The Mafia Encyclopedia (43 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 116
larly unsuccessful in getting Italy, France or Tunisia to take back a criminal who had spent virtually all his living days in America. According to leaks from federal authorities, Marcello had guaranteed he would get the reaction he wanted in Italy by paying bribes of an average of $10,000 apiece to key members of Parliament. At the time Marcello wasn't sure how France and Tunisia would act so to be on the safe side he arranged, the story went, for forged documents to indicate he was born in Guatemala. Even though the U.S. government had plenty of cause to believe the claim was based on forgery and bribery, it virtually shanghaied Marcello out of the country in 1961 and deposited him in Guatemala "where you have citizenship."
Marcello smuggled himself into El Salvador and then trekked through the jungle to Honduras. Then, in as whacky a conclusion as any American deportation case, Marcello simply got on a commercial airliner to Miami and passed right through customs and immigration without even being checked. He has been in the United States ever since.
Actually the best, and sometimes the only way, to get rid of important mobsters is by convincing them to go voluntarily to avoid prosecution. The government might have put Joe Adonis away for a few years on criminal charges but instead an agreement was worked out that stayed prosecution if he left. Adonis, with several million dollars in two Swiss banks, opted for exile in Milan in 1956, living out 16 years in lavish comfort.
The most famous deportee of all was Lucky Luciano who was released from a New York prison, where he was doing 30-to-50 years, because of what was said to have been his great aid to the war effort. His release by Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the man who originally prosecuted him, did not free him from being deported in 1946. Luciano was under the illusion that if and when Dewey was elected president he would be allowed to return to the United States. The "if" never happened so Luciano's grasp on reality cannot now be measured. He remained in exile and as such became the leader of numerous lesser mafiosi who were deported before and after him. Later on Luciano petitioned President Dwight D. Eisenhower on his own behalf and those of other deportees to be readmitted, but the plea was rejected. It was not too tough on Luciano who for almost the rest of his life received something like $25,000 a month from the syndicate. The lesser deportees did not fare too well. Many were impoverished and many of those banished to Sicily were cheated and robbed of what little funds they had by native mafiosi. The rules of the Honored Society simply did not apply to a bunch of damned foreigners.
Desimone, Frank (?-1968): Los Angeles Mafia boss
The impotence of the Los Angeles Mafia has been an embarrassmentnot only to the Mafia, but also to the zealous L.A. press. Even under Jack Dragna, journalistically dubbed the "Al Capone of California" and considered the toughest of all the Mafia chiefs in that city, the crime family already qualified as the "Mickey Mouse Mafia."
When Bugsy Siegel came to town in the late 1930s as the representative of the New York mobs, he rather officiously reduced Dragna to junior partner. Chicago moved into the movie rackets in Hollywood without even consulting Dragna. Worst of all, even after the national board of the syndicate eliminated Siegel, Dragna was unable to wrest control of Siegel's rackets from Bugsy's bodyguard, Mickey Cohen. Bookmakers who should have paid tribute to the mob simply did not, with impunity.
By comparison Dragna's successor, Frank DeSimone was a creampuff. He ruled from 1957 to 1968, and it was not a happy period for the mob there or for DeSimone in particular. Right at the start of his reign he was netted in his first inter-family act, attending the ill-fated Apalachin Conference.
Later on DeSimone was undoubtedly very shook up to discover that Mafia boss Joe Bonanno had added him as a victim in a plot to knock off several crime family leaders, including Carlo Gambino and Tommy Lucchese in New York and Stefano Magaddino in Buffalo. Why little DeSimone? Bonanno had moved much of his interests west and operated part-time out of his "vacation territory" in Arizona. This gave him access to Nevada and southern California rackets. Apparently Bonanno was as prepared to take out DeSimone as he would to swat a fly. By the last few years of his rule, informer Jimmy "the Weasel" Fratianno reported that "DeSimone's scared of his shadow, never goes out nights. The guy's gone bananas."
When DeSimone died in 1968, the L.A. mantle passed to his underboss, Nick Licata, a debatable improvement if any improvement at all.
Destefano, Sam (19091973): Chicago Outfit enforcer and sadist
Sam DeStefano was answering to a higher authority when he killed his brother. Whenever Sam Giancana said kill, he killed. Whenever Paul "the Waiter" Ricca said "make-a him go away," DeStefano saw to it that the man went awaypermanently.
