Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (23 page)

The American mobsters would benefit because there would be less danger of their soldiers being caught smuggling and distributing drugs, especially by Harry Anslinger’s narcotics investigators. Profits for the Americans would come from “franchise fees”—a share of the income—for allowing the Sicilians to sell large amounts of heroin to wholesale drug dealers on United States territory. Until the 1950s, heroin and cocaine use in America had largely been limited to a tiny segment of the population, mainly musicians, prostitutes, criminals, gamblers, and affluent thrill seekers. A sinister innovation in the Sicilian-American plan was the scheme to develop vast heroin sales and usage by reducing the price of the drug and pushing it in working-class black and white neighborhoods.

American and Sicilian mafiosi had long slipped into each other’s countries undetected by local law-enforcement units. The American police had no records or mug shots of the Sicilians, and the Italian authorities were equally ignorant of the American gangsters. By operating far from home, the Sicilian drug runners would be reasonably safe in America, and the Italian police would neither know nor care what the Sicilians were up to in a foreign land. Another cover for the new heroin channel was the fact that the American and Italian law-enforcement agencies went their separate ways, never sharing information.

To mark the heroin accord, most of the mafiosi concluded the international conference at a twelve-hour banquet in a closed-off seafood restaurant on the Palermo waterfront. Only one incident marred the prolonged celebration for the normally cool-tempered Bonanno. A waiter, apparently unaware of Bonanno’s prominence and his knowledge of the Sicilian dialect, mumbled an insult about Bonanno being a haughty, demanding American tourist. Overhearing the remark, Bonanno hurled a pitcher of ice water at him. The waiter suddenly realized his extraordinary mistake and pleaded for forgiveness.

The Cosa Nostra’s variegated crimes—its murders, loan-sharking, extortions, gambling, brutal beatings, prostitution, political fixes, police corruption, and union and industrial racketeering—created immeasurable costs and pain for America. None of these illicit activities, however, inflicted more lasting distress on American society and damaged its quality of life more than the Mafia’s large-scale introduction of heroin. In the decades following the Palermo agreement, the Sicilian Mafia and its American helpers inundated the United States with the drug. An estimated 50,000 Americans were addicts in the late 1950s. By the mid-1970’s, according to studies by government and private groups, at least 500,000 were hooked.

The Mob carved out a boundless market for itself and future ethnic crime groups that wanted a share of the gigantic profit from heroin, cocaine, and the drugs that followed. Violent ripple effects from narcotics trafficking, especially in New York and other big cities, were staggering. Crime rates skyrocketed as thousands of junkies turned to muggings and burglaries to support their addictions. Rival drug gangs staged gun battles on the streets, killing and wounding innocent victims. Large swathes of inner-city neighborhoods were ravaged, making life there almost unbearable for its beleaguered residents and merchants. And the credibility and reliability of police forces were undermined by massive bribes from drug dealers.

About the same time in 1957 that Luciano helped the American Mafia create the world’s largest heroin-exporting venture, he sat for an interview with the writer Claire Sterling for a magazine profile. When she raised the subject of narcotics, Charlie Lucky dismissed as nonsense rumors of his involvement in large-scale international smuggling. Instead, he complained about police surveillance and their ceaseless efforts to pin a drug charge on him. “They been watchin’ a long time; let ‘em watch,” he groused.

Luciano died in 1962, in exile in Naples, of a heart attack. He was sixty-five. Shortly after his death, American and Italian officials announced that he had been targeted for arrest as an alleged member of a ring that smuggled $150 million worth of heroin into the United States.

Two weeks after the Palermo conclave, on the bright Manhattan morning of October 25, 1957, Albert Anastasia eased himself into a barber’s chair at the Park Sheraton Hotel, near Central Park, for his daily shave and trim. Seated in the next chair was his nephew, Vincent Squillante, who took care of the family’s
private garbage-carting shakedown rackets. As they chatted, two men sauntered into Grasso’s Barber Shop and fired a fusillade of five shots into Anastasia’s head and chest. The professional hit men knew their grisly business. Anastasia toppled to the floor, killed instantly. The gunmen walked briskly into the hotel lobby and disappeared in the crowd. Shouting, “Let me out of here,” Squillante bolted unscathed from the shop. As so often happens in well-planned Mob executions, Anastasia’s bodyguard was conveniently absent when the assassins appeared. The bodyguard, Anthony Coppola, had driven Anastasia to the hotel but was inexplicably missing from his boss’s side when the shooting occurred.

