The Mafia Encyclopedia (51 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 139
told, "Unless you let our pals go, we'll come down there and kill everybody we see. We've got plenty of men and some machine guns." Butler reported the threat routinely to the Chicago police, who, rather hysterical about it, warned him to take the call seriously. Butler armed himself, and had the state militia called out to guard the school. Within a few days, a 42er scouting party of three showed up headed by Crazy Patsy Steffanelli. They were grabbed outside the reformatory walls and freely admitted they were scouting ways to have machine gunners bust into the joint. The episode brought considerable press coverage to the 42 Gang, and calls for tougher treatment for hardened juvenile criminals. The
Chicago Tribune
declared the real decision lay between sending 42ers to Joliet penitentiary or to the electric chair.
The press coverage pleased the 42ers no end. Their ultimate ambition was to turn the heads of the big bootlegging gangsespecially the Capones. They staged robberies just to have a lot of cash to spend freely in Capone mob hangouts. Occasionally the big mobsters were impressed enough to use some of them as beer runners or drivers, but for a number of years they considered "these crazy boys" too dangerous to have around.
Finally the Capone men accepted one 42er. Ironically, it was Sam "Mooney" Giancana, and his nickname fit; he was one of the "mooniest" of the gang. Still, he was an excellent wheelman who never got flustered under pressure. Tony Accardo took him on as his driver. Later, as Giancana learned to curb his wild behavior, he moved up the syndicate ladder under the patronage of Accardo and Paul Ricca, the latter especially seeing executive material in this cunning savage. As Giancana moved upward, he brought a number of 42ers after him. Among those who went on to make a considerable mark in the Chicago syndicate were: Sam Battaglia, Milwaukee Phil Alderisio, Sam DeStefano, Leonard and Marshall Caifano, Charles Nicoletti, Fifi Buccieri, Albert Frabotta, William Aloisio, Frank Caruso, Willie Daddano, Joe Caesar DiVarco, Rocco Potenza, Leonard Gianola and Vincent Inserro.
Another 42er didn't last long among the Capones. He was Paul Battaglia, Sam's older brother, and one of the first leaders of the 42 Gang. Paul got careless about whom he robbed; he was a fingerman for gunners who specialized in sticking up horse betting rooms and handbooks. Since such operations by the mid-1930s had come under the Capone Syndicate, information could be swapped around about the holdup men. Pretty soon Paul was the known common denominator in the holdups. That earned him a mob assassinationa couple of bullets in the head.
This left Sam Battaglia with two options, frequently faced in the Mafia and organized crime. He could seek revenge or he could accept a loved one's murder as "just business." Sam opted for the second way and later achieved the level of underboss under Giancana when the latter reached don status.
See also:
Youngbloods
.
Four Deuces: Capone mob headquarters and vice den
The address, 2222 South Wabash Avenue, gave the place its namethe Four Deuces. Standing out front late in 1919 was a chubby, round-faced character, shilling. The journalist Courtney Ryley Cooper later recalled: "I saw him there a dozen times, coat collar turned up on winter nights, hands deep in his pockets as he fell in step with a passer-by and mumbled: 'Got some nice-looking girls inside.'"
He was young Al Capone, newly summoned to Chicago by Johnny Torrio, at first for the most humble of chores, including that of capper for a brothel.
Capone would mature, and so would the Four Deuces. For a time the mob's headquarters, it was also one of the most notorious pleasure joints operated by Torrio and Capone. A four-story structure, it gave over the first floor to a saloon, with a steel-barred gate setting off a large office area. No one but members of the mob passed this barrier. Solid steel doors led to gambling rooms on the second and third floors while the fourth housed what became by Capone standards, a very lavish bordello.
The cellar at Four Deuces was also the scene of a number of murders. A famed, incorruptible Chicago judge, John H. Lyle, wrote:
I got some first-band information on the resort from Mike de Pike Heitler who bitterly resented the mob's invasion of his field [prostitution]. Shuffling into my chambers one afternoon, be told me: "They snatch guys they want information from and take them to the cellar. They're tortured until they talk. Then they're rubbed out. The bodies are hauled through a tunnel into a trap door opening in the back of the building. Capone and bis boys put the bodies in cars and then they're dumped out on a country road, or maybe in a clay bole or rock quarry."
Years later Lyle and a retired police lieutenant took a tour of the then-abandoned building and discovered the tunnel and trap door. Police were reasonably certain that at least a dozen gangsters had been slaughtered in the Four Deuces.
