The Mafia Encyclopedia (73 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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BOOK: The Mafia Encyclopedia
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Page 207
builds millions, defies laws and prison, and rules vast segments of the American economy. His case demonstrates once again that the power of the underworld reaches to the seats of the mighty and that, even when sad mischance brings about the imprisonment of a gangster, bis empire goes on and on
.
The decision caused such a furor that the parole commissioner, James R. Stone, a relative of Charles A. Buckley, Democratic leader of the Bronx, was forced to resign. Tammany boss Carmine DeSapio was linked in testimony to the Lanza case, and it was viewed later as the first sign of a decline in DeSapio's prestige as a national political leader.
Lanza was ordered back to prison, did a bit more time and returned to the fish market to take up a hold that would remain unassailable to his death. Needless to say, Lanza's empire survived him as the Genovese crime family moved to solidify its hold on New York's fish supplies.
Larocca, John Sebastian (19021984): Pittsburgh mafioso
A much-overrated mobster, John Larocca was often described as the Mafia boss of southwestern Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh. Some knowledgeable observers, however, have tended to regard him as the leader of the Mickey Mouse Mafia-East, a play on the description of several West Coast crime families because of their general ineffectiveness and their inability to protect their own turf from incursions by the New York and Chicago mobs. Larocca's empire was just as ineffective, although probably for more understandable sociopolitical reasons.
In those areas where the political forces have the will they can readily triumph over so-called organized crime. From the early 1900s, vice in Pittsburgh was controlled directly by the ward political machines. "Ward syndicates" kept tight control of the numbers rackets, slot machines, houses of prostitution and unlicensed saloons. Madams could only rent houses from syndicate-approved real estate agents who charged exorbitant rents. All illegal businesses had to pay protection money to police and other city officials and the funds were handled directly by the ward chairmen or other representatives of the political machine.
A prizewinning newspaper reporter, Ray Sprigle, once wrote a series of articles that pointed out the firm control the ward chairmen held over the numbers racket. It was pointed out no one syndicate could take over the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh because too many wards were involved and the chairmen guarded their interests well. The chairmen also held sway over the police whom they could appoint and promote, and thus used the police to raid and perform "protection and enforcement" services. In other words the police were charged with keeping both the operators of various illegal enterprises toeing the mark and at the same time seeing to it that no competition moved in.
Under such circumstances mafioso activities could only, at best, be superimposed on this locally controlled racket setup. As a result neither the early mob leader, Frank Amato of Braddock, Pennsylvania, nor his successor in 1956, John Larocca, amounted to much in the national councils of organized crime. Even informer Vinnie Teresa, not a top-rung mobster himself, could sneer about Larocca and describe him simply as "a mob guy from Pittsburgh who some people say is a boss but he isn't."
Laroccawhose police record began in 1922 when he was sentenced to three to five years in prison for assault with intent to kill and maimwas not among those arrested at the notorious Apalachin conference in 1957 when it would have been logical to have introduced him to mob leaders from around the country. Either Larocca was not considered important enough, the most likely conclusion, or he proved to be so speedy afoot that he outlegged police pursuers through the woods.
Whether or not he held the reins, Larocca did run a profitable operation. Certainly he became a millionaire and was very effective in bossing a group of gambling junket operators who supplied "high roller" victims for various mob casinos both inside and outside the country.
When Larocca died in 1984 at the age of 82, the impact of his death was virtually unfelt by organized crime elsewhere. It was perhaps a tribute to a political system that long ago established the principle of taking care of its own. Larocca was succeeded by Michael James Genovese who was only acknowledged as "acting boss"clearly an indication by other Mafia families that the Pittsburgh Mafia is in the minor leagues.
Las Vegas: Organized crime's Promised Land
The first men to gamble in Las Vegas were the Paiute Indians who peopled the area before the town existed. When the Mormons ventured down from Utah in the 19th century to try to convert these Indians to Christianity, they were ignored by the Paiutes who had far more interest in playing a kind of roulette in the sand with bones and colored sticks. The Paiutes and the mobsters of organized crime were to enjoy a similar association with Las Vegas. Conceived as a gambling mecca, modern Las Vegas was built almost exclusively by mob money.
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During World War II Las Vegas was little more than a dusty jerkwater town in the middle of the desert, with a few gas stations, greasy-spoon diners and some slot machine emporiums. It was popularly said that Bugsy Siegel was the first to visualize the town as a glittering gambling mecca, but the fact is he was pushed at first by Meyer Lansky who in 1941 ordered Bugsy to send a trusted aide, Moe Sedway, to work in Las Vegas. For a time Bugsy thought it was a zany idea that he had little time forhe was far happier being a Hollywood playboybut Lansky kept pushing, realizing that an area with legalized gambling offered far more profits and less crooked overhead than illegal casinos elsewhere.
