The World's Most Evil Gangs (8 page)

The seven-year war between the Philadelphia Mob and the Bonannos and Gambinos in New York claimed the lives of no fewer than 209 members from the three families. It felt like a replay of the territorial wars of the Twenties.

Frank Piccolo, allied to the Gambino clan, was Connecticut’s most powerful mobster until the police nabbed him. He was due to stand trial for attempting to extort money from singers Wayne Newton and Lola Falana over a Las Vegas investment that had gone sour. Piccolo was the boss but he was also an embarrassment. Like Galante and others, 58-year-old
Piccolo was now dead weight. Shadowed by his colleagues for days, he collapsed in a spray of bullets as he made a call from a public payphone in 1981. The three carbine-toting hoods then made their getaway in a van, chased by police and a handful of very brave local citizens. The van turned into a long wooded driveway near the home of two Piccolo henchmen, brothers Gustav and Francis ‘Fat Frannie’ Curcio, where the pursuers lost it. It had been the classic
Godfather
movie-type execution.

It seems that food and death often go hand in hand for the men of the Mafia. They dine and they die. Sometimes, like Carmine Galante, they die after their spaghetti and meatballs. Other times, like Carlo Gambino’s successor Paul Castellano, they die before they dine. The seven torpedoes who gunned down Castellano just before Christmas 1985 hissed Sicilian curses at him as they fired. Castellano, who had been on his way to dinner at Manhattan’s Sparks Steak House died on an empty stomach. Killed with him was his bodyguard and would-be second-in-command, Thomas Bilotti.

Mafiosi are hit as an example to others. If their lives were ever spared, then the Cosa Nostra would disintegrate as each man looked to his own enrichment, rather than the Syndicate’s.

The men who do the dirty work have no conscience. Time and again it is apparent when they talk about it, as in the case of two US government witnesses of the time. Luigi Ronsisvalle, a New York hitman working for the Bonanno family, told a court that he killed 13 people, the first when he was just 18 years old. ‘That was a job,’ he said. ‘I no feel ashamed.’ Apparently the only thing he regretted was pushing heroin ‘which destroys hundreds and thousands of young American generations’.

Another ‘squealer’, Aladena ‘Jimmy the Weasel’ Fratianno, a Cleveland mobster who became acting head of the Los Angeles
crime family, confessed to 11 murders but said he felt no emotion. One of the contracts was on his best friend, Frank ‘The Bomp’ Bompensiero, the most feared Mafia hitman in Southern California for more than 30 years. Killing fellow mobsters was Bompensiero’s specialty and his reward from the Los Angeles Mafia was to be made boss of San Diego. In 1977, however, it was discovered that ‘The Bomp’ had been an FBI informer for a decade. ‘The Weasel’ had no hesitation in organising the execution of his friend, and the 71-year-old hulking hood was gunned down outside his home by another hired hitman from out of town.

Afterwards ‘The Weasel’ Fratianno became an FBI informant himself and later gained a measure of fame – or infamy – by writing about the Mafia and giving TV interviews. He revealed the sort of casual language used in the course of a contract killing. ‘You know that fucking Bomp,’ said his killer, ‘he shit his pants when he saw me with the piece [gun]. He tried to give me a hard time.’ Fratianno wondered: ‘How tough a time can a guy with four slugs in his head give you?’

Like so many of his callous cousins in the Mafia, ‘The Weasel’ saw killing as no more than a bit of ‘business’, sometimes even a joke. He said during a television documentary in 1991 that Bompensiero ‘had buried more bones than could be found in the brontosaurus room of the Museum of Natural History’.

L
abour racketeering has always been one of the Mafia’s fundamental sources of profit, power and influence. With 75,000 union branches in the US, many maintaining their own benefit funds, the labour market provides a rich source for organised criminal groups to manipulate, plundering their pension, welfare, and health funds. This exploitation also costs the American public millions of dollars each year through increased labour costs that are eventually passed on to consumers.

‘The historical involvement of La Cosa Nostra in labour racketeering has been thoroughly documented,’ says a current FBI report, which points to a century of corruption within the nation’s major unions.

Early last century, the unions were manipulated by New York mobster Jacob ‘Little Augie’ Orgen, whose labour rackets
earned him a huge fortune until his death at the hands of gunmen in 1927. Such Mafia notables as Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano all took lessons from Orgen in those early days. By the following era, the web of corruption had spread nationwide. FBI files show that more than one-third of the 58 Mafiosi arrested in 1957 at the famous Apalachin Conference in New York listed their employment as ‘labor’ or ‘labor-management relations’.

Three major US Senate investigations have documented La Cosa Nostra involvement. One of these, the McClellan Committee in the late-1950s, found systemic racketeering in both the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. In the early 1980s Gambino family boss Paul Castellano was overheard saying: ‘Our job is to run the unions.’ In 1986 the President’s Council on Organized Crime reported that the Mafia dominated five major unions.

