Joe goes on to describe a meeting where the bosses gathered to decide some important piece of business. Luciano was presiding, Stassi says; it may even have been the meeting the bosses called when Dutch Schultz lobbied for permission to clip Manhattan special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who had made it his mission to lock up Schultz and the other syndicate mobsters.
“I can’t remember exactly what it was about,” Joe says. “We knew the Dutchman was out of control.” He closes his eyes, smiles at the memory. “The meeting was going against Dutch. He was sick as a dog with a bad case of the flu. He was coughing and sneezing, sittin’ off in the corner so as he won’t infect the rest of us. Everyone voices their opinion except Adonis, who’s standin’ at the mirror combing his hair. Now we’re all waitin’ for this arrogant cocksucker to weigh in, even though it don’t make no difference, Dutch was out-voted. We all knew it was crazy to think about hitting someone like Dewey. The Heat that woulda brought down would be unbearable. But Adonis, this asshole, he finally turns away from the mirror an’ makes an announcement. ‘The star says yes,’ he says. When Dutch hears this, he jumps up an’ goes over to Adonis. He hugs him in a headlock an’ slobbers spit an’ mucus all over Adonis’ face!” Joe cracks up, his frail body quaking with laughter. “Can you imagine? ‘The star says yes.’ Dutch says, ‘Now, you fuckin’ star, you have my goimes!’ Adonis was sick for a week with the Dutchman’s flu.”
When Jimmy Alo took over, he inherited Joe’s hatred for Adonis and went on to provoke plenty of his own. Joe’s ready to kill at the mention of Alo’s name. He knew why Alo ordered the killing of his friend, but he didn’t agree with the death sentence. Joe says he protested, he went to Zwillman and argued against the hit. “Abe said he agreed with me, but it didn’t matter. We were out-voted by the others, who claimed my friend was in the wrong.” Joe believes the hit was part of a power play by a gangster named Nick Delmore who wanted to take over running the Jersey operations for the Syndicate.
Again, Joe stresses it wasn’t an isolated killing. Hits were not ordered unless they were sanctioned by the bosses. This killing too was part of the larger power struggle between the Jews and the Italians. “I don’t believe in killing for money,” he says. “There was always another reason—cheating or talking to the law, disobeying orders. They always had a reason, even if the reason wasn’t always right.”
Joe, being the independent operator he was, had friends on both sides of the conflict. It was the ultimate test of Stassi’s loyalty and his treachery.
“This friend of mine, he loved diamonds,” Joe says, remembering the night he killed his best friend. “I told him I had some stones I wanted to show him. So we agree to meet in the parking lot at this train station out in the country.”
Nick Delmore was supposed to provide the getaway car. When Joe called Delmore once the plan was in motion, his wife answered and said Delmore had hurt his leg and couldn’t come to the phone. Joe was enraged. “‘What? You tell that son-of-a-bitch …’” But Delmore ducked him, left him hanging. Fortunately for Joe, unfortunately for his friend, the man drove to the station instead of coming by train. Joe killed him in his own car, sat beside him and shot him in the head as he examined the diamonds, then Joe used his friend’s car to dispose of the body.
“I’ll say it to the whole world, Nick Delmore was no fucking good,” Joe hisses, full of venom. “Later, they made this no-good rat bastard a boss. One regret I got in life, I should have killed Nick Delmore.”
“So you’re saying, what you really regret is that you didn’t kill Delmore, not that you killed your best friend.”
Joe glares at me. I want to make him say it. I want him to confront all his demons. Why? I’m not sure, except that I feel there is some truth for me to be found in the old man’s story, exorcising his demons as a way of dispelling my own naive fantasies of gangster glory.
“I did it on orders,” he says. “Maybe you don’t understand. Who I was, at that time, if I didn’t follow orders, I would be killed. That’s all. There was no other way. That’s how they come to have such trust in me.”
“Abe and Meyer. Because you killed your best friend.”
He nods. “Yes. If you ask me, ninety percent of killings take place between close friends.”
This confession elicits another. Joe tells me how he killed his other close friend and benefactor Max Hassel, again on orders from the bosses. “They knew I was the only one who could get close enough to Max to do the job. I didn’t wanna do it. There was a sit-down. I protested, but the decision went against me. If I didn’t do it, they woulda killed me.”
