The Mafia Encyclopedia (124 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 364
199 years. Still, there were many persons, including several journalists, who considered him innocent of the Factor kidnapping, and took up the fight to clear him. In the 1950s Touhy at last won a rehearing on his original conviction. After a searching inquiry lasting 36 days, Federal Judge John H. Barnes ruled that Factor had not been kidnapped at all but had disappeared "of his own connivance." Judge Barnes had plenty of criticism to hand out to several quarters, especially to the FBI, the Chicago police, the state's attorney and the Capone Gang. It took a few more years of legal jockeying before Touhy was released. He collaborated on a book,
The Stolen Years
, about his ordeal. Just 23 days after Touhy won his freedom, he was gunned down as he was entering his sister's house in Chicago. As he lay dying, the former gangster muttered: "I've been expecting it. The bastards never forget."
The underworld had no doubts about who had knocked off Touhythe word was the price on his head was $40,000that it was the handiwork of longtime Capone mobster Murray "the Camel" Humphreys. Six months after the Touhy rubout, Humphreys bought 400 shares of First National Life Insurance Co. stock at $20 a share from John Factor, Touhy's old nemesis, and a man at the time eager to have an unsullied slate as he was attempting to operate in Las Vegas. Eight months later, Humphreys sold the shares back to Factor for $125 a share, turning a profit of $42,000 in capital gains. The IRS looked at the transaction and related details and declared that the $42,000 was clearly payment for services rendered and that it was subject to full income taxes.
"Terrible" Touhy lies dying after being shot. Released
from prison after doing 25 years on a mob frame-up, he said,
"I've been expecting it. The bastards never Forget."
The Humphreys-Factor financial dealings were not the only noteworthy matter occurring after Touhy's death. Early in 1960, a few months after the murder, retired FBI man Purvis committed suicide.
Trafficante, Santo (18861954): Tampa crime family boss
Like his predecessor, Ignacio Antinori, Florida Mafia chief Santo Trafficante Sr. was a shadowy force. Born in Sicily in 1886, he had lived in Tampa since the age of 18. By the 1920s, Trafficante had emerged at or near the top of the Tampa family. While he apparently shared power with old-liner Antinori, Trafficante cemented his relations with New York gangsters, including the rising star Lucky Luciano. Antinori instead allied himself with mafiosi in Kansas City and St. Louisnot exactly true power bases while the national crime syndicate, under Luciano and Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, was aborning in the early 1930s.
Trafficante deftly maneuvered himself into a position of authority and was probably the godfather of the Tampa family before Antinori was conveniently murdered in 1940. Trafficante did not alter Antinori's operations, which were primarily in the narcotics trade, especially with the French underworld of Corsica and Marseilles. But he greatly extended the family activities in gambling, bit by bit wresting away the major wagering empire of an independent West Florida operator, Charles Wall. Only when the ambitious Trafficante tried to move to Florida's lush east coast did he stumble, there facing Lansky, a man at the top of the syndicate and one who tolerated no competition in his own domain. Lansky could operate on any level, exercising control through the bribe or the bullet as needed. Musclewise, he commanded the gunners of his own old Bug and Meyer Gang, and the forces of the South Detroit Purple Gang, which had relocated, and had the aid of Moe Dalitz and the rest of the Cleveland Syndicate. Wisely, Trafficante headed back to the Gulf Coast.
Trafficante always wanted to make it big in Cuban casinos and dispatched his son, Santo Jr., to Havana in 1946 to operate mob casinos. However, even in Cuba, Lansky was top dog, maintaining top-echelon influence with the government so that Trafficante never was more than a junior partner on the island. With a careful eye to mob alliances, Lansky cut many other gangsters in on the Cuban actionthe New York mobs, the Chicago Outfit, the Dalitz Jewish mob,
etc.
Tampa made a lot of
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money in Cuba, but never achieved its ambition of making the island part of its own territory.