Other mobs gave the Four Deuces considerable competition, especially the nearby Frolics Club. Frolics offered women and booze of Four Deuces quality at lesser prices. Rather than file unfair business practice
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charges, the Capone mob dealt with the problem more ingeniously. One night when the boys had a corpse on their hands, they transported the body over to the Frolics Club and jammed it into the furnace. One of the Capone men then placed an indignant telephone call to the police to complain about the illegal crematorium being run at the Frolics Club. In moments sirens signaled the arrival of the police who, with flailing axes, burst into the club and hurried to the cellar. Sure enough, there was a partially burned corpse in the furnace. The authorities padlocked the joint and had the police virtually tear down the entire structure looking for more corpses.
They found none but the Frolics Club never reopened. Over at the Four Deuces the booze flowed like water in celebration.
Franse, Steven (18951953): Mobster and Genovese murder victim
A rather inventive journalist once labeled Steve Franse's murder the "Dear Abby Murder Case." Franse, a longtime trusted associate and racket partner of Vito Genovese, was innocent of any misdoing. But he died because of the ugly spectre of sex in a form hairychested mafiosi could not abide.
Franse went back to Prohibition with Lucky Luciano and Genovese, and he was about the only person the ever-suspicious Genovese would completely trust. When Genovese had to flee the United States for Italy in the late 1930s, he took a fortune in cash with him. He also left plenty behind, from various secret investments to a quarter of a million dollars in cash in a vault of a Manufacturers Trust Company bank on Fifth Avenue. Genovese left two keys, one with his wife Anna, whom he adored and, in fact, for whom he had murdered her previous husband just so he could have her. The other key was with Franse.
Genovese remained out of the country until the conclusion of World War II. When he returned, he was shocked to hear tongues wagging. Franse had been Anna Genovese's constant companion and, while looking after Vito's business investments, had also looked after Anna's, which she said had "nothing to do with syndicate money." But this was not what bothered Genovese. Franse had not kept a close eye on Vito's wife, and she had simply used Franse as a convenient cover for her dalliances with lovers of both sexes, at least so Vito believed.
His wife had clearly fallen out of love with Genovese. She was to sue him for separate maintenance, revealing in the process much about his underworld activities and income, such as getting between $20,000 and $30,000 a week from the Italian lottery alone. The underworld fully expected Genovese to deal with her in the manner always accorded stool pigeons, but Genovese could not bear to do so. Action, however, was required for Genovese to save face, and Franse was the logical victim.
According to Joe Valachi, the kill contract was passed to him, Pat Pagano and Fiore Siano. Since Franse was a longtime friend of Valachi's, it was a simple matter for his partners to lure him to Valachi's restaurant to show him the joint. Franse got the grand tour ending abruptly in the kitchen where one of the killers got him in an armlock from behind and Siano began slugging him in the belly and mouth. "He gives it to him good," Valachi said. "It's what we call 'buckwheats,' meaning spitework." Obviously, this murder was a matter of honor to Genovese and he wanted Franse to die hard. He did, finally being strangled with a chain around his neck.
Frnntizius, Peter von (?1968)
Founder of an establishment called Sports, Inc., Chicago gun dealer Peter von Frantizius came to be dubbed by the press "The Armorer of Gangland." Regarded as the regular supplier for the Capone gang, he furnished the machine guns and other firearms that figured in many of the most spectacular gang killings of the 1920s. Once pressed to explain the sale of six machine guns to underworld mobsters he told a coroner's jury with a perfectly straight face that he had assumed they were for the Mexican government to put down revolutionaries. The machine gun involved in the murder of big-time gangster Frankie Yale in Brooklyn in 1928 was traced back to Frantizius.
Frantizius lived a charmed life as far as the law was concerned, never being the subject of prosecution, and Sports, Inc., continued to thrive even after Frantizius died in 1968. The company's letterhead continued to list "P. von Frantizius, Pres. & Gen. Mgr."
Fratianno, Jimmy (19131993): Informer
Among the recent criminal informers, including Joe Valachi and Vinnie Teresa, Jimmy "the Weasel" Fratianno was by far the highest-ranking mob figure ever to "turn" and testify against important crime leaders until Sammy "the Bull" Gravano. His nickname harkened back to his youthful fruit-stealing days in Cleveland's Little Italy, when he demonstrated, to the admiration of onlookers, how he could outrun pursuing policemen fast as a weasel. If that won him the admiration of the underworld, it was nothing compared to the high esteem he enjoyed among mob leaders due to his willingness to kill even good friends if so ordered from above. He was involved in 11 murders by his own count.
