Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (19 page)

Hoover’s reluctance to seriously challenge the Mafia stemmed from three main factors, according to former FBI agents and criminal-justice researchers. First was his distaste for long, frustrating investigations that more often than not would end with limited success. Second was his concern that mobsters had the money to corrupt agents and undermine the bureau’s impeccable reputation. And third, Hoover was aware that the Mob’s growing financial and political strength could buy off susceptible congressmen and senators who might trim his budget.

Armed with the FBI’s glowing public reputation and with his bureaucratic skills, Hoover had a free hand in choosing his investigative priorities. The only official who challenged his assertion that a dangerous Italian-American crime organization did not exist was rival law-enforcement expert Harry J. Anslinger, the director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. As head of the agency since its formation in 1930, Anslinger’s mission was to deter and uproot drug trafficking. Unlike Hoover, Anslinger’s investigative tactics were dynamically original, unorthodox, and far ahead of his time. He dispatched numerous agents masquerading as criminals to penetrate narcotics rings, promised immunity from prosecution to criminals who switched sides, and recruited paid informers. Justifying payments to squealers, Anslinger said that informing was a dangerous occupation and that several of his snitches were murdered by suspicious drug dealers. He also authorized harsh third-degree interrogation methods that were commonplace among police units in the 1930s and 1940s but were unconstitutional. Disregarding civil rights, in gathering information his agents battered uncooperative suspects, sometimes working them over with rubber hoses. And Anslinger resorted to illegal wiretaps without court approval to gather intelligence and arrest drug dealers. “The world belongs to the strong,” the dour, huskily built Anslinger said, justifying his methods to another government official. “It always has, it always will.”

Lacking Hoover’s bureaucratic clout and gift for political intrigue, Anslinger, in thirty-two years as head of the Narcotics Bureau, never got the
substantial government support and media attention that the FBI obtained. Hoover won the headline war as the government’s unrivaled crime fighter while Anslinger labored in relative obscurity. With a maximum of three hunderd agents, Anslinger’s agency was a third the size of the FBI, and its agents were paid far less than Hoover’s men. Nevertheless, Anslinger assembled a band of hard-boiled agents, including former cops, who were familiar with the culture and nuances of the drug trade.

When Anslinger organized his agency in 1930, he found that the illegal drug business was diversified with Jewish gangsters predominating, although Chinese tongs and Irish and Italian groups operated in many big cities. By the late 1930s, however, through undercover work and arrests, his agents discovered a major shift in the nation’s narcotics networks: all were virtually controlled by Italian-American gangs. “They seemed to have an extraordinary cohesion,” Anslinger later said of the Mafia gangs, in an interview with the writer Frederick Sondern Jr. “But none of us were aware that they were predominantly Sicilian or what that meant. It took us a while to find that out.”

Aware of the Mob’s rising strength, Anslinger hired Italian-American agents because they might better understand its mores and practices than other investigators. Anslinger’s strategy turned up a trove of intelligence about Mafia activities that went far beyond narcotics. He compiled files on some 800 mafiosi that he called “The Black Book.” Hoover, in a typical sign of contempt for other law-enforcement agencies, declined Anslinger’s offer of a copy of his invaluable records.

Anslinger’s operatives in the 1940s obtained enough intelligence information to work on narcotics cases involving the Gagliano, Bonanno, and Costello-Genovese borgatas in New York, and other major Mafia families, especially those headed by Santo Trafficante in Tampa and Carlos Marcello in Louisiana. The vigilant Anslinger kept his eagle eye on Lucky Luciano when he was deported, and assigned agents to bird-dog the exiled boss in Italy. “That dirty son-of-a-bitch Asslinger,” Luciano said, deliberately mangling the name when he was told that narcotics investigators suspected he might try to open new drug routes to America.

In late 1946, Anslinger discovered that Luciano was in Havana, apparently testing the waters to determine if he could resume control of his crime family from Cuba. Luciano summoned Costello, Genovese, other high ranking members of the family, and Meyer Lansky for a meeting in Havana. Anslinger got wind
of Lucky’s machinations and, based on his discovery, the American government pressured the Cubans to kick Luciano out of the country, effectively ruining his comeback plan.

