The World's Most Evil Gangs (4 page)

Anthony Casso, a homicidal maniac who ran the Lucchese crime family, nevertheless felt the need to show his sensitive side. ‘I truly feel sorry for the younger generation that wants to belong to that life. It’s sad for them. There is absolutely no honour and respect today. Little do the newcomers know that there are many made members in the Mafia that wish not to be there and would like nothing better than to walk away from it. So they do the next best thing: stay low-key if possible. The
young newcomers will never see the kind of big money that was once made. That’s long gone. They don’t realise what it means to be free and to have peace of mind until it’s taken from them.’ Casso also declared his domestic loyalty. ‘Most all men in my life, everyone I know, had girlfriends. It goes with the territory. Women are drawn to us, the power, the money, and we’re drawn to them. But only in passing. Some guys treated their mistresses better than their wife but that’s outrage. No class. Only a
cafone
[ill-mannered peasant] does that. I never loved any woman but Lillian. She and my family always came first.’

But Frank Costello, who was known as the ‘Prime Minister of the Underworld’, did not think so highly of his family: ‘Other kids are brought up nice and sent to Harvard and Yale. Me? I was brought up like a mushroom.’

Family business meant something completely different to Antonio ‘Tony Ducks’ Corallo, a union racketeer at the head of the Lucchese family, who said: ‘Let’s take a son-in-law, somebody, put them into the (union) office; they got a job. Let’s take somebody’s daughter, whatever, she’s the secretary. Let’s staff it with our people. And when we say go break this guy’s balls, they’re there, seven o’clock in the morning, to break the guy’s balls.’

Jimmy Hoffa, the most infamous union leader of them all, obviously agreed. ‘Everybody has a price,’ he said – shortly before he was murdered by Mafia hitmen. Talking of which, Los Angeles gang boss Mickey Cohen passed off his murderous ways with the excuse: ‘I never killed a guy who didn’t deserve it.’ But Chicago hitman Joseph ‘Joe Batters’ Accardo once freed a victim with the words: ‘Let him go. He cheated me fair and square.’ This was somewhat out of character for the killer hired
by Al Capone to attend one of his dinners and publicly beat to death two of the guests with a baseball bat.

Some of the most revelatory quotations from a Mafia leader are those of John Gotti, labelled the ‘Teflon Don’ because of the number of charges that failed to stick. When he was finally convicted, however, it was partly because of an FBI bug that recorded him describing his criminal activities. On one tape he described his organisational ambitions thus: ‘This is gonna be a Cosa Nostra ’til I die. Be it an hour from now, or be it tonight, or a hundred years from now when I’m in jail. It’s gonna be a Cosa Nostra.’

Other memorable quotes from the opinionated Gambino family godfather include: ‘If they don’t put us away for one year or two, that’s all we need. But if I can get a year run without being interrupted … put this thing together where they could never break it, never destroy it. Even if we die, be a good thing.’

‘When I think of the American Indian I think of their courage, strength, pride, their respect and loyalty toward their brothers. I honour the reverence they share for tradition and life. These traits are hungered for in a society that is unfortunately plagued by those whose only values are
self-centered
and directed at others’ expense.’

‘I never lie to any man because I don’t fear anyone. The only time you lie is when you are afraid.’ ‘If you think your boss is stupid, remember: you wouldn’t have a job if he was any smarter.’ ‘I know where my mistakes are, where I made my mistakes. They’re too late to remedy, you know what I mean?’

‘Don’t carry a gun. It’s nice to have them close by, but don’t carry them. You might get arrested.’ ‘You will put the garbage in the cans and make certain that the cans are covered. We got to keep our own backyard clean.’ ‘Be nice to bankers. Always
be nice to pension fund managers. Always be nice to the media. In that order.’ ‘I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That’s not me.’ ‘I’m in the Gotti family; my wife’s the Boss.’ ‘All I wanted was to be what I became to be.’

A prophecy that would have been more likely if Gotti hadn’t talked so much: ‘He who is deaf, blind and silent lives a thousand years in peace.’ And a final wrong call before he was sent to jail in 1992: ‘Three-to-one odds I beat this.’

