The Mafia Encyclopedia (24 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 57
daughters out on the street to make money to cover their juice payments.
Buccieri's awesome reputation did not come from threats alone. He was near to being the most monstrous killer in the Chicago Outfit, and that covered a lot of bloodletters. Evidence of his dedication to the art of murder is offered in tapes collected in a wiretapping by federal agents of conversations between Buccieri and a group of his boys. While planning an underworld hit in a rented house in Miami in 1962, Buccieri nostalgically recounted some of his more gruesome kills, especially the 1962 torture-murder of William "Action" Jackson, a 300-pound collector for the mob's loan-sharking operations. Believed guilty of two major offensesappropriating some of the mob's funds for his personal use and, as Buccieri put it, being a "stoolpigeon for the 'G'"Jackson was hustled to the "Plant," a mob locale with a large meat hook on the wall. With Buccieri were James "Turk'' Torello, Jackie ''the Lackey" Cerone, Mad Sam De Stefano and Dave Yaras, credited in recent years as the most prominent Jewish mobster in the Chicago organization. They started off by shooting Jackson "just once in the knee." Then they stripped him naked, bound his hands and feet and proceeded, in Buccieri's words, "to have a little bit of fun." They worked Jackson over with ice picks, baseball bats, and a blow torch. Next Buccieri employed an electric cattle prod. "You should have heard the prick scream," Buccieri recalled. His audience convulsed in laughter as he regaled them with details of what happened next.
A sober moment was then provided by Torello who said, "I still don't understand why he didn't admit he was a pigeon." Buccieri's response was, "I'm only sorry the big slob died so soon." Considering the fact that Jackson's torture on the meat hook lasted two days, Buccieri's regrets were worth another round of laughter. Buccieri had taken photographs of Jackson's mutilated body and passed them around to other mob workers as a reminder of the perils of breaking "Family" trust.
Buccieri had graduated into the Chicago syndicate from the 42 Gang, a notorious Chicago juvenile gang. He was a follower of another 42er, Sam Giancana, who rose to the top post in the outfit. Giancana, who always appreciated first-rate murderers, made Fifi his personal executioner as well as a powerful ally during the power struggle for mob leadership.
If the authorities thought they might get at Giancana through Buccieri, they were always disappointed. Buccieri would never talk. Even the press found Buccieri's stubbornness a source of amusement. Once federal probers tried to elicit intelligence about the mob from Fifi and quizzed him about his brother Frank, also a syndicate stalwart. They even pursued the fact that Fifi's brother had a girlfriend who had done duty as a Playboy bunny. She was a nude centerfold in
Playboy
magazine, and Frank had given her a horse as a present. Fifi's response, still cited with approbation in the underworld, was, "I take the Fifth on the horse and the broad."
Cancer claimed Fifi in 1973, two years before Giancana's assassination. Many claim no mobster would have dared take out Giancana were Fifi still alive. Retribution in the form of a Buccieri-led bloodbath would have been too gruesome, even by Chicago standards.
Buchalter, Louis: See Lepke, Louis.
Buckwheats: Painful murder methods
Steve Franse died buckwheats. That meant that Vito Genovese ordered that his one-time trusted aide had to die, but not simply die painlessly. Genovese wanted him to suffer. Mob murders are seldom buckwheats, being instead simple business matters. An exception is made, however, for murders of example, such as in the case of informers, or mobsters who hold out on gang revenues, or, in some cases, loan shark victims whose painful demise could inspire other debtors to pay up promptly.
Franse's sin involved an affair of the heart. Genovese had left America to avoid a murder rap and ordered Franse to watch over some of his funds and his wife. Franse did a good job on the money, but Genovese's wife strayed, and all the worse in a manner involving both sexes. Genovese was outraged. Franse had betrayed him by not stopping it, and for this he died hard.
Joe Valachi told what happened. Two hit men grabbed Franse in a restaurant kitchen. While one got him in an armlock the other started beating him in the mouth and belly. "He gives it to him good. It's what we call 'buckwheats,' meaning spite-work."
After Franse collapsed to the floor, the killers wrapped a chain around his neck; when he started to struggle as the chain was tightened, one of his assailants stomped on his neck to hold him down until the job was finished.
Old Joe Profaci of the Brooklyn crime family was known as a vindictive sort who often had victims die hard. One Profaci gunman was quoted as telling a potential victim: "Sometimes guys really suffer, you know? I once saw a guy get shot right up the ass. Man, did
he
suffer."
