Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (22 page)

With revelations from the Kefauver hearings still fresh in voters’ minds, Impellitteri centered his campaign against Tammany Hall, the Mafia, and Costello, the very group that had raised him up from law clerk to mayor. He highlighted every stump speech by declaring, “If Pecora is elected, Frank Costello will be your mayor.” With the help of a slick public-relations campaign, Impellitteri won a startling upset, becoming the only independent party candidate ever elected mayor of New York. Soon after taking office, Impellitteri was spotted dining in a restaurant with Lucchese and a former federal prosecutor. Questioned by reporters, the mayor innocently claimed he barely knew Lucchese and that the gangster had been introduced to him as a clothing manufacturer. A floundering blunderer, Impellitteri was turned out of office in 1954, after one abbreviated term. In that mayoralty contest, the tables were turned on him: he was accused by reformers of being in league with organized crime. Impelliteri’s political and Mafia friends did not forsake him. They eased him into a comfortable judgeship. With Impy’s defeat, however, the Mob’s invaluable pipeline to City Hall was essentially severed.

Heroin and Apalachin

H
is brief prison sentences and the Kefauver Committee hearings behind him, Frank Costello in the spring of 1957 was confidently going about his usual business. Shunning bodyguards and bullet-proof limousines, the sixty-six-year-old godfather met with his Mafia associates in restaurants and traveled about Manhattan in taxis like any ordinary businessman.

On May 2, 1957, Costello had a late dinner date with Anthony “Tony Bender” Strollo, one of his capos, at Chandler’s, a theater-district restaurant. As usual he took a taxi back to his luxury Central Park West apartment. As Costello walked toward the building’s elevator, a man wearing a dark fedora brushed past a doorman and shouted, “This is for you, Frank.” Turning, Costello heard what sounded like a “firecracker,” as a bullet grazed the right side of his forehead, knocking him to the ground. The gunman fled in a waiting black Cadillac.

Wounded slightly, his head bandaged in a hospital emergency room, a dour Costello provided no information to the police about his being shot at almost point-blank range. “I didn’t see nothing,” he told detectives. A search of his pockets produced an interesting item: a slip of paper with the notation “Gross casino win as of 4-27-57—$651,284.” That figure, detectives later discovered,
matched the precise “house take” or gross winnings that day at Las Vegas’s new Tropicana casino, in which Costello was a major secret partner.

Although Costello professed ignorance as to why anyone would want to kill him, detectives had a strong theory that Vito Genovese had the most likely motive to place a contract on the Prime Minister. Released from the hospital, Costello informed the police that he had no fear for his life and would continue his normal rounds without a single bodyguard. The police brass, however, assigned two detectives to keep an eye on the wounded boss. When the detectives showed up in the vestibule outside of his apartment, the urbane Costello insisted that they come in for breakfast with him and his wife. One of the investigators was an Italian-American and he told fellow detective Ralph Salerno that the unruffled Costello bantered with him. “What’s an Italian boy like you doing with all these Irish cops?” Costello asked. “They pay you peanuts. Come along with us. We pay bananas and they come in big bunches.”

On the first day of their assignment, the plainclothesmen followed Costello’s taxi to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in an unmarked car. He went there almost daily for a manicure, a hair trim, and a massage, and for conferences in the hotel’s bar and restaurant. Irritated by the prospect of being shadowed constantly, Costello proposed a compromise. “Let’s be gentlemen,” he said to the detectives. “I’m going to see my girlfriend and I don’t want you guys behind me.” Advising the detectives that he could easily slip $100 to a cabbie to shake them, making them look bad, he promised to return to the Waldorf in about two and a half hours, and they could then resume their watch over him. For the next several days, until the police canceled their protection, the “gentlemen’s agreement” existed between the detectives and Costello whenever he had an assignation.

