“After they let you out of the Hole in Marion, did you work?” I ask him.
“Yes, of course. They make you work. I had a job as a baker in the kitchen.”
“And did you ask if you were being given good-time?”
Joe shrugs, sneers. “I never ask these fuckin’ people for nothing,” he says. “But they told me I was put in for all my good-time. Here.”
He shows me a wrinkled document clipped to the back of his file. It’s what is known as a cop-out, a request to a staff member that someone wrote out on Joe’s behalf while he was at Marion. The scribbled response at the bottom of the page asserts Joe was receiving all his good-time—though, from my calculations, clearly he was not.
I tell him, “Well, just from looking at these records, I’d say we’re talking about at least three-and-a-half, maybe as much as four years, of statutory and meritorious good-time that you were denied—or never credited—once you were cleared on the escape charge. Plus, the three months you did in the Hole. If you could get all that good-time back—that’s what, close to two years you could have taken off your sentence? Which would mean you could max this thing out in”—I make some additional calculations—“you could possibly be released. Joe, if you got all this time back, you could go home in a few months.”
Joe nods, but he doesn’t allow so much as a glimmer of enthusiasm. Apparently, he had done some calculating of his own and figured he must be getting short. But he’s been locked up long enough to understand how difficult it is to get these Bureau of Punishment bureaucrats to admit that they made a mistake and even harder to get them to correct it, particularly if it means doing anything to help a convict.
Still, we decide it’s worth a try. I agree to write up the necessary paperwork and file it on Joe’s behalf.
First we must appeal to the warden in what is known as a BP-9, which is routinely denied even when there is obvious merit. We would then appeal the warden’s decision to the Regional Punishment Bureau higher-ups in a BP-10. Once that is denied, therefore exhausting all administrative remedies, we would file a writ of habeas corpus and try to get a federal judge to rule. This could take years. Joe might well be called and judged by the Creator and condemned to serve an eternal sentence in hell before he gets any relief in this world. But our efforts are not about reprieve necessarily; this is about hope. Keeping hope alive just might sustain the old man, and keep him alive long enough to outlive his sentence.
As I come to know Stassi better over the few weeks I’m at work on his case, he begins to open up, cryptically at first, with shrugs and nods and grunts, a yes or a bitter, hissed no, and then he lets go. He is completely devoid of braggadocio, a quality as rare in a convict as remorse, of which he apparently has none. Yet during our evening meetings in his cell, as I become the old man’s confessor, with his Catholic need to unburden his soul, Joe tells me of things he did in his life that, he claims, he has never told anyone, including his wife—who is still alive and has been waiting for him these many years at the home he owns in Brooklyn.
JOE STASSI IS the oldest of nine children born to a man who earned his living as a street sweeper. He grew up on Stanton Street in New York’s Lower East Side. It was the early 1900s, when hordes of tough immigrant Jewish and Italian kids took over the streets from the Irish gangs.
“My ambition was always to be a gangster, a gunman, whatever you want to call it,” Joe tells me. “What started me was school. When I went into the first grade, I stuttered. The teacher got disgusted with me. She put me in a corner and put a dunce cap on me. The kids in the class all start callin’ me dummy and stupid and laughin’ at me. With the result that I started to hate school. I hated that teacher for what she done to me. I started being a truant, playing hooky.”
He licks his dry lips a few times, a kind of silent stammer.
“I had a little girlfriend who was also a truant,” Joe says and at the memory his face softens to a faint smile. “She liked ribbons from a certain pushcart. The only way I could get it for her, I had to go and grab it and run and get chased. One day I got chased, the man grabbed me by the shirt. He tore the shirt off my back! I had no shirt to go home, for stealing!” He laughs, childlike. “Finally, I was arrested for robbing a bakery shop—for bread, to eat. I was livin’ on the street. Hungry all a’ the time. After letting me off a few times, the judge had enough of me. He sentenced me to two months in the Catholic protectory for juveniles.”
