The World's Most Evil Gangs (10 page)

Gotti was denied bail. In Brooklyn Federal Courthouse, Judge Leo Glasser prudently pointed out: ‘There are no conditions of release that will reasonably assure the safety of any person in the community.’ In the spectacular trial that followed, through March and April 1992, Gravato took the stand to testify against John Gotti and his Mafia empire. Methodically confessing to all the murders ordered by Gotti, he squirmed under the gaze of the Godfather’s steely eyes and knew that he would forever be a marked man. In return for his testimony, Sammy could expect leniency for his own crimes – but it would be a life spent looking over his shoulder.

Increasingly, the defiant Gotti failed to hide his arrogant attitude and Judge Glasser once had to clear the jury from the courtroom before angrily warning the defendant: ‘Mr. Gotti, this is addressed to you. If you want to continue to remain at this trial and at that table, I am going to direct you to stop making comments which can be heard in this courtroom, and gestures which are designed to comment upon the character of the United States attorney. I will have you removed from the courtroom. You will watch this trial on a television screen downstairs. I am not going to tell you that again.’

Gotti’s defence was slim. ‘What happened to it?’ he complained to his team. ‘I should have put on a little song and dance.’ Finally, after tantrums and screaming matches in court, and two bomb explosions outside, the prosecution summed up by damning the ‘Dapper Don’ as leader of the Gambino family and stating: ‘Murder is the heart and soul of this enterprise.’
On 23 June 1992, Gotti wore his handmade silk suit for the last time as he was sentenced to life in prison without parole for ordering at least five murders and on 49 counts of racketeering. Going down with him was another underboss, Frank ‘Frankie Loc’ Locascio, a 59-year-old henchman also nailed by Gravano’s testimony. Outside court, a riot broke out, allegedly organised by John ‘Junior’ Gotti, who had hired 12 buses to bring 1,000 flag-waving demonstrators to the courthouse. Eight police officers were injured. In 1997 Judge Glasser dismissed the fourth and final of Gotti’s bids for a retrial. The ‘Dapper Don’ was destined to die behind bars.

That same year, Gotti’s ex-underboss Gravano, freed after his own reduced five-year sentence, made his last appearance as a government witness by testifying against Genovese family boss Vincent ‘the Chin’ Gigante, known as ‘the Oddfather’ because he had for years feigned insanity to avoid prosecution. By then, Gravano was living the high life. The man who had admitted taking part in 19 murders had published a book, with a movie spin-off. He was a celebrity. But ‘Sammy the Bull’ could not stay clean. In 2000 he and his son were arrested for conspiring with Israeli mobsters to distribute the drug Ecstasy. The following year, they appeared in the same Brooklyn Federal Courthouse, where he had testified against John Gotti. A further trial was held in Arizona, where Gravano was also involved in a statewide drugs ring. He was jailed for 20 years. His belated incarceration pleased the families of many of his murdered victims, angry that he had been treated so leniently by the government. But his ticket to freedom had by then encouraged a wave of other Mafia members to become government witnesses.

John ‘Junior’ Gotti continued to run the family but his reign
was short-lived. In 1999 he was jailed and forfeited $1.5 million after being found guilty of extortion, loansharking, gambling, mortgage fraud and tax evasion. Two of Gotti Senior’s brothers and a nephew were also subsequently arrested. The ‘Dapper Don’ himself died in jail of cancer on 10 June 2002.

So where does that leave the most pervasive criminal organisation the world has ever known? Where today are the descendants of the Italian street gangs of a century ago, of the gun-toting gangsters of the Thirties, of the Murder Inc. mobsters of the Fifties and of the silk-suited Dons of recent times? Certainly the money they made didn’t just evaporate. The billions that vanished from the public purse as the cost of organised crime in America is now largely laundered into legitimate businesses. And the pot still grows. The difference is that instead of seeing blood on the streets, the American public suffers a secret ‘taxation’ by the Mafia blood-suckers, the cost of whose criminal enterprises is reckoned to be well over a trillion dollars a year.

When legendary Mob mogul Meyer Lansky boasted in the Fifties, ‘We’re bigger than US Steel’, most people thought he was exaggerating. Today the Mafia’s turnover is bigger than the economies of many countries. America’s over-stretched crime fighters know that the reason people tend not to hear much about the Italian Mafia anymore is because they are doing what they were always supposed to do: operating in secrecy.

