The Mafia Encyclopedia (130 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 386
meant that Hoover was thereby in Costello's pocket but it was perhaps a contributing factor of some importance in what may be called an "era of good feeling" between the FBI and organized crime that kept federal agents effectively out of the mob's business for some three and a half decades.
This hardly indicates that Winchell himself was less than honest. As the quintessential Broadwayite Winchell would have to have considered gambling among the more minor vices, and while he was always tender to Costello and some others of his ilk, he carried on a long feud with Lucky Luciano whom he considered a procurer, a drug peddler and a murderer. This took a bit of personal courage from Winchell who did not have such qualities in high supply. On one occasion he was afraid to leave his office at the
New York Daily Mirror
because he had offended underworld figures and finally did so only when gangster Owney Madden promised him safe escort.
Actually he was safe from Luciano's vengeance since the latter had established the credo among the new crime syndicate mobsters that under no circumstances was a newspaperman to be killed.
For a time Luciano resided at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel while Winchell had an apartment across the street at the St. Moritz. Luciano once said, "He found out I was movin' into his neighborhood and I heard he didn't like it too much. I said to myself, 'Fuck him.'" Frequently walking along Central Park South, Luciano would see Winchell and he'd wave to him and call, "Hi, neighbor." Luciano recalled, "It burnt him to a crisp."
Later, Luciano heard that a penthouse apartment was available at the St. Moritz and he decided to rent it. When Winchell heard the rumors, he advised the hotel's management that if it took in Luciano, Winchell would vacate and use his column to attack the hotel as a gangster hangout. The St. Moritz rejected Luciano.
Luciano was irate, especially since Winchell paid no rent there himself. "He got his apartment on the cuff for mentionin' the St. Moritz in his column once in a while," Luciano recalled later. "And he talked about
me
being a racketeer."
In the twilight of his journalistic career Winchell lost his contacts with the mob as the older gangsters he knew ended up dead or retired. At the same time his relationship with J. Edgar Hoover grew more distant. Hoover at the time was under pressure from Attorney General Robert Kennedy to start battling organized crime. Under those circumstances Walter Winchell probably became an embarrassment.
Wise Guys and Connected Guys
In a large crime family in which there are 250 or so"made" men, or "wise guys"official Mafia membersthere would be at least 10 times as many "connected guys"men associated with wise guys and taking orders from them. Most of these connected guys hope to become wiseguys, provided they meet the ethnic qualifications.
The made man or wise guy is a "soldier," the lowest rank among Mafia members, but this hardly indicates he is not a man of substantial means. Most soldiers in both the Gambino and Genovese families are believed to be millionaires in their own right. Actually, many connected guys are also as rich, or in some cases richer, than the wise guys.
The average connected guy must adhere to the same rules as the made guys. They take orders from their soldier sponsor, or if they are excellent producers, more likely they take them from the captain, or "capo," over that soldier. The connected guys must report on everything they do. They give "respect" to their superior, and they share the profits with him. (Despite all the talk in the mob about "respect," it is always measured more by the profits brought in than by anything else.) But the connected guy must behave with a certain decorum. The connected guy is not to argue or talk back to a wise guy or to raise a hand to one. ''When you are not a wiseguy,'' mobster Lefty Ruggiero told Joe Pistone, an FBI undercover agent who penetrated the mob as the fabled "Donnie Brasco," "the wiseguy is always right and you're always wrong. It don't matter what. Don't forget that, Donnie. Because no other wiseguy is gonna side with you against another wiseguy."
Some wise guys delude themselves about the reliability of this so-called rule. There is an exceptionand it is spelled m-o-n-e-y. As related by Henry Hill in
Wiseguy
, when Tommy DeSimone, connected to the Vario crew inside the Lucchese crime family, murdered Billy Bates in a private dispute, it was an imprudent act. Helping Tommy in the act was Jimmy Burke, the infamous Irish gangster and mastermind of the Lufthansa robbery, and Hill. Burke restrained Bates while DeSimone killed him. The three of them disposed of the victim's body. The catch was that Bates was a made guy with the Gambinos, but none of the trio was made.
Hill later stated, "If the Gambino people ever found out that Tommy had killed Billy, we were all dead."
In due course the Gambinos did find out. They went to Paul Vario, the head of the crew, and demanded the appropriate punishment. It was arranged with ingenious mob cunning. DeSimone was given the good news that he was to be made. Tommy was overjoyed and went off happily with two Vario boys to what was not an initiation, however, but an execution.
