, a pistol, in his desk. He takes it out and yells out the window at these individuals, and when they run, he shoots them. So they all get caught. Now remember, I got nothing to do with this. But because the pa
rties are all Italians, and because they were seen comin’ to me to show respect by askin’ my permission—and maybe one of these rat bastards in there mentions my name, I don’t know—but they question me, the lieutenant and the warden, and I tell them I don’t know nothin’, so they send me to Marion and lock me in the Hole for ninety days under investigation for the escape attempt.”

  Joe pauses. He licks his flinty lips and then imbues himself with hatred.

  “Rats!” Joe snarls and grimaces. “That’s the only way they make these cases. But you can’t believe these fuckin’ stool pigeons. They’re only saying what the agents an’ the prosecutors want them to say. What I’m saying is the truth! I had nothin’ to do with this. I’ll take a lie detector test, I’ll swear an affidavit; I don’t care. What I’m telling you is the way it really happened.”

  At the mention of rats, Joe looks at me with a fierce glint in his eye, and I see the throttled rage and intense criminal passion that earned Stassi an underworld reputation as the most dangerous man in La Cosa Nostra.

  Interesting, I’m thinking, and not just the story of the escape attempt, which is pure MCC insanity, the kind of event that could only happen at the rock ’n’ roll jail. But mainly for the fact that they locked Joe up under suspicion, they never actually charged him with the escape attempt, and then failed to resume his good-time after he was let out of the Hole and while he was still being held at Marion after the investigation had cleared him of involvement in the thwarted escape. This was clearly wrong. They still had not credited his statutory or meritorious good-time. I can see we have a valid issue, a possibility to get Joe his good-time credited.