That does not mean they’re not still active. Selwyn Raab, an investigative journalist who covered the Mafia for 25 years at
The New York Times,
has highlighted their steady move into commercial and financial crime, which he says reflects ‘the Cosa Nostra’s Darwinian survival adaptability’. In his excellent book,
Five Families,
Raab writes: ‘Despite pronouncements of
unabated vigilance, law enforcement’s efforts against the traditional crime families are unmistakably in a downward cycle. State prosecutors and police forces, confronting terrorism as well as violent crime pressures and budget restraints, show less zeal than previously to engage the Mob’.

FBI director Robert Mueller said as much in September 2003, two years after the 9/11 attacks on New York’s Twin Towers, when he asked the public to accept that, with the agency’s new focus on counter-terrorism, ‘please recognise that we can’t do everything’. But the notion that 9/11 dimmed the Mafia’s intent soon proved deluded. Members of New York’s Lucchese family were found guilty of extorting pay-offs from a company engaged in the removal of debris from the World Trade Center. And the rival Bonanno family tried unsuccessfully to steal scrap metal from the ruins of the Twin Towers.

So any romantic view of the Mafia as just another episode in America’s sometimes violent past is fallacious. Attorney and law professor George Robert Blakey, the principal author of the RICO Act that put so many gangsters in prison, warned: ‘We don’t win a war against the Mob; all we can do is contain it. Keeping a boxer down is easier than knocking him down a second time. By withdrawing resources, we’ll just have to go back and complete the job at a larger cost.’

G
angsters elsewhere in the world tend not to have quite the same ‘glamorous’ image as American mobsters. Maybe it’s in the names. It’s difficult to compete with the
anti-heroes
of previous chapters, like ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, ‘Lucky’ Luciano, Jimmy ‘The Weasel’ Fratianno, Carmine ‘Wagon Wheels’ Fatico or Jack ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn. Britain’s underworld is nowadays short of descriptive nicknames – but it wasn’t always like that.

A little short of a century ago, Britain’s underworld boasted quaint characters like gems thief Joseph ‘Cammie’ Grizzard and drugs smugglers ‘Brilliant’ Chang and ‘Sess’ Miyakawa. There were hard men like ‘Jew Jack the Chopper King’, ‘Wassie’ Newman, ‘Dodger’ Mullins and ‘Razzle Dazzle’ Dalziel. Through the Twenties and Thirties, Soho was controlled by vice king ‘Papa’ Pasquale and North London was terrorised by
Darby Sabini, labelled by the Press as ‘Britain’s leading gangster’. South of the Thames lurked the Elephant and Castle Mob, while in the Midlands the Brummagen Boys held sway. A famous cat burglar of the day was a man named ‘Ruby’ Sparks, aided by his getaway driver, a beauty known only as the ‘Bobbed Hair Bandit’.

Prostitution was big business between the wars, the principal racketeers usually being immigrants – Latvian ‘Red Max’ Kessel, Frenchman Casimere Micheletti and Spaniard Juan Castanar, with their henchmen Charlie ‘the Acrobat’ and ‘Mad Emile’ Berthier. After World War Two the three Messina Brothers, of mixed Sicilian, Maltese and Egyptian descent, took over the London vice trade. Their best night’s business was on VE Day 1945 when, it was faithfully recorded, one girl alone serviced 49 revellers.

But among all these exotically named villains of the past were two hoodlums who stood out as masters of post-war gangland: Jack ‘Spot’ Comer and William ‘Billy’ Hill. They were, at different times, close friends and bitter rivals. And both claimed the title ‘King of the Underworld’.

There are differing versions of how Spot gained his nickname of which he was so proud. As a youth, he was constantly getting into ‘a spot of bother’. Later in life, as a protection-racket enforcer, he was always ‘on the spot’ to sort out trouble from rivals. Or it might have been because of the mole on his face. The son of Polish Jews who had come to Britain in the 1890s, Spot was born Jacob Comacho in Whitechapel, in London’s East End, on 12 April 1912. The name he used changed to Colmore, then Comer, then simply Jack Spot. He gained an early reputation as a street fighter and, with anti-Semitism rife in the Thirties, was paid retainers by
Jewish shopkeepers, stallholders and illegal bookmakers to protect them from thugs. He became a local hero when in 1936 he helped East-Enders break up a march through the area by Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts. But by then, Spot was combining community protection with full-scale protection rackets, concentrating on the illicit gambling clubs that flourished both in the East End and the more lucrative West End of London.