When the killers of Murder, Inc., particularly hated a victim they would ice pick him and shoot him several times before burying him in the sand along a beach or a swampwhile he was still breathing.
Undoubtedly the most buckwheats-oriented family in the country was the Chicago Outfit. Once a showgirl
Page 58
named Estelle Carey was suspected of ratting on a gang member.The mob realized that women often knew more than they should about gangsters and that it would be useful to finish Estelle off in a torturous manner that would convince other women that silence meant survival. Most of Chicago's favorite methods were used on her. Her nose was broken, and her face badly bruised. There were knife wounds and throat slashes, and she was badly burned. Among the weapons used were a rolling pin, a flatiron and a blackjack.
Life
magazine once recounted the agonizing death a 300-pound mob loan shark named william Jackson whom the Chicago Outfit suspected of being both a stool pigeon and a knock-down artist. To get him to confess, they took him to a mob meat-rendering place where he was tied up and hung from a meat hook, Bullets were pumped into him and he was worked over with ice picks and baseball bats; an electric cattle prod was used on his rectum. It took two days for Jackson to die. An FBI bug on a mob apartment later caught several of the boys nostalgically discussing Jackson's demise and amid howls of laughter bemoaning the fact that he hadn't survived longer.
A soldier in the Magaddino family in Buffalo, Albert Agueci, once was arrested with his brother in a narcotics case, one which also involved informer Joe Valachi. Agueci got angry when he and his brother got no bail money from the family and let it be known that he was going to "declare" himself unless boss Steve Magaddino came through for him. All he got was silence and finally was released on bail only after his wife sold his house.
Agueci had acted most irresponsibly and compounded his errors by calling on Magaddino and threatening him. He became a buckwheats candidate. An illegal FBI wiretap caught two capos in the family joyfully anticipating taking him to "Mary's farm" and "cutting him up." The FBI concentrated their search for Mary's farm in the Buffalo area but it turned out to be near Rochester, New York. A few weeks later Agueci's body was found in a field. His arms were tied behind his back with wire and he had been strangled with a clothesline. His body was then soaked with gasoline and set ablaze. Identification of the body was made possible because of a single unburned finger. The worst of Agueci's treatment showed up in an autopsy report which found that about 30 pounds of flesh had been striped from agueci's body while he was still alive.
Buckwheats is an essential ingredient in organized crime, one in which only the most cunning and/or the most brutal survive. it may be why Mafia gangsters in America triumphed over their Neapolitan Camorra counterparts. As
New York Times
writer Nicholas Gage once noted: "... the Camorra punishment for a 'rat' was merely to slit his tongue before killing him, while the Mafia punishment was to cut off his genitals and jam them down his throat before execution." On such nuances are crime empires built.
Bufalino, Russell, A. (1903->): Crime family boss
The McClellan Committee dubbed Russ Bufalino, boss of the Pittstown, Pennsylvania, crime family. "one of the most ruthless and powerful leaders of the Mafia in the United States." He might also be described aptly as "shadowy" since, until well into the 1970s, he avoided any major convictions.
A man some have described as having "nervous eyes"they seem to rotate to opposite corners so that they give others the odd sensation that he is looking around them instead of at them, a condition that can make a threat from him seem matter-of-factly awesomeBufalino centered his operations through much of Pennsylvania but constantly stretched the boundaries of his power into New Jersey and upstate New York. When the aged Stefano Magaddino, boss of the Buffalo family, died in the mid-1970s, Bufalino made a concerted push in that direction as well.
Strong in labor racketeering and considered a major power behind the scenes in Teamsters Union affairs, Bufalino has been considered by federal authorities as the number one suspect in the disappearance of ex union head Jimmy Hoffa. The Pittstown family has often been considered active in the peddling of drugs and the fencing of stolen jewelry, Bufalino's arrest record dates back to his mid-20s and includes minor charges such as petty larceny, receiving stolen goods and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
He did not have a serious conviction until 1977 when he got a four-year sentence for extortion after threatening a witness because he owed $25,000 to a diamond fence associated with Bufalino. Unfortunately, the witness was taped at the time and then tucked away in the witness protection program. Bufalino found out where his was hidden and asked his man Jimmy "the Weasel" Fratianno to arrange to hit hi. Fratianno couldn't find his and Bufalino was convicted. An indignant Bufalino told the court: "If you had to deal with an animal like that, Judge, you'd have done the same damn thing."
Buffalo Crime Family: See Magaddino, Stefano.
