The World's Most Evil Gangs (7 page)

Distraught at being used and then abandoned by both Kennedys, Marilyn had told friends she was going to call a press conference to reveal all of her affairs. The vulnerable star, who was overdosing on drugs and alcohol, intended to expose the Mafia’s secrets too.

Porter, who first met Marilyn as a teenager, said that like her occasional lover Frank Sinatra she had become entangled in the Mafia – in her case, after bedding Giancana’s henchman Johnny Roselli. President Kennedy also got caught up with the Mafia in sharing a lover, Judith Campbell Exner, with Giancana. In the months before her death, pill-popping Marilyn became more erratic, says Porter. A secret visit from Bobby Kennedy ended in a screaming match and further threats to bring down the Kennedy clan. Finally, someone – Porter does not say who – put a contract on the world’s biggest female star.

According to the author, ex-lover Roselli called at Marilyn’s house at 10pm on 4 August, leaving the door unlocked so that five hitmen could sneak in. She was rendered unconscious with a chloroform-soaked washcloth, then her limp body removed to the guest cottage in her garden, where the thugs stripped her and administered an enema of barbiturates. ‘Giancana had ordered that her body was not to be bruised,’ says Porter. His account is convincing. ‘I went to see Marilyn’s surviving friends, many were dying and had nothing to lose by finally telling the truth,’ he says.

The theory that the Mafia might have killed Marilyn Monroe to satisfy or protect John or Robert Kennedy seems pretty far-fetched. Particularly as, for many years, the Mafia had its own ‘Number One public enemy’ – the Kennedy clan itself. The feud went back half a century to the days when, according to mobsters’ stories, the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph,
made a fortune from the profits of Prohibition whiskey illegally imported from Ireland to Boston. In 1927 one of the Irish cargoes was hijacked by the Mob and 11 smugglers were killed in the shoot-out. It was, believe the Mafia, the start of a long campaign, instigated by Joseph Kennedy and continued by his children – principally John, who became President of the United States, and Robert, who became Attorney General.

Bobby Kennedy was responsible for pursuing Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa to jail in the US Justice Department’s relentless drive to crush Mafia influence within the organised labour movement. It was elder brother John who, as President, failed to give full backing to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion attempt of Cuba, planned by the CIA with Mafia assistance.

Years later, after the assassination of both men, the question was being asked: was the Mafia linked with the killing of the President in 1963? At one time, such a question would have been unthinkable. But when dealing with the Mafia, the unthinkable often becomes perfectly feasible. That was what happened in 1979 when a committee set up by the US House of Representatives suggested it was likely that a contract killer was involved in the assassination that shocked the world, in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. After a $3 million investigation lasting two years, the committee’s experts reported: ‘An individual crime leader or a small combination of leaders might have participated in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.’

The report went on to name the ‘most likely family bosses of organised crime to have participated in such a unilateral assassination plan’ – Carlos Marcello, of New Orleans, and Santos Trafficante, of Miami – although both men issued strong denials of any involvement.

Lee Harvey Oswald, who is presumed to have fired the shots that killed the President, certainly had links, far from tenuous, with underworld figures. So had Jack Ruby, the man who gunned down Oswald before the latter could be brought to court.

Oswald’s connection was through his uncle, Charles Murret, and an acquaintance, David Ferrie, both of whom worked for Carlos Marcello. The investigative committee described Murret, who died in 1964, as ‘a top deputy for a top man in Marcello’s gambling apparatus’. Murret took Oswald under his wing when his nephew moved from Dallas to New Orleans in 1963, treating him like a son and giving him a home and a job in his book-making business.

David Ferrie also worked for Marcello, as a pilot. He had flown him back to the US after Robert Kennedy deported him to Guatemala in 1961. Ferrie also had secret connections with the CIA and had trained pilots who later took part in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Oswald’s New Orleans work address in 1963 was the same as Ferrie’s and Oswald was in the same air club in which Ferrie was a pilot.