T
he American Mafia’s ‘coming of age’ – its transformation from a high-profile killing machine into an invisible corporate entity – had begun with the first man to claim the title Capo di Tutti Capi, Salvatore Maranzano. But he was ahead of his time. Within months of his 1931 peace conference to end blood feuds between the major families, he and 40 of his men were dead. Gang warfare on such a scale had alerted Americans to the magnitude of the crime problem in their midst. It had also alerted the Mafiosi themselves to the dangers of advertising their power in blood.

So the man who ordered Maranzano’s killing, Meyer Lansky, took up his assassinated rival’s theme of cooperation, saying: ‘Crime has moved out of the ghettoes and become nationwide.’ Lansky and his contemporaries, ‘Bugsy’ Siegel, ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Vito Genovese, made themselves millions by adopting a
new, more ‘businesslike’ approach to organised crime. As Luciano explained: ‘The world is changing and there are new opportunities for those who are ready to join forces with those who are stronger and more experienced.’

So what happened to these Mafia ‘modernisers’? The previous chapters took us through the blood-stained years to World War Two and highlighted the influence of the original infamous foursome – Luciano, Lansky, Siegel and Genovese – who formed a strong family bond that enabled them to survive that violent era. Extraordinarily, after a lifetime of corruption, torture and violent death, three of the four died of natural causes. The fourth was murdered on the orders of his supposed long-term ‘friends’.

The nickname ‘Lucky’ certainly applied to the Sicilian-born Salvatore Lucania. As one of the most – if not
the
most – powerful men in organised crime, his influence over the US underworld still holds. The first person to challenge the ‘old Mafia’ by breaking through ethnic barriers and forming a network of gangs, he created a national Syndicate that controlled organised crime long past his imprisonment, banishment and death.

Having genuinely helped the American war effort, albeit to his own benefit, the authorities kept their part of the bargain and in 1945, within a few months of the war in Europe ending, Luciano was freed from jail. New York’s Governor Thomas Dewey, a former special prosecutor of organised crime who got Luciano jailed in the first place, granted commutation of sentence and had him deported to Italy. His comrade in crime, Lansky, was there to bid him farewell, with a contribution of half a million dollars to help him start his new life.

From an ocean’s distance away, Luciano continued to hold
sway over his American Syndicate. He lived in Rome for a while but grew restless and in 1946 he sneaked into Cuba, travelling in a most circuitous route – by freighter to Venezuela, then by plane to Brazil, on to Mexico, doubling back to Venezuela, and finally landing by light plane near Havana, where he took up residence on a private estate. He had chosen Cuba because Lansky was already established as a major investor in gambling and resorts under the island’s corrupt regime. He also wanted to be closer to the United States so that he could resume control over Cosa Nostra operations and eventually return to the American mainland. Meanwhile, couriers were set up to keep him supplied with money.

In December 1946 Luciano and Lansky issued an invitation to leaders of US organised crime to meet him in Havana. The supposed reason was to hear visiting singer Frank Sinatra perform but the real reason was to discuss the expansion of Mob operations in Cuba and Las Vegas and into international drug supply. The week-long conference was held at the Hotel Nacional, where Luciano came face to face for the first time in a decade with his old ally, Vito Genovese. A year earlier, Genovese had been extradited from Italy to New York to face trial on an old murder charge but in June 1946 the charges were dismissed and he was free to return to Mob business. Now his former subordinate tried to persuade Luciano to let him run all his East Coast operetions while Luciano remained in exile. His answer was unequivocal:

‘There is no Boss of Bosses. I turned it down in front of everybody. If I ever change my mind, I will take the title. But it won’t be up to you. Right now you work for me and I ain’t in the mood to retire. Don’t you ever let me hear this again or I’ll lose my temper.’

The Havana conference rebounded on Luciano. He had made his presence there so public, by dining at nightclubs and fêting Frank Sinatra, that the Cuban authorities could no longer turn a blind eye to his presence in the capital. Before his empire-building in exile could begin, American pressure on Cuba’s President Fulgencio Batista forced Luciano’s dispatch back to Italy – ignominiously on a Turkish freighter bound for Genoa. On his return he was arrested by Italian police and locked in jail until a judge freed him on stiff parole conditions.

