The Mafia Encyclopedia (109 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 320
with the insurance money. Because the insurance company was suspicious of young Sacco, he quit school in the seventh grade and ran away from home, never again contacting his family, although he did arrange through the years to have money sent to them.
Using the name of Johnny Roselli, he hooked up with the Capone Mob and continued to grow within the mob after Capone's fall. In the late 1930s Roselli represented Chicago's interests in Hollywood and extorted $1 million from movie companies by threatening to have unions under his control slow production, causing studio costs to soar. Sentenced along with a number of Chicago crime figures, Roselli did three years for the caper but returned to Hollywood still a powerhouse. He even produced a number of crime films, including
He Walked By Night
, in which the law always triumphednot over organized crime but rather over 'one-wolf-type criminals. If he'd had his druthers, Roselli would have given up his life of crime to become a maker of Hollywood B-movies. His idea of the top man in Hollywood was Brynie Foy, known at Warners as the "Keeper of the B's."
Roselli clearly loved the Hollywood life and even made it into the fabled Friars Club. It was an event to remembered by other Friars. In 1968 Roselli and four confederates swindled a number of Hollywood personalitiesincluding singer Tony Martin and comedians Phil Silvers and Zeppo Marxout of $400,000 in a crooked card game. It was a typical Chicago Outfit caper, involving peepholes in the ceiling so that observers could see the players' cards and signal a confederate in the game via equipment he wore in a girdle under his clothes. That Roselli could take Zeppo Marx in such a scam was a tribute to his ability, since Zeppo was one of Hollywood's shrewdest crooked gamblers.
None of this altered Roselli's role in Las Vegas as Chicago's rep, and it was a credit to his efforts that such major operators as Moe Dalitz and Meyer Lansky never shorted the outfit.
Roselli was linked along with his superior, Chicago boss Sam Giancana, with Operation Mongoose, the socalled CIA-Mafia plot to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro. Castro had tossed the underworld out of Cuba, and the Lansky-Chicago forces were out a fortune from their shuttered Havana casinos. Giancana figured that killing Castro would open up Cuba once more. Roselli was perhaps a bit more sanguine. He realized the plot would get nowhere and like certain other Mafia leaders, such as Tampa's Santo Trafficante Jr., used Mongoose as a scam to swindle the CIA.
In 1975 Roselli testified at a special hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee five days after Giancana had been murdered in his Oak Park, Illinois, home. Giancana had also been subpoenaed, but his death prevented his testimony. There was considerable speculation that Giancana was killed because certain elements, either in the underworld or in the CIA, did not want the scamming of the intelligence agency known. Roselli solved his testimony problem by talking much and saying little. He disclosed some details of Mongoose, and said he looked upon his efforts as a "patriotic" expression of his love for his country. He said that plots involving poison pills and poisoned cigars had failed. He did not tell the senators that no poison ever went to Cuba, that instead the mobsters had simply flushed it down the toilet. They did not do the same with CIA funds given them to organize the various plots with their supposed Cuban allies.
After his CIA testimony, Roselli's lawyer urged him to hire a bodyguard, but Roselli laughed it off. He had done long service to the mob and felt he was safe going into retirement in Plantation, Florida. "Who would want to kill an old man like me?" he asked. Privately, however, Roselli was talking about the way the CIA had been conned. He was known to have become friendly with columnist Jack Anderson. What he might have been saying was probably discomforting to some people.
In late July Roselli was asphyxiated, and his body sealed in a 55-gallon oil drum. Holes were punched in the drum and heavy chains coiled around it to weigh it down, and the drum was dumped into Florida waters. The idea was to make the drum stay down indefinitely, but gases caused by the decomposing body brought the drum to the surface.
"Deep Six for Johnny,"
Time
magazine headlined its full-page story on Roselli. The magazine noted: "Roselli was one of a breed that is dying offusually by murder."
See also:
Barrel Murders; CIA-Mafia Connection; Giancana, Sam; Operation Mongoose
.
