The Mafia Encyclopedia (103 page)

Read The Mafia Encyclopedia Online

Authors: Carl Sifakis

Tags: #True Crime, #Organized Crime, #test

BOOK: The Mafia Encyclopedia
12.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Page 299
action behind bars. The Eastmans' arch rivals, the mostly Italian Five Pointers, were scattering. Their leader, Paul Kelly, reading the new morality of reform correctly, understood that an enlightened public would not much longer tolerate gang violence in elections, and he deserted his cohorts, moving into relatively minor labor racketeering activities. Even that old reliable, prostitution, a leading gang activity, was hitting hard times. Reformers were everywhere. Then, during World War I, the federal government shuttered many of the country's most infamous vice centersespecially those in Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco.
Immediately after the close of the Great War it happily appeared that the era of the great gangs was over. But Prohibition in one fervent swoop threw society's natural social development into chaos. Across the country 200,000 speakeasies sprang up and large bootlegging organizations were required to supply their needs. Gang criminals, having gone straight out of sheer necessity, returned to their organizations. In New York alone, 15,000 saloons were closed by Prohibition, and 32,000 speakeasies came into existence. The owners of every one of these joints was breaking the law and paying bribes to remain in business. New York became a city on the take, the United States a country doing the same. Bootleggers and rumrunners brought in booze from outside the borders, using brawn and bullets if bribes didn't work. The production of alcohol became a cottage industry in many towns, especially in the Little Italies of major cities, producing foul odors that lay heavy over entire neighborhoods. Since these odors were readily identifiable and the police did nothing to intervene, the police were branded, as never before, as obviously corrupt.
The Jewish Purple Gang of Detroit, till then more dedicated to spectacular robberies and murders, became one of the most important and deadly Prohibition gangs, controlling much of the liquor supply smuggled in from Canada. In Cleveland, the violent Mayfield Road Gang emerged as an extremely potent force, and of course, Chicago's Al Capone gained recognition as the country's most infamous gangster. It was estimated that Capone himself made some $60 million from bootlegging and rumrunning.
In New York, the Broadway Mobcontrolled by Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis and Bugsy Siegelwas taking in about $12 million a year just from booze. In their operation they had about 100 men on the payrolldrivers, bookkeepers, enforcers, guards, messengers and even fingermen (to look for liquor shipments by other gangsters that they could hijack). In an era when a department store clerk made perhaps $25 a week, most of Luciano's men were drawing a base salary of at least $200 a week. This gave the operation a payroll overhead somewhere over $1 million annually and left $11 million out of which they had to cover all expensesmainly supplies and graft. "Grease" alone exceeded $100,000 a week. Ten thousand of this, according to Luciano, went to top police brass, but that represented only a small part of the payoffs. All the precincts had to be taken care oftheir captains, lieutenants and sergeants, all the way down to cops on the beat. After all costs, the combination still came out with $4 million or so in pure profits.
These Prohibition criminals had all begun as mere ghetto criminals, fresh from the source of most violent crime in any metropolis. In the 19th century an Irish ghetto criminal might call it a good day if he cracked a citizen's skull and walked off with $10 for his efforts. But these later ghetto criminals struck it rich thanks to the accident of Prohibition. They were mostly Jews and Italiansthose were the ethnic groups that had taken over the ghettosbut their great wealth was to raise them above the level of mindless street marauders as their ghetto predecessors had been and their ghetto successors would be. They had gone beyond organized ghetto crime to organized syndicate crime. Unlike earlier criminals who were bought by the politicians, they accumulated so much wealth that they reversed things and bought the politicians.
Disrespect for law grew as it became fashionable for even the most respectable citizens to serve bootleg liquor in their homes and visit lavish speakeasies. In the White House, President Warren G. Harding paid lip service to the dry movement and turned the nation's first residence into a private saloon. Most Prohibition agents themselves violated the law and took enormous bribes. Many ran their own bootleg operations. The Treasury Department between 1920 and 1928 fired 706 agents and prosecuted another 257 for taking bribes. Nobody claimed they got all the crooks. Top T-man Elmer L. key described the agents as a "most extraordinary collection of political hacks, hangers-on and passing highwaymen." In New York, an angry and frustrated Captain Daniel Chapin ordered a lineup of all agents and declared, "Now everyone of you sons of bitches with a diamond ring is fired." Half were.