Over the next few years, Luciano was arrested and rearrested several times but always managed to win his freedom. He was, however, placed under curfew at his Naples home, required to report to the police weekly and barred from leaving the city without permission. From 1948 he shared his home with Igea Lissoni, an Italian nightclub dancer 20 years his junior, whom he later described as the love of his life. Although he had affairs with numerous other women, the couple stayed together until Igea’s death from breast cancer in 1959.

Despite the restrictions placed upon him, Luciano managed to orchestrate a massive expansion of his Cosa Nostra operation, mainly by introducing fresh drug routes to the United States. In October 1957 he gathered 30 American and Sicilian Mafia leaders for a summit in a Palermo hotel to plan a massive smuggling and distribution system for the flooding of the American market with vast quantities of heroin and cocaine. The cruel aim was to lower the price of these hitherto ‘elite’ drugs in order to create a market in blue-collar urban communities.

At this stage, Frank Costello, aided by the ‘muscle’ power of Albert Anastasia’s murderous Mob enforcers was still Luciano’s acting chief in New York. But Vito Genovese had not foresaken his ambition to take over as Boss of Bosses. He
was backed by Carlo Gambino, a turncoat member of Anastasia’s crime family.

In May 1957 Genovese ordered the assassination of Costello outside his apartment block but the hitman he hired to do the job, Vincent Gigante, botched it and, although slightly wounded, the target survived. Shortly afterwards, however, the thoroughly rattled Costello conceded control of what became – and is still today known as – the Genovese crime family.

Infuriatingly for him, Luciano was far removed from the action and could only watch from exile Genovese’s attempts to carve up his old empire. And a significant blow to his prestige was the murder of his ally Anastasia on the orders of Genovese and Gambino.

Albert Anastasia had enjoyed an eventful and succesful, though hideously bloody career since falling in with Luciano and Lansky. Having run Murder Incorporated during the
pre-war
era, Anastasia appeared to take a ‘sabbatical’ from crime during World War Two and in 1942 joined the US Army, attaining the rank of sergeant and subsequently being rewarded with American citizenship. In 1948 he bought a dress manufacturer in Pennsylvania and appeared to be a respectable member of the community. In 1951 the Senate summoned him to answer questions about organised crime but he refused to answer. By then Anastasia was back at his old game: murder.

Anastasia had long been under-boss of the Mangano crime family, run by brothers Vincent and Philip. But he was distrusted by them because of his closeness to Luciano and Costello. In early 1951 both Vincent and Philip went missing. Vincent was never seen again but his brother’s bullet-riddled body was found dumped in Brooklyn. It was assumed that Anastasia had ordered them both to be killed.

With Costello’s support, the Commission confirmed Anastasia’s accession as boss of the renamed Anastasia family. But his growing power became too much of a threat to his principal New York rivals, including Genovese, two of whose henchmen followed him to his barber’s shop in a smart Manhattan hotel on the morning of 25 October 1957. With a warm towel draped over his face, he did not see the two gunmen position themselves behind the barber’s chair. After the first volley of bullets, Anastasia appeared to try and fight back against his killers – but he was lunging at the gunmen’s reflections in the mirror in front of him. The image of a victim covered in bloodied white towels shocked America.

With Anastasia safely out of the way, Vito Genovese now believed himself to be the top boss in the Cosa Nostra. In November 1957 he coordinated what became known as the ‘Apalachin Conference’, a Syndicate ‘summit’ of more than 100 Mafia leaders from as far afield as Canada and Italy, at which he expected to be named Capo di Tutti Capi. A local state trooper keeping watch on the conference location, the home of Joseph ‘Joe the Barber’ Barbara in Apalachin, New York, checked the licence plates of the visitors’ limousines and reported the suspicious behaviour to his superiors. A road block was set up and many of the Mafia hierarchy were hauled off. Fifty-eight high-ranking mobsters were arrested and the Cosa Nostra subjected to numerous grand jury summonses. Genovese was blamed for the fisasco and it was an embarrassment and loss of prestige from which he never recovered.

His enemies could now hit back. Genovese’s former ally Carlo Gambino deserted him and, with Costello, flew to Sicily for a meeting with Luciano. An elaborate stitch-up was arranged. A narcotics deal was set up in New York – and the
plotters ensured that Genovese was heavily implicated in it. They then tipped off the police.

