Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (24 page)

The brainstorm for the unscheduled 1957 meeting came from Vito Gen-ovese. Following Anastasia’s murder and Costello’s resignation, he decided that the rest of the country’s Mob families should be reassured that all was well and stable in New York. A national conference, Don Vito thought, was the best forum to introduce himself and Carlo Gambino as new bosses to the rest of the Cosa Nostra elite.

Another important emergency item on the agenda was setting policy on coping with the stricter new federal drug law—the Boggs-Daniels Act—and dealing with the Sicilian heroin importers. Before Sergeant Croswell broke up their session, the godfathers gave lip service to a total ban on drug deals by declaring that the penalty for made men involved in narcotics trafficking could be Mafia capital punishment. As time went by, the prohibition was selectively,
if ever, enforced because drug profits were immense. Some of the bosses, recalling Frank Costello’s frequent cautions about the dangers of deep involvement in narcotics, were ambivalent about how to resolve the question. Narcotics money was too tempting for avaricious dons and their henchmen to forsake. What they feared most was that the new law’s harsh prison penalties could induce soldiers facing certain conviction to save their skins by becoming informers. There was also the possibility that traffickers could themselves become addicted and undermine discipline and secrecy. And last, there was a public-relations issue. Most Mafia operations, especially gambling, were tacitly approved by an indifferent public, but widespread involvement in drugs could provoke public outrage and demands for more vigilant enforcement.

“They knew the new law would be trouble and it was an accurate prognosis,” said detective Ralph Salerno. “What the edict against narcotics really meant was that if you’re involved, don’t compromise any other made guys by being seen with them when you are making drug deals. That was the main message to the troops—work alone without endangering the family.”

The godfathers’ final act before the state police interruption was to “close the books,” put a temporary halt on adding new members, and leaders were advised to prune unqualified mafiosi from their lists. They knew that one of Anastasia’s cronies had been selling memberships in his borgata for as much as $40,000, thereby enrolling untested and undeserving people. The new membership ban, with only a few nepotistic exceptions for close relatives of leaders, lasted twenty years in many families.

Joe Bonanno was out of the country, returning from his trip to Italy, when Vito Genovese set up the second Apalachin conference. Bonanno had presided at the undisturbed national meeting the year before in Barbera’s home. In his memoirs Bonanno claimed that he opposed the 1957 rendezvous because it violated established protocol of a mass meeting every five years, and it was too risky to congregate one year later at the same site. Other bosses believed Bonanno was chagrined because he had not been consulted about the second meeting, and that his influential position in New York and in the country was being challenged by the upstart Genovese.

In his autobiography, Bonanno maintained that he was near Apalachin for private sit-downs but boycotted the big powwow at Barbera’s home. The state police, he insisted, mistakenly identified him because one of his gofers, who was stopped, was using Bonanno’s driver’s license. His explanation was contradicted in a confidential report on the police raid prepared for then New York
governor Averrill Harriman. The report specified that troopers found an embarrassed Bonanno thrashing through a corn field adjoining Barbera’s property and that he told them he was “visiting” a sick friend.

The 1957 attempted murder of Frank Costello, the slaying of Albert Anastasia, the Apalachin disaster—all in a six-month period—put the Mob squarely back in the public eye for the first time since the Kefauver hearings six years earlier. There was renewed pressure on law-enforcement officials for explanations about the mystifying sequence of events culminating in Apalachin. The obvious, disquieting questions were: Who summoned all these reputed gangsters to a mass meeting? What was its purpose? And how powerful is this group?

A federal grand jury indicted twenty-seven of the Apalachin participants and twenty were convicted of conspiracy to commit perjury and to obstruct justice. The verdicts were overturned unanimously by an appeals court on grounds of insufficient evidence of a conspiracy or of perjury. A principal reason cited in the judicial decision exposed the widespread naïveté that prevailed at the time in the criminal-justice system about the existence of the Commission and the Mafia’s methodology. Although noting the “bizarre nature” of the Apalachin gathering, the three-judge panel reasoned that “common experience” precluded the notion that a criminal plot would be hatched in such a large, seemingly nonsecretive assemblage. The judges may have ruled correctly about the lack of evidence in the case, but like most jurists at that time they were clearly clueless about the Mafia’s operations and its motive for the meeting. The only reason for the Apalachin deliberations was to plot and plan criminal activities.