There were several touches of ironic justice to the slaying of Anastasia, a killer who prided himself on his preoccupation with security. Dreaded mainly for his homicidal ingenuity as one of the founders of Murder Inc, he was caught completely off guard at the peak of his power. Crime historians also noted that he was murdered in the same hotel where Arnold Rothstein had lived and into which he staggered after being fatally shot on the sidewalk twenty-nine years earlier. Anastasia had the distinction of being the first Mob boss since the 1931 peace pact to have been rubbed out in old-fashioned gangland style in a public area; when he had eliminated his chief and rival, Vincent Mangano, Anastasia had performed the murder discreetly, and the body was never found.

The Mafia’s wise men quickly realized that the execution was sponsored by two leaders who had the most to gain from Anastasia’s death: Vito Genovese and Carlo Gambino. Despite Bonanno’s intervention, Genovese feared that Anastasia was gunning for him to avenge the attempt on Frank Costello’s life and for forcing his ally on the Commission into retirement. Gambino, although Anastasia’s consigliere, suspected that his erratic, seething boss had grown resentful of his wealth and influence in their borgata and intended to ensure his position by whacking him.

With a mutual interest in eliminating Anastasia, Gambino and Genovese put their heads together and found byzantine reasons to plot Anastasia’s extermination. Gambino, the former black marketeer, would be enthroned as the head of one of the nation’s largest Mob families and automatically become a member of the ruling Commission. Genovese, a boss for only four months, would solidify his position by acquiring Gambino as an ally. And there would be a third boss in the new alliance, Tommy “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese. Lucchese had become close to Gambino through his daughter Frances’s marriage
to Gambino’s son Tommy. The two in-laws and Genovese would form a young troika on the Commission, effective opposition to the two old-time, more conventional bosses, Joe Bonanno and Joe Profaci.

Of all the Mafia hits in New York, the shooting of Anastasia in a busy, mid-town location, before eyewitnesses, was one of the most audacious. The memorable murder was frequently reenacted in movies (most notably the Italian film
Mafioso
) and in fiction. The vivid image of a helpless victim swathed in white towels was stamped in the public memory.

The police’s hottest first lead and suspicion centered on Santo Trafficante Jr., the Tampa godfather, who was in town for sit-downs with Anastasia. Registered at a hotel under the name B. Hill, Trafficante had checked out just two hours before Anastasia’s final haircut and then disappeared for several weeks. Detectives learned that Anastasia was trying to get a share of the manna flowing from Havana, where Trafficante was a major Mob player with large interests in three casinos. One deal on the table was an offer from Trafficante to become partners with Anastasia in the casino concession for the Hilton Hotel being built in Havana. A minor sticking point was a demand by Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista for a yearly bribe of $1 million. It was unclear if the fiery New York don was trying to strong-arm his way into Havana or work out a peaceful compromise with Trafficante.

The theory implicating Trafficante fizzled out, even though he was untraceable for weeks. Eventually detectives concluded that Gambino and Genovese were the conspirators behind the murder and most likely had given the contract to a thug in Joe Profaci’s family, Joseph “Crazy Joey” Gallo. Shortly after the hit, Gallo proudly hinted to close friends that his crew was responsible. “You can call the five of us the barbershop quintet,” a police informer quoted the smirking Gallo.

These “intelligence” nuggets concerning “the three G’s”—Gambino, Genovese, and Gallo—could only be interred in the confidential dossiers of the police department’s Detective Bureau. They were tidbits adding to the fascinating folklore of gangland violence and intrigue but worthless as evidence that could stand up in a courtroom. Detectives in robot fashion went through the motions of seeking Anastasia’s killers, knowing in their hearts that Mob homicides were destined to be classified as unsolved. They rationalized the futility of working on Mafia hits by reciting a popular police maxim: “It’s only vermin killing other vermin.”

