The Mafia Encyclopedia (127 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 376
A pajama-clad Capone charged over from the Hawthorne Inn next door where he had been sleeping, and screamed at the minister, "This is the last raid you'll ever pull!"
The young minister stared at Capone through his pince-nez and said, "Who is this man?"
Capone identified himself, and Hoover replied, "I thought it was someone like that, more powerful than the president of the United States."
To another raider Capone screamed in frustration: "I own the place!" It turned out to be a most injudicious remark.
Capone goons then struck back. They broke the nose of a raider, a real estate man, with a black jack. Another man was thrown to the ground and beaten, all without interference by the sheriff's men. A few days later a member of the Citizens' Association was shot in his garage and left for dead. He needed a month in the hospital to recover.
Capone's terror-tactic response did not discourage further vigilante attacks on his organization, and taking heart from the Citizens' Association, residents of Forest View set fire to the Stockade, a 60-girl brothel, the largest Capone vice operation in the county. Frantic Capone gangsters sounded fire alarms and several nearby fire brigades responded. However, instead of stopping the fire, they merely prevented the flames from reaching neighboring homes. An irate gangster demanded that a firefighter turn his hose to the main fire and was told dryly: "Can't spare the water."
After the raid, amused citizens read the angry comments of the Capone forces condemning the lack of law and order in Forest View and demanding an investigation.
The vigilante raids were successful. Although many mob operations were back in place within 24 hours and with appropriate police protection, Capone nevertheless learned that he was better advised to back away from blatant prostitution activities in stiffnecked suburban areas. It was a lesson the crime syndicate learned well in later years.
Ironically, the illegal vigilante activities against Capone were to cause him great legal problems later when the government moved against him on income tax evasion charges. The government not only proved that the Hawthorne Smoke Shop was a huge moneymaker, but also produced members of the West Suburban Citizens' Association who had heard Capone utter those incriminating words during the raid: "I own the place!"
See also:
Stockade, The
.
Page 377
W
Walk/Talk: Hob effort to avoid eavesdropping
For years before his conviction, it was a common sight on New York television to see John Gotti and some of his cohorts "going for a walk" for several blocks from his headquarters at the Ravenite club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. The technique, dubbed "walk/talk" by the boys, had them talking in true gangster style with lips barely moving. All this was to avoid being overheard and also to frustrate lip-reading experts from picking up their conversations. The Gotti forces understood their headquarters itself was assuredly bugged, so they opted for walk/talks to solve their dilemma. It was wasted effort. The FBI had not simply bugged the club but had stationed cameras on surrounding streets with bugs and zoom lenses. And that was only the beginning of the woes for the Gotti forces.
One time after the Gotti parade had gone on its usual walk/talk route, going perhaps two blocks, turning left for another two or more blocks, then right a bit further, they felt they were now safely away from the Ravenite area bugging. But they were not. Sammy "the Bull" Gravano happened to peer into a partially opened van parked on a street. The Bull noticed the man inside was looking at a television screen. And there was the Gorti paradelive! Gravano rushed to inform Gotti and the information even rattled the dapper don. "How could that be?" he said.
A couple of Gotti's musclemen hustled over to harass the snoop, demanding to know who he was. The man turned off the screen and said tersely, "You know who I am."
Sammy joined in the needling, asking if they would be shown on TV. The law enforcement man needled back, "All I can tell you is we have very sophisticated equipment," and he drove off.
Back at the Ravenite, Gotti announced a counterplot. From then on they would get into a car and drive some 20 blocks away and get out (they assumed their vehicle was bugged as well). Then, said Gorti, "We'll just get out and start walking and go to different spots every day."
It was not known if the tactic frustrated the FBI, but Gotti dropped the routine after only a few times. It was too much trouble, apparently. Undoubtedly it also reflected the level of concentration of the mobsters compared to that of the FBI. There was another factor: It was a blow to Gotti's vanity when suddenly he was not shown on TV that much, something the crime boss was very unhappy about. As Gravano explained, he "was falling in love with himself."
War of the Jews
Before modern organized crime could be established in America, it was necessary to bump off those Italian and Jewish gangsters who were not responsive to the notion of a national syndicate. In the case of the Italians, Lucky Luciano solved the problem, exterminating the leading Mustache Petes, old-line mafiosi who were set in their ways and incapable of cooperating with other ethnics, and often loathe even to ally themselves with mafiosi from other Sicilian villages. The Jews were the responsibility of Meyer Lansky, who not only brought Jewish gangsters into the fold, but also achieved for himself supremacy among his coreligionists. (Most already accepted his primacy, due to his obvious intellectual
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superiority and the muscle effectively supplied by his chief aide, Bugsy Siegel.)
