The Mafia Encyclopedia (53 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 147
Easily the most cunning Mafia leader since Lucky Luciano,
Carlo Gambino (in cuffs) was the model for The Godfather.
He propelled the then-small Anastasia crime family to the foremost
position in organized crime.
Gambino had been an ever-ambitious youthful associate of Luciano and Meyer Lansky, the twin architects of organized crime in America. He rose through the ranks to become underboss to the brutal Albert Anastasia in the 1950s, aiding him in deposing their crime family's first boss, Vince Mangano, whose body was never found.
When in the late 1950s Vito Genovese made his move for the prime position in the Mafia, he approached Carlo Gambino about deposing Anastasia. Then he, Gambino, would inherit Anastasia's familyand obviously, in Genovese's mind at least, become the latter's vassal. Gambino had no intention of letting that happen, and while he agreed and handled much of the arrangements for Anastasia's assassination, he immediately began plotting Genovese's end as well.
Anastasia was murdered in a New York barbershop in 1957 shortly after an assassination attempt on Frank Costello was botched. This was to place Genovese in a dominant position, but one that Gambino was determined would be short-lived.
Despite his double-dealing about Anastasia, Gambino quickly made peace with Costello and the exiled Luciano, both of whom had been close to Anastasia. Together with Meyer Lansky, the four of them plotted to remove Genovese from the scene by having the federal government take care of him. Genovese, within just a few months of reaching the pinnacle, was set up in a narcotics case (actually a second one, since federal agents bungled a first frame arranged by Gambino and allowed Genovese to get away) and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He died there, and Carlo Gambino inherited the position as the strongest family leader in New York.
He kept solidifying his position by judicious alliances and killings until few save Joe Bonanno even thought to challenge him. When he died in October 1976 of a heart attack, Gambino went out in true
Godfather
style. Reporters and onlookers were cordoned off from the hundreds of mourners at his funeral. Hard-faced guards needed only a few threatening words to discourage any would-be intruder. Things were handled with the decorum that Carlo Gambino would have demanded.
See also:
Anastasia, Albert; Apalachin Conference; Colombo, Joseph, Sr.; Genovese, Vito
.
Gambino Crime Family
Although it is difficult to put a dollar value on criminal interests, the Gambino crime family is certainly the richest and most powerful criminal organization in the United States today. Worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the family has a criminal workforce of at least 800 men, and its empire ranges from every borough of New York City to the green felt of Atlantic City and Las Vegas, to the heroin plants of Sicily and Asia, to stolen car outlets in Kuwait. Small wonder it has been labeled by one newspaper as Gambino, Inc. In his reign from 1957 to 1976 Carlo Gambino took a second-string crime family and built it into the Mafia's jewel in the crown, far more wealthy than even the family originally ruled by Lucky Luciano, far more powerful than the Capone-descended Chicago Outfit.
The original family dates to the pre-national syndicate days of Alfred Mineo and Steve Ferrigno in the 1920s when Joe the Boss Masseria controlled the Mafia. They were murdered in 1930 in a bloody ambush carried out by Joe Profaci, Nick Capuzzi, Joe Valachi and a gunman known now only as Buster from Chicago. Taking over were Vince and Phil Mangano, who became part of the modern American Mafia as constituted by Luciano. They ran an outfit limited largely to rackets in Brooklyn, the waterfront and gamblinghorse betting, the numbers, the Italian lottery.
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The Manganos lasted until 1951 when Phil Mangano the less important brother, was murdered by orders o underling Albert Anastasia, already infamous as the chief executioner of Murder, Inc. Vince disappeared a the same time and Anastasia simply took over. No one dared object.
Anastasia, unofficially aided and advised by Frank Costello (who belonged to another family), expanded the organization greatly into new rackets, especially) gambling, loan-sharking, and narcotics trafficking through the piers the mob controlled. Anastasia could only go so far, being a mad hatter who was distracted into meaningless and dangerous activities. (He'd order a citizen knocked off who recognized bank robber Willie Sutton, a criminal with no ties to the mob, simply because he hated "stoolies.")