The hubbub over Anastasia’s murder was of little interest to the police in a rustic slice of New York called the Southern Tier, near the Pennsylvania border, 150 miles west of Manhattan. Three weeks after the slaying, on November 13, 1957, a state police sergeant, Edgar D. Croswell, was investigating a bad check complaint at the Parkway Motel in the region’s main town, Binghamton, when his interest was aroused by a young man booking three rooms, and informing the desk clerk that his father would pay for them. The young man was the son of Joseph Barbera Sr., a wealthy local resident and soft-drink and beer distributor, who Croswell knew had been a bootlegger with an arrest record in his younger days for murder and assaults.

That afternoon, Croswell and Trooper Vincent Vasisko drove out to Barbera’s home, a secluded hilltop English manor house nestled in a 130-acre estate in a hamlet called Apalachin (pronounced by the locals as Apple-aykin). Observing more than a dozen cars, many with out-of-state license plates, Croswell realized something was afoot and surveillance was warranted. His interest was further piqued when a local food supplier told him that Barbera had ordered 207 pounds of steak, 20 pounds of veal cutlets, and 15 pounds of cold cuts to be delivered that day.

Suspecting that a conspiratorial meeting at Barbera’
s
place was under way to plan the violation of liquor laws, Croswell asked for help from a local unit of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The next afternoon, November 14, Croswell and Vasisko, with two ATF agents, drove to Barbera’s house and spotted more than thirty large autos and limousines parked on the grounds. As the investigators backed out of the driveway to set up a barricade on the public road leading from the estate, about a dozen men scampered pell-mell from the house. “One of the guys looked up at the road and hollered, ‘It’s the staties,’ and they all started running into the fields and woods,” Vasisko said.

Croswell radioed for more troopers. Ultimately, the police picked up for questioning forty-six men leaving hurriedly in cars, and twelve others slogging through the woods and fields. Those struggling on foot on the raw, rainy day looked bedraggled and unfit for country hikes; they were middle-aged and elderly, dressed in pointy wing-tipped shoes and business suits. Most of the men offered the same explanation as to why they had gathered at the manor house in sleepy Apalachin: it was a coincidence that they all came for a mass sick call on Barbera, an ailing friend recovering from a cardiac problem.

The investigators knew the story was ridiculous. Quick identification checks turned up a star-studded cast of underworld figures from New York, New Jersey,
California, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, New England, and the Midwest. The New Yorkers taken for questioning to a state police barracks included Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Gambino’s brother-in-law, Paul Castellano, Joe Profaci, and Joe Bonanno.

An unknown number of Barbera’s guests slipped past the hastily formed police roadblocks, and several who were en route turned back after hearing radio reports about the roundup. Tommy Lucchese was the only borgata boss from New York who evaded the cordon; along with Sam Giancana, the Chicago godfather, he got to a road and hitchhiked out of the area.

All who were picked up carried wads of money, between $2,000 and $3,000 in cash, an extraordinary amount of pocket money. But without evidence of a crime and finding no unlicensed weapons, the police released everyone without photographing or fingerprinting them. The press immediately identified the organization that linked the men and their prominence. “Seize 62 Mafia Chieftains in Upstate Raid,” blared the front-page headline in the
New York Daily News.
(The actual number, according to police records, was fifty-eight.)

From electronic eavesdropping, from tips from informers, and from Joe Bonanno’s autobiographical admissions, the reasons for the Apalachin get-together were gradually pieced together. Since 1931, the Commission and Mafia leaders from other parts of the country had met every five years. The regular 1956 meeting had been held safely and comfortably at Barbera’s estate. Another refugee from Sicily’s Castellammare del Golfo, Barbera was the boss of a borgata that operated mainly in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, area and he gave assurances that the sparse, unsophisticated police detachments in Apalachin posed no threat to a mobster convention.