Such evidence, quoted in the House of Representatives committee’s report, is circumstantial, but judged alongside the evidence linking Oswald’s executioner Jack Ruby, to the Mafia, the conspiracy theory becomes stronger. Club owner Ruby’s connections with underworld figures were well established. His telephone records showed that he had been in contact with Mob personalities in Miami, New Orleans and Chicago. He had visited Santos Trafficante. And on 21 November, the day before Kennedy’s death, Ruby was seen drinking with a friend of pilot David Ferrie.

To this day, no one knows who was pulling the strings but all the evidence points to Ruby’s public execution of Oswald
being a certain way of keeping him quiet and preventing him naming accomplices during his trial. Ruby’s own life would not have been of high account; he died in prison shortly afterwards of cancer.

Ruby’s connection with Santos Trafficante brings the amazing web full circle. When Meyer Lansky, ‘Lucky’ Luciano and their associates ran the Havana hotel and casino business under corrupt Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, Trafficante was a small cog in the business. Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime in 1959 and threw the Mob’s men either into jail or out of the country. Among them was Trafficante – whose pilot, David Ferrie, also worked for the CIA. And this might not have been a coincidence.

It had long been the ambition of the CIA and a group of big business interests to overthrow Castro and return Cuba to ‘democratic’ and capitalist rule. Equally, the US government wanted to remove the communist threat from the Caribbean. The Mafia’s motives were more pragmatic: it wanted to restore its interests in Cuba’s profitable tourist, gambling and vice industries, with acquiescent officials and politicians susceptible to bribes.

There had already been various plots to bring down Castro. And the CIA and the Mafia had often worked together successfully, even launching joint military operations before and during the allied invasion of Sicily during World War Two. A similar link-up made sound sense in the organising of the Bay of Pigs invasion, in which 1,400 Cuban exiles launched a botched attack on the south coast of Cuba on 17 April 1961.

The invasion was a debacle. It had been authorised by previous President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1960 and John F. Kennedy had been briefed on it by the CIA. But the military
support that the rag-tag army of Cubans, the CIA and the Mafia had hoped for never materialised. It was a humiliation – and President Kennedy was blamed.

So a President who was popular with the general public was less so with certain elements in the Secret Service and the underworld. The Mafia, of course, never forgives or forgets. Neither had the CIA any reason to thank him. The FBI did not look kindly on the President either. The Bureau’s chief, J. Edgar Hoover, had long been hampered by the Kennedy brothers in his autocratic handling of the agency’s affairs. Attorney General Robert, with White House backing, clipped the wings of the all-powerful Hoover and earned himself an unforgiving enemy. Hoover’s agents collected every scrap of information about the private lives of every leading politician – and in the Kennedys’ case, the files bulged with scandal.

So when Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 and Jack Kennedy in 1963 (and when Robert Kennedy was also assassinated in 1968) conspiracy theories instantly flew. And the link was always the Mafia … the experts at carrying out contracts through ‘third parties’. Did the mobsters with ‘friends in high places’ murder Monroe and the President? The theories sound preposterous – until one realises that there’s nothing more preposterous than the US government and the Mafia collaborating in the invasion of another country. When it comes to the Mafia, the ‘impossible’ often happens.

C
arlo Gambino was the inspiration for the character of Il Capo di Tutti Capi (The Boss of All Bosses) in the movie
The Godfather.
Under the iron rule of this frail old man, the Mafia flourished through the post-war years. And thanks to his low-profile management of the Mob, by 1976 when Gambino died peacefully in his bed at the age of 73, the Mafia had apparently vanished into the woodwork.

His predecessor as Capo di Tutti Capi, Salvatore Maranzano, had attempted the transformation of the Mafia from a public killing machine to a quietly corrupt corporation way back in 1931. But if Maranzano had first voiced the new philosophy and Meyer Lansky later espoused it, then Carlo Gambino perfected it.

