The Mafia Encyclopedia (95 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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illegal racket; numbers players don't have to make the IRS their partners in big scores.
So-called policy shops, where people go to play the numbers, showed up in America in the 1880s. Al Adams, a New York operator, had about 1,000 policy shops in the city, and was one of the biggest bribe donors to Boss Tweed's Tammany Hall. Adams became known as "the meanest gambler in New York" because he rigged the numbers results not only to cheat his clients but also so that he could then bet heavily on the correct numbers with other operators so that he could drive
them
out of business and take over their shops. Eventually Adams went to prison after Tweed was dethroned. To reassure numbers players that everything thereafter would be legit, operators switched to taking the numbers from Treasury Department figures, released daily by telegraph, and obviously not to be fixed.
While numbers had been played in the United States since 1880, the game has changed many times, and, although long popular in Harlem, pennyante numbers, which was to prove the most lucrative of all, came into being only in the 1920s. Before that even black operators in Harlem sold only 50¢ and $1 numbers tickets. Later they experimented with a 10¢ ticket. Over the years both Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky told various interviewers that Lansky was the true inventor of numbers, meaning the game, which could be played for as little as a penny by inhabitants of the poorest ghettos. Certainly among the players on the Jewish Lower East Side the opinion was that numbers was Lansky's game.
Interestingly the Chicago Outfit did not discover numbers until the 1940s when Sam Giancana was doing time in the federal prison at Terre Haute. Black racketeer Edward Jones bragged to him how much profit he was making out of the numbers racket, with most of his customers making bets as little as one cent to a nickel. The Chicago Outfit then slaughtered the black operators and took over. Even though there was a national crime syndicate and the New York mobs under Luciano and Lansky had made millions out of the racket, they had never informed Chicago how profitable the business was. Within organized crime the fact remains that things operate the same as in legitimate business
The term
policy
applied to the numbers game has its derivation in the penny insurance that was highly popular in the poor ghettos; both were a cheap gamble on the future. The winning number, one in a thousand ranging from 000 to 999, paid off at 600 to one. Meaning that for 1¢ a winner would get back $6 (or less in certain localities). Since mathematical odds against the player were actually 1,000 to one the profit potential in numbers is far greater than in any other form of gambling. Numbers operations thus could support a whole bureaucracy from the "banker" on top down through operators, distributors, agents and runners. Basically, only the agents and runners face much risk of arrest, and it is the duty of those above them immediately to bail them out and put in a fix to prevent a conviction, or, at worst, to support the families of those sent to prison.
Whether or not Lansky was the inventor of pennyante numbers or not, it was hardly a copyrightable idea, and it soon was embraced by armies of independent operators. A Madam St. Clair, a Harlem operator, became a millionaire from numbers and would have done so even if she hadn't thrown in an extra fillipher policy wheel was credited with providing a magical potency to the players.
The mobsters were not about to let independents like St. Clair clean up in numbers. Prohibition beer czar Dutch Schultz pioneered the forcible takeover of the numbers racket in Harlem, terrorizing individual bankers into buying his protection and then simply announcing he was assuming control of their businesses. Madam St. Clair once avoided mob executioners by hiding in a pile of coal in a Harlem cellar. Schultz reintroduced the old Adams method of cheating on the numbers results which had been switched by then to the wagering totals of various racetracks. Schultz's "mathematical brain," Otto "Abbadabba" Berman, worked out a system to rig the numbers so that only low-played numbers won.
After Schultz was murdered by the syndicate the numbers racket in Harlem was effectively taken over by Luciano and Lansky, with operations under the supervision of Vito Genovese, Luciano's right-hand man.
Over the years probably as many murders have been committed to gain control of and hold onto the numbers racket as were done during the old mob bootleg wars. Certainly, numbers money remains in many areas the prime source of illegal payoffs to politicians and police for protection. It is often said that the Mafia has been losing control of the numbers racket as the ghettos turn increasingly black and Hispanic. It is a theory nurtured by the Mafia. The fact remains that the mobs in some places have simply granted "franchises" to certain ethnics (as in the past to Poles and Jews, among others, in their ghettos) and for their pay guarantee full protection to the numbers operators.