It was Joe’s first stint in a penal institution, he says, those two months in the Catholic reformatory that became the foundation of his education as a professional criminal. “From young kids like me you had youth up to sixteen or eighteen years old. And we were all put into different yards according to our age. I was in the small yard with the youngest group. In those days, kids didn’t wear long pants. In the bigger yards where they had the older kids, they used to have what they called ‘droppies.’ They got to wear pants that were below the knees. I used to look over and see the older kids and all I could think was that I wanted to be just like them, so I could get over there in that yard and wear pants that came down below my knees.”
Once he was released from juvenile detention, Joe says he went back to the streets. “I was livin’ in the alleys and abandoned buildings with the other runaways. One day, I come around a corner and run right into my father. He was so surprised; I think he thought I was dead. He hugs me and says, ‘Joey, Joey, please come home.’ He was practically cryin’. But I pulled away from him. Then he went to chase after me. He tried to kick me in the ass. It was cold, ice on the sidewalks. He slipped on the ice and fell on the sidewalk. I stopped and looked back at him lyin’ there on the pavement, and I knew he was hurt, and I didn’t know what to do. Do I go back and help him up? Go home and go back to school?”
Joe pauses, looks at me, and smiles ever so slightly, wistfully nodding his head. “No, I didn’t. I turned and run, left my father lyin’ there on the sidewalk. Years later, I owned a newspaper and a printing plant in Jersey, and I put my father in charge of the whole business. I bought him and my mother a home, the only home they ever owned.”
When he was fourteen, an older boy he met in jail gave Joe his gun to carry. “He had a problem with some people that was lookin’ to kill him. They came around the neighborhood every night around midnight. They used to come down Stanton Street and on Chrystie Street turn left and we were waitin’ for them. We shot at them, and believe me, windows were cracking upstairs. Who the hell knew about a gun? We were kids. You just pointed and pulled the trigger. And to make it even worse, the ones that we shot happened to be good friends of mine.”
Arrested for robbery, possession of a weapon, and other petty charges while still a kid, he says it was the connections he made with older criminals in jail that gave him entrée to the New Jersey beer barons and bootleggers of Prohibition. The most influential of these men was the undisputed boss of the New Jersey rackets, Abner “Longy” Zwillman. Just two years older than Joe when they met in the early twenties, Zwillman was already well established as the smartest, if not the wealthiest and toughest of the brash Jersey gangsters. Abe was born and raised in Newark’s predominantly Jewish Third Ward. His father died when he was just fourteen, and Abe took it upon himself to become the breadwinner. He quit school and went to work selling fruits and vegetables from a pushcart. When the Irish kids would roam into the Third Ward to harass and bully the peddlers, the cry would go out in Yiddish, “Reef der Langer! ” Go get the Tall One, the Defender. Longy came running and chased off the outsiders.
With Prohibition, Zwillman went to work for Joseph Reinfeld, owner of Reinfeld’s Tavern, a local hangout for up-and-coming racketeers. Reinfeld bought whiskey from the Bronfman brothers’ Seagram’s Distillery in Montreal and began shipping directly to the Jersey shore, where Zwillman would oversee the off-load and distribution to speakeasies all over the East Coast. By 1922, Newark had become the bootleg capital of the country, and Zwillman, though just nineteen, presented Rein
feld with an offer he couldn’t refuse: a fifty-fifty partnership or Longy would go out on his own. Reinfeld knew that to spurn Zwillman would mean war, and Longy had the muscle. By this time, he also had all Reinfeld’s contacts and plenty of cash. Reinfeld swallowed his pride; they shook hands. Before Prohibition ended, the Zwillman-Reinfeld partnership made them both millions in tax-free cash dollars.
“Right around this time, there was a war going on,” Joe says. “There was always wars, but this one I remember was the war between the Jews and the Italians to control Newark. Newark was where most of the liquor for the whole East Coast came into the country and was distributed. And Newark, Elizabeth, Union City was where we had all the big breweries. Tugboats would bring barges up the river with tens of thousands of gallons of molasses and pump it into the stills. We owned everybody: judges, police, politicians. Nobody bothered us. Except other mobs.”