Finally, when the Democrats won the White House and the Congress in 1932, Prohibition was doomed. The 21st Amendment killed it off in 1933. It did not kill off the great Prohibition gangs; they and various Mafia crime families rich with loot remained in business. The national crime syndicate was formed. The mobsters, now well connected with the political and police world, were a group that wanted to continue to feed at the trough themselves.
Page 300
In the end, Prohibition gave birth to and nurtured organized crime and did such a brilliant job that today we still can't get rid of syndicated gangsters.
See also:
Bootlegging
.
Provenzano, Anthony "Tony Pro" (19171988): Mafia union racketeer
A prime suspect in the disappearance and almost certain murder of former Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa, Anthony Provenzano, often referred to as Tony Pro, had strong organized crime support from the start of his career in labor. One of Tony Pro's early sponsors was Tony Bender, a longtime associate of Vito Genovese who controlled much of the rackets along the New York and New Jersey waterfronts and, in connection with these, ran a number of Teamsters locals as well.
Provenzano was installed as a shop steward in a trucking company in 1945, and, by 1950, Bender had moved him along to become organizer for Teamsters local 560 in Union City, New Jersey. Bender was known to have used longshoremen to smuggle heroin into the country, and federal authorities long believed that Provenzano was deeply involved in narcotics trafficking.
Over the next several years Provenzano's rise continued in the Teamsters; he became president of Local 560 and a vice president of the International. Even when Tony Bender disappeared permanentlyundoubtedly killed by order of Vito Genovese, behind bars at Atlanta penitentiaryTony Pro had a clear run. He had become very important both to the mob and his local; others he controlled became the hubs of various organized crime activities. Tony Pro oversaw bookmaking, numbers and loan shark activities run by his business agents and shop stewards. Even more lucrative was the widespread, often blatant pilferage of cargoes being trucked through New Jersey. Without a pass from Tony Pro no shipment could be considered "safe," and the price was not cheap. This was demonstrated by the successful prosecution and 1966 conviction of Provenzano for extorting $17,000 from a trucking company. One of the witnesses slated to testify against Tony Pro had been Walter Glockner but he was gunned down and killed. Still, there was enough evidence against Tony Pro; he was sent to Lewisburg federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania where he did four and a half years.
In the prison he served as a prison capo under the boss of that institution, mob leader Carmine Galante. It cannot be said that Provenzano had a hard time there, being more or less in charge of assigning cons to some of the prison jobs. Informer Vinnie Teresa, upset at the 15 minutes of daily back-breaking labor spent cleaning a yard area about 10 by 20 feet, told Provenzano he wanted something easier. Provenzano assigned him to radio duty. His work each morning before breakfast consisted of pressing a button that turned on the radios in the cells throughout the prison. That finished the work for the day. Tony Pro assigned someone else to turn the radios off at night.
When Provenzano finished his term he returned to his union duties, where no major opposition now existed. Back in the late 1950s and early '60s there had been some opposition, but the rebels were seriously injured on two occasions, and several were targets of bombings and shotgun blasts.
The last important opposition to Tony Pro was Anthony Castellito, secretary-treasurer of Local 560, who announced plans in 1961 to compete against the mob leader for the presidency. That June after a union meeting, Castellito, like Jimmy Hoffa later, was seen getting into an automobileand seen no more. In 1975 Hoffa disappeared. After his release from prison in 1971 Hoffa announced plans to recapture the Teamsters union presidency from Frank Fitzsimmons, a leader with whom the underworld had become most comfortable. The mob had little interest in Hoffa's return since he would probably be more demanding in dealing with them. Provenzano, as
the
man in the East Coast Teamsters, was said to have warned Hoffa to go away on a number of occasions. It has been a police theory since Hoffa's disappearance that it was Tony Pro who ordered his abduction and secret execution. The charge has never been proved.
In the meantime, charges were brought against Provenzano that he had ordered Harold Konigsberg, a longtime enforcer in the Genovese crime family, and Salvatore Briguglio to kill the long-missing Anthony Castellito. (Briguglio was also a prime suspect in the Hoffa case.) On March 21, 1978, Briguglio, suspected of being a talker to the FBI, was shot on a New York street. Tony Pro was convicted after trial in Kingston, New York, in the Castellito matter. Both he and Konigsberg were sentenced to life imprisonment. Tony Pro died in prison of a heart attack at the age of 71.