His criminal career was interrupted in 1940 when Spot and some of his cronies were conscripted into the Army. For three years he fought the system and, avoiding any sort of military action, was discharged as mentally unstable. He returned to the East End to find his parents dead and much of his home territory devastated by the Blitz. Spot tried to pick up his old business but after an attack on a rival led to a warrant for his arrest, he fled to Leeds, then the black market capital of the North. There he worked as a minder around Leeds and Newcastle, helping other gangsters beat or intimidate businessmen out of their nightclubs, gambling dens or racecourse pitches. He returned to London enriched and set himself up in offices in the West End.

According to Scotland Yard Inspector Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read: ‘Spot epitomised everything about the old-time
Mafia-style
gangster. He always looked the part. Immaculately dressed, wearing a brown fedora hat, he would come out of his flat every morning and cross the road to the barbers where he would be given a shave and a hair trim. Then he would march down the Edgware Road receiving the accolades of the local business owners, and take his usual table in the Cumberland Hotel, where he would receive ‘guests’ in much the same way as Don Corleone did in
The Godfather.
’

But Spot had his eyes on rackets further afield. Before World War Two, an Italian gang, the Sabini Brothers, controlled racecourse rackets, setting up the Bookmakers Protection Association. During the war, the Sabinis were interned like other Anglo-Italians and their absence from the tracks allowed other Mobs to move in. Spot, more ruthless and violent than most, gained a near monopoly on the business after pitched battles with rival outfits, which were harassed and attacked with knives, bottles, and machetes.

Spot’s own favourite weapon was the cutthroat razor. ‘My brother was a barber,’ he once said, ‘and I used to get my nice sharp razors from him.’ Taped at one end, they would be used by Spot and his growing gang to ‘chiv’ thugs who tried to muscle in on his territory – although, he boasted, ‘I’d make sure never to cut them through the jugular vein. I didn’t want to be done for murder, did I?’

Spot’s major rivals for the racecourse protection business were the White family, who controlled major southern courses including Ascot, Epsom and Brighton. Their leader, Harry White, had taken over these courses from the Sabinis and was not now going to offer them on a plate to Spot’s Mob. He soon changed his mind. According to a newspaper report of the time: ‘Harry White’s fear of Spot began in January 1947 in a club in Sackville Street, off Piccadilly. He was drinking with one of his henchmen and racehorse trainer Tim O’Sullivan. Spot walked in with ten thugs, went straight up to Harry and said, You’re Yiddified – meaning he was anti-Jewish. White denied it. He said, I have Jewish people among my best friends. Spot wouldn’t listen and hit him with a bottle. As White collapsed in a pool of blood, the rest of Spot’s men attacked O’Sullivan and the third man. O’Sullivan was beaten
unconscious and pushed into an open fire. The other man was slashed with razors and stabbed in the stomach.’

The White family were finally routed in a very public battle at Harringay Arena, six months later – after which, Spot later revealed, he was pulled in by a chief superintendent at Scotland Yard and given a warning that gang warfare in the city would not be tolerated. Spot said: ‘I called the heavy mob together at once. I said, “We’ve got to pack it up, so get rid of the ironmongery.” We collected all the Stens, the grenades, revolvers, pistols and ammunition, loaded them onto a lorry and dumped the whole lot into the Thames.’

Spot was now running a lucrative gambling club in Aldgate, a protection racket among the West End clubs and was making a fortune from the races. More fancifully, he also saw himself as ‘the Robin Hood of the East End’, travelling to Leeds, Manchester or Glasgow to beat up villains who threatened Jewish businesses. He even claimed that rabbis would advise their frightened people to call for his services.

Spot’s career almost ended when he organised a £1.25 million gold bullion robbery at Heathrow Airport in July 1948. After coshing security guards, his ten-man gang were pounced on by police, who arrested eight of them. Spot escaped. So did ‘Franny’ Daniels – by clinging to the underside of a Black Maria, crawling away only when it reached the police station.

In 1949 Spot, believing he needed a tough enforcer to hold his crime empire together, went into partnership with Billy Hill, a notorious hard-man whose eyes were said to be ‘like black glass’. Hill, the son of a Covent Garden ‘fence’, had committed his first stabbing at the age of 14 in 1925. He was a house burglar while still in his teens and graduated to
smash-and
-grab raids targeting furriers and jewellers in the Thirties.
Jack Spot once praised Hill as ‘an out-and-out thief and a very good one – and very good safe blower, too.’

