The Mafia Encyclopedia (65 page)

Read The Mafia Encyclopedia Online

Authors: Carl Sifakis

Tags: #True Crime, #Organized Crime, #test

BOOK: The Mafia Encyclopedia
8.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Page 181
statistics to the Senate Appropriations Committee that XXX numbers of cars worth XXX numbers of dollars were recovered, thus justifying further expansion of the FBI budget.
One-time number three man in the FBI, William C. Sullivan, stated in his book,
The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI
(published just after his accidental death): "... the Mafia is powerful, so powerful that entire police forces or even a mayor's office can be under Mafia control. That's why Hoover was afraid to let us tackle it. He was afraid that we'd show up poorly. Why take the risk, he reasoned, until we were forced to by public exposure of our shortcomings." Sullivan, more or less regarded as Nixon's man in the agency, was most likely to succeed Hoover if Nixon had carried out his wish to fire Hoover, a step that Nixon drew back from. ("Christ almighty," Assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian once reported to Sullivan of an aborted attempt, "Nixon lost his guts.")
In place of fighting organized crime, Hoover lay special emphasis on relatively easy targets, with a highly publicized war on so-called public enemiesDillinger, Ma Barker (who never was charged with any crime), Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly (who never fired his gun at anyone in anger) and other targets more easily hit than the Mafia. "The whole of the FBI's main thrust," said Sullivan, "was not investigation but public relations and propaganda to glorify its director."
Historian Albert Fried has written that "Hoover paid so little attention to organized crime, indeed, so little that one could accuse him of dereliction of duty." In
The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America
, Fried contends that Hoover thought organized crime "constituted no immediate danger to established order. Or, as some have argued, he assumed that the gang/syndicate members ... were in fact pillars of the status quo. They at least had a vested interest in the health of the free enterprise system, in America's triumph over communism and for that matter over Socialism and liberalism tooover anything that might remotely threaten their specific opportunities." Thus, Fried concluded, the more intelligent mobsters, à la Al Capone, Moe Dalitz and Meyer Lansky, were valuable defenders of capitalism and thus to a certain extent "J. Edgar Hoover's ideological kinsmen."
A Hoover biographer, investigative reporter Hank Messick, carries the idea even further, declaring, "John Edgar Hoover has received support, as well as more tangible rewards, from right-wing businessmen who, in turn, have dealt directly and indirectly with organized crime figures who have not been disturbed by John Edgar Hoover."
However, the Fried-Messick theses may be granting a depth to Hoover's motivations that was not really there. The more standard view is that Hoover simply was too afraid to go after the Mafia and organized crime and rationalized this fear by claiming: 1) the problem didn't exist and 2) (falsely) that his agency lacked the authorization to do anything anyway. This so the argument goes, suffices to explain his reluctance to war on the syndicate.
Additionally, Hoover regarded some members of organized crime as "ideological kinsmen" for reasons other than what Fried states. He once told Frank Costello in the Stork Club, "Just stay out of my bailiwick" and that he in turn would stay out of his. Costello's bailiwick was gambling. Hoover, an inveterate horseplayer, was very tolerant of that activity and said, "The FBI has much more important functions to accomplish than arresting gamblers all over the country." Only to Hoover was it not apparent that with the end of Prohibition, gambling became the chief source of revenue to organized crime, the grease that kept the mob's other rackets functioningeverything from buying protection from the law to financing enormous narcotics enterprisesand murder.
Hoover's morning-noon-and-night devotion to duty has always been a bit exaggerated; within the FBI his disappearances in the afternoon were legendary. He and his lifelong sidekick Clyde Tolson would head for a bulletproof car in the courtyard of the Department of Justice after announcing they were off to work on a case. Actually, they would be on their way to make the first race at Bowie, Pimlico, Charleston, Laurel, Havre de Gracewherever the bangtails were running. Hoover's preoccupation with the races became so pronounced that he was frequently photographed at the $2 window and had a form letter that was sent out to irate citizens objecting to his wagering. (He said he was really only interested in the improvement of the breed and only bet $2 now and then so as not to embarrass his hosts.)
In truth, Hoover played the role of decoy at the $2 window. As Sullivan stated, and others have confirmed, "He had agents assigned to accompany him to the track place his real bets at the hundred-dollar window, and when he won he was a pleasure to work with for days."
