The Mafia Encyclopedia (131 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 389
rigors of the Rock. Capone was released from custody in November, destined to become increasingly less coherent during the last eight years of his life. When he was released, reporters in Chicago asked his longtime faithful aide Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik if Capone was returning to control of the mob. Guzik replied, "Al is nutty as a fruitcake.' There can be little doubt that he harassment he endured as "the wop with the mop" had not helped Capone's overall condition.
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Y
YALE, Frankie (18851928): New York mob leader
Brooklyn gangster Frankie Yale had in the past performed yeoman service for Johnny Torrio and Al Capone. When they both ended up in Chicago and needed on two occasions a positively trustworthy killerfirst to take out Big Jim Colosimo and later, Irish mob leader Dion O'Banionthey contacted Yale for possible hit men. Yale on both occasions decided to handle the very sensitive murders himself. After all, what else were buddies for. Undoubtedly when Al Capone decided to have Yale himself put away in 1928, he probably did feel a mite badly about it, just for old time's sake.
As a teenager Yale was a partner with Torrio in the old Five Points Gang and had probably killed a dozen men before he reached voting age. Around 1908 he and Torrio worked a profitable Black Hand extortion racket among Italian immigrants in Brooklyn, threatening to kill them unless they paid protection money. They also became partners in the Harvard Inn, a bar and brothel near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Torrio later moved to Chicago and Yale maintained the Harvard, eventually employing A1 Capone as a bouncer. When Capone drew heat for a couple of murders, Yale got in touch with Torrio, and Capone went to the Windy City to work in the Jim Colosimo vice empire.
In the early 1920s Yale improved his own position tremendously, building up an important bootlegging and rumrunning operation and taking over control of the national Unione Siciliane, an important Sicilian fraternal organization that had become in part a criminalfront organization. He also ran protection rackets in several fields and invaded the New York tobacconist trade by forcing dealers to order at very high prices some very cheap cigars he manufactured. Thus in Brooklynese "a Frankie Yale" came to mean any sort of product that was overpriced and no good. When police zeroed in on Yale and demanded to know his livelihood, he announced blandly, "I'm an undertaker." In a very broad sense, Yale was telling no lie.
There is little doubt that Yale was imported by Torrio and Capone to murder Colosimo so that Torrio could take over and expand on the lazy Colosimo's crime empire. Torrio and Capone also brought in Yale to take care of O'Banion because the victim did not know him and Yale could approach O'Banion in his flower shop without arousing suspicion. As Yale shook O'Banion's hand, he held on tight so the Irish mobster could not reach his guns. Then two of Capone's favorite gunners, John Scalise and Albert Anselmi, pulled their own guns and shot O'Banion.
By 1928 the relationship between Capone and Yale had soured. First, Yale was trying to take over the huge Chicago chapter of Unione Siciliane, whose members' alcohol-cooking operations Capone needed for his booze operations. Yale was trying to get such moonshining profits sent to the national office which he controlled. In addition, Capone had been depending on Yale to see to landing imported liquor on Long Island and shipping it on to Chicago. Suddenly, truckloads of Capone booze were being hijacked before they ever got through Brooklyn. Suspecting a doublecross, Capone sent one of his men, James "Finesy" De Amato, to Brooklyn to spy on Yale. De Amato was discovered and gunned down on a Brooklyn street, but not until he had notified Capone that Yale was indeed heisting his liquor and then reselling to him.
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Assassinated ;mob leader Frankle Yale received the most garish New York underworld funeral in history, and the New York
Daily News noted with considerable local pride that it "was a better one than that given Dion O'Banion
by Chicago racketters in 1924."
In June 1928 Capone held a meeting in Florida with a number of Chicago henchmen, including Dan Serritella, Jake Guzik and Charles Fishetti. He also sent out a henchman to buy two .45-caliber revolvers and several other guns from a Miami pawnshop. On June 28, 1928, six Chicago mobsters who had been visiting Capone in Florida took the Southland Express back for Chicago. Instead, four got off the train in Knoxville, Tennessee, bought a used black sedan from a Nash agency and drove to New York City.