Joe says that it was through Zwillman and his partner Jerry Catena that he became friendly with the men who conceived and ran the national crime syndicate. Both a loyal soldier and long-range thinker, Stassi learned early on to follow Meyer Lansky’s first law: retreat to the background, turn over the high-visibility street activities to others. Joe became a master of the low profile. He never used his real name. He moved from place to place. “All the mobs knew I was connected,” he explains, “but no one knew exactly how or why. I was the only one who was free to go wherever I wanted, meet whoever I wanted without having to report. I never had to report because I was with Abe and Meyer.”
Joe remembers that around this time Lansky and Ben Siegel had their headquarters in a building on the Lower East Side. They were at war with the four Fabrizio brothers from Brooklyn. One of the brothers, a killer known as “Tough Tony” climbed onto the roof of the building where Ben and Meyer had their office and dropped a bomb down the chimney. One man was killed and Siegel was injured. Tough Tony was seen fleeing over the rooftops. A few weeks later, as Tough Tony was having dinner at his parents’ home, a couple of Ben and Meyer’s men showed up dressed as cops and demanded to talk to Tony. When he got up from the table and went to the door, the men barged in and shot him to death right in front of his parents.
“Ben was honorable, a good guy with plenty of guts,” Joe says of Siegel. “When there was trouble, Ben was always the first to go in. He’d help you. I remember Abe had an apartment at the Riviera Hotel in Newark. There were steel bars across the windows; it was impossible to get in unless Abe let you in. That’s where a lot of the meetings were held. One day we get a tip there’s a group of men in an apartment across the street and maybe they’re planning to hit us. Ben takes out a gun, runs over and starts shooting up the place. He got shot in the arm but just kept shooting and ran them all off.”
Siegel was the most outspoken man Joe ever met. “Fun to be around,” he remembers. “No bullshit. People would say to Ben, ‘If you ever need anything, just let me know.’ Ben would say, ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I do need …’ whatever, five grand, just to call the guy’s bluff. Then, when the guy starts making excuses, Ben would say, ‘You no-good son-of-a-bitch. Who the fuck do you think you are, asking me if I need anything?’”
In the forties, Stassi was one of the first men invited to invest when Siegel began to explore the possibilities of founding a gambling empire in the deserts of Nevada. Siegel and a guy named Little Moe Sedway were partners in a small hotel in what was to become the mob’s richest jackpot. “Moe was buying up property, and they tried to get me interested. I had a place in Lake Tahoe with Lou Walters—that broad, Barbara Walters’ father. I was looking at Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Ben come down and visited me in Havana a couple of times,” Joe says. Then he adds, almost as an afterthought, “When Ben was killed, everyone was shocked. They thought it might have been Little Moe that had it done.”
“Who thought that?” I ask.
“Meyer and Abe,” Joe answers.
“Wait a minute, you’re saying Meyer Lansky never okayed the hit on Siegel?”
“Please. That’s all nonsense. Meyer loved Ben. I was the one who looked into it. I went out to California, I investigated it for Meyer and Abe.”
“So who did—”
“Excuse me. Listen to me, I’ll tell you.”
Joe says he hired an ex-detective, Barney Wozinski, a PI in LA, to investigate the Siegel killing. “There was a cigarette girl Ben was always talking to. Ben’s girlfriend, Virginia Hill, was jealous of this girl. One day Virginia Hill got that cigarette girl and beat the bejesus out of her. When Ben heard about it, he went out and got Virginia Hill and beat the hell out of her. Virginia Hill left for Switzerland.
“The night Ben was killed, there was Al Smiley and Swifty Morgan with Ben when they drove in from Vegas. They stopped for dinner at Jack’s, the fish place on the pier in Long Beach. They dropped Swifty off at the hotel, and Al and Ben drove to Virginia Hill’s house. I talked to Al, he said they only just sat down, Ben on the couch, him on the side chair, when the shot came through the window. Al says, ‘Believe me, Joe, I was afraid I was gonna get killed.’”
Joe insists the stories that have been written in any number of books and portrayed in movies like Bugsy and Lansky—which portray the Siegel killing as a mob hit okayed by Meyer Lansky at a sit-down in Havana with the exiled Luciano—are fictional, gangland lore gleaned almost entirely from second- and third-hand information, some of it no more than rumors and gossip.
