The Mafia Encyclopedia (32 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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BOOK: The Mafia Encyclopedia
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Page 81
The situation in Cicero hardly encouraged any ardent police officer even to
think
of standing up to the gangsters. Typical was the policeman posted on the steps of the town hall on a day when Mayor Joseph Z. Klenha offended Capone by some unauthorized act of office. The beefy gang chief knocked His Honor down the steps of the town hall and proceeded to kick him repeatedly in the groin. The officer found the entire procedure rather embarrassing and was able only with difficulty to look the other way.
While it was Capone who consolidated power in Cicero it was Johnny Torrio who first opened it up to syndicate exploitation. His technique was to make Adolf Hitler's later incursions into Austria and Czechoslovakia seem rather old hatbut strikingly similar.
Torrio realized that the mob needed a safe territory from which to operate without fear of official intrusions; even in Chicago there were some honest political authorities and police officials. He decided Cicero was the perfect base, especially since it was not all that clean to begin with and certain criminal gangs already functioned there. Torrio's opening move included no rough stuff. Without making any arrangements for protection he sent in a troop of prostitutes and opened a bordello on Roosevelt Road. (Cicero had always been clean of prostitution mainly because the West Side O'Donnell Gang disapproved of such low activity, among other reasons feeling that it stirred up too much opposition from the local citizenry.) The Cicero police immediately shut the Torrio brothel. Undeterred, Torrio sent in another score of harlots and opened another joint at Ogden and Fifty-second Avenues. The police demolished the place and clapped the women behind bars. Torrio then pulled out of town, exactly as he had planned.
The honeymoon lasted only two days. Torrio had things sewed up in much of Cook County; suddenly deputies from the Chicago office of Sheriff Peter Hoffman discovered there was slot machine gambling in town. Properly shocked, his men swept in and confiscated every slot machine in Cicero. Then Torrio delivered his ultimatum. If he could not bring prostitutes into Cicero, no one could run slots and bootlegging, and speakeasies would have to go as well. It was not an offer anyone wanted to accept. Then Torrio suggested a compromise. He would not bring prostitution into Cicero (the move having merely been a ploy to force a deal), and the O'Donnells could maintain their beer accounts and, in partnership with a local rogue, Eddie Vogel, continue their profitable slot machine business. In return Torrio wanted the right to maintain his base of operations in Cicero and introduce any form of gambling and vice he wished other than whorehouses. A deal was hammered out. Torrio stuck to his agreement about harlots although the surrounding areas were another matter.
Having got his foot in the door, Torrio then turned the town over to Capone brownshirt-style to lock everything up. Big Al proceeded to extend mob influence by bribe and force. By 1924 Cicero could be called Syndicate City. The only cloud developed when the Democratic Party, harboring some delusion about a two-party system, decided to run candidates against the Klenha slate. Capone brought in hundreds of mobsters to guarantee that no excess of political freedom occurred. On the eve of the election the Democratic candidate for town clerk, William E Pflaum, was beaten up in his office and the premises demolished. With dawn of election day gangsters in seven-passenger black limousines patrolled the streets, terrorizing voters, many of whom decided not to cast their ballots. Those who showed up at the polls were inspected in line by the Capone gangsters who inquired how they intended to vote. If their answer was incorrect, the mobsters confiscated their ballot and marked it for them. Then a Capone hood, massaging a revolver half out of his coat pocket, made sure the voter put the ballot in the box. Honest poll watchers and election officials were cowed into silence and those few who could not be intimidated were simply kidnapped and held prisoner until the voting ended. A Democratic campaign worker, Michael Gavin, was shot through both legs. Policemen were blackjacked.
In early afternoon some Cicero voters found a county judge, Edmund K. Jarecki, who was willing to take action against the Capones. He deputized 70 Chicago police officers, nine squads of motorized police and five squads of detectives and sent them into the town under siege. Throughout the afternoon and evening, police and gangsters fought pitched battles. Among those killed was Al Capone's brother Frank. It was a personal tragedy for Big Al, who a few days later gave his brother the biggest funeral Chicago had seen up to that time, even surpassing that of Big Jim Colosimo in 1920.
Capone consoled himself; his brother had died a winner. The Klenha ticket won in a landslide. Syndicate City was secure.
See also:
Capone, Frank; Hawthorne Inn
.
Cigarette Bootlegging
Bootlegging became a Mafia fine art during Prohibition when the goods was booze. Now there is a thriving business in bootleg cigarettes. The old Profaci-Colombo family remains very active in this field, importing through syndicate functionaries vast amounts of cigarettes from North Carolina, a tobacco state with no tax
Page 82
Lawmen with seized shipment of
bootleg cigarettes, a prime
mob operation.
on its cigarettes. A great boon to the mob was the U.S. surgeon general's decision in 1964 to start warning the public that smoking kills. Several states saw in this the ultimate wisdom of saving livesand handsomely feeding state coffers by jacking up the tax on cigarettes.