Manhattan DA Frank Hogan was not so obliging as the police. He subpoenaed Costello before a grand jury, demanding answers about the shooting and $651,284 in casino winnings. This time citing his Fifth Amendment rights, Costello refused to talk about the attempt on his life and the slip of paper found in his pocket. As a result, before anyone was arrested for creasing his brow with a bullet, it was the victim Costello who served sixty days in the “workhouse,” the municipal jail, for contempt of court.

Costello might have been reluctant to cooperate, but the doorman of his building, Norval Keith, picked out a suspect from the rogue’s gallery files. He identified Vincent “Chin” Gigante, a chauffeur and muscleman for Vito Genovese, and
holder of an arrest record for bookmaking, auto theft, and other petty crimes. A former light heavyweight prize fighter, the twenty-nine-year-old Gigante vanished after the shooting for three months before voluntarily surrendering. At Gigante’s trial in 1958 for attempted murder, Frank Costello was a reluctant prosecution witness. Under oath, Costello admitted having been a bootlegger, a bookie, a slot machine operator, and the owner of a gambling club in New Orleans. But, he added, he was now retired.

Smiling during most of his testimony, Costello grew serious when for the first time he gave his version of the attack that nearly cost him his life. “I walked through the front door into the foyer. I heard a shot; it sounded like a firecracker to me at the time. I paid little attention to it for the moment. Then I felt something wet on the side of my face. It was blood and I realized I was shot.”

Under cross-examination, Costello complied with the oath of
omertà.
He testified that he had not seen the gunman even though he had briefly faced him, did not know Gigante, and knew of no reason why Gigante would want to shoot him. As Costello walked from the well of the courtroom, newspaper reporters heard Gigante whisper, “Thanks a lot, Frank.”

Even though the doorman stuck to his story that Gigante was the assailant, after six hours of deliberations the jury brought in a verdict of not guilty. The jury foreman told reporters that the doorman’s identification was questionable, and that the entire case against Gigante was weak.

His close call changed Costello’s
belief
in his invulnerability. Vito Genovese, he knew, was trying to settle an old score. “He went around without bodyguards because he never suspected that Genovese or anyone else would try to kill him,” Salerno said. “Ten years had gone by since Genovese had come back from Italy and Costello thought everything was okay.” Soon after the bullet nicked Costello’s skull, Salerno and other detectives learned that he had assured Genovese that he was taking early retirement. “That shot from Gigante was just as effective as if it had killed him,” Salerno added.

True to his word, Costello relinquished all of his Mob holdings to the new boss, Don Vito Genovese. For the rest of his days, Costello lived peacefully in Manhattan, rarely going out at night, and tending to the garden at his country home in Sands Point, Long Island. His few public appearances were at flower shows to display his own prized entries. His continual notoriety contributed to the revocation of his citizenship in 1961, because he had lied about his occupation and criminal record at his naturalization hearing in 1925. In 1973
Costello, former Prime Minister of the underworld, died of a heart attack, almost a forgotten figure. He was eighty-two.

Although Costello surrendered unconditionally to Genovese in 1957, his ally Albert Anastasia was infuriated by the assault on a fellow godfather with whom he had sponsored mutually profitable deals. Six years earlier, Anastasia, “the Executioner,” remorselessly eradicated Vincent Mangano and took over his family without first seeking approval from a majority of the Commission members. Now, he asked the Commission to allow him to wage war against Vito Genovese for taking over a family without permission, just as he had done. Joe Bonanno, the secure leader of his own family, took congratulations for preventing a ruinous battle between the Genovese and Anastasia factions by bringing the two rival killers together at “a select dinner,” where they kissed each other on the cheek and presumably made peace. Recounting his intervention, Bonanno demeaned Anastasia and Genovese as “impetuous” ruffians, while heaping praise upon himself as “debonair,” “articulate,” and “prepossessing.” Commission rules might bar a
capo di tutti capi
, but Bonanno immodestly considered himself first among equals: a
capo consigliere
, chief counselor, to whom other bosses looked for diplomatic guidance on thorny issues. He pompously christened the results of his mediation on the Commission between Anastasia and Genovese as the “Pax Bonanno.”

