The Mafia Encyclopedia (15 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 34
hattan skyscraper. And it was said that that was the only way an opportunist like Bender could make it to the top.
See also:
Pisano, Little Augie
.
Berman, Otto "Abbadabba" (18801935): Policy game fixer
Before Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky realized how lucrative it was, Dutch Schultz had in the early 1930s found the way to fix the numbers racket in order to control the winning digits.
Avaricious to the core, Schultz did not like the fact that policy produced a mere 40 percent profit on the money gambled. Every paid-off winner grieved Dutch. If he could only find a way to fix the results, he realized, he could greatly increase profits.
Schultz took over the Harlem rackets, business concerns that took off thanks to a mathematical "magician" named Otto Berman, "Abbadabba." At that time the numbers were determined by the betting statistics at various race tracks. It was impossible for the mob to control the figures at the New York tracks, but when those tracks were closed the numbers were based on the results from tracks that the underworld had successfully infiltrated, such as Chicago's Hawthorne, Cincinnati's Coney Island and New Orleans's Fair Grounds. Berman worked out a system whereby aides could pour money in on some races to manipulate the payoff number. It was believed that Abbadabba's mathematical wizardry added 10 percent to every million dollars a day the mob took in.
Dutch Schultz, noted as being one of the stingiest crime bosses in New York, paid his top gangster aidesmen like Lulu Rosenkrantz and Abe Landausomething like $1,200 a week. By contrast he paid Abbadabba $10,000.
In 1935 a vote by the syndicate's national commission passed the death sentence on Dutch Schultz after he announced plans to bump off Thomas E. Dewey. Then a racket-busting prosecutor, Dewey was closing in on Schultz. The other top mobsters in the syndicate, men like Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Louis Lepke and Joe Adonis, felt that such a killing would cause a widespread crackdown in which they would all be hurt. So much for criminal statesmanship. It was also a fact that all the mobsters were eager to cut in on Schultz's rackets.
On October 23, 1935, Schultz and two bodyguards, Landau and Rosenkrantz, arrived at the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey. A three-man syndicate hit squad was dispatched to take care of them. Unfortunately, another late arrival joined the Schultz party. It was Abbadabba Berman.
All four were shot to death, Abbadabba included. A final testament to the skills of the magician was contained in the papers the quartet had been going over. They indicated that over a certain period of time the Schultz policy banks had taken in $827,253.43 in bets and paid out only $313,711.99. The difference between that last figure and the approximately $500,000 which should have been paid out to winners was attributed to Abbadabba Berman's skills.
His demise cost the syndicate literally millions of dollars annually. For a time others tried to imitate Berman's techniqueas much as could be figured outbut none came within a fraction of his results. Even Vito Genovese, probably the most anti-Semitic crime bigwig in the syndicate, mourned the passing of "the Yid adding machine."
Bilotti, Thomas (19401985): Castellano aide and murder victim
A rule of thumb: The assassination of a top aide of a Mafia boss often presages the boss's murder. The reason: It usually weakens the boss and at the same time eliminates a figure who, if he survives, could rally the crime family to his side.
Thomas Bilotti didn't exactly fit the pattern. Clearly he had moved up to top aide of Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino crime family. On the natural death of underboss Aniello Dellacroce (no close ally of Castellano) on December 2, 1985, Bilotti was slated to succeed as No. 2 man in the familythe eventual, logical successor to Castellano.
Under Castellano the Gambino family had been divided into two less than friendly camps. Before his death, Carlo Gambino, who wanted his brother-in-law Castellano to succeed him over the underboss Dellacroce, won his way by giving Dellacroce control of most of the crime family's Manhattan rackets. Dellacroce gained the allegiance of a number of Young Turks, especially John Gotti, said at the time to control the organization's rackets at JFK airport. Gotti, who idolized the murderous Albert Anastasia (a previous boss of the family), was clearly viewed as the ailing Dellacroce's successor and as such the logical heir to the position of underboss. The problem that arose within the Gambino family was that by December 1985 there were two logical heirs to the throneobviously one too many.