Joe grimaces, his mouth trembles, he closes his rheumy eyes and shakes his head.
“The bosses,” he laments, “they lie around in their pajamas, they pick up the phone and say, ‘Go here, go there, do this, do that …’ I had to do it. It was the life I chose. What do you want me to say, I’m sorry?” he asks. “I’m not looking to be forgiven. I’m just trying to tell you what I done, and what I learned.”
Joe reasons some men join the military or the police and kill in the line of duty. Or they become politicians or businessmen and kill with the pen. Joe was a soldier in a different army, fought a different war. The way he sees it, they’re all mobs: the government, the police, Wall Street, big corporations, just in different rackets. What Joe did was part of the struggle to get out of the ghetto, an assault on the culture that shunned him, an attempt to be assimilated and respected.
“You ask me a question: What do I believe in, religion or money? I’ll tell anyone who says religion, they’re a fucking fool. I don’t believe them. Money is the most important thing in the world. Without money, you can’t do nothing.”
“What about family? Love?” I ask him. “Don’t they mean anything to you?”
“Well, money fits in. Love, when there’s no money, love falls out. You get married to a girl that had everything. A good life. Or when she needed a dress, she had a few dollars to buy it. She’s married now, she’s got a house to clean, she’s got kids, a husband. Love, what’s love? You get laid, it falls out. You go home and you ain’t got the money to pay your electric bill, your food bill, where’s love then? And family … listen to me, you need money to provide for your family.”
After proving his fealty, Stassi was entrusted with bigger hits. He was given responsibility for the planning and implementation of some of the most notorious gangland executions in mob history. Joe was like a producer and director of high-level contract killings. He tells me how he got the contract to kill his old pal Dutch Schultz, whose real name was Arthur Flegenheimer, one of the most notorious gangsters of his day. Shultz was Public Enemy No.1 when the mob decided it was time to take him out. Joe arranged to meet the Dutchman at the Palace Chophouse and Tavern in Newark. Because Joe was so well known in the neighborhood, he sub-contracted the hit to two of Murder Inc.’s most accomplished triggermen: Charlie “The Bug” Workman and Emanuel “Mendy” Weiss. Joe acquired the weapons, including a rifle; he planned the killing; he provided the getaway car and mapped out the escape route. Dutch was hit with a hail of bullets as he sat in the chophouse waiting for his meeting with Joe Stassi.
Joe remembers he was just twenty-two in 1928 when he took his first trip to Havana. He loved the place. “It was wide open. Beautiful young whores everywhere, every street corner, every bar. In one club, there were twenty-five girls. You picked the ones you wanted to be in a live sex show. There was a guy in the show who was famous for his huge donkey dick. I was shocked to see these young girls take that giant cock. Men would go in there with their wives or their girlfriends. Then the women would come back by themselves later on to get fucked by these giants.”
He remembers there was no crime, no robberies. Maybe an occasional knife fight. Stassi made it his business to become well acquainted with all the top Cuban officials.
After the gold rush of Prohibition, Zwillman urged Joe to go into that other enduring vice, gambling. Stassi took over the numbers for
Zwillman and began opening dog and horse racing tracks in Jersey and Florida. During the Depression, when everyone else went bust, Joe continued to rake in millions in cash, socking it away in half a dozen safe deposit boxes in the vaults of the Manhattan Trust and other banks. “I just kept stuffing it in there,” he says. “I never even had time to count it.”
Stassi lived in the best hotels under assumed names, and he married the lovely Frances Paxton of Charlotte, North Carolina. Frances had once been crowned Miss America, but she had to forfeit the title when it was learned she had been married and divorced. Joe says he and Frances were out every night in the most popular restaurants and clubs—El Morocco, Copacabana, the Stork Club. In the late thirties and early forties, he took over the Hollywood Restaurant and Nightclub on Broadway between 48th and 49th, which became one of the hottest spots in town. He went to every major heavyweight fight; he hobnobbed with movie stars and celebrities: Frank Dempsey was a close friend; Jean Harlow, whose affair with Longy was long and torrid; Joe DiMaggio, who took to hanging out in Newark with the local mafiosi; Frank Sinatra, whom Stassi first met at Willie Morretti’s club in Jersey; Toots Shor, and any number of other savvy denizens of New York nightlife. But it was Havana that kept drawing him back.