Even after Apalachin, J. Edgar Hoover, the nation’s most prominent law-enforcement expert, was still publicly in denial about the existence of the Mafia. The FBI viceroy, however, was privately humiliated after Apalachin by the kudos given to his knowledgeable arch rival, Harry Anslinger, the Narcotics Bureau head. Overnight, Anslinger was recognized by the press as law enforcement’s best authority on organized crime. Hoover had to respond. Characteristically, without acknowledging previous misjudgments or mentioning the forbidden word “Mafia,” he ordered a crash catch-up program modeled on one of his public-relations successes, the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.” Every FBI bureau would identify and seek prosecutions of the “Ten Top Hoodlums” in their jurisdictions. “Hoodlums” in Hoover’s terminology was a code name for mafiosi. Coming up with ten targets was simple for agents in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other big cities. But bureaus in states where the Cosa Nostra had never ventured—Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Iowa, Utah,
Nebraska, and many others—complied with Hoover’s command by apprehending petty criminals and juvenile delinquents. The program nabbed dozens of small-time bookies and gamblers but the overall impact of the arrests was meaningless.

Hoover’s other step was clandestine and more effective in gleaning intelligence information—but it was illegal. He issued confidential instructions for “black-bag jobs,” FBI argot for planting bugs without court authorization, in suspected mafiosi hangouts. In a directive to SACs, Special Agents in Charge, of regional offices, he told them to employ “unusual investigative techniques,” a euphemism for electronic surveillance.

It was a difficult assignment since most agents and bureau supervisors were almost totally ignorant of Mafia ways or where its leaders talked business. As in the top-hoodlum campaign, little intelligence was gained except for a lucky break in Chicago where aggressive agents bugged a room above a tailor shop used by Sam “Momo” Giancana, that city’s godfather. They picked up one conversation that conclusively demonstrated the importance of the Apalachin meeting and the humiliation caused by the police roundup. Agents heard Giancana on the telephone chastising Stefano Magaddino, the Buffalo boss, for helping to organize the meeting. The illicit eavesdropping could never be used as evidence in a court, but parts of it were leaked by FBI agents to the press seven years later.

“Well, I hope you’re satisfied,” a sarcastic Giancana complained to Magaddino. “Sixty-three of our top guys made by the cops.”

“I gotta admit you were right, Sam,” replied Magaddino. “It never would have happened in your place.”

“You’re fucking right it wouldn’t,” Giancana exploded. “This is the safest territory in the world for a big meet. We could have scattered you guys in my motels. We could’ve given you guys different cars from my auto agencies, and then we could have had the meet in one of my big restaurants. The cops don’t bother us here.”

Hoover had one more secret ace up his sleeve. Under the direction of a top aide, William C. Sullivan, a monograph or special report was researched for him on whether or not the Mafia actually existed. Completed in July 1958, it declared: “The truth of the matter is, the available evidence makes it impossible to deny logically the existence of a criminal organization known as the Mafia, which for generations has plagued the law-abiding citizens of Sicily, Italy and the United States.”

Pulling no punches, the report found that many law-enforcement officials were “unable to comprehend the Mafia,” and “it is easy to rationalize and conclude there is no formal organization called the Mafia.” Finally, Sullivan’s analysis warned: “In this sense, it is the American counterpart of the old Sicilian-Italian Mafia. It exists not as a distinctly outlined, conventional organization, but as a criminal movement and a mode or way of life no less harmful to the United States.”

The monograph was essentially a historical account of the origins and nature of the Mafia in Sicily and its transplantation to America. Only a handful of the director’s most trusted lieutenants were permitted to read the report, which totally discredited his infallibility on the contentious subject. After receiving it, Hoover buried it in an FBI vault as a classified document.

Regardless of Hoover’s obstinacy, the fallout from Apalachin reached Congress in 1957 in the form of a new committee with a jaw-breaking title: “The Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field.” Its chairman, Senator John L. McClellan, an Arkansas Democrat, was attached to the party’s southern, conservative, states’-rights, anti-integration wing; they were known as the Dixiecrats. Reared in a small town near Hot Springs, the crusty senator was not beholden to union and Mob-backed big-city Democratic machines. He also was a crafty negotiator for getting legislation that he wanted approved by Congress.