Gambino, born in Sicily in 1902, sailed to the US and entered illegally to join up with his relatives in the New York
crime family headed by his brother-in-law, Paul Castellano. He began carrying out murder contracts while still in his teens and at the age of 19 became a ‘made man’ and was inducted into La Cosa Nostra. Between the world wars he followed the traditional criminal path of bootlegging, illegal gambling, protection racketeering, extortion and loan-sharking.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Carlo Gambino chose to stay low-profile. He lived modestly in Brooklyn. At the age of 30 he married his first cousin and they raised three sons and a daughter. His trademark was his meek physical demeanour, accented by a hawk’s beak nose, and his polite, paternalistic manner. He preferred to work things out with his rivals but would not hesitate to have someone ‘clipped’ when they stood in his way. The most public of his many contracted ‘hits’ was that of Masseria family boss Guiseppe, ordered by Gambino and Luciano in 1931.

In 1937 Gambino was arrested and convicted of tax evasion but got off with a suspended sentence. World War Two was a gold mine for him. He became a millionaire by bribing city officials for ration stamps, which he then sold on the black market. After the war, the softly-spoken Gambino forged an unlikely alliance with the murderous Albert Anastasia and together they planned the overthrow of New York’s Mangano family. Its leader, Vincent Mangano, vanished in 1951 in what was assumed to be a killing arranged by Anastasia and Gambino. In 1956 Anastasia appointed Gambino his
underboss
. He didn’t serve his master for long; the following year he ordered the barber’s shop assassination of Anastasia. One of Anastasia’s loyalists, James Squillante, followed his boss to the grave in 1960. Carlo Gambino now set about consolidating his power base.

In 1962 his eldest son Thomas married the daughter of fellow Mob boss Gaetano Lucchese in a union not only of two young people but of two burgeoning crime families. Rackets throughout New York were carved up between the ‘amico nostra’ – literally ‘friends of ours’.

After surviving his main rivals – Joe Bonanno was ousted by ‘The Commission’, Vito Genovese died of a heart attack and Tommy Lucchese of a brain tumor – Carlo Gambino became all powerful. Quietly, throughout the Sixties and into the Seventies, he built an empire that operated in New York, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas.

The Gambino family – with names like Carmine ‘Wagon Wheels’ Fatico, Carmine ‘The Doctor’ Lombardozzi, Joseph ‘Joe Piney’ Armone, Armand ‘Tommy’ Rava, Joseph Biondo, Aniello ‘Mr Neil’ Dellacroce and Joseph Riccobono – had between 500 and 800 ‘soldiers’ operating a $500 million-
a-year
business.

The Gambinos became the dominant family in Manhattan. They ran the Longshoremen’s union, thereby controlling all goods entering New York by ship. The unions at the city’s airports were also under their influence. However, Godfather Carlo avoided the lucrative but high-profile drugs trade. His warning ‘Deal and Die’ meant a death sentence to any family member dealing in heroin or cocaine.

It was a strangely moral stance for someone who had ordered the deaths of an untold number of enemies. Thomas Eboli was one murder attributed to him. The drug racketeer owed Gambino $4 million and, when he failed to repay, was sprayed with bullets from a passing truck as he sat in his car in Brooklyn in 1972. The same year, the Godfather’s 29-year-old nephew ‘Manny’ Gambino was kidnapped and, despite a
ransom being paid, murdered. Irish mobster James McBratney was suspected of being one of the kidnappers and the order went out for him to die slowly and painfully, in a manner befitting his crime against Carlo Gambino. The three-man hit squad, including a new protégé named John Gotti, found their man in a Staten Island tavern and, perhaps fortunately for him, was swiftly dispatched when he tried to flee.

Carmine ‘Mimi’ Scialo’s end was less swift. A member of the Colombo family, the drunken Scialo verbally abused Carlo Gambino in a restaurant in 1974. Gambino remained calm, as he always did, and uttered not a word in retaliation. Soon afterwards, however, Scialo’s body was found at a Brooklyn social club – semi-encased in the cement floor.

There were many challenges to Gambino’s authority, particularly as he became old and frail, but he survived them all. While the Mafia had supposedly abolished the title of ‘Boss of Bosses’, Gambino’s position afforded him all the powers such a title would have carried. He was the undisputed head of the largest, wealthiest and most powerful crime family in the country and was the leader of the Commission, a position only previously held by ‘Lucky’ Luciano.