See also:
Berman, Otto "Abbadabba
."
Nut: Backing for a mob enterprise.
The nut is the start-up money needed to pull off a caper. Individuals or crew divisions within a crime family are
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expected to raise their own funds for the activities they wish to promote. Of course, they can tap funds from higher-ups, but that nut is not a diminishing asset. Should the funds be advanced for a drug shipment, for instance, the borrower must be good for the debt since the bosses tolerate no loss of their money even if the drugs are seized by authorities. In such a case the bosses can be magnanimous and merely demand their initial investment be returned. Offering excuses in such situations can have a direct bearing on the borrower's life expectancy.
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O
Oakes, Sir Harry (187311943): Murder victim
In 1943, U.S.-born Sir Harry Oakes, a tough old examiner who became, according to some, the world's richest man, was murdered. The Bahamas's number one citizen, Sir Harry was catered to by the duke of Windsor, the former king of England and then-governor of the islands.
In the aftermath of Sir Harry's death in 1943, kept secret by the duke for some hours, ensued one of the most inept police investigations, and probably the most celebrated murder trial, of the war years. The duke of Windsor, after the discovery of the body, called in American lawmen to investigate, informing them that Sir Harry had committed suicidea remarkable observation since Sir Harry had died of massive head wounds made by some kind of pronged instrument. What's more, the bed where Sir Harry lay had been set ablaze and the dead man's body incinerated. In a macabre touch, feathers were spread over the burned corpse. Clearly this was no run-of-the-mill suicide!
But if it wasn't suicide, that meant the investigation run by imported Miami police captain Otto Barker and Edward Walter Melchen was aptly described by one authority as "one of the most lackadaisical criminal investigations of modern times." There was considerable evidence that the murder was committed by American gangsters seeking to infiltrate the island for gambling purposes. Harry Oakes had the prestige and power to get the official okay for such activities, but the former gold hunter who hit the second largest gold strike in history was a contrary individual who could give his word one moment and break it the next. It appeared he had taken $1 million as a downpayment from a leading American mobster operating out of Miami, Meyer Lansky, and then refused to push for the establishment of a casino in Nassau. The Florida investigators developed no interest in their fellow Miamian and instead came up with "evidence" that pinned the murder on Sir Harry's unwanted son-in-law Alfred de Marigny, an aristocratic Frenchman from Mauritius, who though handsome and charming, was suspected by Bahamian society of being a bad sort.
The trial proved to be a sensation and the social event of the year on the islands. Wealthy landowners had their servants queue up for seats at the trial long before dawn. De Marigny was tied to the murder by tainted evidence, particularly a fingerprint of very dubious origin and worth. The prosecution's case was built on innuendo. De Marigny had a bad reputation and wanted his father-in-law's money. Sir Harry disliked him intensely and was not about to give him any money. His son-in-law murdered him.
The defense's case was aided by the highly professional work of a famed American private detective, Raymond Schindler, who had to contend with all sorts of roadblocks set up by the local authorities. He was denied access to many matters, was followed and his telephone tapped. Yet he easily destroyed the prosecution's casea conclusion approved by Erle Stanley Gardner, one of the many writers assigned to cover the 13-week trial. It took the jury only two and a half hours to clear de Marigny.
But who killed Sir Harry Oakes? The royal government was decidedly uninterested in finding out thereafter. There are law enforcement agencies in the United States whose investigators have been convinced by a number of underworld informers that they have discovered the
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true story. The thesis, presented in a number of recent books on the case, has Lansky more than a little upset by Sir Harry's refusal to go through with his agreement. Lansky insisted that a local mild-mannered Bahamian real estate man named Harold Christie (who no one at the time knew had a Boston police record) was in on the deal to get Sir Harry to see the light. Christie knew what the underworld did to men who crossed them, knew that Sir Harry's high position would offer him no protection.
