The Mafia Encyclopedia (104 page)

Read The Mafia Encyclopedia Online

Authors: Carl Sifakis

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

BOOK: The Mafia Encyclopedia
9.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

 

Page 302
Purple Gang, Modern
A new Purple Gang evolved in New York City in the late 1970s, taking its name from the legendary Detroit Purple Gang of Prohibition infamy. It would take quite a collection of deadly mobsters to live up to such a fabled moniker, but the newer-look Purples, say authorities, justify the accolade. In fact, the new Purples have often been called New York's sixth crime family, deserving of all the angry attention of the five established mafioso outfits.
All quite youngin their 20s or 30sthe new Purples graduated from "gofer" positions for established narcotics traffickers to become, says the Drug Enforcement Administration, a criminal organization with an "enormous capacity for violence" and a "lack of respect for other members of organized crime." Small by comparison to the established families, the new Purples number somewhat over 100. Membership is restricted to young Italian Americans who were raised on Pleasant Avenue between 110th and 117th Streets in East Harlemstill an underworld stronghold where deals are constantly struck between mafioso narcotics traffickers and the new black gangs that have taken over the street operations in the drug racket.
Money-hungry, these youths, almost all graduates from youth gangs, are feared by the underworld and police authorities as well. There is considerable worry that the Purple Gang will eventually start a shooting war against both the Mafia families and the blacks. Members of the gang talk openly of having control of all drug trafficking on the East Coast. Indeed, as long as the Purples remain on the scene, it is presumptuous, and in fact laughable, to talk of an emerging "Black Mafia." The Purples seem also to be establishing ties with the Latino drug traffickers, and they may also prove the masters of the so-called Latin, or Cuban, Mafia as well.
In the late 1970s the
New York Times
traced the activities of the gang and found it was dominant in the large-scale distribution of drugs in the South Bronx and Harlem. The Purples were also pulling muscle jobs for two crime families' extortion activities, as well as carrying out the murders of at least 17 victims, including two police plants. Supplementing their drug activities, the Purples are deeply involved in international gunrunning and are alleged to have direct ties to certain Latin American terrorists.
Page 303
R
Raft, George (18951980): Movie actor and gangster pal
Whether George Raft or Frank Sinatra was more often linked with the Mafia is a tough call.
A small-time hood turned successful movie gangster, Raft's first association with a big-time hoodlum was with the charismatic Bugsy Siegel. Bugsy had been sent to Los Angeles in the late 1930s by the East Coast crime families to develop their national gambling empire and to lay the groundwork for their eventual colonization of Las Vegas. Siegel was taken with Raft's portrayal of the coin-tossing gangster in
Scarface
, a character Siegel viewed as the mirror image of himself. The pair became inseparable, seducing starlets by night and betting the horses heavily at Santa Anita racetrack by day.
When Siegel opened the glittering Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas in December 1946, Raft was an honored guest and reciprocated by greeting other movietown figures. But the Flamingo was an instant flop, showing no sign of its future glory. Siegel, who had skimmed off hundreds of thousands of dollars of mob money advanced for construction purposes, was murdered.
Raft took the demise of his favorite gangster very hard, so hard, in fact, that a tenderhearted Meyer Lansky, who rather obviously had had to give his okay for the Siegel hit, felt he had to do something to ease the actor's grief. He soothed Raft with a job as a sort of superior toastmaster at his Capri Hotel in Cuba. It was the beginning of Raft's career as a super shill for the mob, an occupation that grew as his movie career faded.
Raft proved enormously important to the mob, far more than his compensation reflected. When the mob built the Sands in Las Vegas, Joseph "Doc" Stacher, one of Lansky's closest associates, saw the importance of the Hollywood connection. As he later explained in retirement in Israel: "To make sure we'd get enough top-level investors, we brought George Raft into the deal and sold Frank Sinatra a nine percent stake in the hotel."
Inevitably, Raft was marked as an associate of underworld characters. Accordingly, the authorities began to create some domestic problems. Even the Communist authorities made it hot when, in the case of Havana, Raft lost out as Castro came to power and routed the Lansky-Batista combination that ran the casinos. In the 1960s, the elderly Raft became a star of the London scene, playing the operator of the Colony Sports Club, a sort of Rick in a real-life
Casablanca
. (Raft ironically was the pre-Bogart choice for the part).
The Colony was a plush place, controlled by Lansky and his frequent associate in casino operations, Dino Cellini. It quickly became the "in" place to go for English and visiting society. Raft was always in the limelight, appearing each evening in a tuxedo, meeting people, signing autographs, and dancing with awed women.