But nobody seemed more determined to keep Hoover happy than the boys in the mob. A happy Hoover was not likely to destroy gamblers and syndicate criminals, and so the mob developed a technique to stroke the FBI kingpin. The key in this operation was Costello and a mutual friend, gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Hoover got horse tips from Winchell who got them from Costello who, in turn, got them from Frank Erickson, the nation's leading bookmaker. The tips were on "sure things," a term that does not connote in mob vernacular the best horse in a race as much as the one who was going to win. Erickson and Costello spelled sure thing: "F-I-X."
Page 182
Frank Erickson, the mob's top gambler, was the first player
in the hot-horse-tip pipeline that went from Erickson
to Frank Costello to Walter Winchell to J. Edgar Hoover
who then rushed to the track.
This cozy arrangement, corroborated by Winchell staffers, had the desired effect from Costello's viewpoint. He was a man whom Hoover could not dislike, one whom he invited for coffee at the Waldorf Astoria. "I got to be careful of my associates," Costello told him. "They'll accuse me of consortin' with questionable characters." But as long as Costello provided Hoover with solid tipsand didn't run with a youth gang heisting cars or join the Communist Partyhe was relatively safe from retribution.
Some may object to the idea of Hoover being influenced so simply by the mob, through a few race winners, but only a true horseplayer can really comprehend the warm feelings a gambler has for the man giving him a tip that stands up.
Whatever the reason, from malfeasance to non-feasance, to laziness, to fear, to stroking by the mob, J. Edgar Hoover kept right on denying the existence of organized crime. The charade ended by what FBI agent Welch called "an accident." The accident was the discovery of the underworld conference at Apalachin, New York, in 1957. As Welch stated: "The victims of this accident came in through crime figure Joe Barbara's front door. The lucky ones made it out into the woods ... Sixty others left in state police cars. It was the biggest roundup of organized crime bosses in national history, and it was an accident."
And another casualty was Hoover. The
New York Herald Tribune
wondered in an editorial where Hoover and his FBI were while organized crime was growing in America. Not even Hoover had the nerve to go on with the line that it didn't exist. He threw the FBI into a turmoil, demanding his agents now get him off the hook and prove there was a Mafia and that the bureau had known about it all the time.
The hot potato was thrown to the research and analysis section and the FBI was off on an incredible three-decade game of catch-up, learning everything about the previously-invisible forces of organized crime and the Mafia. Several agents were put on the research, and one agent, Charles Peck, stayed in the office every night until 11 or 12, reading no fewer than 200 books on the Mafia and checking through the
New York Times
coverage of "organized crime" for the previous 100 years. The conclusion was inevitable: The Mafia existed and had operated in America for many decades.
While many FBI agents now felt free to launch investigations against the mobs, Hoover soon tired of the chase and probably would have eased back on FBI crackdowns as the heat dissipated. But the appointment in 1961 of Robert Kennedy as attorney general kept Hoover on his toes. Unlike his predecessors, who had been fearful of tangling with Hoover, Robert Kennedy pushed the FBI chief hard; he had to go after the "Cosa Nostra."
When Kennedy resigned office, Hoover saw to it, as Sullivan put it, that "the whole Mafia effort slacked off again." In fact, the FBI war against the Mafia remained slack until Hoover's death in 1972. Since then the Mafia and the FBI have been in a persistent confrontation.
On the day of Hoover's death in 1972 three men, identified to an onlooker as "Gambino guys from Brooklyn," were leaving Aqueduct Racetrack in New York. One picked up a copy of the
New York Post
headlining the FBI chief's demise and rushed back excitedly to the other two. One of them, clearly the highestranking of the three, kept up a brisk pace and announced with a shrug of the shoulders: "You know what I feel about thisabsolutely nothing. This guy meant nothing to us one way or the other."
See also:
Cosa Nostra; Kennedy, Robert F.
Horse Killings and Mobsters
In Mario Puzo's
The Godfather
, one of the most darkly humorous scenes involves the killing of a horse by the Corleone forces to win their way in a Hollywood matter. The incident is not based on specific reality, but it does reflect a long tradition of horse killing by mobsters.
At one time in the primitive days of organized crime, horse poisoning was big business. In New York in the
Page 183
