American Mafia
by Harry Reynolds
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There was a time when a working man heavy with dinner could sit in his cold water flat and savor his evening paper's reports of criminals like Kit Burns, given to biting off the heads of live rats, or Monk Eastman, leader of a gang of 1,200, to say nothing of misunderstood fraternal associations like the Gophers, Dead Rabbits, Bowery Boys and the Five Pointers. That time is long gone. We live in the age of the dull criminal, twin to the dull politician. In this dark period, we have only the occasional book by a boring writer about boring bumblers who have managed, from the viewpoint of the bored working man, to bring crime into disrepute. Today, criminal defendants look like accountants.
Thomas Reppetto's American Mafia, however, is not such a book, nor are the criminals in it the slack-jawed specimens in yesterday's Daily News. His fact-driven narrative, written in a gentlemanly prose, detached, sometimes whimsical, quietly intellectual, always temperate, never judgmental, is pitched to that tension that draws the hand to turn the page. The book, notwithstanding its perhaps sardonic title, proves that there was no Sicilian-based Mafia in this country, except the one created by potbellied reporters who, lacking style, dug into the deep pockets of fiction.
Reppetto's book opens in October, 1890, in New Orleans, with the sound of a shotgun blast that kills the police chief as he reaches home. His dying words are, "The dagos did it", a foreshadowing of the chapters that follow. Mayor Joseph Shakespeare orders the arrest of every Italian in sight. After a jury acquits six and disagrees as to three, a crowd of 6,000 attacks the jail and murders eight of the defendants. The New York Times deplores the event but can find no one who "deplored it very much". Today, the Times would give its entire 30-pound Sunday issue to the attack.
Turning north, Reppetto begins his central theme, the alliance of criminals with corrupt politicians, judges, prosecutors, and police. In detail, he renders the reign of the Morello clan, the protection by Tammany's Big Tim Sullivan of the Jewish gang led by Monk Eastman and the hundreds of thugs led by Paul "Kelly" (née Vaccarelli). He describes Detective Giuseppe Petrosino, a squat, solitary figure given to playing the violin in his small tenement room, the pursuer of Italian criminals who prey upon their own. He is sent to Italy on a suicide mission to investigate the backgrounds of Italian criminals in America, and is shot to death in Palermo. He lies in state in St Patrick, where 250,000 attend his funeral.
As New York descends into criminal control, Chicago dives head first into overwhelming crime and official corruption. Prostitution there was so open that its master pimp, Calabria-born "Diamond Jim" Colosimo, oversaw about 200 cathouses,one named "Everleigh". Reppetto makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like adjoining convents compared to Chicago. It was as nothing for Anthony D'Andrea, a savage, defrocked Sicilian priest, to set out directly for Chicago to engage in counterfeiting and prostitution. It was there that Johnny Torrio actually organized crime. It was Torrio who, by way of a favor to Brooklyn's Frankie Yale, gave a job to a fat face, thick-lipped 22-year-old from Brooklyn, Al Capone, who had hotfooted it out of New York where Irish gangsters wanted to give him something. It was Torrio who arranged for Yale to shoot poor, big hearted Colosimo in whose funeral judges and politicians, snapping their fingers at public criticism, marched in mourning for the loss of their pimp.
Meanwhile, crime was doing its usual tango in New York. Partners change, but the music is constant. Police lieutenant Charles Becker waved goodbye from the electric chair for murdering an informer of police payoffs. A police commissioner was fired. Reform administrations appeared in New York and Albany. Tammany's Big Tim Sullivan became insane, escaped his keeper, and was found dead under a train. Tom Foley, allied with Arnold Rothstein, overseer of bootlegging, drugs, and bookmaking, was annointed Tammany's overlord of organized crime. The Sicilians (Manhattan) battled with the Camorra (Brooklyn). Politicians ran the criminal justice system in the service of crime. All this during Prohibition, that deranged legislative act that would corrupt not persons but an entire society. In Chicago, the city administration made Johnny Torrio the controller of bootlegging, and controlled it was: between 1919 and 1934 there were 765 gangland murders. Capone's gunmen patrolled Cicero's polling places and seized that town and its election. A bullet turned out Arnold Rothstein's lights in 1928, but by the 1930's Chicago and New York gangsters had put together a national syndicate. The daunting stench of crime caused a United States senator to ask President Hoover to send the marines to Chicago. Did I omit the 1929 St Valentine's Day massacre, the usual journalistic pit stop, in which Capone had seven men machine-gunned against a Chicago garage wall? Two of his gunmen bragged of their work, were invited by Capone to a banquet, and there had their heads bashed by a baseball bat wielded by Capone. In reward, Capone was given a federal investigation, a multipage tax evasion and Volstead Act indictment, and a sentence of 11 years to reflect upon his syphillis as it progressed towards his ultimate reduction to an addlebrained 48-year-old corpse.
The next figure in Reppetto's diorama is Charlie Luciano who at 14 arrived from Sicily and settled in this reviewer's silk stocking neighborhood south of 14th Street and First Avenue. He enrolled as a Five Points member and later took the well-dressed Arnold Rothstein as his mentor. When Rothstein advised Luciano to stop dressing like a hoodlum and get a "genteel" tailor, Luciano replied, "What do you mean? My tailor is a Catholic". Though Luciano was secretly mocked by many for his reply, he died a natural death in 1962, a leader in international crime, while Rothstein, having lesser intuitive instincts, walked into a death trap in 1928, proving that clothes do not always make the man.
