The Mafia Encyclopedia (100 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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BOOK: The Mafia Encyclopedia
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Page 291
who could be described as Young Turks, in the same sense as Lucky Luciano played that role in New York.
The Cuckoos cooperated with the American-born Italians in waging war against the Sicilians, of which Fresina and his Pillow Gang were an important branch. Fresina had once been shot in the buttocks and thereafter he carried a pillow with him to use when sitting. Somehow, Fresina's pillow tended to detract from the dangerous image the mob tried to project. It did not promote a feeling of terror in others.
It remained for that illustrious senatorial prober, Estes Kefauver, to sum up Fresina's career with a humor he seldom seemed to possess: "Eventually Fresina, an extortionist and bootlegger, was dispatched with two bullets in the head and no longer needed his pillow."
It would be many years after the fall of the Pillow Gang before the Mafia would become a powerhouse in St. Louis crime. The impetus came around World War II, from Kansas City, which dispatched Thomas Buffa and Tony Lopiparo to set up a branch of the K.C. family there and build up an organization primarily on the narcotics trade. Buffa eventually was assassinated, in 1946, and over a period of time the St. Louis crime family was to pass to the control of Anthony Giordano. While he was in prison in the 1970s James Giammanco became acting boss.
Pineapple Primary: Violent 1928 Chicago election
Probably no U.S. election in the 20th century can match the violence or social disregard of the April 1928 Republican primary in Chicago. Referred to by the press as the "Pineapple Primary," the event was characterized by the bombs, nicknamed pineapples, used in wholesale lots by gangsters seeking to have their ticket succeed. Both sides employed professional terrorists and the Capone ranks provided most of the bomb throwers. The police seemed singularly unable to stop any of the violence.
In the primary, a rebel faction headed by Republican senator Charles S. Deneen challenged the ruling faction headed by Mayor Big Bill Thompson and State's Attorney Robert E. Crowe. Thompson and Crowe were aligned with Governor Len Small, who, like the former pair, was a friend of mobsters. Deneen, carrying the banner of reform, was backed by racketeer Diamond Joe Esposito, who clearly desired to seize the Capone mantle for himself.
Violence erupted on both sides at the primary. The first attack victims were the Thompson-Crowe men. The homes of Charles C. Fitzmorris, Thompson's city controller, and Dr. William H. Reid, the commissioner of public service, were bombed. Further bombings of Thompson-men homes followed when the mayor announced, "When the fight is over, the challengers will be sorry."
In due course, the homes of Judge John A. Swanson, Deneen's candidate for Crowe's seat as state's attorney, and Deneen's own home were blasted, and Esposito, having ignored death threats from the Capones, was assassinated. A black-humored couplet, written by a Chicago newsman, probably best summed up the terror of the Pineapple Primary:
The rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that Chicago's still there
.
Two days before the primary, on Easter Sunday, the united clergy of ChicagoProtestant, Catholic and Jewishdenounced the Thompson-Crowe-Small forces: "We have a governor who ought to be in the penitentiary.... Ours is a government of bombs and bums.... O Lord! May there be a reawakening of public spirit and consciousness. Grant that we may be awakened to a sense of public shame...."
The appeal was not enough against the muscle, guns and bombs of the Capone forces, who supported the Thompson machine. And Cook County chicanery and fraud never reached a higher state of perfection than in this primary; ballot-box stuffing, voting under fictitious names, and harassment of voters numbered among the less violent crimes. Ultimately the Capone forces carried the day.
In the general election, however, the result was stunningly different. Capone was astute enough to realize that the national and international outcry against the Pineapple Primary was the death knell for the Thompson machine. When 75-year-old civic leader Frank J. Loesch, the founding member of the Chicago Crime Commission, called on him and insisted that he allow a peaceful general election vote, Capone did so.
"All right," Capone, who was famed for bragging that he owned the police, said, "I'll have the cops send over squad cars the night before the election and jug all the hoodlums and keep 'em in the cooler until the polls close."
Capone's word became the police's duty. A dragnet swept the streets clean.
"It turned out to be the squarest and the most successful election day in forty years," Loesch later related in a lecture at the Southern California Academy of Criminology. "There was not one complaint, not one election fraud and no threat of trouble all day."
In the election, Chicago's voters turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote against gangsterism. Governor Small and State's Attorney Crowe were swamped, and every Thompson candidate went down to defeat in the backlash of the Pineapple Primary.