Rothstein, Arnold (18821928): Criminal mastermind
Today Arnold Rothstein is remembered by students of crime as the socalled mastermind of baseball's worst gambling disgrace, the Black Sox scandal of 1919 when the World Series was fixed. Rothstein was a multimillionaire gambler, but he was much more than that. Indeed, he stands as the spiritual father of American organized crime.
He was known by many nicknamesMr. Big, the Big Bankroll, the Brain, the Man Uptown, the Fixer. All were accolades to his importance in the world of crime, to his connections with the underworld and the upperworld of police, judges and politicians. Although he operated strictly in the background, Rothstein may well have been the most important criminal of his era. At various times he financed the criminal activitiesin
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fact, usually masterminded themof the likes of Waxey Gordon, Dutch Schultz and Legs Diamond. He was the early tutor of Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello and Johnny Torrio. (Torrio never returned on a visit to New York from Chicago without having discussions with Rothstein.) It is generally acknowledged that Torrio, and later Lansky and Luciano, learned from Rothstein the joys of forming alliances, regardless of ethnic considerations, not only with underworld confederates, but also, above all, with those who could perform the political fix. The dollar, Rothstein pointed out, had only one nationality, one religionprofit.
Rothstein became known to all as the man who had influence everywhere and could fix anything. He could clear virtually any illegitimate activity through his political and police contacts. During Prohibition, a later study showed, Rothstein intervened in literally thousands of bootlegging cases that went to court. Of a total of 6,902 liquor-related Rothstein-era cases, 400 never even came to trial while another 6,074 ended in dismissal. Most of the credit had to go to Rothstein whose credentials with Tammany leader Charles Murphy were impeccable. Rothstein's record in prostitution and gambling cases was equally as impressive.
Rothstein and Murphy altered the way graft was collected in New York. Up until their time the standard procedure was to use police as major graft collectors, allowing the politicians to remain somewhat aloof from the process. This was possible when the politicians, the hub of all illegal activities, bought the criminals and used them as they wished. With the new wealth of Prohibition, the central power shifted to the criminalsand above all, Rothstein. He could buy the political leaders, and insisted on direct payoffs to eliminate possible police defections. The police got separate graft but they now became secondary to the power of the criminals and the politicians. When the criminals wanted changes in police procedures, the politicians saw that those changes were made. Is it any wonder that Rothstein in 1925 served as the inspiration for Meyer Wolfsheim in
The Great Gatsby
and later on for Nathan Detroit in the musical
Guys and Dolls
?
The Rothstein style was to hang back, to remain in the background while still seizing a major portion of all loot. Prohibition, he realized, was too immense a field to be dominated by one man or even one gang, so he moved himself into the safest part of the racket, importation, the area most insulated from arrest. Through aides, he made agreements with European distilleries for supplies. In that fashion he made himself immune to gangland assassinationif he was killed, the flow of good liquor would slow. He was simply too valuable to be allowed to die. (This was a lesson Meyer Lansky learned well, especially in gambling and the movement of money. The Mafia's later dependence on Lansky allowed him to move freely among the various gangs, indeed to be recognized as the ultimate power. That "Meyer is a Jew and has no vote" was a fiction maintained in the lower ranks of crime. The fact was that when the "Little Man" spoke, all the mobsters listened.)
Arnold Rothstein's importance in criminal history is frequently underestimated.
Remembered as a gambler and fixer in baseball's Black Sox scandal of 1919, he was
actually the bankroller and spiritual father of American organized crime.
Rothstein learned how to keep the various gangs content by apportioning supplies among them. By the mid-1920s, he had already started tapering off his interest in the booze racket, realizing Prohibition had to end some day. He was already laying the groundwork for a number of criminal empiresgambling, labor racketeering, diamond and drug smuggling. In fact, Rothstein was thinking in terms of a national syndicate. Lansky and Luciano, who instinctively leaned that way, heard his message clearly.