In the Twenties, an honest to God, so to speak, Sicilian capo, Salvatore Maranzano, arrived. He became the leader of younger Sicilians, among them Joe Bonanno, Tommy Luchese, Carlo Gambino, and Joe Profacio. Joe Masseria, the bloody boss of bosses in 1931, went on an April day to lunch with Luciano at a favorite Italian restaurant of Masseria. Luciano, apparently with the script of the Godfather in hand, excused himself and went to the men's room. Enter Joe Adonis, Bugsey Siegel, Vito Genovese and Albert Anastasio. Exit Masseria with five bullets in him that he did not have when he sat down to eat. Enter from stage right Maranzano, the new boss of bosses. Maranzano soon decides to kill Luciano. Enter from stage left and into Maranzano's office men claiming to be "federal agents", but who in fact were Jewish gunmen hired by Meyer Lansky. With considerable labor they shoot and stab Maranzano to death. Luciano, having long ago changed his tailor, convenes a meeting of gang leaders and declares the end of the boss of bosses style of governance. New York is amicably divided, like a pizza pie, among the leaders. Tammany's Tom Foley is succeeded by district leader Jimmy Hines, and Adonis represents Brooklyn politics. In 1932, Luciano and Frank Costello are powerful influences at the Democratic convention. Adonis supports LaGuardia for mayor. By the mid-Thirties, there is an alliance of interstate crime, with Italian gangs controlling organized crime locations. Indeed, such is the opportunity offered by this country to all who would but work for it, that Frank Costello, with an IQ of 97, would name New York's mayor in 1945.
As racketeering seeped through New York's labor unions, the clothing, trucking, and other industries, Tammany leader Jimmy Hines, by controlling judges and prosecutors like prostitutes, protects Dutch Schultz and Luciano. Joe Adonis in Brooklyn had similar power over the Kings County District Attorney. No one foresaw in 1935 that a New York County grand jury would on its own investigate industrial racketeering, fending off the countervailing help of what must have been the anxiety stricken district attorney. Governor Lehman appoints, as special prosecutor, 33-year old , 5 foot 6 Thomas Dewey who promptly suits up to pursue Luciano. If you were Luciano, Dutch Schultz's partner, and you knew Schultz had decided to kill Dewey, would you kill Schultz? What did Meyer Lansky advise Luciano to do? Read Reppetto's book. Flying high from the beginning in narrative skill, Reppetto revs it up at this point and maintains that altitude to the end. How did Dewey get Luciano? Did Dewey as District Attorney fire 61 of the 64 assistant district attorneys? What happened to Tammany leader Hines? Who succeeded Hines? Would you cry if it was Frank Costello? Start crying.
American Mafia is not only a body count of the corrupt. Reppetto rewards the reader with surprising facts concerning the FBI's origin, J Edgar Hoover's history of slouching away from organized crime, the infiltration of the movie industry by the mob, the criminal corruption in the political machine that produced President Truman and, for contrast, the striking figure of Henry Morgenthau, Jr, using among other things, Treasury to fight crime. Reppetto offers an example of political arithmetic. If Costello controlled New York County (+1), and Adonis controlled Kings County (+1), what did that add up to in controlling Bronx boss Ed Flynn who had to answer to Governor Lehman and President Roosevelt should New York County and Kings County fall out of their baskets in configuring the Democrat control of New York State? If your answer is 2, leave the room and while out there reflect on the fact that, according to Reppetto, when Flynn was Bronx County sheriff Dutch Schultz was issued a deputy sheriff's badge.
Putting aside Reppetto's sound rejection of the Kefauver Committee's conclusion that this country's crime syndicate was controlled by the Italian Mafia, we turn to Coney Island and an open hotel window for a view of all that is contained in Reppetto's study of 50 years in the rise of American, home-grown, organized crime.
Sidney Hillman, political intimate of President Roosevelt, was the powerful head of a clothing workers union. He used the murderous Lepke Buchalter to repel union rivals. In 1939, Abe Reles was accused of murder and offered the corruptible Kings County District Attorney, William O'Dwyer, proof of 85 murders. In consequence, eight were executed and 50 imprisoned. Reles implicated Anastasia and Buchalter, thus fingering Hillman. Reles was kept in room 623 of the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island guarded by 18 police officers who worked out of O'Dwyer's office. The scene suggests Dracula in charge of a blood bank. Notwithstanding that five police officers were on guard, Reles's body managed to leave room 623 at night at an angle that suggested that he had been thrown through its window without the alerting of the five policemen. In dubious sorrow, the mob recalled Reles as "the canary who could sing but not fly". From O'Dwyer's point of view, when Reles went out the window he took with him the case against Anastasia and, in effect, the entire Brooklyn political organization. At the Kefauver hearings, O'Dwyer, who with the aid of President Truman had fled the mayoralty for Mexico, testified under a grant of immunity, appearing to many, writes Reppetto, "like nothing more than a gangster's stooge".
As we leave the Half Moon Hotel, consider the play of chance in our having Robert Morgenthau as our District Attorney. When he graduated from law school, he became an assistant of Robert Patterson, former secretary of the army, at Patterson's law firm. As Patterson and Morgenthau were heading for LaGuardia Airport on a business trip, Patterson saw that he had left important documents at the office. Deciding to emplane, he asked Morgenthau to return to the office for them and take a later flight. Patterson died that afternoon when his plane crashed. When one considers the powers ever quick to corrupt the office of District Attorney one might ponder whether, in the absence of Robert Morgenthau, they might well have done so. Think whether you would sleep well if today we had William O'Dwyer in the place of Robert Morgenthau.