See also:
Hoffa, James R
.
Public Enemies: Organized Crime mobsters
When the average person is asked to name the most famous "public enemies" in the world of crime, the names he mentions are Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, Ma Barker and the like. Among this group, despite the constant raging against them by the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, Machine Gun Kelly never fired his weapon at anyone and Ma Barker was never so much as charged with a crime.
Page 301
The press-concious Hoover stole the idea from others and launched a publicity campaign in the early 1930s to dub a group of criminals, mostly little more than armed stickup men, the Public Enemies. At the time, Prohibition was ending and the old bootleg mobs were forming the new nationwide criminal syndicate. Apparently fearful and certainly uninterested in tangling with such major mobsters, Hoover concentrated his wrath on minor criminals, cloaking them in the mantle of master criminal. For instance, while John Dillinger killed at most one person and his gang about nine others, Al Capone in Chicago was responsible for no less than 500 to as many as 1,000 murders. Had the full energies of Hoover's agency been turned on the major menace of the Capone-Luciano-Lansky organizations, it has been argued by many crime experts, organized crime today would be far less effective and pervasive, if not totally eliminated.
The first use of the term
public enemies
, before it was appropriated by Hoover, was made by Frank J. Loesch, a venerable corporation counsel and civic leader in Chicago and a founding member and longtime head of the Chicago Crime Commission. He compiled a first list of 28 Chicago public enemies"persons who are constantly in conflict with the law"in an effort to counter the romantic aura with which certain elements of the most sensational press of the city and nation had endowed gangsters. Loesch's list included
1.
Al Capone
2.
Tony "Mops" Volpe
3.
Ralph Capone
4.
Frankie Rio
5.
Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn
6.
James Belcastro
7.
Rocco Fanelli
8.
Lawrence "Dago Lawrence" Mangano
9.
Jack Zuta
10.
Jake Guzik
11.
Frank Diamond
12.
George "Bugs" Moran
13.
Joe Aiello
14.
Edward "Spike" O'Donnell
15.
Joe "Polock Joe" Saltis
16.
Frank McErlane
17.
Vincent McErlane
18.
William Neimoth
19.
Danny Stanton
20.
Myles O'Donnell
21.
Frank Lake
22.
Terry Druggan
23.
William "Klondike" O'Donnell
24.
George "Red" Barker
25.
William "Three-Fingered Jack" White
26.
Joseph "Peppy" Genero
27.
Lee Mongoven
28.
James "Fur" Sammons
Almost any member of this list would makeHoover's "public enemies" look like boy scouts.
See also:
Loesch, Frank J
.
Purple Gang: Infamous Detroit mob
One of the most feared bootlegging mobs during Prohibition, the Detroit Purple Gang was basically an allJewish outfit. The gang dominated the city's criminal activities and was responsible for at least 500 killingsa record that, proportionally speaking, exceeded the tally of the Capone mob in Chicago. Its leaders, Benny and Joe Bernstein and Harry and Louis Fleisher, maintained close ties to the Cleveland Syndicate and such stalwarts as Moe Dalitz and Chuck Polizzi. Detroit was of pivotal importance during Prohibition because it served as a funnel for illegal booze shipped across the border from Canada.
The Purples engaged in competition with another mob, the Little Jewish Navy, and to aid them in their killings, they imported Yonnie Licavoli and his gunners from St. Louis. Licavoli and his brothers, cousins and friends in time formed what would be called the Licavoli family of the Mafia in Detroit. Licavoli did not ever challenge the authority of the Purples, whose other gunmen were considered so proficient that, according to a leading theory, three of themGeorge Lewis and brothers Phil and Harry Keywellwere borrowed by Al Capone to help carry out the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929. The Purples did not limit themselves to booze running, but accumulated additional millions in jewelry robberies, hijacking and extortion. They were also involved in drugs and were one of the prime suppliers to jazz musicians of the 1920s.
When the national crime syndicate was formed in the 1930s under the aegis of Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, the Purples were invited to join. No coercion was usedthe gang was considered too bloody and powerful to be subjected to force. However, the Purples accepted, disbanded their own organization and took an important role in the crime cartel's far-flung gambling activities, often providing any "muscle" that was needed.
The name of the Purple Gang was too colorful to be allowed to die, and years later any really tough character from Detroit was quickly labeled by the press as being a member of the Purple Gang.
See also:
Purple Gang, Modern
.

Other books

Throwaway by Heather Huffman
The Giants and the Joneses by Julia Donaldson
The Last Kings by C.N. Phillips
Whistle Pass by KevaD
Soul Intent by Dennis Batchelder
Wild Embrace by Nalini Singh
Playing by Heart by Anne Mateer