Five months after resolving the Anastasia-Genovese dispute, in October 1957, Don Peppino Bonanno flew to Italy on a mission that would have momentous consequences for the Mafia and for the United States. He was accompanied by ranking members of his borgata and business associates from New York. Bonanno and his party were greeted like royalty by government officials in Italy and Sicily. Red carpets were actually rolled out for the group at airport ramps. In Rome, a minister of the ruling Christian Democratic Party—strongly and openly supported in Sicily by the Mafia—was on hand to welcome the visitors.

Writing almost thirty years later, Bonanno, in his self-serving autobiography, described his first trip back to Sicily as a nostalgic sightseeing journey to his native land, an opportunity to become reacquainted with relatives and boyhood friends, and to visit his parents’ graves in Castellammare del Golfo. There is a casual reference in his book to conversations in Palermo with some men of honor, without further amplification.

The primary reason for his trip to Sicily was omitted in Bonanno’s book. He
was heading an American Mob delegation negotiating a pact with the Sicilian Mafia for the importing of huge quantities of heroin to the United States.

The Grand Hotel et des Palmes, an upscale but fading belle époque relic in the 1950s, was a favorite meeting spot for Sicilian
cosca
nabobs and their retainers. When in Palermo, Charlie Lucky Luciano, the exiled American don, made the hotel his second home; his favorite conference nook always was reserved for him in the bar-lounge.

Unbeknownst to Italian and American law-enforcement agencies, more than thirty Sicilian and American Mafia leaders assembled at the hotel for a fateful parley from October 10 through October 14, 1957. Each day they met in the Sala Wagner, an ornate suite named after Richard Wagner, the nineteenth-century German composer, who had orchestrated works while staying at the hotel. With a Renoir portrait of Wagner staring at them from the wall, the Sicilians and Americans used the room to map out details for an explosive expansion of the heroin trade in America.

Illustrating how little American investigators knew about the Mafia at mid-century, the major U.S. law-enforcement agencies remained unaware of the meeting and its significance for twenty-five years. These agencies and their Italian counterparts finally learned about the Grand Hotel sit-down in the 1980s, when it was revealed by Sicilian and American Mafia defectors.

Luciano had narcotics interests and vital Mob connections on both sides of the Atlantic, and he brought the two groups together. Shortly before the meeting, Luciano had even persuaded the main Sicilian Mafia chiefs to adopt one of his American innovations by establishing a Commission-like body to resolve their disputes. In Sicily it was called “the Cupola.”

Indicating the gravity of the deliberations, at Bonanno’s side in the sessions in Palermo were his underboss, John Bonventre, and his consigliere, Carmine Galante, who was also his principal drug trafficker and narcotics adviser. At the hotel conclave, the new Cupola leaders heard about the American priorities. Bonanno explained that the United States bosses were worried about potential danger from the recent passage by Congress of a tough narcotics-control law, the Boggs-Daniels Act of 1956, which imposed sentences of up to forty years for drug convictions. The Americans feared that mandatory penalties could induce mafiosi nailed on drug charges to save themselves by breaking the oath of
omertà
, becoming informers and possibly compromising and implicating
bosses and other hierarchs. Narcotics was far from the top moneymaker for the Americans, but drug arrests were a threat because the five New York families and their satellite associates imported and supplied more than 90 percent of the heroin in the nation.

Since the formation of the Commission in 1931, the Sicilian Mafia clans had not operated in America. The centerpiece of the Grand Hotel et des Palmes plan was the Americans permitting the Sicilians to take over the risky task of distributing heroin in the states. With ample supplies of heroin from refineries run by Corsicans in France, and later by themselves in Italy, the Sicilian bosses would obtain a captive market in America.