The spread between the cigarette prices in many states soon ballooned to 100 to 150 percent more than North Carolina prices and gave the crime families a genuine meal ticket. Individual operatives might also import cigarettes, but they lacked the Mafia's guaranteed distribution method. The mob long controlled much of the cigarette vending machine business and peddled them as well in the hosts of clubs and restaurants it owned directly or indirectly. It also had the muscle to force other businesses to handle the bootleg butts or face other woes.
Despite a steady drumbeat of arrests and seizures of bootleg cigarettes it has been estimated in recent years that as much as 400 million packs sold annually in the New York metropolitan area are bootlegged. The sale of illicit cigarettes in New York has been estimated to cost the state a tax revenue loss of $85 million to $100 million or more annually.
Cirillo, Dominick V. (1930): Named boss of Genovese family in 1997
Called "Quiet Dom," he spent four decades maintaining a low profile in the mob. But by late 1997 Dominick V. Cirillo was recognized by federal investigators as the head of the Genovese family, the number one combinationand the wealthiestin the American Mafia.
It was clear that Quiet Dom represented a new breed of non-flamboyant mob bosses. Cirillo refused to operate as an attention getter eschewing the dapper don quality of a John Gotti, the ostentatious living of a Paul Castellano, or even the bathrobe strolling, "mental case" act of his predecessor as boss, Chin Gigante.
Cirillo lived in an attached house in the Bronx and drove himself around town in inexpensive cars, insisting that he was surviving on little more than $500 a month in Social Security. In an impromptu interview outside the Cirillo home, his son complained the house needed many repairs.
"We don't have money to fix a drain pipe or the roof, and the washing machine in the basement leaks," the son said. "If he had money and was such a big shot, would we be living like this?"
Page 83
Evidence gathered through informer information and eavesdropping told a very different story, and even more revealing was the way other mafiosi deferred to him in his presence.
By the time Gigante was convicted of murder, conspiracy and racketeering charges, Cirillo was the last surviving member of Chin's inner circle, and he was the obvious candidate for successor. No one else knew as much about the family's far-reaching activities. But it was said that Cirillo took the job of boss with considerable reluctance.
"As boss," said Frederick T. Martens, a Mafia expert who tracked Quiet Dom for 30 years, "he automatically gets more money and a piece of everybody's action in the family, but today there is one major disadvantage. You may be at the pinnacle of power, but the top echelons of law enforcement gear up and turn their sights on you."
Could Quiet Dom's style make him less vulnerable than other bosses? It might and certainly the Genovese mob needed a strong leader. The mob's activities in garbage removal, the Fulton Fish Market, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and even the Feast of San Gennaro had been crimped by law enforcement authorities. Cirillo would be under the gun to salvage these operations, while maintaining extremely profitable strangleholds on extortion for labor peace in the construction industry and from businesses on the New Jersey waterfront.
Cirillo already had demonstrated an aptitude for mob politics and infighting by moving up the ladder. In 1953 at age 23 he was convicted of running a heroin ring in East Harlem grossing $20,000 a day. Cirillo did four years for that but since has only been arrested for consorting with known criminals, a misdemeanor used for harassment purposes by detectives. All such charges were dismissed.
What surprised law enforcement was the way Cirillo advanced in the mobquietlythereafter. The Genovese family, like most other Mafia groups, generally refuse to advance anyone with a drug record, since convicted narcotics traffickers attract additional law enforcement surveillance. Evidently his know-how made Cirillo an exception to this nearly ironclad rule.
It was clear Quiet Dom would not be an easy target for law enforcement. It was considered unlikely that he would be caught on electronic tape, as he always specialized in "walk talks," whispering to associates on noisy streets rather than on the phone or inside mob social clubs. Investigators also knew Cirillo was a hard man to track with an uncanny knack for shaking tails. Above all he showed "car smarts" when followed by automobile. Frustrated investigators told of suddenly losing their prey, only to discover him now behind them
trailing them!
See also:
Surveillance Tricks by Mafiosi
.
Civella, Nicholas (19121983): Kansas City Mafia leader
The reputed head of the Kansas City crime family for many years, Nick Civella was, though highly trusted, still a lesser among equals within top Mafia circles. Kansas City during Civella's reign was under considerable domination by the Chicago Outfit which exerted important influence over Civella. The Kansas City mobster was utilized in one period, according to federal authorities, as one of three men who crossed the country as couriers for the "grand council of the Cosa Nostra.' The McClellan Committee listed Nick and his older brother Carl as criminal associates of important but lesser mafiosi. For some time Civella's role could be described as being a Las Vegas "gofer" for the mob. There are indications that all he received annually from the skim at one leading Nevada casino was a puny $50,000 a year.
Yet Civella did play a valuable role in mob activities. He was the agent through whom Roy L. Williams, later president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, was dominated by the mob. At a trial of Midwest crime leaders in 1985, Williams admitted Civella had put him on the pad for $1,500 every month for seven years in return for help in gaining a $62.5 million loan from a union pension fund to finance the acquisition of two casinos; a cynic might note how chintzy the mob could be in their payoffs. The payments lasted until 1981 when Williams was elected president of the union, defeating Cleveland crime family favorite Jackie Presser. Civella alone could hardly have put Williams acrossChicago and St. Louis muscle tipped the scale.