When World War II ended, Bugsy warmed to the idea of Las Vegas with glitter. His enthusiasm convinced mob figures to invest big money to develop the town. Lansky now was able to hang back. If the idea fell through Siegel could take the rap; if it succeeded, Lansky would step forward to take credit.
With a bankroll of something like $6 million in mob funds, Siegel built the Flamingo, which turned out to be a monumental bust because he was forced to open early, before public interest could be built up. Bugsy had other woes. He had skimmed off huge sums of construction money, and when the mob discovered this, they gave him a deadline for its return. Siegel's only hope was to get the Flamingo to succeed. When it didn't, he was summarily murdered.
Nevertheless, Las Vegas grew. With Lansky now overseeing the Flamingo it turned profitable by the end of its first year. Now the mob really piled in. State officials set up strict rules aimed at keeping the Mafia out, but to little avail. With appropriate fronts, the syndicate simply took over. The Thunderbird became Lansky's baby although he had slices of many other places. The Desert Inn was largely owned by Moe Dalitz and others of the Cleveland mob.
The Sands was controlled behind the scenes by Lansky, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello and Doc Stacher. Actor George Raft was brought into the deal, and singer Frank Sinatra was sold a 9 percent stake. Sinatra was said to have been extremely flattered, but as Stacher later stated, "The object was to get him to perform there, because there's no bigger draw in Las Vegas. When Frankie was performing, the hotel really filled up."
The Sahara and the Riviera were controlled mainly by the Fischetti brothers, Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana, the rulers of the Chicago Outfit. The Dunes was a goldmine for Raymond Patriarca, the top mafioso in New England.
When the Stardust was being built, Dalitz started complaining that it would drain funds away from his Desert Inn. Dalitz looked like he was ready to solve the problem the way a problem was handled during the bootleg wars of Prohibition, but Lansky suggested a meeting to try to iron out the problems. Representing the Stardust interest was mobster Tony Cornero, one of California's pre-war gambling-boat operators, while Dalitz and his right-hand man, Morris Kleinman, were present for the D.I. Winging in from New Jersey was Longy Zwillman. A deal was hammered out so that each group ended up with an interlocking interest in each other's hotels, and when the lawyers got through with it, nobody could really tell who owned what where.
When Frank Costello was shot in 1957, police found a tally in his coat pocket that matched the revenues of the Tropicana for a 24-day period. It was apparently a revelation to the Nevada Gaming Control Board that Costello and his longtime partner, Dandy Phil Kastel, were the chief owners of the Trop.
Caesar's Palace was a case unto itself. Its decor and architecture certainly evoked images of ancient Rome, or as comedian Alan King put it: "I wouldn't say it was exactly Romanmore kind of early Sicilian." In any event it had a Roman legion of Mafia investors, among them Accardo, Giancana, Patriarca, Jerry Catena (one of Vito Genovese's top aides), and Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo (a longtime buddy of Lansky's). The biggest investor of all may well have been Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters Union's pension fund, with at least $10 million sunk into the Palace (and another $40 million sprinkled around town). The money was in the form of ''permanent" loans and undoubtedly contributed to the retirement of more aging mafiosi than over-the-highway truckers.
In the 1960s billionaire Howard Hughes started buying up hotels, collecting 17 Nevada casinos in all. The big mobsters got out, but most of their underlings remained in place; it was a matter of maintaining required "expertise." Things however went wrong for Hughes. He had expected to make more than 20 percent on investments from the lavish joints but never did better than 6 percent, and by 1970 his holdings were several million dollars in the red. After Hughes bailed out of Vegas, the mobsters returned to the scene.
Although the boys suffered some convictions in the late 1970s, the FBI launched the real assault on the Mafia's hold on Las Vegas casinos in the following decade. As a result numerous casinos that had previously been "mobbed up" were sanitized and taken over by legitimate owners. Among those establishments were the Tropicana, the Stardust, Desert Inn, Circus-Circus, Caesar's Palace, the Fremont, the Aladdin, the Sands, the Riviera and the Sundance. Two others, the Dunes and the Marina, were torn down.