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Only after he was the object of a death plot himself did Fratianno turn on the mob and begin telling all. His testimony helped convict Mafia bosses in California and New York, but perhaps his more important contribution was in detailing the mob's best-kept secrets. Unlike Joe Valachi, whose information was almost totally limited to New York City, Fratianno was a high-ranking caporegime, or lieutenant, and, for a time, acting boss of the Los Angeles family. He could offer a more authoritative overview of the workings of organized crime, including eye-opening facts about the CIA's attempt to kill Castro while at the same time Florida crime boss Santo Trafficante, a key mafioso involved in the plotting, may well have been cooperating with the Cuban leader, in effect collecting from both sides of the street.
Fratianno's story was told in a best-selling book,
The Last Mafioso
, in which the Weasel is shown to develop a way common to most informers. He turned informer much earlier than the public believed, a situation probably true of Joe Valachi as well. Fratianno found it worthwhile to get the law on his side by feeding it certain information and gaining a special measure of freedom thereafter, since the FBI does not keep too close tabs on its informers. While he was spilling minor facts to the FBI, Jimmy the Weasel kept maneuvering himself all the way up to becoming an acting boss of the Los Angeles crime family.
After his testimony in a number of cases, Fratianno entered the witness protection program. Some years later he was bounced from it, apparently for some infraction or infractions. He died in 1993 of natural causes.
See also:
Operation Mongoose
.
French Connection: See Palermo Connection.
Friday and Saturday Nights
"Friday Night" and "Saturday Night" have very special connotations in the wise guy vocabulary. Friday night is the time for wise guys to howl. As far as mob wives are concerned, that night is a husband's time to play cards with the guys. The wives need not expect their husbands to get home until Saturday morning or even midafternoon. Actually Friday nights are when mob guys take out their girlfriends. It is not unusual on Friday nights on New York's Mulberry Street in Little Italy to see a stretch limo pull up in front of a restaurant and spew out a number of sexy young women and their mob lovers. Things are different on Saturday night when all the mob guys go out with their spouses. This arrangement eliminates the chances of a wise guy running into other mafiosi's wives while out with his girlfriend, and the newsbe it helpful or cattygetting back to the injured wife.
"Friend of Ours" and "Friend of Mine": Code introductions
When a mafioso introduces a colleague to another mafioso who does not happen to know him, he uses the coded message: "Meet Tommy, he's a friend of mine," or "he's a friend of ours.'' If the person is presented to other mafiosi as a ''friend of ours," it indicates that he is a made man and can be trusted. But if that person is "a friend of mine," he is not a made man, and the phrase gives due warning to the other wise guy to say only what he feels safe to say. Nevertheless, by using the phrase "a friend of mine," the wise guy making the introduction is vouching for his "friend," so if that friend turns out to be an informer or an undercover law enforcement agent, the wise guy faces a certain fatea fatal one.
When Sammy "the Bull" Gravano was made, he was ecstatic the first time he was introduced to other made men with the comment "Sammy is now a friend of ours." As Sammy recollected, "Chills went up and down my spine." Presumably being accorded the "friend of ours" accolade was mobdom's equivalent of receiving the Order of the Garter.
Funerals of Gangsters
Frankie Yale, the powerful Brooklyn mafoso, took an avid interest in the lavish funeral given Dion O'Banion, Chicago's vicious North Side Irish gang leader. Yale had a vested interest in the matter; he was one of the three assassins who had blasted O'Banion away in his flower shop in 1924. In a sense, Yale was entirely responsible for the funeral.
Of the O'Banion rites one Chicago newspaper commented with a mixture of awe and annoyance, "Presidents are buried with less to-do." The bronze and silver casket for the deceased had been made to order in Philadelphia for $10,000, then rushed to Chicago by express car. Before the funeral, 40,000 persons passed through the undertaker's chapel to view the body as it "lay in state," as the
Chicago Tribune
termed it. At the funeral, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed the "Dead March" from
Saul
, while the pallbearerslabor racketeer Maxie Eisen, president of the Kosher Meat Peddlers' Association, and five distinguished triggermen, Hymie Weiss, Bugs Moran, Schemer Drucci, Frank Gusenberg and Two Gun Alteriewbore the casket to the hearse. Behind them trooped solemn-faced Johnny Torrio and Al Capone, and then henchmen as well as criminals from many other gangs. Outside the funeral parlor was a wreath, so enormous that it could

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