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On July 1, 1928, Yale was driving along 44th Street in Brooklyn when a black sedan crowded him to the curb. Yale and his car were ventilated with a hail of bullets. The assassins abandoned the black Nash a few blocks away and vanished, leaving behind severa weapons, including two .45-caliber revolvers traced back to Miami and a Thompson submachine gun that proved to have come from a Chicago gun dealer named Peter yon Frantizius known to be a supplier of weapons to the Capone mob. It was the first time in New York that a machine gun, popular in Chicago, had been present during a killing.
They gave Frankie Yale a spectacular funeral, the biggest and best any gangster had gotten in New York. It was in line with Yale's wishes. He had been very impressed with the funeral Dion O'Banion had gotten in Chicago, and he had always said he wanted one that would surpass it. That was no easy task; after all, music for O'Banion's funeral was provided by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Still they did Yale up proud. The funeral cost more than $50,000 in 1928 dollars. He had a $15,000 nickel-and-silver coffin and flower stores were denuded of blooms to provide 38 carloads of flowers. Flags flew at half-staff and 250 cars followed through the streets of Brooklyn to Yale's resting place at Holy Cross Cemetery. At least 10,000 mourners, spectators and police watched the show. Among them were two women who it developed were married to Yale; each declared she was the rightful Mrs. Yale.
The
New York Daily News
rendered a final verdict, one that pacified local pride and would undoubtedly have pleased Yale himself. The newspaper declared the Yale funeral "was a better one than that given Dion O'Banion by Chicago racketeers in 1924."
Youngbloods: Sam Giancana's American-raised Chicago mafiosi
They represented in the 1930s a new phase in syndicated crime in America, an example of the ethnic reinforcements available to the new national crime syndicate in the ghettos. Organized crime continued under the increasing dominance of Italian and Jewish ethnic groups, reversing a trend of just prior to World War I when the more typical ghetto experience was one of social mobility and so had lead to the breakdown of the large Jewish and Italian gangs, specifically the Monk Eastman and Paul Kelly gangs.
These ethnic crime groupings revived under the bigmoney opportunities provided by Prohibition and so became America's first syndicate criminals, as distinguished from the more common ghetto criminals of the past. Young Turk elements began taking over the gangs, causing among the Italians, for example, a longterm bloody purging of the old-style, old-world mafiosi, replacing them with younger immigrants less "tainted" by the old crime rules and dominated by only one basic drivethe buck. Historically, a couple of decades should have been sufficient to move the ethnic Jewish and Italian gangs out of the ghettos and into a stratum of lower incidence of crime, even ethnic crime. But now the basically first-born ghetto youths were frozen into their locales by a second sociological force as powerful as Prohibition and its consequencesthe Great Depression.
In the Chicago "Patch" area of the West Side, youth gangs saw only one future open to them after they passed the mindless age of juvenile crime. That future lay with the mob, the syndicate, the Caponeswhatever one wished to call it.
The 42 Gang from the Patch spewed out a steady supply of mobsters-to-be, most prominent being Sam "Momo" Giancana, already at that age, to use a police description, "a snarling, sarcastic, ill-mannered, illtempered, sadistic psychopath." As Giancana moved up the syndicate ladder of success, he took with him a group of juvenile companions from the old 42 Gang who within the underworld became known as the "Youngbloods."
The Youngbloods later included other 42 Gang members, but their nucleus formed around such Patch graduates as Sam Battaglia, Milwaukee Phil Alderisio, Marshall Caifano, Sam DeStefano, Fifi Buccieri, Willie Daddano, Frank Caruso, Charles Nicoletti and Rocco Petenza. By the 1950s the Youngbloods were the mainstays of the Chicago Outfit. Many of the older Capone hands, those who had survived the violence of the preceding decades, were now starting to fall away under the ravages of age, men like Golf Bag Hunt, Terry Druggan, Phil D'Andrea, Jake Guzik, Little New York Campagna, Frank Diamond and Claude Maddox.