Narcotics in the 1930s and ‘40s was not the scourge it was later to become in the United States. The narcotics bureau estimated that 95 percent of the drugs entering the United States immediately after World War II was smuggled by Mafia traffickers. Alarmed by its intelligence reports, the bureau in a March 1947 memorandum issued a clear warning to other federal agencies concerning the larger menace it had perceived after more than a decade of narcotics investigations.

“For many years,” the report declared, “there has been in existence in this country a criminal organization, well-defined at some times and places, and at other periods rather loosely set up. This is composed of persons of Sicilian birth or extraction, often related by blood and marriage, who are engaged in the types of criminal specialties in which a code of terror and reprisal is valuable. These people are sometimes referred to as the MAFIA.”

Anslinger and the narcotics bureau recognized the general outlines, if not the totality and magnitude of the Mafia’s framework. But the FBI and all other competing federal law-enforcement units ridiculed the intelligence analysis as unsubstantiated rumors and hypotheses by an agency seeking undeserved glory and praise. No attention was paid to Anslinger’s incisive findings.

At mid-century, almost two decades after their formation, the five New York families were prospering, with four of the original godfathers still in place, controlling huge criminal conglomerates. The borgatas run by Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, Vincent Mangano, and Gaetano “Tommy” Gagliano were secure and under no pressure from the law. These four men were powerful crime figures; yet their names and their organizations were invisible to the public and to most law-enforcement investigators. The only Mafia boss with a widely recognized name was Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano’s successor. Costello became a public figure because of his scandalous political influence in Tammany Hall and his gambling and slot machine interests. But the full extent of his domain as the boss of the nation’s largest organized-crime family was unknown, and the word Mafia was never publicly linked in government reports and the media to the name Frank Costello.

Overall, about two thousand made men, assisted by thousands of wannabes
and associates, operated in New York City and nearby suburbs. The five borgatas constituted almost half of the total five thousand mafiosi in the country’s twenty-four crime families. The combined strength of the New York families dwarfed the second-largest Mob group of roughly three hundred soldiers in Chicago.

A postwar bonus for the New York gangsters was the departure in 1945 of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who did not seek a fourth term after twelve years in City Hall. LaGuardia’s gadfly administration and scrupulously honest police brass had not disrupted any major racket except for Costello’s slots. The reform mayor, however, had at least driven gambling and other traditional Mafia money-making franchises underground, and had forced mafiosi and their helpers to worry about police raids.

Conditions changed radically in the new administration of former Brooklyn DA William O’Dwyer, the candidate of Tammany Hall and Frank Costello. Soon after Mayor O’Dwyer took office, the police department seemingly adopted a laissez-faire policy toward gambling, a supposedly nonviolent crime. The changeover was most visible in low- and middle-income neighborhoods. For years, bookmakers and numbers operators had conducted their businesses furtively, in back rooms of stores and pool rooms. Now, under the new administration, police pressure was relaxed. In sections like the Lower East Side, Harlem, Williamsburg, Brownsville, and the South Bronx, bookies and numbers runners worked freely on the streets, some using clipboards to openly record wagers. The relaxed crime-fighting atmosphere suggested that “the pad,” police talk for systemic corruption in local precincts and districts, was back.

Police laxity became so outrageously flagrant that the FBI took note. Beginning in LaGuardia’s administration, some precinct commanders failed to list all reports of unresolved thefts and robberies so as to burnish their crime-solving statistics. Inside the department, the practice of discarding crime complaints in waste cans became a common joke: “Assign the case to ‘Detective McCann.’” Under O’Dwyer’s police commissioners, the “Detective McCann” case load became so excessive that the FBI in 1949 refused to publish New York City crime statistics, citing them as unreliable and discredited.

All Mafia families continued to rely heavily on proven garden-variety rackets: sports gambling, numbers, loan-sharking, and hijackings. Each also developed separate criminal niches, sometimes jointly with another borgata. Costello’s gang dominated the Manhattan waterfront and the Fulton Fish Market,
and together with other families controlled trucking and other interests in the garment industry.