“I used to go there practically every New Year’s Eve,” he says. “People would come from all over the world to celebrate at Sloppy Joe’s in Havana.” Joe remembers drinking with Ernest Hemingway, whoring with Ben Siegel and other gangsters who came to the island to visit him. When Lansky decided to expand the mob’s gambling interests in Cuba, because of the trust he had in Stassi, Meyer asked Joe to act as his man on the ground in Havana overseeing operations. By the fifties, Stassi was in partnership with Tampa, Florida, Mafia boss Santo Trafficante Jr. in the Sans Souci casino and with Philadelphia godfather Angelo Bruno in the Plaza Hotel and Casino. “Meyer told me Santo was looking to open up the Sans Souci. Meyer was waiting on the license to open the Nacional, and he asked if I’d be interested in going in on the Sans Souci with Trafficante. I said, ‘Yes, lemme meet him.’”
It was around this time that the FBI began keeping close track of Stassi’s movements. Stassi’s son, Joseph Junior, married the daughter of a Cuban senator, Miguel Suárez Fernández, who was a close friend of Fulgencio Batista. Stassi, Lansky, and the other mobsters underestimated Fidel Castro. They lost millions when Castro’s men came down from the mountains and drove the gangsters off the island. “The Plaza was one of the first places they wrecked,” Joe says and shakes his head ruefully. Castro’s men arrested Jake Lansky, Meyer’s brother, Santo Trafficante, and a few others. And they were looking for Stassi. “I called the Capri and they told me, ‘Joe, don’t come here. They just pinched everybody.’” Before that, Joe says, he got arrested every week, but they never held him. From the fact that they had arrested Jake Lansky and Trafficante, Joe knew this time it was serious. He lay low for a while, then he fled the island. “There had been revolutions before,” he says. “I thought Castro would only last a year or two. My son stayed on another year. But in the end, I lost everything I had invested there. I had bought a lot of real estate for little money. I had bought a copper mine. I heard the mine became very productive—for the Russians.”
In 1960, Jack and Bobby Kennedy moved into the White House. Prior to the Kennedy regime, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover adamantly refused to acknowledge the existence of an organized crime cartel. Ignoring Thomas Dewey’s racketeering prosecution of Luciano in 1936, the Murder, Inc. trials in the forties when Abe “Kid Twist” Reles first revealed the existence of the national crime syndicate, and the revelations of the Kefauver Committee Hearings in the 1950s, Hoover dismissed the notion of the Mafia. Only after the Apalachin, New York debacle when dozens of gangsters from all over the country were caught meeting in upstate New York, would Hoover reluctantly admit the possibility that there were criminal groups operating in concert to control nationwide illegal enterprises. The G-Men went from pursuing Reds and bank robbers to stalking racketeers. From then on, FBI would stand for Forever Bothering Italians.
Nothing had prepared Stassi and the other mobsters for the zeal of young Bobby Kennedy. His drive on organized crime and labor racketeering had the tenor of a vendetta with Irish Catholic overtones. Joe believes the beef goes all the way back to the days of the patriarch, Joseph Kennedy Sr., who made his stake as a rumrunner and held on to the distribution rights for Scotch whiskey from England after repeal. Joe Kennedy would later be named ambassador to Great Britain. Joe Stassi tells me of his early brush with the man whose beloved son would be elected president, and then be murdered in Dallas.
Stassi was living at the Warwick Hotel at 54th and Madison, where Joe Kennedy also happened to reside. Joe says he never did business with Kennedy back in the bootlegging days, though he is aware that Abe Zwillman and his partner Joseph Reinfeld—whose combined efforts, the government would later allege, accounted for at least forty percent of the illegal beer and liquor distributed on the East Coast—often moved Joe Kennedy’s shipments of Scotch. There was a cocktail lounge at the Warwick where Joe says he would sometimes meet a woman whose last name was Rogers, coincidentally the same name as Joe’s alias. Joe Kennedy also knew Miss Rogers; in fact, he was dating her. One time Kennedy came into the cocktail lounge and found Joe Rogers sitting tête-à-tête with Miss Rogers. “Are you two related?” Kennedy asked with a wry smile.