Carlo Gambino died of a heart attack in October 1976 at the age of 74. He had given explicit orders that his brother-
in-law
and cousin, Paul Castellano, take over the family. But many of his associates and underlings believed his loyal under-boss Neil Dellacroce should have had the top job. The dissension split the family in two.

Gambino’s legacy was not what he had hoped. His mission to transform the Mafia from a high-profile killing machine into an invisible corporate entity remained incomplete. In fact, the Seventies and early Eighties saw some of the most public
instances of Mafia violence. Over the same period, ordinary Americans received, through police crackdowns, media investigative reporting and a few revelatory court cases, an insight into how little had changed in the murderous minds of the Mafiosi.

The most sensational example of this was a very public assassination that had been set in motion by Carlo Gambino himself. Shortly before he died, the ailing Godfather had happily given his seal of approval to the elimination of a deadly rival. It was vengeance from beyond the grave that remained outstanding for three years until the contract was finally executed on a man who had boasted: ‘No one will ever kill me, they wouldn’t dare.’

Carmine ‘Cigar’ or ‘Lilo’ Galante, who saw himself as the new Godfather following Gambino’s death, was a brutal,
old-time
Mafioso of the Bonanno family. In his youth, he had been a vicious triggerman, carrying out contracts in grisly fashion many times. But now he was to become the target. His brazen bid to become Godfather and seize control of the New York narcotics market had angered other Syndicate leaders. And his aim of rubbing out all gangland opposition was drawing unwelcome attention from US lawmakers.

In July 1979 Galante was finishing lunch on the patio of Joe and Mary’s Italian restaurant on Brooklyn’s Knickerbocker Avenue. He had enjoyed a plate of spaghetti and meatballs with side orders of salad and fruit. Dining with him were Leonard Coppola, a Bonanno capo, and restaurant owner Giuseppe Turano, a cousin who was also a Bonanno soldier. Also sitting at the table were Galante’s Sicilian bodyguards, Baldesarre ‘Baldo’ Amato and Cesare ‘Tall Guy’ Bonventre.

The cigar-chewing mobster was sipping his sixth glass of
Chianti as two black limousines drew up outside. He looked to his bodyguards – but they had set him up for the contract murder. Three men, neatly dressed but wearing ski masks, strolled calmly from the cars into the eating-house and opened fire with a whole arsenal of shotguns and automatic weapons. They didn’t even give their quarry time to scream. The 69-year-old mobster tried to rise from his chair but was cut down in a hail of bullets. He died with his cigar still grotesquely clenched between his teeth. His two associates were also killed. As the gunmen sped off, the bodyguards walked away unharmed.

The Galante assassination was a Mafia ‘classic’. The contract had been farmed out by the Commission to friendly Mafiosi in Connecticut, who provided the killers as a favour. This is a Cosa Nostra trademark. To confuse the authorities and hostile gangsters alike, the actual executioners are often ‘imported’ from out of town. The trail is sometimes covered once again when those who put out the original contract have the executioners rubbed out afterwards. Dead men tell no tales.

A string of murders during that period of modern history horrified an American public who believed such violence had ended in the lawless Twenties and Thirties. The headlines, however, proved that the Mafia’s rules had not changed. In short, it is difficult to join the organisation unless, of course, you’re close family. Getting out, though, is very easy indeed: you become dead.

The typical Mafia execution remains a few clean bullet holes in the head. Unwanted personnel, even Godfathers, are disposed of in this fashion. But there are nastier ways of disposing of the greedy, the talkative, the disloyal and the rebellious. By Mafia tradition, those undesirables were killed
slowly and painfully. Some were garrotted, others cut to pieces with chainsaws or crushed to death in various ways.

Quite often, a cryptic message would accompany the rubout. A traitor’s genitals would be cut off and stuffed in the corpse’s mouth, for instance. In 1961 Giuseppe ‘Joe’ Profaci, founder of what is now known as the Colombo family, put out a contract on a member of a rival gang. Ten days after hitman Joseph ‘Jelly’ Gioielli disappeared, his bosses, the Gallo brothers, received the man’s clothes wrapped around a fish. Translation: ‘Jelly sleeps with the fishes’.