Born the son of Italian immigrants in 1912, Civella was in trouble with juvenile authorities at the age of 10. By the time he was 20 he had been arrested on numerous charges, including car theft, gambling and robbery. He also rose steadily in Mafia circles and, in 1957, despite his denials, attended the Apalachin Conference.
Although he was barred by the Nevada gaming control board from entering casinos in the state, Civella was notoriously active in Las Vegas affairs. He shared in skimming of millions in casino gambling profits, although the theory that he may have been rewarded with only about $50,000 a year may indicate his worth within the entire operation. Quite naturally, Civella always denied the existence of the Mafia and in 1970 said in a newspaper interview, "I even deny, to my knowledge, that organized crime exists in Kansas City."
Page 84
In 1980 Civella was sent to prison for four years on a bribery conspiracy charge and the following year was indicted on a Las Vegas skimming conspiracy count. His name figured prominently in the 1982 trial of Teamsters boss Williams and four others; ultimately the union leader was convicted of conspiring to bribe Howard W. Cannon, U.S. senator from Nevada. Civella died in custody before he came to trial on the skimming charges.
Clean Graft: Payoffs to politicians and police
Without clean graft organized crime could not exist in this country. It is the corrupting force that "oils" the police, prosecutor, judges and politicians. The payoff allows the mafioso underworld to run its policy rackets, its bookmaking outfits, its loan-sharking activities, its porno parlors, its prostitution setups.
It should be understood that most police and other members of the criminal justice system will not accept payoffs from narcotics violationssome will but by no means all. When police accept graft it is almost always "on the pad" to all members of a precinctfrom the patrolman up through the sergeants, the detectives, the lieutenants, captains and inspectors.
Where to draw the line? Clean graft allows a bookmaker and other gamblers to operate; fixes parking and speeding tickets; lets call girls and hookers operate. It creates an ignorance of liquor violations in still-dry areas of the country. And clean graft affords some politicians and police officers a kickback on the sins that will always be with us. So why shouldn't they have a slice of the pie? Could they otherwise have swimming pools or send the kids to college?
But "dirty graft," offered to cover up the narcotics rackets, or murder, armed robbery or rape, is harder to accept. Some cops do, as do some politicians. Regardless of whether it's accepted or not, the line between clean and dirty graft is illusionary.
In fact, clean graft is what allows the criminal syndicates to operate in the first place. They buy the friendships they need and use the revenues they get from "clean" operations to finance dirty deals. Murder, Inc., was financed almost completely from the revenues of "clean" gambling money. It is the policy revenues, the skimming operations from casinos, the horse and baseball and football bets, that provide the financial backing for huge heroin deals. It was $100,000 in clean money that Frank Costello used to see to it that Murder, Inc., stool pigeon Abe Reles went sailing out a sixth-floor window in a Brooklyn hotel where he was being kept under constant police "guard.'' The list is seemingly endless.
See also:
Dirty Graft
.
Cleveland Crime Family: See Licavoli, James T. "Blackie."
Clothesline: Hanging an imprisoned guy out to dry
They call the Mafia the "Honored Society." That doesn't mean that mafiosi cannot cheat or even kill one another if they have good reason and enough power. A mob guy who goes to prison is supposed to be taken care of along with his family. Sometimes, however, the payoff continues for a short time and then stops. There have even been capos who go to prison and find their own crews forget about them, coming through with no money at all. Frequently, the lowly soldiers have been put under another capo and the money may not be there unless they cough it up from their own end. They might even be ordered not to provide support money, thus putting the guy and his needy family "on the clothesline."
Some jailed mafiosi are resourceful enough to set up scams and operations from behind bars to provide for themselves. Some come up with deals to bring in contraband to sell to other prisoners.
When they come out, some may forget about their clothesline treatment. Some may not and blood may flow. Law enforcement officials regard the clothesline tactic as the stupidest thing mobsters do. If a man cannot provide for himself or his family, he grows more resentful and may talk to the law.
The clothesline treatment was part of the reason that Joe Valachi started talking. He was being clotheslined and "put on the shelf" by the big-shot mafiosi. The more resentful he acted the more they suspected him of being a stoolieand a stoolie he finally became.
Cocaine-Heroin Shuttle Scheme
In the aftermath of the Pizza Connection breakup, Mafia forces in the United States and Italy sought to resume narcotics trafficking in a way that cut down heavy shipments of money and the high risks involved. Thus in the late 1980s the so-called cocaine-heroin shuttle was established.
Cocaine purchased in South America was shipped to Italy and there exchanged for heroin. The arrangement was mutually beneficial. Cocaine had become more valuable in Europe than in America as it was adopted by many as their drug of choice. This gave U.S. interests more capital for the purchase of heroin, which commanded top dollar in America. The lack of cash transactions eliminated a considerable amount of money laundering.
Things went smoothly until late March 1988 when eavesdropping techniques revealed the scheme to inves-

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