Lansky's plan was opposed principally by Waxey Gordon, the bootleg king of Philadelphia. Both he and Lansky had been "brought up" by Arnold Rothstein, perhaps the finest criminal organizer of the 1920s, not illogically nicknamed "the Brain." After Rothstein's murder in 1928, ill feelings between Lansky and Gordon erupted. Gordon suspected, rightly, that Lansky (and Luciano) had frequently hijacked his liquor shipments while Lansky suspected, rightly, that Gordon sought to make deals with Luciano's enemies within the Mafia.
The feud turned bitter and violent and each side suspected the other, undoubtedly rightly, of several gang murders. Luciano for a time tried to act as peacemaker, but, by 1931, Lansky and Gordon had come to blows in what became known as the "War of the Jews."
Luciano realized that one or the other of the Jewish mob leaders would have to go, and that leader would not be Lansky. Just as Lansky had helped solve Luciano's Mustache Pete problems, Charley Lucky now took care of Lansky's. It was Luciano who decided the solution lay with the government. Internal Revenue was, at the time (1931), trying to levy tax evasion charges against Gordon, but their case was weak and sketchy. Luciano saw to it that all sort of incriminating documents reached officials. Gordon was sent to prison, never realizing the true cause of his woes.
Lansky saw that, with the end of Prohibition, the future in booze lay in controlling legitimate trafficking of imports. His natural rival would undoubtedly prove to be Charles "King" Solomon of Boston who handled much of the scotch whiskey entering the country. Solomon's murder took care of that detail, and shortly after that, Lansky's ethnic creation, the Jewish Mafia, finely honed by him in the early 1930s, became the dominant element in syndicate crime along with the Luciano forces.
The "War of the Jews" had ended in a momentous victory for organized crime.
See also:
Jewish Mafia
.
Waterfront Rackets
General corruption long proliferated along the waterfronts of most major American ports. Mafia gangsters, first successful in the rackets in New Orleans, ultimately made their biggest push on the New York-New Jersey docks, the country's largest and richest port area. Throughout the 19th century the docks had been the domain of Irish gangsters, but early in the 20th century warfare was almost constant between Irish and Italian gangs for dominance. The flood of Italian immigrants had altered the situation and forced the Irish to battle what they called the "dago invasion." But no matter which ethnic group maintained control of the waterfront, "service" was the same for customers trying to do businessthey always had to pay.
Slowly the Italians, under Paul Kelly (Paolo Vacarelli) and later under Albert Anastasia, Joe Adonis and Vince Mangano, gained dominance over the Irish. By 1925 with the murder of Pegleg Lonergan, the last important leader of the Irish White Hand Gang (hit in person, by no less a personage than a visiting Al Capone from Chicago), the Italian gangsters won the docks.
Joseph Ryan, president of the International Longshoremen's Association and with important connections in Tammany Hall, put the union's shakedown operations on an organized basis. Anastasia, Mangano, his crime family head, and Adonis, the payoff man for Brooklyn politicians and police, solidified the underworld's lock on the docks.
Shippers had to pay if they wished to guarantee their goods would be loaded or unloaded. Thefts of cargo ran into six figures monthly. Workers were bled for kickbacks to "hiring bosses" who decided who would work each day at dock "shape-ups." They were even billed monthly at a set fee for using a mob barber for haircuts, whether they got the cutting there or elsewhere. Loan-sharking became a way of life on the waterfront, and new workers were guided to syndicate agents working inside the union. Since the dockworker's occupation was seasonal, shylocking thrived. The loan sharks demanded a dockworker turn over his pay card as security. The worker had to present his pay card to collect his wages. In such cases the shylocks collected the wages and took out their interest before giving the hand the rest of his money. In a typical case a longshoreman borrowed $100 and for the next 36 weeks had $10 a week taken from his pay. "You," he was advised, "have only paid the interest up to now. You still owe the hundred." Hundreds of New York dockworkers were in the same boat.
By the late 1930s Anastasia and his brother Tough Tony Anastasio directly controlled six ILA locals in Brooklyn. One insurgent who dared to challenge their hold disappeared, his body turning up a year later in an Ohio lime pit. Another, Peter Panto, was taken for a ride, strangled and his body buried in a mob chickenyard graveyard in New Jersey.
The mob was frightened by no one in attempting to extract tribute. The
New York Daily News
in 1948 was harassed by a picket line set up around a ship from Canada bringing in newsprint. The pickets demanded $100,000 in tribute, and failing that, one dollar a ton on all newsprint shipped in. Since the newspaper at the time used 300,000 tons, the cost would have been sig-
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nificant. The newspaper broke the scheme by sending the ship to Philadelphia and then having the cargo shipped by freight to New York.