Anastasia was also caught up in the intrigue between his friend Costello and Vito Genovese for control of the largest family, Lucky Luciano's own organization. In 1957, Genovese deposed Costello and succeeded in having Anastasia killed with the connivance of Anastasia's aide, Carlo Gambino. Once Gambino achieved his goal of control of the Anastasia crime family, he had no further need for Genovese, a mobster with delusions of becoming the new boss of bosses. In machinations involving the deposed Costello, the deported Luciano and Meyer Lansky, and probably others, Gambino arranged to have Genovese set up and delivered into the hands of the federal narcotics people on a framed case.
Over the succeeding years, Gambino extended the power and influence of his crime family. The relatively small Mangano operation became the biggest in New York and the nation. Gambino, with the departure of Costello from the active scene, became Meyer Lansky's most important partner in national syndicate enterprises and became recognized, as Luciano was in the 1930s, as the de facto boss of bosses. Gambino foiled the plots of Joe Bonanno to assassinate him and other crime leaders and so to become the most powerful don in the United States.
In the 1970s, ill health forced Gambino's gradual withdrawal from the public eye, although he remained the cunning kingpin right up to his death in 1976. Before he died, Gambino settled on his succession. Logically it should have been his underboss, Aniello Dellacroce, a tough killer who could prevent incursions into the family's rights. (Indeed, Dellacroce proved to be a key man in the assassination of Carmine Galante in 1979 when the latter moved to take over the New York families.) However, Gambino believed strongly in family ties and tapped Paul Castellano, his brother-in-law, as his successor.
Some dons would have so decreed and left their decision to the fates. Gambino realized that if Dellacroce went to war, he would destroy Castellano. The cunning Gambino realized too that murdering Dellacroce would solve nothing. Another would replace him and the lessthan-imposing Castellano would still be in the same boat. Gambino had to make Dellacroce Castellano's life insurance policy. He accomplished that by offering Dellacroce essential control of all the family's lucrative Manhattan activities, a sort of crime family within a crime family arrangement that Dellacroce could not refuse.
To further his plans, Gambino counted on the support of Frank "Funzi" Tieri, who he had installed as the head of the old Genovese family after he arranged to have boss Tommy Eboli "clipped." Tieri was Dellacroce's match and could be counted on to remain loyal to Gambino after death and to be supportive of Castellano. He was, but his natural abilities inevitably overshadowed Castellano's; without even trying, Tieri emerged as New York's most powerful don.
In a sense, then, Paul Castellano presided over a decline of the Gambinos, but in 1981 Tieri died. Weaker leadership, or perhaps a divided one, in the Genovese family righted the Gambino fortunes, and under Castellano and Dellacroce primacy was restored. Dellacroce, suffering from cancer, made no move to depose Castellano, even though a Young Turk element, epitomized by a violent capo named John Gotti (who modeled himself after his idol, the murderous Albert Anastasia), grew constantly more dissatisfied with Castellano's rule. However the Young Turks, out of a combination of fear and genuine affection for the old boss, dared not strike as long as Dellacroce lived. Dellacroce, like the Turks, felt that the family should get into the lucrative fields of armored car robberies, hijackings and expanded narcotics activities, while Castellano laid great stock in loan-sharking, union construction shakedowns and such relatively easy crimes as car theft. With those activities fully manned, Castellano tried to starve the Young Turks.
On December 2, 1985, Dellacroce died. Paul Castellano lasted just two weeks, being assassinated along with an aide obviously being groomed as a counter to John Gotti. Within days of Castellano's assassination, it was obvious to law enforcement people that John Gotti had officially become the new boss of the richest and most powerful crime family in America.
See also:
Gotti, John
.
Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, The: Book and movie parody of Crazy Joe Gallo Gang
While
The Godfather
was rather well received by most mafiosi, Jimmy Breslin's
The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight
, based on the Gallo Gang and its war with the Profaci crime family, was not. As Peter "Pete the
Page 149
Greek" Diapoulas, Joey Gallo's grade-school chum and later bodyguard, explains in his book
The Sixth Family
, "The writer our crew would have loved giving a beating to was Jimmy Breslin."