Castellano had cast about among his supporters for someone deemed capable of standing up to the fiery and vicious Gotti. He came up with Bilotti and promoted him to the position of capoin line with Gotti. What Castellano liked best about Bilotti was his toughness; he was known to smash opponents over the head with a baseball bat as a way of ending disputes. With the 70-
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year-old Castellano under several indictments and likely facing a long imprisonment, it appeared that Bilotti would jump over Gotti.
But, on December 16, 1985two weeks to the day after underboss Dellacroce diedCastellano and Bilotti stepped from a limousine on New York's East 46th Street near the Sparks Steak House, where they had reservations to dine with three unknown individuals. The three men who showed up on the sidewalk carried semi-automatic weapons under their trenchcoats and put six bullets each in Castellano and his protégé.
For a time authorities believed the motive was to kill Castellano, and Bilotti had to go just because he was there. However, after a period of gleaning information from informers and through electronic eavesdropping, investigators concluded that the Gotti faction had marked Bilotti as a primary target.
Bilotti, it was theorized, was not taken out first, according to custom, since it would alert both Castellano and the authorities. A protective ring would surround Castellano and make him harder to kill. Castellano and Bilotti had to go together.
In the shifting eddies that mark Mafia power struggles, there are a few who make it to the top and some like Tommy Bilotti who are stopped just short.
See also:
Castellano, Paul
.
Binaggio, Charles (19091950): Kansas City political-criminal leader
The murder of Charley Binaggio, the political and criminal boss of Kansas City and real successor to Tom Pendergast, was arguably the most important killing in decades. Although the underworld itself might number many other homicidesthat of O'Banion, Rothstein, Masseria, Marazano, Schultz, Reles and Siegel, to name a fewas far more momentous, from the view of law and order, the April 6, 1950, killing of Binaggio and his "enforcer," Charley Gargotta, is paramount. Without those murders it is entirely possible that the famed Kefauver hearings might never have come about.
Even Kansas City, which had seen almost everything during the heyday of the Pendergast Machine, was shocked. Binaggio, at age 41, was found dead, shot four times in the head and stretched out in a swivel chair at his headquarters at the First District Democratic Club. Gargotta, a vicious muscleman and killer, lay on the floor nearby, the same number of bullet wounds in his head. Looking down on the scene were large portraits of President Harry Truman and Governor Forrest Smith, a man for whose recent election Binaggio took much credit.
The method of execution told much about Binaggio, who law enforcement men would speculate was an actual member of the Mafiaand if so, the highest ranked mafioso on any political ladder, a political boss on the brink of national importance.
In death there could be no doubt he had been subjected to Mafia violence. The bullet wounds in the heads of both men were arranged in two straight rows, forming "two deuces." This is called Little Joe in dice parlance, and it has long been the mob's sign for a welsher. When used in a murder it indicates the mob not only did the job but also wanted everyone to know it. Clearly, Binaggio had welshed to the crime syndicate and he was paying for it.
Binaggio was considered a political "comer," steeped in scandal perhaps, but likely to overcome such trivialities through the exercise of raw power. Born in Texas, Binaggio was a drifter with arrests in Denver for vagrancy and carrying a concealed weapon. He landed in Kansas City at 23 and joined the operations of North Side leader Johnny Lazia, probably through the sponsorship of mafioso Jim Balestrere. Lazia delivered the votes of the North Side to Democratic boss Pendergast and was in turn allowed to control all gambling, racing wires, liquor and vice in the area.
Lazia was murdered in 1934 after he got into tax trouble and made signs of informing against the machine in exchange for gentle treatment. This left the way clear for Binaggio's climb up the criminal ladder. By the early 1940s, Binaggio had a lock on the North Side while the Pendergast machine was foundering.
In 1946 President Truman ordered a purge of Congressman Roger C. Slaughter who was consistently voting against the administration. Truman called in Jim Pendergast, the late Tom's nephew successor, and ordered him to get the nomination for Enos Axtell. Slaughter was defeated but the
Kansas City Star
uncovered evidence of wholesale ballot fraud. In the ensuing investigations, a woman election watcher was shot to death on the porch of her home. And just before critical state hearings were scheduled to begin, the safe at City Hall went up in a huge dynamite blast that destroyed the fraudulent ballot evidence.
Binaggio, everyone suspected but could not prove, was the brain behind both the ballot fraud and the City Hall bombing. As a result, only one minor hanger-on, Snags Klein, was punished with a short prison term for the crime.