Vincent “Don Vincenzo” Mangano, the boss of a Brooklyn-based borgata, had a stranglehold on the Brooklyn docks and, with Costello’s organization, had begun to take over private garbage-carting companies in the city.

Another Brooklyn-based boss, Joe Profaci, had entered the country illegally with Vincent Mangano. They were boyhood friends and fellow refugees from Mussolini’s Mafia shackles in the 1920s in Sicily, where Profaci had served a year in prison for theft. In the New York region, Profaci used Mob money from bootlegging, prostitution, and the numbers and loan-sharking rackets to acquire twenty legitimate businesses. The gross take from his numbers or lottery action was a staggering $5 million a week, according to a confidential FBI analysis. Famous in the grocery industry as “the Olive Oil King,” he was the largest importer of olive oil and tomato paste in the country through the Mama-Mia Olive Oil Company. Anslinger’s investigators suspected it was used as a cover to smuggle narcotics. Despite convictions for violating the Food and Drug Act and for income-tax evasion, Profaci never served a day in an American jail, getting off leniently with fines or probation. He lived modestly in Brooklyn but owned a hunting lodge, a private airport, and a 328-acre estate in rural Hightstown, New Jersey.

The godfather in the Bronx was Tommy Gagliano, a low-profile, secretive figure, unknown outside of the Mafia’s select ranks. Gagliano’s longtime right arm and underboss, Tommy Three-Finger Brown Lucchese, was his front man in setting up a variety of cash cow garment industry and union rackets. Lucchese also oversaw the family’s narcotics trafficking interests and its protection kickbacks from garbage haulers and construction contractors in Long Island.

Joe “Don Peppino” Bonanno’s family equaled Costello’s in overall illicit wealth, with extensive sports gambling, loan-sharking, numbers, and narcotics deals. There were also Bonanno Mob-engineered monopolies providing restaurants with laundry services and supplying mozzarella cheese in the New York area. He remedied a problem stemming from his illegal entry into the country by briefly staying in Canada and returning legally to the United States through Detroit; that ploy cleared the way for his naturalization in 1945, ruling out potential deportation proceedings that plagued Luciano, Genovese, and other top-echelon mafiosi. For relaxation from his hectic activities in the city, Bonanno
retreated to a fourteen-room colonial-style house he built on a 280-acre estate and dairy farm in upstate New York.

Impressed by the organizational strength and wealth of the New York families, some Cosa Nostra leaders in the country sent young mafiosi there for training in the 1940s. A notable prodigy was Santo Trafficante Jr., son and heir of the Mafia boss in Tampa. Junior got special tutoring from Tommy Lucchese and other members of the Gagliano family. Later, after becoming Tampa’s Mafia boss, Trafficante told his lawyer, Frank Ragano, that he picked up invaluable lessons in New York about illegal business ventures, Mafia lifestyles, and a code of behavior concerning women.

From the New Yorkers, Trafficante learned that mafiosi were expected to maintain a higher regard for “the sanctity of their women” than the rest of male society. “Their rigid code prohibited an affair with the wife or girlfriend of another mobster under penalty of death,” Ragano noted. “And they were obligated to protect the wife or mistress of a fellow mobster if he was not around.” Trafficante explained to Ragano that the Mafia had no objection to married soldiers having affairs, but there was a caveat. “Santo had a mistress but conducted the affair with discretion to spare his wife and daughters embarrassment,” Ragano added. “That was expected of all Mafia members.”

By the late 1940s, the Prohibition era of bloodshed and rivalries between the New York families was a distant memory. Bonanno and Profaci further secured their relationship through the marriage of Bonanno’s son Salvatore “Bill” to Rosalie Profaci, Joe Profaci’s niece. Uniting two Mafia royal houses, the wedding was attended by all the aristocracy of La Cosa Nostra, with the singer Tony Bennett serenading three thousand guests. The opulent reception at New York’s Hotel Astor was the social event of the year for the American Mob and it became the model for the opening wedding scene in the movie
The Godfather.

Except for Frank Costello, who delighted in mixing with political and café society, the other godfathers shunned ostentatious lifestyles. Joe Bonanno, however, made one exception. He started a flashy trend among mobsters by wearing huge ruby, sapphire, jade, and onyx pinkie rings.