In the Breslin opus, the Gallos and Profacisclothed in fictional names, but closely paralleling their reallife situationswere all rather inept, often comically so. Rather caustically Pete the Greek declared:
The whole thing was funny. The Profaci war was just a bunch of laughs. Well, Breslin should have spent one night with us, found out what it would feel like if some Profaci clipped him in the ass. Even with a small Baretta, he wouldn't be fucking laughing
.
Joey Gallo served as the model for Kid Sally Palumbo, a characterization that angered Gallo, either because the Brooklyn gangster was made to look silly or because the name Palumbo sounded like Gallo's hated enemy "Colombo." The Gallos were also upset that the movie was filmed in their Brooklyn backyard around President Street. Quite naturally the mobsters had asked what was going on but were only informed some kind of comedy was being filmed. The fact that there were a dwarf and a lion in the cast should have alerted the mobsters; Armando the Dwarf was a reallife hanger-on with the gang, and the gang did have a lion as mascot.
After the film's Broadway premiere, Joey Gallo was incensed. But he was also curious and thus invited actor Jerry Orbach and his wife Marta to dinner Orbach had played the Gallo role in the film. Though Orbach played the fictional Gallo for a laugh, he was truly taken by the real Gallo. He and his wife learned Gallo was a man who could converse knowledgeably about such writers as Sartre, Camus, Kafka and Hemingway. And they learned that the gang actually did keep a three-quarter-grown lion in a cellar; Crazy Joe said they did so to send poor-paying loan shark victims down for a visit. After that, Gallo said, with a straight face, everyone paid up.
The movie did not really hurt the Gallos' image, even if they were portrayed as ineptly boobytrapping an enemy's car so that it exploded with much smoke and noise but did no real harm at all. On the other hand, the movie proved in a way the death of Crazy Joey. His friendship with the Orbachs had flourished. If it had not, Gallo might not have become big on the entertainment social circuit. He might not have decided to celebrate his 43rd birthday in a party at the Copacabana night club with the Orbachs, comedian David Steinberg and his date, and columnist Earl Wilson and his secretary. About 4 A.M. Gallo, Pete the Greek and four female friends and relatives adjourned to the China-town-Little Italy area in search of food and ended up in Umberto's Clam House, where Gallo was shot to death and Pete the Greek ended up as he so liked to term it, "clipped ... in the ass." Without his new showbiz orientation, Gallo's birthday festivities would have been entirely differenthe might not have ended up in Umberto's, where he was cornered by a gangster who could shoot straight.
Garment Industry Rackets
The underworld's involvement in the garment industry dates to the beginning of the 20th century. Today, it remains a lush field for organized crime.
Labor sluggers, mostly Jews (as were most of the workers), were hired by employers to crush union activity. Labor soon retaliated by hiring its own criminal sluggers, sometimes simply outbidding the employers' gangsters with higher pay. This led to the Labor Sluggers War just prior to World War I between rival gangs seeking dominance. As a result, no real cohesive criminal leadership was established until the 1920s when criminal mastermind Arnold Rothstein took an active interest in the field. Rothstein provided financial aid and know-how for the two gangsters who would dominate the field after his murder in 1928Louis Lepke and Gurrah Shapiro.
Unlike the other labor racketeers in the field, the pair followed the Rothstein blueprint and lifted labor extortion in the garment industry to new heights. Instead of simply using their sluggers and gunmen to terrorize labor unions during strike periods, Lepke worked them directly into the unions, and by threat, violence and murder took control of one local after another. At the same time manufacturers who hired Lepke and Shapiro to handle their union problems "soon found themselves," in the words of crime reporter Meyer Berger of the
New York Times
, "wriggling helplessly in the grip of Lepke's smooth but deadly organization. He moved in on them as he had on the unions." In the process the pair personally took out of the garment industry rackets anywhere from $5 million to $10 million a year.
To back their will, the pair employed an army of 250 enforcers and collectors. In the whole field only the fur trade escaped domination. The left-wing Needle Trade Workers Industrial Union made no bones about hiring gangsters in the '20s, but they were able to fend off racketeer domination probably because of the long socialist tradition of its members. That, combined with a readiness to keep their own internal squads of enforcers and even to outbid the Lepke forces in bribes to the police so that they instead arrested the strikebreakers, kept them apart.

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