During London’s wartime blackout, Hill’s gang expanded their business into black marketeering and providing false documents for deserting soldiers. He also cooperated with Spot in West End protection rackets. After the war, Hill went on the run following a warehouse robbery and fled to South Africa, where he briefly ran a gambling club in South Johannesburg. There, his reputation was enhanced when he silenced a rival by slicing him from head to toe with a razor, leaving the man needing 100 stitches. Arrested by South African police, he jumped bail and returned to Britain, where he gave himself up and was sent to jail.

On his release in 1949, Jack Spot was waiting outside the gates of Wandsworth Prison, southwest London, to offer him a partnership. The two gang leaders settled down as ‘businessmen’, living well on the proceeds of their rackets in West London. They left the vice trade to the Maltese Messina Brothers, who ran Soho’s sex industry. Spot concentrated on his gaming and racecourse ‘protection’. Hill was more adventurous, though. In 1952 he stole £287,000 (the equivalent of more than £6 million today) in used banknotes from a Post Office van in Paddington and in 1954 he organised a £45,000 gold bullion heist in Holborn. In neither case was any of the money recovered.

Hill also funded a drug smuggling operation from Morocco, where he owned a nightclub. It was run by his wife, an
ex-prostitute
known as ‘Gipsy’ Riley. He had fallen for her after his release from prison, and when her ex-pimp, ‘Belgian Johnny’, tried to force her back on the streets, he cornered him in a restaurant and carved his face to shreds. Hill later described
his expert use of the razor-sharp knife he usually carried: ‘I was always careful to draw my knife down on the face, never across or upwards. Always down. So that if the knife slips you don’t cut an artery. After all, chivving is chivving, but cutting an artery is usually murder. Only mugs do murder.’

Both Spot and Hill were planning their retirement by 1953 – the same year that they met a pair of violent young East End twins, Ronnie and Reginald Kray. The old and new guard got involved in a few joint enterprises before Spot and Hill fell out. Each of them was keen to be recognised as ‘King of the Underworld’ and the crunch came when Billy Hill achieved celebrity status first.

In September 1954 ‘The Amazing Confessions of Billy Hill’ were serialised in
The People
newspaper. The newspaper’s renowned crime man Duncan Webb had ghosted Hill’s biography, immodestly titled
Boss of Britain’s Underworld,
in which Hill was described as ‘a crook, a villain, a thief, a thug’ – but also strangely as ‘a genius and a kind and tolerant man’. In his memoirs, Hill boasted of organising the bullion robbery in Holborn the previous year and spoke of his 1952 Paddington mailbag heist.

Jack Spot was furious. Spot blamed not only Hill but also Duncan Webb for the unwelcome publicity about the gang’s previous crimes. He invited Webb to a pub meeting and beat him up with a knuckleduster; he also retaliated by giving his own version of events to the Press. He said: ‘I made Billy Hill. He wrote to me when he was in jail, wanted me to help him. Then he got to be top over me. If it wasn’t for me he’d never have got there. I should have shot Billy Hill, I really should.’

A string of court appearances followed as Spot tried in vain to reassert his authority. For the attack on Webb, he was fined
a modest £50 for grievous bodily harm. For an unprovoked attack on another rival, his ex-bodyguard Albert Dimes, Spot was charged with instigating the affray, attempting to pervert the course of justice and with perjury. With off-course betting about to be legalised and suffering mass defections of his troops to Hill, Spot faced bankruptcy.

But Billy Hill was not yet finished with him. One night in May 1956 Jack and his wife Rita were strolling outside their Bayswater home when they were attacked by a gang armed with coshes, knives and razors. Spot needed 78 stitches and a blood transfusion. He knew his assailants but refused to name them. Rita, however, gave evidence and three of them – all Hill henchmen, including the feared ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser – were sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.

Following the murderous street attack, Spot moved to Ireland in fear of his former partner. Hill briefly prospered as a Kray mentor but sank into depression and died alone at the age of 73 in 1984. Spot, who described Hill as ‘the richest man in the graveyard’, died, aged 83, in 1996. Their ‘manors’ had long been taken over. For just as those self-styled ‘Kings of the Underworld’ had fought their way to the top, so younger, hungrier and more vicious figures arose to fill the void created by their downfall.