Later Raft would confide to friends that his days at the Colony were the happiest of his life. As he put it to informer Vinnie Teresa, "Vinnie, those were the best days I've had in years. I had a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, beautiful women with me every night, a beautiful penthouse apartment in the Mayfair area, and five hundred dollars a week. Who lived better than I did? What did I care about what was going on in the casino every night or who was involved? I never did anything wrong." Whether Raft did anything wrong or not finally meant
Page 304
little to British authorities, who decided he was fronting for mobsters. Making him the scapegoat, they deported him from the country.
After that Raft tried for shill jobs both at home and abroad, but in due course he was subjected to the same sort of official disapproval. Raft in time became poison to the mob, and eventually he was finished as both an actor and a casino shill.
Raft had made millions for the mob, and Teresa was later to call him ''the best investment Lansky and Cellini made'' in England. With a recommendation like that, it was perhaps inevitable that Raft died broke.
See also:
Colony Sports Club
.
Ragen, James M. (18811946): Gambling kingpin and mob murder victim
After Prohibition, gambling was embraced by the national crime syndicate as a principal source of revenue. But from 1940 to 1946, after the conviction and imprisonment of publisher Moe Annenberg, the mob lost control of the horse-racing wire business. Annenberg had been essentially a creation of the Chicago Al Capone/New York Luciano-Lansky-Costello axis, as organized crime switched from booze to gambling as the prime source of revenue.
The mobsters were in disarray, outmaneuvered by James Ragen, who skillfully converted himself into the most powerful figure in gambling in the country.
Ragen had come up the hard way in the Chicago underworld, having started out as a circulation slugger for the
Chicago Tribune
during the era of the great newspaper circulation wars, when Max Annenberg, Moe's older brother, was circulation manager. Ragen learned the art of violence with a host of future big criminals, including Dion O'Banion, Walter Steveris, Frankie and Vince McErlane, Mossy Enright and Tommy Maloy, men who later turned Chicago into a bloody murderground. Ragen had the distinction of outliving most of his fellow students of mayhem while at the same time maintaining a certain independence from the Capone mobsters.
The federal government had mistakenly thought that the imprisonment of Annenberg in 1940 and the dismantling of his Nation-Wide News Service would be a crippling blow to illegal gambling around the nation. However, Ragen moved quickly to take advantage of the syndicate's plan to lay low for a time. His Continental Press Service met the urgent need of bookmakers and became the dominant racing wire in the nation, providing the latest results from dozens of tracks directly to thousands of bookie joints.
Finally the mob started pressuring Ragen to come in with them, even dangling a handsome buy-out price for his business. Ragen had been in the Chicago underworld too long not to know the score. He told friends he knew how the mob worked and that if he sold out, there was no way he would be allowed to live to collect his payoff. Faced with Ragen's intransigence, the mob set up TransAmerican Publishing under the murderous Bugsy Siegel and forcibly took over the lush California market, charging bookies $100 a day for the necessary racing information. Ragen, however, maintained a tight grip on the rest of the country, and it soon was obvious things could never change as long as Ragen lived. Such details were no problem to the mob. In June 1946 Ragen was cut down by a fusillade of bullets from a passing car. Remarkably, he survived and was taken to a hospital where he was put under 24-hour police guard.
From his hospital bed, Ragen, no believer in omerta, charged the mob with trying to kill him off. It was not the smart thing to do in 1946 Chicago. In September Ragen died, supposedly of his wounds; however, an autopsy showed death resulted from mercury poisoning. The mob had had no trouble penetrating Ragen's police protection, and his death was officially listed as a gang murder. Several mob big shots were quizzed in the case, including Greasy Thumb Guzik, but the final results were the usual ones for Chicago: no arrests, no convictions, one body. And the way was open for the mob to grow fat on ever-increasing gambling profits.
See also:
Annenberg, Moses L
.
Ragen's Colts: Chicago Irish gang
The recalcitrant Irish gangsters were the most reluctant to join with other ethnic gangs in what was to become organized crime in America. Many important Irish gangsters, unable to conform to the syndicate mold, had to die. There were Mad Dog Coil in New York and Dion O'Banion in Chicago, to name two. But some Irish gangsters were finally tamed and joined up, their descendants today important allies of mafiosi in many cities.
In Chicago Al Capone's toughest chore was making peace with Irish gangsters. He was far more successful with the Jews, the Poles and even the blacks. There were times when he must have felt sure that Ragen's Colts were a lost cause.
The Colts were at the pinnacle of their power in the first two decades of the century, dominating the South Side of Chicago around the stockyards. Described as racists, jingoists, political sluggers, bootleggers and murderers, they, like many other gangs in early Chicago, started out as a baseball team. Frank Ragen, the star pitcher, was also the star political operator of the outfit which was officially called Ragen's Athletic and Benevolent Association.
Page 305
