Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (21 page)

As Kefauver’s investigators searched for evidence of Mob activities, a vital power shift occurred right under their noses. In 1951 Vincent Mangano, an original Commission member, disappeared; he had headed his Brooklyn-based borgata for twenty years. His body was never found, but there was no doubt among other Commission members that Mangano had been eliminated by his nefarious underboss, a founding partner in Murder Inc., Albert Anastasia.

Anastasia boldly appeared at a Commission meeting to announce his presence as the new godfather of Mangano’s family. The other dons considered Anastasia a hothead, but accepted the fait accompli and, in effect, violated a cardinal Commission rule by overlooking an unsanctioned slaying of one of their own elite untouchables. Without explicitly admitting that he had killed Mangano, Anastasia relied on a flimsy Mafia excuse: he indicated that he had struck first in self-defense because Mangano resented him and was plotting his assassination. Even Joe Bonanno, who had been close to Mangano for twenty years, exonerated Anastasia, declaring that he wished to avoid a war between families. Although Anastasia came from the Italian mainland, Bonanno reasoned that since he admired ancient Sicilian traditions, he deserved a boss’s crown and should be honored and distinguished as “Don Umberto.”

Celebrating his new rank, Anastasia built a mansion in Fort Lee, New Jersey, near the George Washington Bridge. Anastasia, “the Executioner,” was
vigilant about his own safety. He surrounded himself with bodyguards, and at his new home erected seven-foot-high barbed-wire fences and unleashed ferocious Doberman pinschers to patrol the grounds.

Anastasia’s malevolence as “the Executioner” extended beyond the Mafia itself. In February 1952, Willie “the Actor” Sutton, an elusive bank robber and prison escape artist, was captured in Brooklyn. A reward for the arrest was given to twenty-one-year-old ex-Coast Guardsman Arnold Schuster, who trailed Sutton and alerted the police after spotting the bank thief in the subway. Watching Schuster being interviewed on television, an incensed Anastasia reportedly blurted out, “I can’t stand squealers. Hit him.” Joe Valachi later disclosed that the Mafia grapevine resonated with news that Schuster was gunned down near his Brooklyn home by Anastasia’s hirelings.

Another significant Mafia development overlooked by the Kefauver inquiry and law enforcement was the changing of the guard in the borgata founded by Gaetano Gagliano in the early 1930s. Fatally ill from a heart aliment, Gagliano relinquished control to Gaetano Tommy “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese, his longtime number-two powerhouse. The borgata became known as the Lucchese family.

Born in Palermo in 1900, at age eleven Lucchese emigrated with his parents to the overcrowded tenements of East Harlem. A disobedient teenager and a petty thief, Lucchese’s juvenile escapades dishonored his parents, and when he was sixteen his father threw him out of their apartment. He briefly worked in a machine shop—the only legitimate job he ever held—where his right index finger was mangled in an accident. The injury soured him on a workman’s life, and he launched a full-time career in crime. A policeman who fingerprinted Lucchese, arrested for car theft when he was twenty-one, jokingly bestowed on him the alias “Three-Finger Brown.” (The officer was a fan of the Chicago Cubs pitcher Mordechai “Three-Finger” Brown.) The nickname stuck.

During Prohibition, Lucchese enlisted in the Masseria gang and formed partnerships with Lucky Luciano. A Luciano confidant, his duplicity set up the murder of Salvatore Maranzano, enabling Luciano to create the five families and the Commission in 1931. Luciano rewarded him by landing him the number-two position in Tommy Gagliano’s new family, and Lucchese’s underworld business acumen enriched Gagliano and himself.

Thin, fidgety, and hyperactive, Lucchese over two decades became a Mafia
trailblazer, inventing money-making schemes and refining conventional Mob rackets. Using muscle and brain power, he acquired control of New York’s kosher-chicken cartel; a protection shakedown that masqueraded as a window-cleaning company; garment-industry trucking companies; and a narcotics-trafficking ring.

Lucchese’s masterstroke was replacing Lepke Buchalter as the garment industry’s most feared Shylock and introducing a new loan-sharking gimmick. A perennial headache for clothing manufacturers was raising capital to stay in business while awaiting sales receipts for their new lines of seasonal coats, suits, and dresses. Unable to get legitimate loans, the owners’ last resort was Lucchese. He supplied cash but only on terms known as a “knockdown loan.” This meant that the borrower paid usurious interest of five points (5 percent) weekly for at least twenty weeks before the principal could be whittled down. Thus, for a $10,000 loan, the borrower paid $500 a week or $10,000 over twenty weeks. At the end of the twenty-week period, the manufacturer still owed the mobster the complete principal. Under threat of physical harm, the victim had to continue paying $500 a week indefinitely until the full original sum of $10,000 was paid separately. At a minimum, Lucchese doubled the profit on each illegal loan. The scheme is said to have generated more than $5 million a year even during the darkest days of the Depression.