period immediately before World War I, three organized gangs operated as horse killers for pay. They would steal or poison horses to order. At the time the horse was the lifeline of many businesses, especially the produce, ice cream, beer and seltzer trades. Businessmen or lowly hucksters, faced with stiff competition, would often hire gangsters to destroy a rival's trade. The simplest way to accomplish this was to poison the competitor's horse, thus destroying his distribution system. It was common on the Lower East Side to see a produce seller with two dead horses in the street trying to get rid of his stock at half price to clamoring housewives before all his wares were spoiled.
The New York horse poisoning racket was controlled by Jewish gangsters, but in many Little Italys around the country, the practice abounded. Black Handers often poisoned a horse as the first attempt to coerce a businessman into making extortion payments. The practice fell into disuse by 1920 because of legal actions by authorities and because Black Hand gangsters moved into the more profitable field of bootlegging.
Since then horse killings have become more or less extracurricular activities. A psychopathic mafioso in Chicago, Samoots Amatuna, once chased after a Chinese laundry wagon driver, determined to shoot him for returning one of his silk shirts scorched. At the last moment Samoots was overwhelmed by what some writers considered a most unusual outburst of humanity whereby he spared the Chinese's life. He shot his horse instead.
When the celebrated Nails Morton was thrown while riding a horse and then killed in Lincoln Park, Chicago, in 1924, his pals in Dion O'Banion's North Side gang, abducted the animal from its stable at gunpoint and took it to the spot where Nails had been killed. There the poor beast was executed for its "crime." Each gangster solemnly shot it in the head. However, before shooting, the zany Two Gun Alterie first socked the hapless horse in the snout.
See also:
Alterie, Louis "Two Gun"; Morton, Samuel J. "Nails
."
Hotsy Totsy Club: Mob nightclub
It was said that Lucky Luciano once warned his gangsters to stay away from New York's Hotsy Totsy Club on Broadway between 54th and 55th Streets. They could, Luciano felt with considerable justification, end up being killed there. Technically the joint was owned and operated by little Hymie Cohen, but he was really just fronting for Jack "Legs" Diamond, the pathological mobster and killer.
Diamond liked to drink there and fool around with the girls there, but most of all he liked to commit homicide there. Many gangsters with whom Diamond was on the outs were lured into the nightclub for a boisterous reconciliation. And if any reconciliation was to be made, it was on Diamond's terms. Otherwise, the gangsters were led into a back room and slaughtered, later to be lugged out of the place as "drunk."
One night in 1929 Diamond and his top sidekick Charley Entratta got into an argument with a couple of tough waterfront characters. Pretty soon it looked like mayhem was about to break loose. Hymie Cohen yelled to the orchestra to play louder, and the boys struck up a deafening rendition of "Alexander's Ragtime Band"as though trying to wake the dead. Rather than drown the shooting, the band offered a weak accompaniment for the percussive blasts. Diamond shot one character, Red Cassidy, and as he slumped to the floor Diamond leaned over and put two more slugs in Cassidy's head. Entratta joined in by gunning one Simon Walker to death. It was an injudicious act on Diamond and Entratta's part since there were a number of witnesses to the murders. The pair fled.
Then from hiding Diamond directed a rash of murders to clear his name from the taint of a homicide charge. That meant the bartender had to be knocked off as well as three customers who clearly had seen what had happened. Diamond's partnership with Hymie Cohen was also liquidated, with the front man joining the suddenly dead. In addition the cashier, a waiter, the hatcheck girl and another club regular disappeared, never to be heard from again.
After this minor purge the police were embarassingly free of any witnesses to the original murders, and Diamond and Entratta came forward, saying they had just heard they were wanted for questioning about something or other. The charges against them were dropped.
Hughes, Howard (19051976): Mafia victim
In the mid-1950s outside investors started buying into the Las Vegas hotel-casino scene. In the mid-1960s, under most unlikely circumstances, billionaire Howard Hughes showed up. Hughes was a big gambler, and a lousy one at that. One night he lost a huge amount at Moe Dalitz's Desert Inn where he had already rented the entire ninth floor. Reacting in typical Howard Hughes fashion when his ego was bruised, he offered to buy the place for $30 million. Since he offered cold cash in full, the owners of the D.I. sold out on the spot.
Actually, it was a good deal for the mob at the moment; the federal government was all over town, looking for evidence on skimming operations. To some it looked like the day of the skim was passing. Hughes provided the mob with a perfect escape hatch. In almost no time at all Hughes began buying up casino after

Other books

The Lost Bradbury by Ray Bradbury
Death in Veracruz by Hector Camín
One Year After: A Novel by William R. Forstchen
Tucker's Last Stand by William F. Buckley
Secret Value of Zero, The by Halley, Victoria
Totaled by Stacey Grice
Long Way Down by Michael Sears