The Mafia Encyclopedia (47 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Costello himself was often referred to as Don Francesco by mobsters and even by columnist Walter Winchell. Costello was a very tight-lipped gambler and often had information on a good thing, and when he did, other mobsters found the one way to get him to share the information was to ask, "Have any good tips, Don Francesco?" Costello could seldom resist such flattery and would share his hot informationalthough it inevitably cut into the odds he would receive.
Unlike "Mustache Pete," used disparagingly against some old-line mafiosi who could not alter their ways and adapt to the new methods of syndicate crime in America, the term
don
usually indicates a much respected oldster, of which there were and are many today in the American Mafia. In the New England crime family under the late Raymond Patriarca there was even a mob advisory council made up of the "old Dons," respected by the current leaders as the men who had made the mob decades previously. Informer Vinnie Teresa said of them: "They got the town [Boston] in the bag, and it's been in the bag ever since. They were the ones who made the connections with the police departments. They'd had connections in the district attorney's office for thirty or forty years. They made the mob."
In their twilight years these men were accorded the title of don and although they no longer did anything except sit around in lounge chairs, Patriarca saw they got their cut from some kind of racket. And when they were needed in a crisis they were called to a meeting, just to get their thinking since they knew the nuances of mob mentality around the country. In this sense the concept of don has remained uncorrupted within the Mafia from its meaning in the old country.
Double-Decker Coffin: See Mafia Coffin.
Dracula: Keeper of DeMeo's murder clubhouse
His name was Joseph Guglielmo, and he was said to have been some sort of cousin of Roy DeMeo, the assembly-line hit man for Paul Castellano and the Gambino family. To others in the vicious murder crew, he was known simply as Dracula, or Drac for short. Dracula actually lived in the murder clubhouse where dozens of killings and dismemberments took place. It was his job to tidy things up and to make sure the bathroom was locked when unexpected visitors arrived or when the murder crew on a non-lethal night might have lady friends in for some affairs of the heart. After all a naked
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body or two might be hanging there to let the blood drip out. Drac also cleaned the floors, no easy task since despite all precautions blood inevitably stained them.
Dracula had to scrub and scrub and scrub and eventually, when the stains got too deep, repaint the floor. Just after one paint job, Dracula told a confederate with a certain pride in his voice, "There's a lot of history in that floor."
Dracula himself probably could not determine exactly how many killings and dismemberments took place in the clubhouse, but the most conservative estimates place the figure in the dozens.
No one ever quite knew how old Dracula was, though apparently he was somewhere in his 50s, and he was more or less regarded as a sort of mascot. However, when the feds started nearing the truth about the slaughter setup, Castellano felt the heat and decided it would be best if his prize killer, DeMeo, ceased his activities permanently. DeMeo was whacked.
This left Dracula in a peculiar position. He was indicted but never located. Authorities assumed that the murder mascot had lost his value to the mob, and that he too had been murdered and cut up in little pieces.
See also:
DeMeo, Roy
.
Dragna, Jack (18911957): Los Angeles crime boss
He was called by officials and the press "the Al Capone of Los Angeles"something of an overstatement.
Boss of the "Mickey Mouse Mafia," Dragna was never strong enough to control crime in California or in nearby Las Vegas. L.A. became known within the national syndicate as an outfit incapable or organizing the diverse criminal elements of California in any effective manner. Independent bookmakers saw little reason to seek Dragna's "protection," and refused to pay him tribute.
When the eastern mobs decided to move the racing wire business into California, no serious thought was given to having Dragna handle iteven though California was his territory and syndicate rules required it. Instead, Bugsy Siegel was sent in. Similarly, the Chicago Outfit paid Dragna no mind when they moved in with their Hollywood rackets. If the L.A. Mafia and Dragna had been powerful, it would have been interesting to see Chicago stake its claim to everything west of the Windy City. As it was, Dragna could do little but acquiesce to the outsiders.
Dragna was particularly galled when Siegel moved in, but a firm warning from Lucky Luciano (from behind bars in New York) was enough to warn Dragna off. Siegel's presence involved more than the gambling wire. He was also the advance man for the eastern mobs seeking to establish a gambling empire in Las Vegas, a big-time operation for which Dragna was also deemed unsuited. Essentially, Dragna became little more than Siegel's hired gun, and inwardly he seethed and wished for the demise of the handsome, blue-eyed intruder.
Dragna was a man who thought small. The limit of his successful capers involved such matters as providing protection to certain illegal operatives and then sending in a confederate to shake them down. They would come crying to Dragna for protection and he would agree to do so, demanding, however, an extra payment. In at least one case the would-be victim kept insisting his tormentor, Dragna's secret ally, had to be killed, and when Dragna saw the victim could not be "cooled," he ordered the victim murdered. Dragna was a cheat, often victimizing not only outsiders but his own men as well.
When Siegel was assassinated, the story made the rounds that Dragna himself had eagerly handled the assignment, but this was very unlikely. Despite his denials, Meyer Lansky pushed for Siegel's execution and would hardly have trusted Dragna to carry it off successfully. As near as can be determined, the Siegel assassination was carried out by a longtime Lansky hit man, Frankie Carbo, who had previously committed a number of murders in league with Siegel. Naturally Lansky's people spread the gospel that Dragna had done the job.
Dragna rose to the top among the "home-grown" California mobsters only because he was the best of a poor lotalthough practiced murderers, they simply lacked the abilities of their eastern compatriots. He was born in Corleone, Sicily, in 1891, and first immigrated to this country in 1898 with his parents. They returned to the old country 10 years later, but Dragna came back to the United States for good in 1914. Within a year he was convicted of extortion and did three years in San Quentin. After that Dragna was arrested many times but was never convictedat least, in escaping punishment, he exhibited a true godfatherly trait.