As a cover and for income-tax purposes, Lucchese kept an office in the Garment Center and listed his occupation as “dress manufacturer.” He did own or had publicly registered interests in more than a dozen dress factories in New York and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The garment-industry unions, obviously aware of his Mafia importance, made no attempt to unionize his sweatshops.

Boss of more than one hundred Men of Honor, Lucchese was sufficiently wealthy and confident to give his capos and soldiers wide latitude in their own numbers, gambling, and hijacking operations. Under his leadership, a sphere of influence that became increasingly important was the rough-and-tumble business of professional boxing.

Since the early days of Prohibition, Irish, Jewish, and Italian gangsters were deeply involved in managing fighters and promoting matches. Owney Madden, Dutch Schultz, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and other racketeers had all been secret owners of popular boxers and champions. It was a violent sport-similar to their own risky occupations—that mafiosi and other gangsters understood and identified with. Authentic fans, they enjoyed the ambiance and macho electricity of arenas and training gyms. Just as owning nightclubs gave
mobsters a demimonde status, there was a similar underworld prestige in possessing and controlling champions and contenders.

Many bouts were actually on the level, but others were predetermined, and there was almost good-natured internal competition among mafiosi to fix fights and pull off betting coups. In the 1940s, a Lucchese hit man began a gradual takeover that made his borgata dominant in the fight game and squeezed out the other families. The soldier who acted in Lucchese’s behalf was best known as Frankie Carbo, although his real given names were Paul John. Reared in the Bronx, starting at age eighteen Carbo chalked up a lengthy police record for homicides and assaults. Arrested on four murder charges and suspected in the assassination of Bugsy Siegel, Carbo was convicted of only one killing, serving five years for manslaughter in the 1920s.

After an acquittal in 1942 for a slaying involving an assignment from Murder Inc., Carbo turned most of his attention to boxing. By that time his monikers included “Frank Tucker” and “Mr. Fury,” but his alias in arranging rigged fights was “Mr. Gray.” A keen student of boxing, Carbo actively managed several fighters. His main influence was exerted through violence and threats against managers, promoters, and trainers. Those who balked at Carbo’s suggestions were visited by lead-pipe-carrying sluggers. His control of fighters and managers forced promoters to do Carbo’s bidding if they wanted to stage top-rated bouts and remain healthy.

From the 1940s until the early 1960s, Carbo was the undisputed Mob linchpin and underworld commissioner of the boxing game. It was “Mr. Gray” who determined the contestants in many lightweight, middleweight, welterweight, and heavyweight division championship titles. He often had a hand in deciding the results. Carbo cashed in by getting a thick cut of fighters’ purses and a share of the promoters’ profits, and by always placing the right bets.

Carbo’s boss, Tommy Lucchese, impressed his neighbors in the upscale Long Island town of Lido Beach with his knowledge of boxing and urged them to wager on big fights; they said he always gave them tips on the winners.

Long after his retirement, Jake LaMotta admitted that Carbo ordered him to take a dive in a 1947 bout with Billy Fox. LaMotta dumped the fight and, in return, Carbo gave him a crack at legitimately winning the middleweight championship from Marcel Cerdan two years later.

“When the man known as ‘Mr. Carbo’ wanted to see somebody it was a command performance,” “Sugar Ray” Robinson, a middleweight and welterweight champion of the 1940s and ‘50s, said. One of the stellar boxers of his
era, Robinson wrote in a biography coauthored by Dave Anderson that he rejected Carbo’s order to fix a series of fights with LaMotta. Robinson’s popularity and drawing-power apparently allowed him to politely defy Carbo and survive unharmed.

Nat Fleischer, the editor and publisher of the boxing industry’s bible,
Ring Magazine
, at a congressional hearing in 1960 tersely summed up the terror exerted by Carbo. “Everybody was scared of him,” Fleischer said of the pudgy gangster with owlish horned-rimmed glasses.