Finally, the story goes, Lansky said he was sending a special emissary to settle matters once and for all. He was accompanied by four button men who arrived aboard a fast power cruiser on the afternoon of July 7, 1943. Christie and Sir Harry drove down to the docks and went aboard the craft. Sir Harry, rather than Lansky's emissary, did most of the talking and yelling. He said he had no intention of letting gangsters get a foothold on the islands. Lansky's emissary said nothing, but he nodded slightly to one of the enforcers. Sir Harry went down hard when hit in the head with a four-pronged winch handle.
Christie was terrified by the sudden violence, but Lansky's man assured him Sir Harry was only stunned. He had the real estate man and one of the button men pack the millionaire into the car and take him back to his mansion. There it was obvious that Sir Harry was never going to wake up again. Christie was frozen with fear, but Lansky's operative went about the grisly task of undressing the dead man and getting him into pajamas. Then the bed was set on fire, followed by the corpse. The feathers were a last-minute detail, intended apparently to give the killing a bizarre touch. Christie was left to say whatever he wanted, but he could not mention Lansky or his enforcers at all.
Of course, the Oakes case was never officially solved and Lansky had not been tied to it in any firm way by 1963, when, 20 years after the murder, Lansky got his gambling monopoly in the Bahamas. According to later investigation, the cost to Lansky to get the fix in was approximately $1 millionthe same amount offered Sir Harry Oakes.
O'Banion, .Charles Dion "Deanie" (18921924): Gang leader and Capone rival
He was Al Capone's toughest competitor in the latter's struggle for power in Chicago, the gangster capital of the world. Even after he was assassinated in 1924 in a Capone-Johnny Torrio coup, O'Banion's ghost continued to haunt Capone. O'Banion supporters, enraged by his murder, refused to give in and for the balance of the decade the carnage on Chicago streets reached unparalleled levels.
O'Banion had a kind of perverse charisma; he was as charming a psychopath as one could find. And he would do anything for a laugh. His sense of humor was legendary, although best appreciated by the criminal mind. Among his more innocent practical jokes was giving a friend Ex Lax and telling him it was sweet chocolate. Really thigh-slapping fun was his shotgun challenge. He would surreptitiously fill both barrels of a shotgun with hard-packed clay and then bet some friend or acquaintance that he could not hit the side of a barn some 30 feet away. With the money down, O'Banion made a ritual out of loading both barrels and handing the shotgun to the sucker. He moved back out of the way of the inevitable recoil as the patsy pulled the trigger. The backfire would cause him to lose an arm or an eye or even three-fourths of his face. Dear Deanie would still be howling about it the following day.
Chicago chief of police Morgan Collins labeled O'Banion "Chicago's archcriminal" and said he killed at least 25 men. Others said Collins was less than half right, that O'Banion had at least 60 murders to his credit as he cheerfully made his appointed murder rounds, always with a rosary in his pocket and a carnation in his buttonhole. He also had three pistols tucked away in special pockets of his expensive made-to-order suits. For years O'Banion had been the darling of the Democrats for his skill at getting out the vote, until he switched to the Republicans at higher pay. The oft-quoted joke of the time was: "Who'll carry the Forty-second and Forty-third wards?" The answer was, "O'Banion, in his pistol pocket."
O'Banion grew up in the Little Hell district on Chicago's North Side. He lived a double life as an acolyte and choir boy at Holy Name Cathedral and as a street punk in a tenement jungle jammed with saloons and whorehouses. Thanks to his training in the church choir Deanie became a singing waiter in the tough dives on Clark and Erie. He brought tears to the customers' eyes with sentimental Irish ballads, and when they were deep in their cups, he'd pick their pockets.
After-hours, O'Banion labored as a street mugger, becoming partners with a young Lou Greenberg, destined to become the multimillionaire owner of the Seneca Hotel on the city's Gold Coast. One midnight, each without knowing the other was present, they had pounced on the same victim in an alley, and then over his prostrate body contemplated bashing the other for the loot. Instead, wisdom prevailed. They split the take and became partners. The arrangement continued for several months until in 1909 Deanie was imprisoned three months for robbery. In 1911 he did another three months for carrying concealed weapons. Although he was arrested many times thereafter, it was the last prison time O'Banion did in his life. He quickly learned

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