Still, Trafficante remained the power in his own bailiwick, especially after 1945 when he forced Wall to enter into a number of partnerships with the crime family. The fact that Wall suffered three attempts on his life seems to have been a potent convincer. Wall sought to ensure his own safety by keeping a sort of "insurance" document that revealed his dealings with Trafficante. The document kept him alive through his retirement in 1952, and, indeed, until 1954 when the elder Trafficante died. The following April Wall was found murdered in his home, savagely beaten and his throat slashed. With the elder Trafficante dead, Wall's insurance simply lapsed. The police got hold of the document in 1960 but by then there was nothing in it that could harm anyone living.
Santo Trafficante Jr. succeeded his father as boss of Tampa, one of the few times in the American Mafia when a son succeeded his father as godfather. It was a tribute to both Trafficantes and their ability to exercise power and terror to achieve their ends. For half a century Tampa was Trafficante country.
See also:
Trafficante, Santo, Jr
.
Trafficante, Santo, Jr. (19141987): Second generation Tampa godfather
Despite numerous stunted ambitions, Santo Trafficante Jr. was regarded as one of the most powerful of the Mafia bosses in the United States. He ruled the Tampa, Florida, family with an iron hand and, following a long Mafia tradition in that city, has kept it profitably involved in many standard organized crime activities, such as gambling, loan-sharking and, above all, narcotics dealing. Florida is regarded as the top entry point for drugs into this country.
Born in this country, he is one of the few sons of a Mafia don to succeed to the godfather position in a crime family. His father, Santo Trafficante Sr., was boss for many years until his death in 1954. The elder Trafficante bequeathed his crown to his son, and his offspring had the required cunning, forcefulness and determination to take it.
Through the years it has been difficult for law enforcement officials and other observers to gauge Trafficante's activities, although it has been well known that he, as much as his father, initiated the crime family's move into the gambling casino world of pre-Castro Cuba. Trafficante took up Cuban residence in 1946 and remained there until Fidel Castro ejected the mobs in 1959. After that Trafficante returned to Tampa and maintained the family's international ties in other fields. It has been alleged that in 1969 he journeyed to Saigon to make arrangements with the Corsicans there to ship Indochinese heroin unto the United States.
Santo Trafficante Jr. is one of the sons to inherit
his Father's mantle as godfather. He was wooed by
the CIA in its anti-Castro assassination debacle.
Trafficante was known to have been deeply involved in the CIA efforts to involve the underworld assassination attempts on Castro. Under pressure of a court order granting him immunity from prosecution, but threatening him with contempt if he refused to talk, Trafficante admitted to a congressional committee in 1975 that he had in the early 1960s recruited other mobsters, such as Johnny Roselli, to assassinate Castro. "It was like in World War II," he told the committee. "They tell you to go to the draft board and sign up. Well, I signed up." According to Trafficante, he and his fellow underworld conspirators considered "poison, planes, tanks. I'm telling you, they talk about everything." Eventually, he said, the plots all failed.
Others give a different interpretation of the facts, that Trafficante above all others took the CIA for a ride. This version, backed by Roselli's statements, holds that Trafficante had no intention of trying to get Castro, that poisons prepared by CIA master chemists were simply flushed down Florida toilets, and moneys from the CIA to be siphoned to Cubans on the island never left the United States. Some lawmen, and Roselli and his superior, Chicago boss Sam Giancana, ended up believing that Trafficante had even sold out to Castro. When Castro took power, he jailed Trafficante for a
Page 366
time, then suddenly released him and allowed him to leave with all his money. The theory holds that Trafficante became Castro's agent in Florida, and when the CIA plots developed, he probably reported everything to Cuban agents in the state. There has long been a theory among many researchers that the assassination of John E Kennedy was actually a Castro retaliation for the CIA-Mafia plots against him. In 1978 Trafficante testified once again before a House assassination committee on the Kennedy murder. This time the committee was especially interested in a sworn statement made to committee investigators by Cuban exile leader Jose Aleman that months before the Kennedy assassination, Trafficante had told him, "Kennedy's gonna get hit."