Page 59
Bug and Meyer Mob: Early Lansky-Siegel gang
In the 1970s when Meyer Lansky was in Israel and trying to win permanent residence there, he was questioned about the early Bug and Meyer Mob. He insisted, in an effort to win the sympathy of Israelis, that it was just a little old group of Jewish boys out to protect other Jewish boys from the dirty Irish gangs of the era who were beating up on them. Actually the last thing Bug and Meyer were concerned with was acting as selfless pogrom fighters.
The gang, formed in 1921 by Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, was aptly named the Bug and Meyer Mob. Lansky was the brains and Siegel the star shooter of an expert group of gunmen. They started as a gun-for-hire gang that also supplied mobsters with stolen cars and trucks and expert drivers. Their specialty, however, was as shootists; they performed as hit men on order. Lansky hired out his boys to protect bootleg gangs' convoys and at times helped out in hijacking rival gangs' trucks. It was not always wise to involve Bug and Meyer in hijacking because they might just as readily turn around and grab your own shipments.
The mob's rates came very high under the circumstances, and it was hardly surprising that some bootleggers finally figured out it would be cheaper to bring them into the operation and give them a slice of the take rather than pay them wages.
Lucky Luciano had known both Lansky and Siegel from their teenage years (Siegel at the time the Bug and Meyer mob was formed was a murderously precocious l5-year-old) and was the prime mover in having the Jewish gangster duo join Joe Adonis's Broadway Mob, Manhattan's foremost bootleg outfit. It was Lansky's first regular work with leading Italian mobsters, an arrangement that would continue the whole of his life.
When Lansky and Luciano formed the national crime syndicate in the early 1930s, it was Lansky who pushed hardest for a special outfit to handle "enforcement,'' that is, murders for the entire syndicate. In that sense the old Bug and Meyer mob served as the model for Murder, Inc., and in fact many of its "graduates" played godfatherly advisers for the Brooklyn extermination troop bossed by Louis Lepke and Albert Anastasia.
See also:
Lansky, Meyer; Siegel, Benjamin "Bugsy."
Bullet Eaters: Hard-to-kill victims
"Bullet eaters" are legends of the mob, victims or wise guys who manage to survive being shot several times on one or more occasions. An amazing bullet eater was gangster Legs Diamond who was shot on numerous occasions by underworld gunners and lived. Once he was peppered in the head with shot and took a bullet in the foot but still escaped. Another time his wounds were so bad that doctors predicted his death. They were wrong. Diamond was finally dispatched by killers who found him asleep in bed, and, while one held his head, the other pumped three shots into it.
That
was more than even Legs Diamond could digest.
The most storied bullet eater of all has to have been the now incarcerated Carmine "the Snake" Persico, who during the mob wars for control of the Colombo crime family, won tribute as a man who could catch bullets with his teeth. That was a slight exaggeration. In fact, Snake was ambushed in a car, and bullets rained in on him, through the doors, the frame, the windows, and the motor. One spent bullet lodged in Persico's mouth and teeth. That was good enough for the boys. The Snake could catch bullets with his teethreal bullet eating!
Burial Grounds of the Mafia
In August 1985 a tranquil Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, neighborhood, centering around a Mobil station at 86th Street and Bay 7th Street, was shattered by sudden and intensive excavation work. Under the eyes of FBI agents three backhoe units dug a gaping 10-foot-deep hole. At first, journalists got no comment on the reason for the excavation; eventually it came out that the FBI expected to find at least three mob rubout victims buried beneath the gasoline tanks.
One of the owners of the station recalled that the FBI "come up to me a week ago and say, 'We got to dig up your station.' I say, 'Why?' But the FBI guy says, 'No particular reason.' We take it in stride. They think somebody's going to find some bodies. There's nothing there we know of."
The owners, who had bought the station eight years previously, made an agreement with the FBI that the two massive gas tanks pulled out for the dig would be replaced, the station would be fully restored and compensation would be given for lost business.
An FBI spokesman said it had decided to dig up the station after getting information from two different sources that it was a mob burial ground. The final count: zero bodies. The backhoes started filling up the hole, and the full restoration effort ran to about three weeks.
The hunt for Mafia burial grounds has always tantalized law enforcement officials because it is an established fact that mobsters do seem to form a sentimental attachment to certain spots. The father-and-son Mafia team of Charles and Joe Dippolito, both soldiers in the Los Angeles crime family, planted a great many corpses, each with a sack of lime, in the fertile soil of their vineyard in Cucamonga.

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