Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (25 page)

Vito Genovese’s imprisonment culminated the most tumultuous decade of leadership shifts in the Mafia since the five families had been organized. In one gang, Vincent Mangano and Albert Anastasia were murdered, leaving Carlo Gambino in charge. Frank Costello, the successor in his family to Lucky Luciano, retired after being wounded; and that borgata’s new godfather, Vito Genovese, was imprisoned. In a third gang, Tommy Lucchese had replaced Gaetano Gagliano after his death. The five families had endured the humiliation of the Apalachin mess, the scrutiny of the Kefauver and McClellan hearings, and three major family power shifts. Yet they remained as vibrant as ever.

But confrontations with unyielding, defiant mafiosi had whetted the fervor of Senator McClellan and his investigative committee’s counsel, Robert Kennedy. Their implacable commitment to dig deeper into the fabric of organized crime would alter the future of the Mafia.

Death of a President

“For a hundred years of health and to John Kennedy’s death.”

W
ith unrestrained elation, the two men dining in Tampa’s ritziest restaurant clinked their glasses of Scotch. They were celebrating the assassination only a few hours earlier of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It was the evening of November 22, 1963, and Santo Trafficante Jr., the Mafia boss of Tampa, and his lawyer and confidant, Frank Ragano, knocked back several more joyful toasts with loud introductory
salutes
, and with gusto enjoyed an expensive dinner and several bottles of wine at Tampa’s International Inn. “Isn’t that something, they killed the son-of-a-bitch,” Trafficante repeated several times during the meal. ‘The son-of-a-bitch is dead.”

Trafficante and Ragano’s merriment was vividly noticeable in the restaurant, but the two men were unconcerned about the reactions of the other subdued and mournful diners and the staff, who were stunned by the murder that day of a young, popular president. Among Mob leaders, Trafficante’s behavior was probably the most conspicuous public display that evening of the relief that swept through the Mafia after the death of Kennedy. ‘This is like lifting a load of stones off my shoulders,” Trafficante confided to Ragano. The mobster meant, and his lawyer clearly understood, that Kennedy’s elimination would
ease and perhaps abruptly end an unprecedented law-enforcement threat to himself and his Mafia cohorts throughout the country.

The genesis of the Mafia’s enmity for Kennedy stemmed from the 1960 presidential election and the Mob’s entanglement in it. Joseph Kennedy, father of the president and patriarch of the Kennedy clan, secretly sought financial and political aid from northern Mob bosses in both the Democratic primary campaign and in the general election. The elder Kennedy was a multimillionaire, a financial tycoon, the regulatory official chosen by Franklin D. Roosevelt to reform Wall Street after the 1929 crash, and a former ambassador to Great Britain. Despite those super-respectable credentials, Joe Kennedy maintained loose ties to organized crime that dated from Prohibition, when he engaged in bootlegging partnerships with Frank Costello. Joe Kennedy was never owned and was never a flunky for a Mob boss, but he knew how to reach out to mafiosi for clandestine help in business and political matters.

Long after the 1960 presidential election, investigators and Congressional committees would learn of claims by mobsters that in the spring of 1960, at Joe Kennedy’s urging, they pumped money into an early primary won by John Kennedy in West Virginia. Kennedy needed a smashing victory there against his main opponent, fellow Senator Hubert Humphrey, to prove that a Catholic could carry a heavily Protestant state. Even more important in the general election that year, the northern mafiosi, again reportedly solicited by Joe Kennedy, used their influence with big-city northern Democratic machines to produce votes for his son. Chicago’s Outfit members, led by their boss, Sam Giancana, boasted that they had helped Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley steal enough votes for Kennedy to squeak by in Illinois and provide the vital electoral votes to defeat Richard M. Nixon, the Republican candidate. It was the closest presidential election since 1916, and Mafia bosses were convinced they had a role in Kennedy’s razor-thin victory.