Page 209
The biggest loss of all to the mob was the Stardust, which was a gold mine to the Chicago Outfit, the skim being absolutely fabulous. It was taken over by the reputable Boyd family, who were surprised by its huge profits, with every penny of income recorded. Ex-FBI agent William E Roemer Jr., longtime senior agent of the FBI's organized-crime squad in Chicago and an expert in Las Vegas doings, said, "The amount of skim had been so heavy that the profit and loss statement did not present a true picture of the gold mine that the Stardust was."
The FBI investigations into Las Vegas skimming took a decimating toll on the mob. Organized crime control of the Tropicana Hotel was broken with the convictions of several Kansas City mob chiefs. A second more sweeping probe uncovered control of a number of casinos by Chicago, Kansas City, Milwaukee and Cleveland mobs. Among those netted in the investigation were Joey Aiuppa, the top boss in Chicago; John Cerone, the Chicago underboss; two other Chicago capos; Frank Balistrieri, the boss in Milwaukee, and the top leaders in Kansas City, along with a top figure in Cleveland. All drew huge sentences and probably faced the rest of their lives behind bars.
In 1994 Roemer declared organized crime presence in Vegas was nowhere what it had been, although he said "concerns remain" regarding three other hotels.
See also:
Flamingo Hotel; Greenbaum, Gus; Hughes, Howard; Siegel, Benjamin "Bugsy"; Spilotro, Tony "the Ant
."
Last Chance Tavern: Kansas City gambling den
The most controversial gambling den in the 1940s and 1950s probably couldn't have existed anywhere but in Kansas City, often considered the most crime-ridden city in the Midwest, surpassing even Chicago.
The Last Chance Tavern was situated in a building on Southwest Boulevard right on the Missouri-Kansas state line. In Kansas Citywhere the blatant was the ordinary in the operation of the old Pendergast Machine, and the one run later by Charley Binaggioit was hardly surprising that Binnagio himself was a partner in the ownership of the building.
After Binaggio's murder in 1950, the Kefauver crime hearings came to Kansas City to probe the almost limitless corruption in the town. The senator found the Last Chance a typical example of conditions in Kansas City. He later observed with wry humor:
The Last Chance was an intriguing establishment located on the border between Kansas and Missouri, with a thin wall right on the state line. When the cops from one state would come to "raid" it the gamblers with great hilarity would shift their equipment over to the other side and carry on without interruption. Cops from both states never seemed to arrive at the same time, so everybody had a lot of fun and Binaggio's gang made a lot of money. Senator [Charles W.] Tobey did not think much of this operation. After we pried from Eddie Osadchey how the racket worked, Tobey exploded: "You know, Mr. Chairman, if I had been one of those cops, I would have gone across and brought them back and knocked them cold and said, 'Here they are in Kansas territory.'"
Senator Tobey, considered the innocent among the probers, failed to understand the depth of corruption the Last Chance represented, and the fact that Charles Binaggio may well have been an actual member of the Mafia (with other Kansas City mafiosi such as reputed boss Jim Balestrere and Tano Lococo said "to own a piece of him"). Binaggio was the only mafioso in American history to achieve the highest quasi-official status of a political boss.
See also:
Binaggio, Charles
.
Latempa, Peter (19041945): Genovese murder victim
According to a mob adage, it was as well for a stool pigeon to wind up dead as it was to be under protection in Brooklyn. Surely canary Abe Rele's "flight" out the window of a Brooklyn hotel is a case in point. Surely, too, was Peter LaTempa's death a demonstration of the long reach of the mob in Brooklyn.
Mobster leader Vito Genovese had fled from New York to Italy in 1937 to avoid prosecution for the murder of Ferdinand Boccia. The case against the boss was based primarily on the evidence of Ernest "the Hawk" Rupolo, who was doing a 9-to-20-year sentence for attempted murder in a job assigned him by Genovese. To earn his release, Rupolo revealed details of the Boccia kill. Rupolo's word was not enough by itself to convict Genovese, and there was no supporting circumstantial evidence. There was, however, another witness to the murder, a hoodlum named Peter LaTempa. Pressure was put on LaTempa to talk, and, by the time Genovese had fled the country, LaTempa did, feeling his squealing no violation of omerta because Genovese would never be prosecuted anyway.
Later, near the end of World War II, Genovese was taken into custody by the U.S. Army and was returned from Italy on January 8, 1945. Like a shot from a cannon, LaTempa turned up at the Brooklyn district attorney's office, demanding to be put in protective custody. He was lodged in the Raymond Street jail. On January 15, one week after Genovese's return and long before the court case against him could get started, LaTempa

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