Principal among them was the Teamsters. For if ‘Little Augie’ Orgen’s century-old operation was the training ground for union corruption, the finishing school was that of Jimmy Hoffa, notorious leader of America’s giant transport union. No labour force has been infiltrated to a more infamous degree than the Teamsters.

The Jimmy Hoffa story is one of legend – and explains in a way how a corrupt but flamboyant figure can be presented as that curiously American animal: a tainted folk hero. Pint-sized Hoffa, for instance, was known as the ‘biggest little guy in the USA’. His firebrand exploits were lovingly reported by the media, and the reason for the fascination is not hard to fathom. The trade union bigshot fought the Kennedys, courted the Mafia, stole workers’ millions, was imprisoned,
courted Richard Nixon, did battle with the Mafia, won back the workers and split the unions. And then in 1975 he suddenly vanished.

So what happened? Was he turned into glue? Ground up in a mincer? Compacted in a garbage plant? Cemented into a bridge? Squashed inside a junked car? Fed to Florida’s alligators? Or could he perhaps still be alive? It was many years before the truth about his fate emerged, and it wasn’t pretty. But even on the day of his disappearance, all of America knew instantly that foul play was afoot. There was no question: Hoffa had been murdered. He’d had it coming …

The aptly named James Riddle Hoffa was born in poverty on 14 February 1913. In the tough Depression era, he worked his way up from a docker’s job to become president of America’s largest and most powerful trade union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Anything that moved around America, by truck, ship or rail, involved this union. And anything that involved the union also involved the Mafia. Under the direction of Hoffa from his Detroit headquarters, the Teamsters changed from being a disorganised rabble into a major force. Even the Michigan State Police joined Hoffa’s union. All employees and employers alike paid into the enormous Teamsters’ pension fund, which was mercilessly milked by Hoffa’s Mob supporters. Attorney General Robert Kennedy pursued Hoffa and his fellow officials with a vengeance but he was never able to nail him for the web of fraud he had spun.

Hoffa had been arrested 23 times but somehow no significant charges ever stuck. The 5ft 5in hothead boasted that he had ‘a record as long as your arm’ but in fact he had been fined only twice – a paltry $10 and $1,000 – and had never
been to jail. Hoffa’s luck finally began to run out in 1964 when he received an eight-year sentence for jury tampering. That same year he was given an additional five-year sentence for defrauding the Teamsters’ pension fund of $2 million. A string of appeals failed and he eventually went to prison in 1967.

Astonishingly, for a cheat who had stolen their hard-earned funds, Hoffa was still a hero with his fanatically loyal union members. And from inside prison, he continued to influence the union’s affairs. He had planned for a weak ‘caretaker’, his Detroit deputy Frank Fitzsimmons, to head the Teamsters while he was in jail. Fitzsimmons, however, wanted power in his own right. He failed to follow the orders relayed to him from inside a prison cell. Meanwhile, Hoffa seethed.

In December 1971, after his parole appeal had been rejected for the third time, Hoffa was suddenly freed – his sentence surprisingly commuted by President Richard Nixon. The union boss had served only 58 months of his 13-year sentence. There was a catch to the Nixon deal, however, in that Hoffa was barred from union activities until 1980. That just happened to coincide with the end of Fitzsimmons’ term of office. Despite being freed from jail on the President’s direct orders, Hoffa complained publicly that Nixon had conspired with Fitzsimmons to betray him. Hoffa was particularly upset because he had promised Nixon the endorsement of the Teamsters and other unions in his 1972 election.

But why would the President get involved at all? For money, said the Phoenix-based
Arizona Republic
newspaper, which in 1979 published the diary of Mafia paymaster Edward ‘Marty’ Buccieri, who was murdered in 1975. Handed to the FBI by convicted hitman Gerald Denono, the diary itemised $28 million of illegal financial transactions in a 15-month period
between 1972 and 1973. The diary, which named Nixon aides Bob Haldeman, Charles Colson and John Ehrlichman, catalogued half a million dollars of Mafia funds going directly to the President of the United States.

Out of prison, Hoffa desperately tried to wrest control of the Teamsters away from Frank Fitzsimmons. He told his old supporters: ‘I know the union business upside down, around and over. The members are interested in how many bucks they can make – I get them for them.’ Where persuasion failed, violence began to have an effect. The union was torn apart by civil war. The Teamsters’ Detroit office was machine-gunned, an official’s boat was blown up, another official was blinded by a shotgun, other union activists were beaten up, and the
union-owned
car of Fitzsimmons’ son Dickie, a local branch official, was dynamited. Although Dickie Fitzsimmons survived because he had stopped for a drink in a bar, the attack was obviously the last straw for the anti-Hoffa forces.

On 30 July 1975, exactly three weeks after the bomb attack, Jimmy Hoffa vanished. That evening, 62-year-old Hoffa took a phone call and told his wife Josephine that he was going out. He drove from his suburban home in Lake Orion, 45 miles north of Detroit, to the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield township. There, he had a dinner date with two Mafia hoodlums: Anthony Giacolone and Anthony ‘Tony Pro’ Provenzano. Neither turned up at the restaurant – but Hoffa did, and was abducted somewhere in the street outside.