The number one madhatter of the Chicago Outfit, Sam DeStefano was considered the most demented of all the mob's killersand thus a particular favorite of Giancana and Ricca. An extortionist, rapist, loan shark,
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hijacker, counterfeiter, narcotics trafficker and sexual psychopath, he insisted on torturing his victims before the kill. When he got the contract to hit Leo Foreman, a sometime mob associate, he had three of the boys lure Foreman to a suburban home, take him into a basement sauna-bomb shelter, and shoot but not kill him. They then used a butcher knife on him a couple of times, but still did not kill him. They were waiting for Sam. Then Sam walked in, dressed in pajamas. "You thought you'd get away from me," one of the three, Charles Crimaldi, who turned state's witness, quoted Sam as screaming. "I told you I'd get you. Greed got you killed."
Foreman begged Sam to spare him, "Please, unk, oh my God," Foreman cried. (In better days he'd always referred to DeStefano as "unk.") Then, Crimaldi related, Sam grabbed a gun and shot him in the buttocks. They watched him writhe in pain for a while, then one of the others stabbed him several more times and Foreman lay still. They took turns cutting chunks of flesh from the corpse's arms and then DeStefano looked upset. He observed Foreman's face was frozen in what looked like an unmoving smile. "Look at him," Sam said. ''He's laughing at us. Like he's glad he died."
Victims of Sam's torture, police and even fellow hoods conceded he was mentally deranged. That may be what made him so valuable to Ricca and Giancana. As a "juice collector" he had no equal. Loan shark victims would do almost anything to find money to pay their debts to the mob. One of DeStefano's favorite ploys was to shove a debtor into a telephone booth and jam an ice pick in his stomach. "I'll pull your eyeballs out. I'll put ice picks in you." He meant it.
Another time he took a loan shark debtor into a jeweler's and bought him a wristwatch. He told the jeweler to engrave it "From Sam to Bob," explaining to the juice victim "so when they find you in a trunk they'll know I was your friend."
Once six juice victims worked out a desperate plot to kill DeStefano. They planned to darken their faces, arm themselves with hand grenades and army rifles, and attack Sam's house, rolling the grenades down his breezeway. Unfortunately, they chickened out.
DeStefano was very useful to the mob at eliminating competing loan sharks. One Peter Cappelletti tried it for a while until DeStefano came after him. He abducted him, chained him to a radiator, tortured him and in full view of his wife urinated on him. Then Sam and his men unchained him and threw him to his wife's feet. "I'm giving back his life to you," DeStefano announced magnanimously.
DeStefano had contempt for almost everybody, including the law. He ranted in courtrooms and sometimes wanted to testify with a bullhorn. On one occasion he became outraged when the name of a fellow mobster was used at his trial. DeStefano jumped to his feet shouting: "I'll not have the names of any gangsters mentioned during my trial." He demanded the right to cross-examine a detective. "I want to know his background. Joe Stalin may have sent him."
In 1969 author Ovid Demaris profiled DeStefano in his book
Captive City
and dubbed him "the gangster police elect as the most likely to be discovered in a car trunk." He proved close, but it was an event that could not be considered until Ricca's death in 1972. Ricca's opinion always received a hearing and was even revered as if from a deity.
Equally obedient to Giancana, DeStefano didn't balk at the contract in 1955 on his younger brother Michael. Because he was a drug addict, it was Sam's way of curing him. For the same reason, he stripped the body clean and washed it to remove the stain of narcotics. When questioned about how he had killed his brother and then handled the body, DeStefano was reduced to wild giggling and making his interrogators repeat their questions over and over. Instead of answers, he just giggled on.
In 1971, DeStefano was sentenced to three and a half years for threatening a government witness. That was on appeal when the authorities broke the Leo Foreman murder. Indicted were Sam, his brother Mario and a rising hoodlum named Tony Spilotro. Sam was by this time talking even more wildly than before. He was diagnosed as having cancer but there were those, especially Spilotro, who feared his antics in the upcoming murder trial. There were others in a burglary ring that Sam bossed who also worried about his upredictability. Not even Sam Giancana, shorn of some of the power he had previously enjoyed, could save him, much as he wanted to. DeStefano was excellent life insurance for Giancana.
The trouble was that DeStefano had no life insurance of his own anymore. In 1973, the 64-year-old hoodlum was doing some chores in his garage in a nice residential section on Chicago's Far West Side. He was sweeping with a new broom when he saw the barrel of a shotgun aimed at him. The double blast knocked him flat, severing his left arm at the elbow while the lead bored into his heart. The killer or killers had let Sam die quick and easy, a charity he hardly ever granted his victims.