Joe smiles faintly at the memory. “After that, a fella I knew well tells me, ‘I was speaking to the law and was told to advise you to move out of the hotel. The management doesn’t want you. You’re gonna get put out, maybe arrested to get you out.’” Joe heard later that Kennedy might have had something to do with Stassi’s wearing out his welcome at the Warwick. “Joe Kennedy was law in the Warwick Hotel. If he made a suggestion …” Joe gestures, cocks his head. “I moved out. Later I’m told Kennedy said I was one of two people in his life he hated.”
“Because of Miss Rogers? Seems kind of extreme,” I say.
Joe admits he doesn’t know if it’s true any more than he knows why Bobby’s office saw fit to frame him on narcotics charges. “I think they just hated Italians. It goes back to the way the Irish were treated in Boston. You know how it is, it all starts when you’re kids, scrappy neighborhood kids in the streets, you’re with this gang or you’re with the other gang. It’s the same thing when you grow up.”
The nexus between organized crime and the Kennedys was longstanding and Byzantine, and it morphed into an unholy covenant. It was at Joe Sr.’s behest that Zwillman and the mob helped get Jack elected in 1960. The CIA and at least two high-ranking mafiosi—Joe’s partner Santo Trafficante and John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli—with the connivance of the Kennedy White House, were plotting to assassinate Fidel Castro. And to make it personal, Jack Kennedy, Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana, and Frank Sinatra were all fucking the same woman, Judith Campbell Exner. The relationship between the mob and government spooks goes back at least to the days when Luciano was released from prison and allowed to return to Italy for his help to the Allied forces during World War II. The clandestine alliance is thick and rife with treachery and denial.
Joe says that when Bobby took the helm at the Justice Department, he made Stassi one of the first to be targeted and to take a fall. After Joe decamped Havana, he was approached by the FBI. He agreed to speak to them with the proviso that he would not discuss anything to do with his personal business or that of his friends; he said he would talk only about what he knew of the political situation in post-revolutionary Cuba. “They asked me, ‘Are you a good American?’ I said, ‘Yes, I’m a good American.’ But Stassi gave them very little information. He said he was returning to Cuba to visit his son and would talk to them again on his return.
In November 1962, almost a year to the day before the Kennedy assassination, Joe says he met in New York with Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans Mafia boss who was hounded out of the country by Bobby Kennedy. That meeting
, Joe believes, was surveilled by the FBI and led them to believe Joe was privy to information about the planning of the hit on Jack Kennedy. “They kept asking me about that meeting. What did I discuss with Santo and Carlos? That’s all they wanted to know.”
I also want to know. “What did you and Marcello and Trafficante talk about at that meeting?”
“Nothing. We had breakfast.”
“C’mon, Joe. You expect me to believe that? I’m sure you never met with anyone without discussing something.”
He holds up his hand. “I don’t remember.”
“The Kennedys?”
“We might have talked about all the Heat we was gettin’ from that little prick, Bobby.”
“Do you believe Trafficante was involved in the assassination?”
“Please. Santo wouldn’t have the balls,” Joe obfuscates.
“I’m not saying him personally,” I probe, sure the old man knows much more than he is saying.
He shrugs. “Santo was a piece of shit.”
Joe has nothing good to say about Santo. Cheapest man he ever met. Whenever there was money owed, Trafficante was nowhere to be found. His own people told Joe that Santo fucked them out of money all the time. The FBI was aware of the rancor between the partners, and they hoped to exploit it.
“I never talked to them after that,” Joe says. “So they come after me.”
In 1963, Stassi was named by Joe Valachi during testimony before a Senate committee as a member of La Cosa Nostra. By then, the FBI had already classified and targeted him as a Top Hoodlum. Under Justice Department supervision, they opened an extensive investigation. Soon after, Joe was indicted on the heroin importation case in Texas. He went on the lam and lived for three years as a fugitive sought around the world in one of the most extensive manhunts of the time. Finally brought to ground at the Canada Club in Pompano, Florida, Joe says he was framed on the narcotics case in an effort to make him talk about the mob and about the Kennedy killings.
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