Now Binaggio was ready to make his move for supremacy against Jim Pendergast. Pendergast was nowhere near as astute as his late uncle and, by 1948, Kansas City, politically and criminally, belonged to Binaggio. However, Binaggio needed a political slush fund to wipe out the Pendergast forces and he appealed to Mafia crime families around the country for financial aid. Many responded, Chicago most generously. More
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than $200,000 came in from the underworld in exchange for Binaggio's promise that once he got his man in the governorship both Kansas City and St. Louis would become "wide open" for syndicate operations.
Binaggio backed Forrest Smith for the office and Smith won. There was no hard evidence, however, that Binaggio had funneled something like $150,000 into Smith's campaign. But the other crime families had put up the money and expected results. Binaggio failed to deliver. A St. Louis newspaper broke the story about the understanding Binaggio had with the underworld and the St. Louis police commissioner blocked all efforts to open up the city.
Binaggio stalled for time on his deal. It wouldn't wash with the mob. They were troubled with thoughts that Binaggio had merely backed the winner and hadn't put up the money they had advanced him. Like true businessmen the crime families wrote off their investment. They also wrote off Binaggio and Gargotta. Little Joe was the warning to others not to try the same thing.
See also:
Five Iron Men; Last Chance Tavern; Little Joe
.
Bioff, Willie Morris (19001955): Movie extortionist and stool pigeon
In his 55 years Willie Bioff enjoyed many unsavory careers. He was a pimp, a procurer, a strongarm man, a labor racketeer, a stool pigeon, and a friend of leading politicians. But his chief claim to fame was as a Hollywood extortionist, shaking down tough-minded movie moguls, making them quake with fear. It was said that Louis B. Mayer was convinced that Bioff would kill him as readily as he would look at him.
Bioff's life of crime started when he was 10 years old. He lined up some girls and sold their favors atop a pool table to other schoolboys. By the time he was 16, he was a full-scale procurer with a string of hookers working for him in the Levee, Chicago's worst vice area. For a time he worked with Harry Guzik, another notorious procurer, and as such came in contact with the Capone mob. Harry Guzik was the brother of Jake Guzik, Al Capone's closest gang ally, who saw in Bioff greater talents. A man who could whack around prostitutes might well be able to intimidate others. There was plenty of room in the mob's shakedown and union rackets for a man with the brutal talents of beefy Willie Bioff.
Bioff proved he could be a very convincing union slugger and it was decided to put him on more lucrative assignments. Jake Guzik recommended Bioff to Frank Nitti who was running the mob after Capone's imprisonment for income tax violations. Nitti assigned Bioff to provide muscle power for George Browne whom the mob was promoting from a local union power to presidency of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Operators. The election was in the bag. Chicago was solid for Browne, and in New York Lucky Luciano and Louis Lepke lined up strong support for him as did Al Polizzi in Cleveland.
Bioff became Browne's watchdog. Together the pair at first split 50 percent of all monies they were able to shake out of the movie industry, with the rest going to the Chicago Outfit. Later Browne and Bioff's share was cut to 25 percent, but by then the pie was enormous and they never noticed any loss. Through Bioff and Browne the Chicago mob just about controlled the Hollywood movie industry in the 1930s. In 1936 Bioff informed the head of Loew's, Inc.: "Now your industry is a prosperous industry and I must get two million dollars out of it." They actually did get a million over the next four years.
A later court trial demonstrated Bioff's negotiating ability. He was dealing with Jack Miller, labor representative for an association of Chicago movie exhibitors.
Bioff: "I told Miller the exhibitors ... would have to have two operators in each booth. Miller said: 'My God! That will close up all my shows
."
Prosecutor: "And what did you say?"
Bioff: "I said: 'If that will kill grandmathen grandma must die.' Miller said that two men in each booth would cost about $500,000 a year. So I said, well, why don't you make a deal? And we finally agreed on $60,000".
Judge John Bright: "What was this $60,000 paid for?"
Bioff (beaming): "Why, Your Honor, to keep the booth costs down ... You see, Judge, if they wouldn't pay we'd give them lots of trouble. We'd put them out of business and I mean out."

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