However, in public testimony, Aleman, clearly fearful of Trafficante's wrath, gave the comment a different interpretation. What the mob boss probably meant. Aleman said, was that Kennedy would be hit by Republican votes in 1964not bullets. It was the first and only time Trafficante was granted status with George Gallup as an expert on voter opinion, and for that matter it was virgin use of the term "hit" in mob lingo as being synonymous with "landslide."
Trafficante glided through the probe. He was one of (the most successful Mafia bosses in that respectsuspected of much but convicted of little until his death in 1987 of a heart ailment.
See also:
Bay of Pigs Invasion; CIA-Mafia Connection; Roselli, John
.
Trapman: Mob security specialist
As important to organized crime as hit men or respectable business fronts, the trapman provides rich mobsters with psychological well-beingvia readily accessible hiding places for funds. This security specialist builds traps or secret panels or hidden safes. Very few top mob leaders do not make use of such traps in either their homes and/or their offices.
Many years after Bugsy Siegel was murdered in Beverly Hills and his Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas sold to other interests, a hidden safe was found in the hotel floor. Siegel had undoubtedly used the safe to hide much of the operating and building funds he'd skimmed off and indeed hidden from his underworld partners. It was empty when discovered and since Bugsy had expired too suddenly to have emptied it himself, someone who knew about the trap must have done itor a trapman had talked to the mob.
Mobsters have a passionate dislike for safety deposit boxesat least, in this countryand not all of them truly trust the Swiss or Bahamian banks with all their wealth. They like to keep their funds close at hand, often in concealed safes which also hold vital records and arms caches. Their houses often contain phony walls or even panels in swimming pools. One important mobster who maintained a close financial arrangement with Meyer Lansky, the late Trigger Mike Coppola, was said to have kept at least $300,000 stashed in various traps in his Alton Road home in Miami Beach.
Mobsters demand very sophisticated traps, such as a trap built behind a trap, a fireproof trap inside a stove or furnace, or one with an opening mechanism that can only be triggered in another room located often on another floor than the actual trap.
The trapman tends to be a non-crime person, pledged to secrecy. Since only the trapman and his client know of the trap, the security specialist has two vital reasons to maintain his silence: He likes the high pay he gets for his work and, even more important, he wants to stay alive. If a trap is busted, the trapman is the logical suspect.
Top trapmen do work for non-syndicate clients as well. Doctors and dentists, notorious for saving their "non-taxable" $100 bills, also feel unsafe with bank safe deposit boxeswhich can be opened by tax authorities. Thus they prefer to keep traps in their homes.
Ethically, the only time a trapman is allowed to break his silence is if his client suddenly dies. Then, the trapman is allowed to come forward and reveal the trap to the dead man's associateseven to associates who may have conspired in the victim's death. If the trap is found to contain money, the trapman, under the mob's special code, is entitled to a percentage of the find.
Tresca, Carlo (18751943): Anti-Fascist and Mafia murder victim
Officially the 1943 murder of anti-Fascist, anti-Communist editor Carlo Tresca on New York's Fifth Avenue remains unsolved. Yet everyone in the Mafia and New York police knew who ordered the murder and who pulled the trigger. It was a Mafia operation all the way.
Tresca was the editor of
II Martello
and had known Benito Mussolini since 1904 when the latter was in his short-lived leftist youth. Now in exile in America Tresca was an implacable foe and caustic critic of Mussolini. In 1943, in wartime New York City, Tresca had little to fear from the Fascist dictator. Unfortunately for the 68-year-old syndicalist, Vito Genovese, who had fled to Italy before the war to avoid a murder charge, was now close to Mussolini. He was a big-money contributor to the Fascist cause and further ingratiated himself with Il Duce's son-in-law and foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, by keeping him supplied with narcotics.
When Mussolini raged about Tresca, "Genovese's countryman," for constantly attacking him, the gangster sought to ingratiate himself all the more by promising to

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