Page 292
However, Capone remained sanguine. His criminal machine had flourished during a previous reform regime, and he was confident it would survive another campaign of virtue. His power was too deeply intermeshed with the police, the courts and the ward politicians for him to be alarmed. His reasoning did not prove faulty.
See also:
Loesch, Frank S
.
Pisano, Little Augie (?1959): Leading New York mafioso
Little Augie Pisano was perhaps the quintessential mafioso. Born Anthony Carfano, Little Augie took his nickname from a deceased East Side gangster. He came up the hard way as a gunman and sported a huge scar on his left cheek which he wore as a badge of honor, much in the style of an aristocratic Prussian duelist.
A longtime friend of Frank Costello and Joe Adonis (and for a time running Brooklyn rackets for the latter) Little Augie Pisano exhibited only one real sign of overwhelming ambitionhe moved to Miami with plans to make it his private fiefdom. Miami represented an enormous rackets potential and required a fine touch with political circles. But Meyer Lansky saw its potential too and that it would require a huge amount of underworld manpower and brains. Lansky urged that the cities of Miami and Miami Beach be declared "open territory" (as would be done later with Las Vegas) so that various crime families could skim their grand potential.
Despite Costello's closeness to Pisano he ordered him to curb his ambition and understand he had to work with Lansky. A dutiful soldier, Pisano did, and his loyalty thereafter to both Costello and Lansky never diminished. In the end, his loyalty was to prove the death of him.
In 1957 Vito Genovese, seeking to take control of the Lucky Luciano crime family, under the local direction of Costello since Luciano's deportation in 1946, ordered Costello assassinated. The job was botched and Costello survived.
Costello refused to tell the police who had tried to kill him, but Genovese, fearing all-out war, ordered all the important members of the crime family to report to his Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, mansionnow an armed camp surrounded by 40 gunners, as a demonstration of unity with his cause. Little Augie was the sole capoat the time he ran the family's rackets in the upper Bronxwho refused to show. It was a sin Genovese would not forget, but he had more pressing matters, dealing with Costello and the murderous Albert Anastasia who had vowed to stop Genovese. Although Anastasia was eliminated, Genovese was forced to let Costello retire from the rackets, and it was apparently part of the deal that Little Augie was accepted back in good grace.
The peace lasted until 1959 when Genovese ordered Little Augie hit. The would-be assassins had considerable trouble getting Little Augie alone. He was often with his good friend Tony Bender, chief operator of the crime family's rackets in Greenwich Village, and the killers asked if it was all right to blow away Bender at the same time. Genovese had a strong need for Bender at the time and vetoed the suggestion. Finally Bender discovered his good friend was being set up and he cheerfully agreed to put Little Augie on the spot.
On September 29 Little Augie was partying at the Copacabana with a friend, Mrs. Janice Drake, a former beauty queen, with whom, the cutting underworld comment went, he was having a platonic relationship. She was the wife of comedian Alan Drake, whose career Little Augie had helped. (Mrs. Drake's relationship with Little Augie was never clear. She was grateful to him and called him "Uncle Gus." It was possible she was merely a flamboyant symbol that the mobster liked having around as flattering to his image.) They were joined, apparently by chance, by Bender who invited them and a few others to dine with him at Marino's restaurant, not far from the Copa. During dinner a phone call caused Little Augie to leave hurriedly, Mrs. Drake on his arm.
At 10:30 P.M., about 45 minutes later, they were found in Little Augie's black Cadillac on a dark street near La Guardia Airport in Queens. Both were sitting in the front seat, heads tilted toward each other like young lovers. Both had been shot in the back of the head.
Police later theorized that the killers had been hiding in the back seat of Little Augie's car and forced him to drive to his place of execution. Mrs. Drake, they said, had died just because she happened to be along for the ride.
See also:
Bender, Tony
.
Pittsburgh Crime Family: See Larocca, John Sebastian.
Pittsburgh Phil (19081941): Murder, Inc.'s, premier hit man
Pittsburgh Phil Strauss was once philosophizing with a friend early in his career as a murderer. "Like a ballplayer, that's me," Pittsburgh Phil mused. "I figure I get seasoning doing these jobs. Somebody from one of the big mobs spots me. Then, up to the big leagues." Pittsburgh Phil had it right. He was spotted by some very discriminating experts, men named Louis Lepke, Lucky Luciano, Joe Adonis, Albert Anastasia. And he achieved great success in his chosen fieldmurder. In time he became the most prolific killer Murder, Inc.,and all of syndicated crimeever produced.
Killing didn't seem to bother Phil, although he worried greatly for his own health. The contract murder of

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