Joseph ‘Crazy Joe’ Gallo had been celebrating his 43rd birthday with a slap-up meal at famous Umberto’s New York Clam House when he was ‘clipped’ in 1972. When he assassinated Gallo, the lone gunman – later revealed to be out-
of-state
hitman Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran – broke an unwritten Mafia rule: you don’t blow a man away in front of his family. With him at the restaurant that night were his bride of three weeks, former dental assistant Sina Essary, and her ten-year-old daughter Lisa, as well as Gallo’s sister and a number of friends.

The furious gun battle spilled into the street, leaving Gallo, New York’s most feared hitman, dead and his bodyguard, Peter ‘The Greek’ Diapioulas, wounded. The Gallo brothers had been responsible for shooting down rival don Joe Colombo at an Italian-American rally at New York’s Columbus Circle a year earlier. At least a dozen men died in the ensuing feud between Gallo and Colombo factions of the old Joe Profaci family.

The violence was not restricted to New York. In Chicago, the infamous Momo ‘Sam’ Giancana was executed in 1975 by three hoods who burst into the kitchen of his suburban home. The 67-year-old was shot in the mouth, with another five bullets to the neck.

In Kansas City, the Spero brothers were wiped out one by one during their ten-year war with the reigning Civella gang. Nick was executed in 1974 and stuffed into the boot of his car. Michael was gunned down in a bar five years later. Joseph was wounded at that time but died when an explosion tore apart his warehouse in 1980. Carl was shot in the back when his brother Mike died. Paralysed, he carried on the war from a wheelchair, but in 1984, as he was rolling towards his specially adapted car, the Civella boys blew up the whole parking lot.

The decade was marked by a rash of arsons at Mafia-owned restaurants in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York. In the smouldering ruins of Giuseppe’s Pizza joint in Philadelphia one day in 1977, police discovered two charred bodies. One was still recognisable: Vincenzo Fiordilino, a Bonanno capo from New York. How had he come to die in a Philadelphia cafe? Police pieced together the story. Fiordilino and his friend had just brought 200 gallons of petrol into the kitchen, intending to start a blaze, but the pilot light ignited it before the two could get out.

Vincent Papa, a Colombo capo who made himself a legend when he stole $100 million worth of drugs from the police in 1972, was stabbed to death in the exercise yard of the Atlanta Penitentiary six years later. That daring robbery became a smash-hit movie,
The French Connection.
But Papa had begun to parade himself. It’s called ‘showboating’ and if you do it within the Mafia, it usually gets you killed.

James Eppolito, a Gambino lieutenant, was running a bogus charity so successfully that the then president’s wife, Rosalynn Carter, endorsed it with an appearance in 1979. A picture of the two together appeared in newspapers and Eppolito had extra copies made, which he passed around among friends and
business associates. Two weeks later he was dead. Hitmen Roy DeMeo and Richard DiNome had orders from the top. Then they, too, were rubbed out.

One age-old Mafia rule always applies: the old must make way for the young. Many stooping, white-haired dons, like Carmen Galante, seemed to forget that. And so, usually with the thumbs-up from the other bosses in the Commission, the Mob ‘retires’ its oldsters. A pension is out of the question.

Philadelphia chieftain Angelo Bruno was 69 when he got his ‘retirement’ in 1980. He was shot through the back of the head as he sat in a friend’s car outside his home. The body of an associate believed responsible for the murder was found a month later stuffed in a plastic bag, shot 14 times and littered with $20 bills torn in half, the Mafia sign that he had committed a greedy act.

Bruno’s successor in Philadelphia was Philip ‘Chicken Man’ Testa. His reign lasted exactly a year. He was blown to bits when a bomb, set off by radio control, shattered his home. Three years later his 28-year-old son Salvatore, who had vowed vengeance on the perpetrators, was himself blown away with two bullets to the back of the head.