But Rothstein, the Brain, self-destructed. Gambling obsessed him and he bet compulsively. He made huge bets, won some and lost more. In 1928, Rothstein played in one of Broadway's most fabulous poker games, one that lasted nonstop from September 8 to 10. At the end, Rothstein was out $320,000. That Rothstein could lose shocked the wise guys of Broadway, but not nearly as much as the fact that Rothstein welshed on the debt. He declared the game had been fixed.
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On November 4, Rothstein was murdered at the Park Central Hotel. The prime suspects were the two California gamblers who had beat him in the game, Nigger Nate Raymond and Titanic Thompson. The case was never solved, and there have long been reports that the debt was merely a cover for the real motive of the murder, that an ambitious Dutch Schultz saw a chance to increase his own empire vastly by knocking off Rothstein.
Ironically, no suspicion ever rubbed off on Lansky and Luciano who profited most by Rothstein's demise. It was they who moved on his ideas for a new syndicate. They developed close ties with labor racketeers Louis Lepke and Gurrah Shapiro, who in turn reached understandings with Schultz and other Jewish gangsters. And they gained the support of the young mafiosi and other Italian criminals who eventually purged the oldline Mafia leaders Joe the Boss Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano.
Lansky and Luciano became the fathers of the national crime syndicate, and in many respects Rothstein's pivotal role was forgotten. Instead, his name is more widely recalled in constant retellings of the Black Sox scandal, and how he was alleged to have planned the fix by bribing several players of the Chicago White Sox to throw the World Series to the underdog Cincinnati Reds. Supposedly, Rothstein financed the great baseball betting coup through ex-featherweight boxing champion Abe Atell, although no firm evidence supports this. It is known that he was approached for financial backing, and it is also known that, at least at first, he withheld agreement. Rothstein probably didn't put up any money, realizing the deal was so good it would go through with or without him. So why should he pay out bribe money? Instead, Rothstein remained aloof, simply bet $60,000 on his own on Cincinnati, and won $270,000. That version surely reflects the
real
Arnold Rothstein.
See also:
Garment lndurstry Rackets; Lepke, Louis; Luciano, Charles "Lucky"; Orgen, Jacob "Little Augie"; Seven Group; Shapiro, Jacob "Gurrah
."
Rum Row: Bootleg fleet
Within months of the onset of Prohibition on January 16, 1920, organized crime had set up floating liquor markets, or "Rum Rows," all the way down the Atlantic coast and along the Gulf of Mexico. Flotillas of rumrunners rode the swells just beyond the three-mile limit, where they were safe from Coast Guard interference, and awaited the arrival of small speedboats belonging to bootleggers who figured they could load up with booze and outrace a government cutter to shore.
U.S. Coast Guard ambushes small boat trying to
bring booze ashore From "Rum Row."
Eventually these fleets stood off Boston, New York, Norfolk, Savannah, Tampa, Mobile, New Orleans and Galveston, but the most important Rum Row stretched from Maine down to New Jersey. European goods, especially Scotch, were unloaded here, as well as huge quantities of liquor from Canada.
Easily the most famous rumrunner of the day was the founder of the New England/Mid-Atlantic Rum Row, Captain William McCoy, whose goods were always first-rate and unadulteratedthus both he and his contraband liquor became known as "The Real McCoy." McCoy preferred serving the New York area because that was where the money was. One of his prime customers was Joe Adonis, who handled the imports for the Broadway Mob headed by himself, Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky. The Broadway Mob supplied good whiskey to all the speakeasies in Manhattan, and while it was common for some importers to duel with the government gunboats known as rumchasers, the Adonis fleet seemed for some reason to have less trouble than others. Part of this good fortune appears attributable to Frank Costello who was already functioning as a fixer for the mob.
Rum Rows, which included every type of vessel afloat from old fishing boats to luxury cruisers and yachts, remained an embarrassment to law enforcement for the life of Prohibition, strikingly visible confirmation that Prohibition was too profitable and served too many customers to ever be enforceable.

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