Ragen soon proved invaluable to the Democratic Party in the city, offering Colts' firepower and muscle in campaigns. Many members of the city council and state legislature owed their election to the gang. "When we dropped into a polling place," one Colt bragged, "everybody else dropped out."
By 1902 the gang numbered 160, and just six years later it adopted a motto, "Hit Me and You Hit 2,000," which was probably only a slight exaggeration. Over the years the list grew of aldermen, sheriffs, police brass, country treasurers and numerous other officeholders beholden to the gang. Even Ragen himself took a job as a city commissioner. But, as always, the most notable members of the gang were accomplished criminals. Among such worthies were Gunner McPadden with a list of homicides to his credit so large that no one, McPadden included, could make an accurate count; Dynamite Brooks, a saloon keeper with the reputation of killing when he got drunk; Harry Madigan, another saloonman and owner of the Pony Inn in Cicero, who was charged with several kidnappings and assaults during various elections; Stubby McGovern, a deadly hit man who bragged he never failed in an assignment; Danny McFall, who despite murdering two business competitors was named a deputy sheriff; Yiddies Miller, a boxing referee and notorious racist, who denounced the Ku Klux Klan as a bunch of "nigger lovers"; and Ralph Sheldon, a fearless bootlegger and hijacker said to "take no prisoners."
Besides providing political muscle duty and operating a number of rackets, the Colts were always ready to provoke a race riot, starting one in 1919 that nearly destroyed the city. A black youth swimming off a South Side beach strayed into white, segregated waters. Bathing Colts promptly stoned and drowned him. The Colts then took to the streets baiting blacks. After nightfall they roared into the Black Belt, shooting blacks on sight, dynamiting, and looting shops and homes and setting others on fire. Black veterans of the war seized up their service weapons and fired back. Rampaging blacks in turn overturned streetcars and automobiles carrying whites and destroyed property. The rioting continued for four days before finally wearing itself out, leaving 20 whites and 14 blacks dead, with another 1,000 burned, injured and maimed.
With the onset of Prohibition even the Ragen Colts had no time for organized bigotry. They shifted into bootlegging. Ralph Sheldon formed a splinter group which had little interest in making or importing booze, much preferring to hijack the wares of other gangs, a habit not conducive to peaceful racketeering.
Still, Capone showed extreme tenderness dealing with the Colts although he was forced to do battle with them, seeing the possibility of winning their cooperation, something he had consistently failed to do with the forces of other Irish mobsters like Dion O'Banion and Spike O'Donnell. Eventually most of the Colts, even Sheldon who for a time had shifted alliances from one group to another and would do so again, joined the combination. Today the descendants of the original wild Colts remain important figures with organized crime.
Rastelli, Philip (19181991): Boss of Bonanno family
A mafioso famed for having one of the more involved marriages in the underworld, Phil "Rusty" Rastelli was the boss of the Bonanno family in the early 1970s, then stepped down when the violent Carmine Galante was released from federal prison. After Galante was murderedpolice have often linked Rastelli with the 1979 assassinationhe resumed the top spot. After his return to power there were steady reports of rumbles against his rule, but then there have been rumbles in the Bonanno family ever since Joe Bonanno was forced into retirement in the late 1960s.
Rastelli probably found Mafia activities tame compared to his married life. His wife Connie was gunned down in 1962 after she'd informed federal agents that Rastelli was a drug trafficker. Before that, federal law enforcement sources have indicated, Connie had been a big help in her husband's activities, very unusual for a Mafia wife. She was described as driving getaway cars during heists, keeping books for her husband on gambling operations and even running abortion mill rackets set up by Rastelli.
Rastelli was not always entranced with his wife. Once, on the lam in Canada, he took up with a young woman. On finding out, Connie shot right up to Canada and proceeded to clobber her young rival senseless. She also informed Rastelli that if he fooled around any more she'd kill him.
Rastelli apparently operated under the assumption that no wife would really mess with a "made" mafioso and continued his straying ways after he got back to New York. Connie promptly cornered him on a Brooklyn street and emptied a gun at him, hitting him twice, but not wounding him seriously. After that, RasteUi thought it best if he didn't go back to his wife at all, but Connie was not the sort to be neglected. She warned him she'd talk to the law about his activities.
As far as the mob was concerned, Mrs. Rastelli had overstepped her bounds. She was visited by Big John Ormento, a sinister crime leader, and warned to stop making such threats. But Connie's threats weren't idle. She went to the feds and started talkingat the very time the government was investigating Ormento and several other important mafiosi about narcotics activities.

Other books

36 Exposures by Linda Mooney
Inez: A Novel by Carlos Fuentes
Blood Orange Soda: Paranormal Romance by Larranaga, James Michael
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
The Poison Throne by Celine Kiernan
Shattered Emotions by Carrie Ann Ryan
The Power by Colin Forbes