After Siegel's demise it might have been expected that Dragna would at last establish his power in California, but he proved incapable of curbing Chicago and New York's intrusion into California, and, more significantly, into Las Vegas. Dragna never was able to get in on any major action in Vegas, and his incompetent dealing with Mickey Cohen, Siegel's top aide, who refused to cut Dragna and other mafiosi in on any of Bugsy's old L.A. gambling revenues, probably sealed his reputation as a blunderer. The Dragna family tried to kill Cohen any number of times and failed every time to the point, it was said, that it became a Hollywood comedy epic. As a result, Dragna simply never rated highly in the national councils of the underworld and was allowed in only on low-level action.
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In his biography,
The Last Mafioso
, Jimmy ''the Weasel" Fratianno tells of an alleged shakedown effort he and Dragna put on kingpin Lansky to get a cut of the Vegas action. According to Fratianno, he personally whacked around Lansky's tough underlings, Doc Stacher and Moe Sedway, until Lansky got the message that Los Angeles would have to be taken care of. Even if Fratianno's word is accepted on those claims, nothing came of it. Dragna later told Fratianno that Lansky sent word they could get a piece of the Flamingo (a Las Vegas casino hotel) for $125,000, a princely sum in the early 1950s. Dragna didn't have it and Los Angeles wound up with nothing. Fratianno functioned best on a lowly hit-man level despite his ambitions and simply could not grasp the significance of a situation in which the alleged shakedown victim sets the terms. Lansky was actually rubbing their noses in the dirt, making them an offer they had to refuse, and demonstrating the full extent of his power.
Dragna's influence continued to wane. After he died in 1957, he was followed by a number of bosses and acting bossesFrank DeSimone, Nick Licata, Dominic Brooklier, Louie Tom Dragna and Fratiannoall save Fratianno, at least by Fratianno's estimation, inferior even to Jack Dragna. The word on the West Coast mob remainedMickey Mouse Mafia.
See also:
Cohen, Mickey
.
Dragna, Louis Tom (1920- ): Syndicate gangster
Louis Tom Dragna, identified by some journalists as the boss of the Mafia in southern California, was described by a federal judge in 1983 as "genteel"even after he was convicted in the judge's court of racketeering, conspiracy and extortion. Informer Jimmy "the Weasel" Fratianno would probably describe him as "yellow."
Louie Dragna served as acting boss of the Los Angeles family in the 1970s when then-reigning boss, Dominic Brooklier, was off doing a stint in prison. Brooklier knew what he was doing; Dragna would never have had the nerve or the inclination to take over the mob permanently. At the same time, Brooklier realized that Dragna needed more spine. He named hit man Fratianno as co-leader with Dragna.
Louie Dragna was the nephew of the long, time boss of the family, Jack Dragna, who had died in 1957. Louie's father, a capable killer, served as Jack's consigliere until that same year.
After Fratianno turned federal informer, he described how Louie Dragna, sitting in a room with several other mobsters, watched when Fratianno and another expert killer, Frank "Bomp" Bompensiero, garroted one Russian Louie Strauss as he entered the room. Years later Dragna, according to Fratianno, was still ecstatic about how that killing had gone and told him: "I've never forgotten how quickly it happened to Russian Louie. The fucking guy walked in Gaspare's house and you and Bomp moved so fast he was a goner in ten seconds." The ingracious Fratianno said he put Louie Dragna down by telling him he "ought to try" killing someone himself sometime.
Louie was also in the dressmaking business. According to Fratianno, he was schooled by racketeer Johnny Dio who flew in special from New York to offer advice in the violent ways of slugging and intimidation so that it wouldn't be necessary to worry about union pay scales or rules. Eventually, the business Dragna started, Roberta Manufacturing, was doing $10 million a year and was perhaps the most profitable plant in its field in California, paying its Mexican women help, Fratianno estimated, an average of 85 cents an hour. Dragna is also believed to have been involved as an investor in the Las Vegas casino field; he was one of 11 "undesirables" banned by Nevada gambling authorities in their first "Black Book" issued in 1960.
In 1980 Louie Dragna was convicted along with four othersBrooklier, Jack LoCicero, Mike Rizzitello and Sam Sciortinoon conspiracy charges involving extortion of bookmakers and pornography dealers. The Justice Department's Organized Strike Force viewed the case as the most significant Mafia prosecution ever in Los Angeles. Of the five, U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. imposed the mildest sentence on Louie: two years with a recommendation that he be confined in a minimum-security honor camp. When he imposed sentence, Judge Hatter said he was taking into consideration Dragna's lack of prior convictions, the only one being a 25-year-old case involving extortion which was overturned on appeal. Hatter said he thought Dragna was on the "genteel" side and that he'd been drawn into the mob's conspirary to extort pornographers and gamblers through a sense of loyalty to the deceased members of his family who had been leaders of the L.A. Mafia in the 1950s.
The federal Bureau of Prisons refused to go along with Hatter's recommendations and slated Dragna to be sent to a medium-security prison. A federal attorney called Dragna a man "tied to La Cosa Nostra for 32 years." In a most unusual move the judge then tossed out the original sentence and resentenced Dragna to spend a year in a local community treatment center, placed him on five years' probation and fined him $50,000. At the treatment center Dragna was to be allowed out during the day to work at Roberta Manufacturing and return at night to the treatment center. Thus if Dragna was merely to be regarded as a reputed mafioso, he was subjected to a punishment federal authorities regarded as more reputed than real.

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