Frank Sinatra, the singer and actor, played a role in the Kennedy Mafia drama. He helped initiate a delicate love-sex triangle between Sam Giancana, President Kennedy, and Judith Campbell Exner, an alluring young woman who moved in the show-business circles of Hollywood and Las Vegas. Sinatra, a friend of Kennedy’s and of his brother-in-law, the actor Peter Lawford, was a longtime buddy of Giancana’s and was on friendly terms with other mobsters. In 1960, before Kennedy’s election, Sinatra introduced Ms. Campbell to Kennedy and Giancana and both men had sexual affairs with her while Kennedy was president.

Giancana, according to Ms. Exner, delighted in crediting organized crime for swinging the election to Kennedy. “Listen, honey,” she quoted the mobster in a kiss-and-tell book, “if it wasn’t for me your boyfriend wouldn’t even be in the White House.”

Because of their support, the Mob bosses expected a comfortable, relaxed relationship with the new administration. Instead, they got Robert F. Kennedy, President Kennedy’s younger brother, as his attorney
general
.

The thirty-five-year-old Robert Kennedy assumed the job of the nation’s top law-enforcement official in January 1961, unaware of his father’s election requests of the Mafia. On the contrary, his most incisive memories of mobsters arose from his encounters with arrogant gangsters when he was a counsel with Senator McClellan’s investigative committee. Two of Robert Kennedy’s immediate priorities were destroying the backbone of
organized
crime—the Mafia—and dissolving the Mob’s corrupt affiliations with labor unions.

A review of operations at the Justice Department and at the FBI left the new attorney general livid at the apathy he found. He was appalled to discover that America’s highest law-enforcement officials not only had no strategy for combating mobsters but, even more disturbing, refused to recognize the existence of powerful Italian-American gangs.

After the publicity uproar from the Apalachin raid in 1957, the Eisenhower administration’s Justice Department had created a unit of prosecutors to specialize in organized-crime investigations. The unit’s major effort in three years was obtaining convictions against some of the Apalachin participants for conspiracy to obstruct justice and commit perjury. The verdicts, however, were overturned and Kennedy found that the unit had drifted into a soporific state without a single major accomplishment. Undertaking a quick shakeup, he beefed up the department’s organized-crime section of prosecutors from seventeen to sixty, replacing most of the ineffective old hands with gung-ho recruits. Kennedy’s impatience with placid indifference spread quickly among the newcomers, especially one of his rebukes when career administrators cited legal hurdles in launching prosecutions of mobsters. “Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” he insisted. “Tell me what I can do.”

An energetic new prosecutor, G. Robert Blakey, encountered the widespread indifference in the department to tackling the Mafia. He was greeted by blanket denials from department veterans that organized crime was a severe problem.
“They told me that the Mob does not exist. It was just a loose association of gangs. They are not organized.”

One of Kennedy’s first moves to overcome the lethargy was the creation of a team to zero in on labor racketeering in the nation’s largest union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT). At Senator McClellan’s committee hearings, Kennedy had squared off with the union’s truculent president, James R. Hoffa, over allegations that the union was beset with corrupt organized-crime connections. Kennedy hired Walter Sheridan, an investigator from the McClellan Committee and an implacable antagonist of Jimmy Hoffa, to head the unit. Sheridan’s dedication was so intense that his staff pinned a hand-made valentine on his door with a photograph of a grinning Hoffa in the center and the inscription, “Always Thinking of You.” Sheridan’s investigators and lawyers, with the blessing of Kennedy, became known as “The Get Hoffa Squad.”

At the FBI, Hoover, after completing his gimmicky but ineffective “Top Hoodlum” program in the late 1950s, had again closed his mind to the Mob. Hoover’s investigative commitments were most evident in New York where a grand total of four agents were assigned full-time to keep an eye on the nation’s largest and most active mafiosi detachment of more than two thousand soldiers and thousands of wannabe associates. In contrast, Hoover, chronically fearful of the espionage threat of the Communist Party, assigned more than four hundred agents to maintain surveillance in the New York area of the party’s dwindling and aging members, most of whom had long ceased to be a political or a subversive threat.

The bureau’s intelligence records on organized crime in 1961 consisted mainly of newspaper clippings, and Robert Kennedy eagerly accepted Harry Anslinger’s long-ignored “Black Book” dossiers on Mafia suspects and turned them over to his reinforced phalanxes of prosecutors and investigators for action. At first, Hoover appeared unimpressed by Kennedy’s campaign. “No single individual or coalition of racketeers dominates organized crime across the nation,” he pronounced publicly, almost a year after Kennedy began moving against the Mob.