Noting that twenty-two of the identified Apalachin visitors were employed by unions or in labor-relations jobs, the committee convened a special hearing on the mobster conference. Except for stating their names and official legal occupations, the subpoenaed bosses and their assistants took refuge in the Fifth Amendment. Carlo Gambino listed himself as a labor consultant and counselor. One of his prized accounts was a $36,000-a-year fee for advice on union matters to the developers of the Levittowns on Long Island and in Pennsylvania. William J. Levitt, the giant company’s chief executive, denied that the payments for Gambino’s unspecified services were a “shakedown” to avoid labor disruptions, but Levitt executives were unable to provide background material to support Gambino’s dubious claim of being an expert in construction or union relations.

There was also little information forthcoming from Tommy Lucchese and Vito Genovese. All the senators learned from Lucchese was that he was “a dress contractor”; Genovese said his income derived from investments in trash-handling and package-delivery businesses. Genovese set an unofficial record by
invoking the Fifth Amendment more than 150 times. At one point in the hearings, a scowling McClellan, incensed by the parade of uncooperative gangster witnesses, many of them immigrants, lashed out with nationalistic fervor: “They do not belong to our land, and they ought to be sent somewhere else. In my book, they are human parasites of society and they violate every law of decency and humanity.”

Testimony before the committee about Mob intrigues in unions and evidence from a previous hearing about corruption in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters led to significant labor legislation: the passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959, a law regulating union elections and requiring the submission of annual union financial reports to the Department of Labor.

“The testimony we have heard,” McClellan summed up at the hearings, “can leave no doubt that there has been a concerted effort by members of the American criminal syndicate to achieve legitimacy through association and control of labor unions and business firms. The extent of the infiltration poses a serious threat to the very economy of our country.”

Apalachin and the Senate hearings were particularly embarrassing to Vito Genovese. His fellow bosses blamed him and his imperial ambitions for having the unprecedented meeting in the first place, and the hearings unveiled fissures in his personal life. To spotlight Genovese’s bulging wealth, the chief counsel for the McClellan Committee, young Robert F. Kennedy, presented evidence from a separation suit by Genovese’s wife. As part of a property settlement, Mrs. Genovese gave details of Don Vito’s illegal income from gambling, racetracks, nightclubs, union shakedowns, extortions, and other rackets. By her calculations he netted more than $40,000 a week and had secret caches in numerous safe-deposit boxes in America and Europe. Kennedy’s exposure of the separation settlement notified every mafiosi in the country that Anna Genovese had left the Mob boss. Genovese’s murderous temperament was feared in the Mafia, and his wife’s departure and financial revelations were inordinate insults to the godfather’s prestige. Don Vito, who had wed Anna after arranging her first husband’s slaying, had a soft spot for his “bride by murder” and never made a move to harm her.

Genovese’s marital problems were overshadowed by a small-time drug pusher in East Harlem named Nelson Cantellops. During the Apalachin uproar, the Puerto Rican Cantellops was serving time for a drug conviction. Seeking a deal for early prison release, he told federal narcotics investigators that he had worked directly for Vito in drug trafficking. The authorities said he passed
lie-detector tests and volunteered firsthand information that corroborated Genovese’s complicity in a heroin operation.

Mainly on Cantellops’s testimony, Genovese was convicted on narcotics charges in 1959 and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. “All I can say, Your Honor, is I am innocent” were Genovese’s only remarks at the sentencing. He may have been telling the truth about this specific narcotics charge. In a parallel to Lucky Luciano’s trial, the validity of the guilty verdict in Genovese’s case was later questioned by many experienced detectives and lawyers. They believed the government got a kingpin mobster for the wrong crime. Ralph Salerno emphasized in his book,
The Crime Confederation
, that the most incriminating witness against Genovese was the low-level courier Cantellops, who swore in court that he had personally met and talked with the boss of a Mafia family about details of the drug network. Salerno found this relationship totally contrary to traditional Mob practices. “To anyone who understands the protocol and insulation procedures of Cosa Nostra, this testimony is almost unbelievable,” he wrote.