Vigorous prosecutions and reform and finally the death of Albert Anastasia in 1957 and his brother Tough Tony in 1963 brought some improvement to the docks. The eventual rise to power of Anthony M. Scotto, a young college-educated relative by marriage to Tony Anastasio, was said to represent the dawning of a new era on the waterfront under a "new breed labor leader."
However, in 1979 it was found that conditions had not changed all that much on the waterfront. Scotto, despite character-witness testimony from the governor and two New York City ex-mayors, was convicted on labor racketeering charges.
See also:
Anastasio, Anthony "Tough Tony"; Lovett, William "Wild Bill"; Scotto, Anthony M.; White Hand Gang
.
Weiss, Hymie (18981926): O'Banion Gang boss
There are those who have said that little Hymie Weissrather than the jolly Irish psychopath Dion O'Banionwas the toughest foe Al Capone ever faced in his battle to take over Chicago crime. The Polish-American Weiss, O'Banion's successor as leader of the intractable Irish North Side gang, stood up to the encroachments of the Johnny Torrio-Al Capone combination for several bloodstained years.
Hymie was a most devout cold-blooded murderer who hardly ever missed Mass. He would never dream of venturing forth without crucifix and rosary in his pocket. And he always carried a gun or two. With the latter, a cynical newsman observed, he "could perform his own version of the last rites on an enemy."
Crime experts credited Weiss with being the one responsible for building O'Banion's bootlegging empire. He was more thoughtful, forward-looking and resourceful than the often explosive O'Banion and relied far more on reason and bribery than "Deanie" ever did. He also left his mark in the criminal dictionary, having originated and christened the "one-way ride." In 1921, a gangster named Steve Wisniewski offended the O'Banions by hijacking one of their loaded beer trucks. O'Banion assigned Weiss to exact the proper vengeance. He invited Wisniewski for a drive along Lake Michigan, from which the hijacker never returned. As Weiss quaintly stated to friends, "We took Stevie for a ride, a one-way ride."
Weiss was born Earl Wajciechowski, which the family changed to Weiss shortly after they arrived in the United States from Poland. Befriending O'Banion in his teens, he became an accomplished burglar, car thief, safecracker and hired slugger in the newspaper wars and for labor unions. O'Banion's passion in that period for jewel theft and other safecrackings was swelled by Hymie, whom O'Banion called the "best soup artist in Chicago." With Prohibition, the boys moved into bootlegging, and Weiss, as O'Banion's right-hand man, showed saloon keepers the superiority of O'Banion's merchandise, explaining that there was not a bit of lead in the booze barrels, but there would be if they bought elsewhere.
Weiss wept openly and honestly at O'Banion's grave after the latter was murdered in November 1924. There was no doubt at all that Torrio and Capone had engineered Deanie's murder, even though Capone boldly showed up at the services, albeit with six bodyguards. Weiss kept the O'Banion gunners in check at the cemetery, having promised the Irishman's grieving widow there would be no further violence until after their beloved Deanie was planted. The Chicago police had 100 officers at the gravesite to ensure peace. Asked by a reporter if he held Capone responsible for O'Banion's assassination, Weiss threw up his hands in mock horror for the merest suggestion of that. "Blame Capone? Why Al's a real pal. He was Dion's best friend, too.
Then Weiss went back to plotting revenge.
For two months, Weiss maintained a cover of peace. (He even banished Two Gun Alterie from the gang because he kept publicly stating the gang was going to get Capone.) Finally on January 12, 1925, Weiss, Schemer Drucci and Bugs Moran tailed Capone's black limousine to a restaurant at State and 55th Streets. They drove slowly by and pumped 26 slugs into the vehicle. The chauffeur was wounded but two bodyguards in the back seat were unhurt. Capone, who had stepped into the restaurant seconds earlier, was unscathed. Then Hymie tried to get Johnny Torrio as he was riding in his limousine. The chauffeur and Torrio's dog were killed, but Torrio escaped with just two bullet holes in his gray fedora.
Torrio and Capone raced to knock off Weiss before he could strike again, but Weiss stayed out of sight. Then on January 24, 1925, Torrio was ambushed in front of his apartment house as he and his wife, Anna, returned from a Loop shopping trip. As Mrs. Torrio entered the apartment house lobby, Torrio followed with an armload of packages. Weiss and Bugs Moran jumped out of a passing blue Cadillac. Weiss downed Torrio with a sawed-off shotgun. Then Moran, wielding an army .45 automatic pistol, squeezed off two shots. Poised to apply the coup de gracea shot pointblank through the headMoran and Weiss instead fled at the sound of an approaching vehicle (which turned out to be a laundry truck). Torrio hovered near death in the hospital for more than two weeks. When he was

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