One witness saw him in what may have been the last moments of his life. By chance, the witness drew up alongside a brand new maroon Mercury car outside the restaurant and for a few seconds saw what everyone believes was the abduction. He recognised Hoffa as one of four passengers: he
was leaning forward, shouting at the driver, and he had his hand behind his back, perhaps tied. The witness identified the driver from ‘mugshot’ files as being Charles ‘Chuckie’ O’Brien, Hoffa’s own foster son. Raised by the Teamsters’ chief, Chuckie had become his bodyguard and personal assistant. Hauled in by police, he vehemently proclaimed his innocence. The maroon Mercury was, however, tracked down by the FBI. Sniffer dogs picked up Hoffa’s scent on the back seat – and in the trunk.

Both Giacolone and Provenzano made sure they had alibis for the night in question. Indeed ‘Tony Pro’ was conspicuously at his home in New Jersey the day he was supposed to be meeting Hoffa for dinner. Giacolone was a simple Detroit hood. But Provenzano, a former amateur boxer, was a member of the Mafia family of Vito Genovese, as well as being a local leader of the Teamsters in Union City, New Jersey. Hoffa and ‘Tony Pro’ bore a fierce hatred for one another. They had been close friends and allies, but during a term they shared at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, they fell out.

Although ‘Tony Pro’ almost certainly knew Hoffa’s fate, the contract must have come from a much higher authority. Mafia boss Rosario ‘Big Man Russell’ Bufalino, head of the relatively small but influential Northeastern Pennsylvania crime family, is reputed to have ordered Hoffa’s death. The accepted theory is that the Mob’s operation to extort money from employers and to siphon off the union’s pension funds was working so effectively under Fitzsimmons that they didn’t want Hoffa returning to ruin it all.

After his abduction, the FBI launched the biggest manhunt in its history and continued to keep open the file on Hoffa’s disappearance. But not a single arrest was ever made and no evidence was ever found of Hoffa’s body. Was Provenzano the
master-hitman? We shall never know. Two years after Hoffa’s disappearance, Provenzano was given a life sentence for the murder of another Teamsters’ official. In 1988 he died in prison, aged 71. After jail terms for extortion and attempted murder, boss man Bufalino died, aged 90, in 1994. Hoffa’s wife died in 1980 after a long illness. His children, James and Barbara, continued to fight to have the FBI release files on the case that they believed could solve the mystery.

Hoffa may have known that he was a target. Just before he vanished, he drew out a million dollars in cash. Although this raised speculation that he might still be alive and on the run, his family and the police remained convinced that he was dead. And while it was uncertain who had ordered the killing, no one was in any doubt that it was a Mafia contract.

Over the ensuing years, dozens of criminals, from mobsters to fraudsters, have come up with ‘revelations’ about the slaying and the disposal of Hoffa’s body. Here are a few of them: Hoffa’s corpse was mixed into the concrete used to construct the New York Giants’ football stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The body was encased in the foundation of a public works garage in Cadillac, Michigan. His remains were buried at the bottom of a swimming pool in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The body was ground up and dumped in a Florida swamp. It was crushed in an automobile compactor at Central Sanitation Services in Hamtramck, Michigan. His corpse was put into a 55-gallon steel drum and carted away in a Gateway Transportation truck. His remains were disintegrated at a fat-rendering plant. He was buried under the helipad at the Sheraton Savannah Resort Hotel, which at the time of his disappearance was owned by the Teamsters. His body was placed in a steel drum and buried in a toxic waste site in Jersey City, New Jersey.

An intriguing report of Hoffa’s death came in 1995 when an un-named ex-convict appeared on TV and, after taking a lie detector test, described his part in the murder. He said he had been a Mafia hitman but was suffering from emphysema and wanted to set the record straight before he died. This was his story:

Nevertheless, during the trip Hoffa recognised ‘Sally Bugs’ as Salvatore Briguglio, a hood within the New Jersey Teamsters, who would be killed a year later in New York’s Little Italy while working for ‘Tony Pro’ Provenzano. The hitman continued:

Couldn’t they just have shot him? ‘One of the things a mechanic does is give the customer what he wants. That was the way the customer wanted it and this was the way it was done.’ The anonymous hitman then paid a final tribute to the man he had helped murder: ‘I’ve clipped people who’d beg and plead and say, Take pity on my family, and that kinda thing. Not him. He was a man’s man – tough as nails.’

Another hitman who claimed to have been present at the Hoffa murder was Richard Leonard ‘The Iceman’ Kuklinski, a New Jersey contract killer who earned his nickname from his knack of disguising the time of his victims’s death by placing their corpses in a freezer. Before his own death in 2006, Kuklinski cooperated in a book,
The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer,
in which he said he had stabbed Hoffa with a hunting knife, after which his body was placed in a 55-gallon drum and set on fire. He was allowed to burn for ‘a half hour or so’ before the drum was welded shut and buried in a junkyard. Later the drum was dug up, placed in the trunk of a car which was compacted to a 4ft by 2ft cube and sold as scrap metal.