Having eliminated Anastasia along with other rivals, Genovese had savoured the fruits of power for only a year before being jailed in 1959 for drug smuggling. From prison, he continued to control the activities of his crime family, even arranging for his top aide, Tony Bender, to be assassinated because he believed him to have played a part in the drugs plot. Genovese had served ten years of a 15-year sentence when he was found dead from a heart attack on 14 November 1969.

He must have been pleased to have survived his arch enemy ‘Lucky’ Luciano, who had already gone the same way. On 6 January 1962 he had been waiting at Naples airport for the arrival of an American movie producer planning to film the
64-year
-old mobster’s life story. But Luciano’s luck had at last run out. He dropped dead of a heart attack in the airport lounge. Italian narcotics agents who, unbeknown to Luciano, had been following him with an arrest warrant for drug offences witnessed his demise. The Mafia boss’s body was shipped back to the United States and buried in St. John’s Cemetery in New York’s Queens district. More than 2,000 mourners attended the funeral, Luciano’s friend Carlo Gambino giving the eulogy.

One of those publicly mourning his old friend was Meyer Lansky – but he was perhaps not as sorry as his feigned grief might have suggested. As the years of exile dragged on, Luciano’s formerly rock-solid relationship with Lansky had begun to falter because the Italian did not feel he was receiving his fair share of profits from the Mob. But there was little that Luciano could do about it – because by the early 1960s the names of Meyer Lansky and ‘the Mob’ were virtually synonymous.

The diminutive, soft-spoken 5ft 5in tall Russian Jew had been a driving force in forming the national crime Syndicate and became one of its major overseers and bankers, laundering funds through foreign accounts. He developed gambling operations in Florida and New Orleans and also in Cuba, where he arranged payoffs to President Batista. He also funded the early development of Las Vegas as a gambling mecca and sent out his own top aide and good friend ‘Bugsy’ Siegel to take charge of it.

When Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, Lansky switched his gambling operations to the Bahamas, nurturing cooperation from the government of the then British colony to build casinos. He also invested in casinos throughout the Caribbean and in London. He controlled hotels, resorts, golf courses and even a meat packing plant. But his operations were not all ‘clean’ businesses. He was also into narcotics smuggling, pornography, prostitution, labour racketeering and extortion.

The FBI estimated that by 1970 Lansky had salted away $300million in Swiss bank accounts. But that year he learned of plans to arrest him on suspicion of income-tax evasion and fled to Israel, seeking to remain safely there under the so-called Law of Return. This law, passed in 1950 by the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, grants any Jew the right to seek sanctuary in the country – but excludes those with a criminal past. After two years in Israel, Lansky was arrested and deported back to the US, where he was finally brought to trial on several indictments. However, because the principal witness, a loan shark named Vincent ‘Fat Vinnie’ Teresa, utterly lacked credibility, Lansky was acquitted of income tax evasion but convicted of grand jury contempt, a verdict overturned on appeal.

Indictments on other charges were abandoned in 1974 because of Lansky’s ill health. He lived quietly in Florida and little was heard of him until 1979 when the House of Representatives Assassinations Committee, ending its two-year investigation of the Warren Commission report, linked Lansky with minor Mob figure Jack Ruby, the nightclub owner who killed presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (of which more in a subsequent chapter). Meyer Lansky died at the age of 80 of lung cancer in Miami Beach on 15 May 1983, leaving a widow and three children. He was buried in Miami in an Orthodox Jewish ceremony. By then, his fortune may well have exceeded $500 million but of course no one, least of all the US government, could tell with any certainty how much and where it really was.

So, of those four friends and partners from the rip-roaring Twenties, three of them – Luciano, Genovese and Lansky – who between them had ordered thousands of murders, all died of natural causes. The exception was the fourth member of that merging of Italian and Jewish gangsters, ‘Bugsy’ Siegel.

Benjamin Siegel hated his nickname, which he had earned early in life. He once said: ‘My friends call me Ben, strangers call me Mr. Siegel, and guys I don’t like call me Bugsy, but not to my face.’ Among the friends he was referring to, the closest and most long-standing was his trusted partner in crime, Meyer Lansky. And it was Lansky who ordered him murdered.