Although Hill did not address the matter, undoubtedly Tommy was tortured to reveal the events of the murder, and he most certainly revealed the roles of
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Burke and Hill. Yet nothing ever happened to the pair. The reason was obvious. Hill and especially Burke were huge money makers for the mob, and that was enough to save them. The avenging of the late, made Billy Bates had to be limited to DeSimone. The surviving pair had the best of all possible connectionsthat old reliable, m-o-n-e-y.
Women, Mafiosi's Attitude Toward
Do Mafia men beat their wives, their daughters, their girlfriends? Of course they do, but probably less than one might expect of men in such a violent profession. This is not too hard to understand. Though they are men of violence, their violence is part of their "business'' activities. To carry that behavior over to nonbusiness situations strikes them as unnecessary, stupid and, toward women, most unmanly.
It is rare for a Mafia man, especially one on the lower echelons to beat a woman because such behavior could mark him as intemperate. And it is somewhat rare to hear a mob guy use foul language in front of a woman, his wife or otherwise. That might not be true during moments of "recreational rape," but in most situations swearing at women would not be proper in personal relationships. By contrast a strongarm guy seeking to pressure a loan shark victim might speak very coarsely to that man's wife, daughter or lady friend. This qualifies as legit behavior because it is business. Likewise it's perfectly acceptable to "put a woman to sleep" if she becomes a threat to mob business, as was the case of mob boss Rusty Rastelli's woman.
Virtually all wise guys hold their women to a very high standard. One mobster told undercover FBI operative "Donnie Brasco" that "if a female swears, she's a
puttana
a whore" and that if his girl ever "said 'fuck,' I'd throw her out the window." This was from an accomplished hit man.
Women as Mafia Victims: Mob gallantry myth
Part of John Gotti's self-portrait was that he brooked no mistreatment of women, and the same has been said of other mob leaders. Gotti was famous for holding doors open for women reporters and making comments about how he was brought up to be nice to the weaker sex. In the first of his three important trials in the 1980s and 1990s, James Sanetore, a turncoat witness against Gotti, was asked by the defense during cross-examination: "Mr. Sanetore, didn't you burn a woman's breasts with cigarettes?'' The criminal witness was irate: "Absolutely not. All we did was tie her on the bed and throw burning matches on her breasts. That's all we did."
Left unanswered was how the Gotti side knew about the witness's transgressions.
The mistreatment of women is a staple of forcing loan shark victims to cough up the money they owe at exorbitant interest charges. One common method is to threaten violent punishment of the wife.
Clearly, the mob tolerates the murder of women, many of whom are innocently under the gun in gangland affairs. All it takes is the feeling that she knows too much about criminal activities and is likely to cave in under scrutiny by prosecutors.
Such was the fate of Cherie Golden, a 19-year-old brown-haired beauty with brown eyes and a cherubic smile who had won a Twiggy look-alike contest. She was wooed by John Quinn, a married mobster with six kids on Long Island, who showed Cherie off in Little Italy restaurants. Unfortunately, he also took Cherie along while negotiating the purchase of hot cars and to a number of chop shops he ran. His superiors in the mob did not like that and warned Quinn to dump Cherie. He refused and then got in severe legal trouble. Suddenly he looked like a prime candidate for becoming a turncoat, and that made Quinn an obvious hit candidate.
Quinn was invited to a mob meeting in a Brooklyn tavern with Roy DeMeo, his boss in the car racket and the Gambino family's ace killer. Quinn brought Cherie along and left her outside in his car. He went inside and was promptly put to sleep with a silencer-equipped gun.
Cherie did not hear the shot. Two of the mob's members came to the car and started flirting with her, one on each side of the vehicle. As one of the men distracted the young girl, she turned her head toward him and the other one drew a gun and shot her in the brain. As her head whipped around, she took another bullet in the face. The killers disposed of her body, removing her halter top just to give the police a possible sexual angle to investigate.
DeMeo made the hit on his own without getting higher approval, which upset the recently installed new boss, Paul Castellano. Big Paul recognized the murder as one that could produce very bad press. He wanted to know why the girl was killed. DeMeo's direct superior, capo Nino Gaggi, was also angered but had to put the best face on the situation and explained she knew too much about the stolen car operations. Castellano was not convinced but could do nothing. He ordered that DeMeo not do any hits without prior approval. "Just talk to Roy," Castellano said. "Make sure people just don't start going who don't have to go."