“We were as close to it as you could get,” Joe goes on. “I spoke to everyone. Whoever did it had to be a marksman that shot through the window from outside, someone that knew how to handle a rifle. The police found casings from a military-type rifle. What we found was the one that killed Ben Siegel was Virginia Hill’s brother. He hated Ben, and Ben hated him.”
Joe learned Hill’s brother was a sharpshooter in the Marines. He had a rifle he kept in the gas station down the street. “The day after the killing, Barney Wozinski went to the gas station looking for the rifle. They called Virginia Hill’s brother. He disappeared and the rifle disappeared.”
“So the story that Ben owed all the bosses a lot of money in cost overruns for construction of the Flamingo is not true?” I ask.
“That’s bullshit. Ben owed nobody money, and if he did, he was honorable, he would pay it. As far as the Flamingo, every partner in there knew they were going to make their money back many times over. Nobody was worried. We knew Vegas was going to be big.”
Joe shakes his head, sighs. So many wars, so many killings, so many hits—who can keep them all straight? But the Siegel killing, that one he remembers. “It came from me. I told Abe and Meyer it was the brother, and everybody accepted it. Ben was killed by a sniper with a rifle. If it was a hit, that’s not how it would have been done.”
Joe says he laughed when he heard Joe Valachi claim he turned rat because Vito Genovese gave him the kiss of death. “There’s no such thing as the kiss of death. You think they’re going to give you a warning? Please. You’re all right when they curse you. You need to worry when they’re nice to you, invite you for dinner.”
He imparts the methodology of a mob hit. To kill a man like Ben Siegel, Joe says, they would send a friend, someone he would never suspect, who could get in close and shoot him in the head with a revolver. “Never walk away from a body without making sure you put one or more in the head and the party is dead.” The way Sam Giancana was killed. Or in a public place, usually an Italian restaurant, send in a couple of torpedoes and blast away. Like the Carmine Galante still life, blood and pasta. Or Joey Gallo staggering out of Umberto’s Clam House and dying on the sidewalk on Mulberry Street. Or the recent killing of Big Paul Castellano gunned down in front of Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan. Classic mob hits befitting a boss. But snipers? Too risky. “If you’re going to kill a tough guy like Ben Siegel, you are going to make sure he’s dead,” Joe says.
“Always empty a gun before you toss it. Someone finds an empty gun, they’re likely to keep it or
sell it. If they find a partially empty gun, they’ll turn it into the cops for fear of being connected with whoever got shot,” Joe advises, warming to his subject—the fine art of murder. And I see the other Joe Stassi, the wily professional hitman lurking behind the old man’s kind, artistic visage.
“How many people have you killed, Joe?”
He waves his hands, closes his eyes. “So many … I can’t remember.”
Yes, he is a murderer, he confesses. This slight, hunched, and reserved old man is an accomplished killer of more “individuals” or “parties” than he cares to remember. When I ask if he is burdened by the memory of the men he killed, he goes silent, retreats within. And then he nods and admits that he is haunted by two killings in particular. “I killed my best friend,” he says.
“Max Hassel?”
“No,” he sighs. “I killed Max, too. But I’m speaking of another party.”
“Who?”
“I’ll tell you …” But he can’t quite bring himself to say the man’s name. It was his best friend, that’s all I need to know. Joe says the order for the hit had come to Zwillman and Lansky from Jimmy Alo, who took over as the boss in New Jersey after Joe Adonis was deported to Italy.
“I hated Alo,” Joe says. “He was a piece of shit. I hated him almost as much as I hated Adonis. This fuckin’ Adonis,” Stassi practically spits his name. “Don’t get me started talkin’ about that son-of-a-bitch.”
But now that the bile is flowing, Joe can’t contain himself. Adonis, whose real name was Joe Doto, had assumed the alias out of conceit that he was the handsomest of criminals. Joe says Adonis epitomizes the power-crazed boss who orders his soldiers to kill on a whim. Adonis had once called a sit-down that, had it not gone Stassi’s way, would have ended in his death sentence. Adonis resented Stassi ever after. There was also an issue over a girlfriend. Joe believes the order to kill his best friend had come from Adonis, through Alo, to Meyer and Abe merely to place Stassi in conflict with the men to whom he answered.
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