Detroit Crime Family: See Zerilli, Joseph.
Dewey, Thomas E. (19021971): Gangbuster and near assassination victim
Thomas E. Dewey was a knight in shining armor, the fearless gangbuster who almost took up residence in the White House. In the underworld, Dewey had a different reputation.
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In
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano
, Luciano portrays Dewey as a man on the take, who demanded and got big bucks as "campaign contributions" to commute Luciano's 30-to-50-year prison term. (Coauthor Richard Hammer, in his introduction, explains that much in the book "is angry, scurrilous, even defamatory.")
Although the same charge was raised by Democrats at election time, no hard proof was ever offered to back up Luciano's claim. However, a thorough analysis of Dewey's record on crime has never been made and his dedicated biographers have had little interest in doing so. This does not mean that the Dewey record is not somewhat troublesome.
It was Dewey's crimefighting prowess that moved him along politicallyto the governorship of New York and the Republican candidacy for president in 1944 and 1948. Dewey's career began as a Wall Street lawyer. As a prosecutor of errant industrialists, businessmen and financiers, he showed limited effectiveness. It was against gangsters that Dewey shone. In various enforcement positionsU.S, attorney, special prosecutor, district attorneyhe clapped in prison or sent to the electric chair such gangsters as Luciano, Waxey Gordon, Gurrah Shapiro and Louis Lepke.
Before he nailed Luciano, Dewey had targeted Dutch Schultz, the king of Harlem policy rackets and many other illicit enterprises. The Dutchman combined a brilliant criminal mind with the off-the-wall acts of a flake, always fond of solving dilemmas with a gun. When Dewey's men were closing in on his operations, an angry Schultz went before the national board of the crime syndicate to demand that Dewey be knocked off. This was counter to one of the founding rules of the organization, which Luciano later restated, "We wouldn't hit newspaper guys or cops or DA's. We don't want the kind of trouble everybody'd get." Led by the forces of Luciano and Lansky, the crime board voted Schultz down. "I still say he ought to be hit," the mad Dutchman raged in defiance, "and if nobody else is gonna do it, I'm gonna hit him myself."
As a young prosecutor Tom Dewey (here being sworn)
built a racket-buster image that turned him into
a presidential candidate. Some Found his anti-mob
record rather spotty.
If at first the mobsters thought Schultz was just letting off steam, they changed their minds in October 1935 when they learned Schultz had an actual murder plan in place. Dewey's Fifth Avenue apartment was staked out by a man who posed each morning as the father of a child pedaling a velocipede. That man watched as Dewey and two bodyguards walked by to a neighborhood drugstore, from where the prosecutor called his office each morning from one of several booths. Dewey feared the mob might tap his home phone.
As the Schultz plan was supposed to work, the "caser" with the child would one morning be in the drugstore with a gun and silencer awaiting Dewey's arrival. He would shoot Dewey as he entered a telephone booth and then walk out past the bodyguards waiting unsuspecting outside.
Hurriedly the national board of the syndicate passed a death sentence on Schultz and he was murdered in a chop house in Newark, New Jersey, before he gave final okay to the Dewey rubout.
Dewey did not learn of his "almost assassination" until 1940 when it was revealed to him by Murder, Inc., prosecutor Burton Turkus. His eyes widened when mention was made of the proud papa with the child on the velocipede. After five years he apparently still remembered them.
By that time Dewey had had Luciano sent to prison for 30 to 50 years for compulsory prostitution, the longest sentence ever handed out for such an offense. After World War II, Dewey backed a parole board's recommendation that Luciano be freed, an action for which Dewey was roundly attacked by political opponents. The move, Dewey insisted, was made because of Luciano's aid to the war effort. It may well have been influenced by Luciano's intercession in the Schultz plot. To his dying day Luciano insisted there was another reasonthat after considerable negotiations, the mob had contributed $90,000 in small bills to Dewey's campaign fund.
Although it would be unacceptable to give credence to such a source as Luciano without independent evidence to confirm the charge, there were in later years reasons enough to find Dewey's actions unfortunate and troublesome. Luciano's claims that, for instance, a New York police commissioner being on the take can be supported when it is shown that his acts were precisely what the mob wanted. In Dewey's case this was

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