The mobster’s reign was finally shattered by law-enforcement investigations begun in the late 1950s. The Manhattan DA’s office obtained an indictment, accusing him of “illegal matchmaking.” The prosecutor in charge of the case, Alfred J. Scotti, labeled Carbo “the most powerful figure in boxing.” In Los Angeles in the early 1960s, Carbo was convicted on federal charges of extortion and threatening managers and promoters. The sentence was twenty-five years in prison. Before his imprisonment, Carbo’s final accomplishment for Lucchese was gaining control of Sonny Liston and a huge slice of the million-dollar purses earned by him as the heavyweight champion from 1962 to 1964. Liston was KO’d by Muhammad Ali, the first heavyweight champ in three decades believed to be totally free of gangster influence.

Carbo’s misfortunes barely affected Lucchese’s illicit income in New York and elsewhere. Outside his home territory, he forged narcotics trafficking and other deals, principally with Santo Trafficante Jr., the boss of the Tampa borgata. Lucchese had been close to Trafficante’s father in the 1940s, and he had helped train the son. The younger Trafficante met frequently in New York with Lucchese, and on one jaunt he brought along his lawyer, Frank Ragano, and Ragano’s future wife, Nancy Young.

The two Mafia emperors treated each other regally on visits, sparing no expense. One night Lucchese invited Trafficante and his other Florida guests to an expensive restaurant, Mercurio’s, near Rockefeller Center. The Mob bosses spent most of the dinner talking with each other in Sicilian until Lucchese suddenly turned to Nancy Young, a vivacious blond, addressing her in English. Upon learning in the conversation that the young woman did not own a fur coat, Lucchese insisted upon making her a gift of one. Ragano was impressed by the generosity but, reluctant to become indebted to Lucchese, tried to decline. Trafficante frowned and whispered to the lawyer that he should accept, warning him that he was violating a Mafia rule by crossing a godfather. “Don’t embarrass me,” Trafficante ordered. “You’ll insult him by refusing.” The next
day, Lucchese escorted the wide-eyed Nancy through a fur salon filled with racks of hundreds of fur coats, stoles, jackets, and pelts. With Lucchese’s guidance she chose a full-length black mink that Ragano estimated cost at least $5,000, a year’s salary for a factory worker at that time.

Ragano characterized Lucchese as Trafficante’s most trusted ally in the New York families. The Florida boss particularly admired Lucchese’s liaisons with corrupt government officials. “This guy has connections everywhere in New York,” Trafficante told Ragano with a touch of envy. “He’s got politicians and judges in his pocket.”

In the political sphere, Lucchese maintained a close alliance with Frank Costello and, like the Prime Minister, became a power broker in New York’s Democratic Party machine and in the appointments of corrupt judges, assistant district attorneys, and city officials. But unlike Costello, Lucchese’s interests remained hidden, never attracting public attention. Lucchese also cultivated Republican officials and extended his range to the radical wing of politics. He successfully lobbied Vito Marcantonio, the congressman representing his old East Harlem neighborhood, the only member of the House of Representatives repeatedly elected by the leftist American Labor Party, to nominate his son for appointment to West Point. (One of Meyer Lansky’s sons was also a West Pointer.) Lucchese’s suburban home was far removed from the railroad flats of East Harlem, but the Mob still swayed votes in the then heavily Italian section.

Tommy Lucchese’s discreet influence with legislators and politicos was further demonstrated when he was naturalized as a citizen in 1943 through a private bill approved by Congress. About the same time, several legislators persuaded the New York State Parole Board to grant Lucchese a “Certificate of Good Conduct,” expunging his arrests and convictions in the 1920s for auto theft and bookmaking.

In 1945, probably in a back-room deal with Frank Costello and Tammany Hall, Lucchese chose a minor clubhouse politician and fellow Sicilian-American, Vincent R. Impellitteri, as O’Dwyer’s running mate on the Democratic ticket. O’Dwyer was elected mayor, and Impellitteri, whose only job experience was as a law clerk to a Democratic judge, became City Council president, a mainly ceremonial office. When O’Dwyer resigned in 1950, Impellitteri (“Impy” in tabloid headlines) succeeded him as acting mayor. Tammany leaders, however, considered Impellitteri too incompetent, too inarticulate, and too lightweight even by their modest standards. They endorsed Judge Ferdinand Pecora in the 1951 election for mayor.

Impellitteri, who had grown accustomed to the pomp, power, and perks of City Hall, refused to drop out of the race, running as the sole candidate of a newly created “Experience Party.” The election put the Mafia in the enviable position of having a stake in both candidates, as Lucchese secretly supported Impy while Costello backed Pecora.