Even though Sam Giancana still took orders from the older hierarchyincluding Tony Accardo and Paul Ricca, the latter elevated to near sainthood within the mobthe Youngbloods were the main muscle in the organization. Giancana kept his Youngbloods close to him, not assigning many to capo status with many soldiers to supervise and "feed," but appointing them instead to an elite corps of buttonmen serving directly under him and carving out large slices of mob profits for themselves.
The Youngblood reign lasted through the slow decline of Giancana in the late 1960s until his assassination in 1975. Within two years previous to that, Giancana had lost many of his most ardent Youngblood supporters. Men like Buccieri, Daddano and Battaglia
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died; others like DeStefano were murdered (DeStefano would have to go before Giancana could be taken out).
With Giancana's murder by the mob (unless one holds to the underworld charge that it was a CIA hit) the Youngblood element lost complete dominance although many remain to this day powerhouses within the Chicago Outfit. Like those they had previously replaced they are now the Oldbloods of the mob.
See also:
Forty-two Gang
.
Page 394
Z
Zangara, Joseph (19001933): Assassin
Joseph Zangara is always listed as and was executed as the would-be assassin of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt and the killer-by-mistake of Chicago mayor Anton Cermak. However, a strong minority view is that Zangara never wanted to kill FDRcontrary to his own later confessionbut was a hired Mafia hit man assigned to shoot Mayor Cermak while he was with the president-elect in Miami in February 1933. Indeed, Judge John H. Lyle, generally held to be the most knowledgeable non-Mafia man on Chicago crime, stated categorically that "Zangara was a Mafia killer, sent from Sicily to do a job, and sworn to silence."
Cermak, elected as a "reformer," was anything but that. He waged war on the Capone Mob (at the time Big Al was already in prison) but not so much to clean up the city as to replace the Capones with his own gangsters, headed up by Teddy Newberry. He moved against Frank Nitti, Capone's at least titular successor, once Big Al was behind bars. In fact, court testimony later indicated that the mayor had dispatched some "tough cops" to erase Nitti, which they attempted to do after handcuffing the unarmed gangster. Nitti was shot three times in the back and neck but miraculously survived, whereupon the mayor of America's second city hurriedly left his bailiwick for Florida.
The way the theory goes, Nitti had Newberry killed and then sent a hit manZangarato take care of the mayor. Considering the fact that the mayor had left Chicago on December 21, 1932, and was still in Florida on February 15, 1933, it is conceivable that he might not have been planning to return at all, figuring Florida sun was preferable to Windy City lead.
On February 15 Cermak was in an open car with FDR in Miami when Zangara opened fire, fatally shooting the "wrong man" Cermak. Yet Zangara had won several pistol-shooting awards when he was in the Italian Army. The fact that he of all people failed to hit the president-elect led some crime observers to believe that he might have hit his real target after all. Lingering in his deathbed for three weeks, Mayor Cermak declared he had no doubt that he had been Zangara's real target.
Why had Zangara missed FDR? According to press accounts, his failure was due to the alert reactions of fearless spectators who grabbed his arm and shoved it upward as he began to fire. Privately Zangara contradicted this version to his lawyers, saying his arm had not been seized until he had gotten off all his shots. A policeman who helped bring him down confirmed this version of the events. It made the theory that he had hit his target all the more plausible.
Zangara ranted and raved against capitalists, yet there was nothing on the record to indicate he was an anarchist, communist, socialist or even Fascist. Despite all his ravings previously against "capitalist presidents and kings," Zangara turned out to be a registered Republican.
For two years before the shooting Zangara had lived in Florida, his main occupation seeming to be betting on horses and dogs. One researcher on Zangara, the Reverend Elmer Williams, wrote that Zangara had worked in a syndicate "cutting plant" in Florida "convenient to a canal where the whisky was run in from the islands." Williams's thesis was that Zangara got in trouble with his underworld employers and was given the

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