No punishment was exacted for Cherie's murder, and none seemed to have ever been meted out for other Mafia killings of women. Often a woman is killed simply as an object lesson to her husband or boyfriend to keep his silence.
Page 388
While Hollywood extortionist Nick Circella was doing time, the Chicago mob worried he might flip to gain his freedom. A mob enforcer visited Circella's lady friend, Estelle Carey, a Chicago cocktail waitress. The mob also feared Estelle might talk to help her man, an action that could inspire other women to talk. They decided Estelle had to die and that she had to be killed in grisly fashion to make a vivid point.
They tied her to a chair, tortured her, broke her nose, battered her face, stabbed her several times and cut her throat. Weapons used on her included a flatiron, a blackjack and a rolling pin. Then she was doused with gasoline and set on fire. The only witness to the horrid homicide was Estelle's pet poodle cowering in a corner. But when her body was found, the torture hit had a most salutary effect. Nick's lipsand those of several females who were thought likely to gabstayed very zipped.
When Gus Greenbaum, a leading casino operator in Las Vegas, was marked for execution for skimming the mob's skim money, it was decided his wife should die with him. Meyer Lansky ordered the killings and handed the contract to the Chicago mob, an outfit known, as in the case of Estelle Carey, for a passion for brutality. Greenbaum and his wife were found dead in their home in Phoenix, their throats cut. After the killings Lansky supposedly spread word that he had merely ordered straight hits. But this was doubtful since the killings were meant to encourage other Vegas employees to see the wisdom of playing fair with the mob.
See also:
Coppola, Michael "Trigger Mike"; Rastelli, Philip
.
"Wop with the Mop, The": Alcatraz disparagement of Al Capone
Al Capone's sphere of influence was large, indeed, but not large enough to matter at Alcatraz, "The Rock." The convicts operated under a different "social order" on who was a supercriminal and who was not. Capone's term in the federal prison was hard, not so much because of the sternness of the penal system and its employees, but rather on account of his fellow inmates.
One day Capone and a number of other convicts were lined up at the barber shop for their monthly haircut. The mighty Capone saw no reason to wait and stepped to the front of the line, making the error of cutting ahead of James Lucas, a mean Texas bank robber doing 30 years.
Lucas knew who Capone was but was not impressed. He snarled, "Hey, lard ass, get back at the end of the line." Capone turned and gave Lucas a withering look that would have chilled many a mobsteron the outside.
"You know who I am, punk?" Capone asked.
Lucas reddened in rage. He grabbed the scissors from the convict doing the haircutting and stuck the point into Capone's fat neck. "Yeah," he said, "I know who you are, greaseball. And if you don't get back to the end of that fucking line, I'm gonna know who you
were
."
Capone went to the rear of the line and never again tried to pull rank in Alcatraz. Not that this prevented him from further hostility. Capone suffered his first real violent treatment when he failed to join a prisoner strike after the death of a convict to whom the warden had denied medical treatment because he said he was malingering.
Capone ignored the protest and stayed on his prison laundry job. Other prisoners started calling him "scab" and "rat," and finally Capone was allowed to go to his cell until the strike was crushed. When he returned to work, an unknown convict threw a sash weight at his head. Shoved aside by another convict, train robber Roy Gardner, the weight missed, hitting Capone's arm and causing a deep cut. Capone was transferred to new work mopping up the bathhouse, whereupon the convicts promptly nicknamed him "the wop with the mop." His nemesis, Lucas, one day crept up behind him and stabbed him in the back. Capone was hospitalized for a week, and Lucas was sent to the Hole (solitary confinement). There were other efforts to maim or kill Capone, but friendly convicts, attracted by Capone's payment of money on the outside, protected him. They frustrated a plot to spike his breakfast coffee with lye. On another occasion Capone was on his way to the dentist when a con jumped him from behind and almost strangled him before Capone broke loose and floored him with a single blow.
Such stories reached the press, which informed its eager readers how far the once powerful King of Chicago had fallen. Capone's wife unsuccessfully petitioned the attorney general to have Capone transferred to another institution, so the persecution of "the wop with the mop" continued.
Later on in his confinement Capone began slipping in and out of lucidity. His paresis, caused by an advanced stage of syphilis, prompted most prisoners to let up on him, extending him the sympathy due any convict going "stir crazy."
In January 1939, Capone was shipped out of Alcatraz for the Federal Correctional Institution on Terminal Island near Los Angeles. He was too sick for the

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