Although the bureau was structurally under the administration of the Justice Department and the attorney general, the dogmatic Hoover had always set his own agenda. But in the Kennedy administration he was unable to outflank the attorney general by maneuvering over his head to the president. This attorney general had the ear of the president and they were brothers, an affiliation too solid for Hoover to fracture.

For three decades, whenever possible, Hoover had ignored the Mafia. He had reasons for doing so. These investigations were tricky, difficult, and often unproductive. Moreover, Hoover realized that his agents, predominantly from small midwestern and southern towns, lacked the know-how and street smarts to infiltrate the borgatas or quickly make significant headway in producing cases that would stand up in court. And like all law-enforcement bureaucrats, he knew that investigations into organized crime were corruption minefields, hazardous for ordinary police officers as well as for federal agents. Mobsters, many of whom were harvesting fortunes from gambling and loan-sharking, would bribe anyone, possibly even tempting wholesome FBI agents and thereby tarnishing Hoover’s reputation.

But with Robert Kennedy cracking the whip and the president supporting him, Hoover was forced to undertake an intensive investigation of the Mob. Kennedy urged him to scrutinize organized crime as fervently as he had two of his favorite targets: domestic Communists and Soviet bloc espionage. Hoover responded with his customary bureaucratic ploys, creating a new FBI Special Division for Organized Crime and developing another of his “Most Wanted” lists. After decades of disputing the Mafia’s existence, he suddenly compiled a roster of forty suspects who were ripe for immediate probing. The top forty were mainly bosses and their lieutenants who had been spotlighted earlier by other law-enforcement authorities and by the press after Apalachin. New York’s prominent godfathers, Carlo Gambino, Joe Bonanno, Joe Profaci, and Tommy Lucchese were high on Hoover’s target list.

Ignorance was the main obstacle for agents in the FBI’s new platoon of Mafia hunters. Under Hoover’s aegis, agents generally had avoided cooperating closely with other federal agencies and with state and local police forces. Hoover was disdainful of the ability and the corruptibility of big-city police departments and distrusted other federal organizations as rivals. He rarely permitted joint undertakings, primarily because he had no intention of sharing recognition with any law-enforcement official. When asked to turn over their own data on criminal cases to the bureau, detectives in New York and other cities usually did so grudgingly. The bureau had a legal right to inspect police intelligence dossiers on the Mafia without having to reciprocate. Remo Franceschini, a New York organized-crime detective, was incensed at the bureau’s highhanded “rape of our files.” FBI agents, however, often refused to turn over information they might posses to local investigators, citing federal law restrictions. On one rare occasion, Franceschini said the bureau did give him
its confidential research material on a mobster, but it was worthless. The entire FBI file consisted of intelligence reports that the city’s police department had given to the bureau. Most big-city detectives resented the FBI’s propaganda apparatus and its unearned reputation for excellence. As a sign of contempt for Hoover’s agents, New York detectives sarcastically referred to the bureau’s initials as standing for “Famous But Incompetent.” Because of the FBI’s zeal in generating meaningless anticrime statistics through the recovery of stolen cars, other wags labeled FBI agents “Fan Belt Inspectors.”

Now Robert Kennedy’s demands for results compelled Hoover’s sleuths to seek help from outsiders with firsthand knowledge about the Mafia. One veteran they turned to was Ralph Salerno, the New York detective, who willingly shared his hard-earned files with them. “They had a lot of catching up to do,” Salerno said. “It was the first time they came and said, What have you got on these guys?’ “He tutored agents on fundamental tactics of gathering intelligence information about Mafia families through diligent surveillance at Mob social events: wakes, funerals, weddings, christenings, and restaurant meals. “Pecking orders” in families, the detective instructed, often could be traced through the respect shown to individuals at these occasions, which also were used for meetings to discuss family matters. The Mafia’s rigid code of behavior required elaborate demonstrations of homage to leaders, and the treatment accorded to mobsters in public rituals often disclosed recent promotions, power shifts, and alliances.