Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (26 page)

The detective’s practical tips included secretly photographing mobsters at the gatherings for identification purposes and slipping into wedding receptions of Mafia sons and daughters to obtain lists of guests as a means of identifying known and new members. He advocated filching lists of cash gifts that brides sometimes recorded; the amounts would indicate the importance and rank of mobster guests because, under Mafia protocol, wedding gifts were made according to status with the largest sums coming from the highest in rank. From a wiretap, Salerno once got a risible peek into Mob matrimonial etiquette. He heard an anxious Lucchese soldier’s wife sounding out the wife of a family higher-up on the amount her husband was planning to give at a coming wedding. The soldier’s wife said her husband wanted to be generous but was fearful of showing up his immediate superior as a cheapskate.

Hoover’s other major step against the Mafia was resorting once again to illegal bugs as he had after the Apalachin embarrassment. He directed field supervisors and agents to employ “Highly confidential sources,” bureau-speak for
planting listening devices and eavesdropping in scores of mobsters’ homes and hangouts—without court authorization. In this avenue of investigation, the FBI, with decades of experience from espionage surveillance, was unrivaled. The bureau’s electronic technicians even impressed Ralph Salerno. “I saw them install a bug in thirty seconds. They were real good, masters at their trade.”

In 1962, under confusing existing laws and court rulings, federal agencies were prohibited from “interception and disclosure” of telephone conversations. In 1954, during the Eisenhower administration, Attorney General Herbert Brownell gave Hoover the discretion to use bugs—concealed microphones or transmitting apparatus—in “internal security” cases. The authority was intended for use by the FBI against Soviet bloc nations and the Communist Party. Hoover now dynamically interpreted and expanded that authorization to include organized-crime investigations. The FBI’s theory was that it could secretly “intercept,” listen in, on bugs and telephone or wire taps, so long as the contents were not “disclosed.” The information from the eavesdropping could never be used as evidence in a court, but it would provide the bureau with invaluable intelligence and clues about Mafia activities.

The electronic spying was a carefully guarded secret and Hoover never officially told Robert Kennedy that he had launched the illegal project, which some agents referred to by another coded name: “the June Files.” For the record, the bureau maintained that its sudden cornucopia of information and insight on the Mob came from informers, turncoats, and intensive leg work by agents. Only one official in the Justice Department, William G. Hundley, the head of Bobby Kennedy’s Organized Crime Section, was discreetly informed that agents might be resorting to illegal and unconstitutional eavesdropping. “Hoover never asked for authorization,” Hundley said. “Occasionally, my counterparts in the FBI would hint in a roundabout way that they had some information from a bug but they were never specific.” Hundley believed that the agents informed him unofficially of the eavesdropping as a bureaucratic cover, which would allow the FBI to claim that the Justice Department was aware of the legally questionable program, should it blow up into a scandal. It was apparent to Hundley that some prosecutors in the department, from careful reading of FBI reports, could deduce that the confidential information could have come only from surreptitious bugs, known as “black-bag jobs.”

When Kennedy learned belatedly about the bureau’s electronic tactics, he asked Hundley why he had kept the sensitive information to himself. “Kennedy
said to me in effect, ‘You knew about it? Why didn’t you say something to me?’ “Because of the legally questionable nature of the bugs and wiretaps, Hundley had kept his mouth shut to protect Kennedy from personal damage if the surveillance program became a political hot potato. “It was one of those things you don’t talk about,” Hundley conceded. “Hoover had never done anything on organized crime. His game plan was to catch up in a hurry with the bugs. Later he could use the information from the bugs to develop informers, make cases and nobody would ever know.”

Technically, the electronic spying techniques were near perfect. Nevertheless, it took time for agents unfamiliar with Mafia slang expressions and its puzzling protocol and culture to figure out what they were hearing. They were sent to language schools to learn Italian, especially the Sicilian dialects that were often spoken or interjected into profanity-laced conversations by gangsters. A naive FBI squad in Las Vegas, oblivious to mobster schedules, at first routinely worked on surveillance and electronic eavesdropping from 8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. Eventually the agents discovered that mafiosi and their gambling coteries conducted most of their business well past midnight, when the agents were off duty and asleep.

In less than a year, the FBI had surmounted the learning curve, and bugs were flooding the bureau and the Justice Department with leads. “They had to learn from scratch,” Bob Blakey, one of Kennedy’s lawyer-prosecutors, said of the FBI’s efforts. “But by mid-1962, they got it all down.”

Robert Kennedy opened another front by trying to isolate mobsters from the lawyers and accountants who willingly or unwillingly abetted them. Defense lawyers traditionally considered themselves and prosecutors equal members of the same professional fraternity—the legal bar—and therefore immune from investigation of their association with dubious clients. To cripple the Mob, Bobby Kennedy broke that unwritten, seemingly sacrosanct rule. Without evidence of possible illegal acts, the FBI began investigating lawyers, accountants, and businessmen who provided support services for Mob families. A long-range goal was to discourage or intimidate these specialists from sheltering the vital interests of mobsters and protecting them from indictments and convictions. Isolated from their skilled hired hands, mafiosi might be more vulnerable to prosecutions and imprisonment. A secondary goal of the plan was to “turn” or persuade these noncriminal supporters to inform or cooperate with the government in cases against the Mob. Since the professionals were well aware of the fate that awaited squealers, this part of the program got few results.

Kennedy also implemented the deportation power of the Immigration and Naturalization Service against high-ranking mobsters who had entered the country illegally or had questionable immigration status. His first big-shot quarry was Carlos Marcello, the undisputed Mob boss of New Orleans. Marcello, whose baptismal name was Calogero Minacore, was born in 1910 in Tunisia, then a French colony with a sizable Sicilian population. At the age of eight months, he and his mother arrived in New Orleans to be reunited with his father. His crime career was similar to other mafiosi of his generation: an early school dropout, petty crimes followed by robbery and narcotics trafficking convictions. Mar-cello’s big break came when he connected with Frank Costello’s gambling operations in the late 1930s and ‘40s in Louisiana, eventually becoming a partner with Costello and Meyer Lansky in illegal casinos. In 1947, at age thirty-seven, Mar-cello became one of the nation’s youngest Mafia godfathers when he took control of the New Orleans family. Because he was only five feet, four inches tall, the new don was commonly known in the New Orleans underworld as “the Little Man,” a sobriquet that was totally misleading in terms of his influence and assets.

Marcello’s legal covers were pinball and jukebox companies, real estate developments, and a shrimp-boat fleet. The Mob boss’s pride and joy was a 3,000-acre plantation, Churchill Farms, that he bought and restored in a New Orleans suburb. On immigration and other government forms where he had to list his occupation, Marcello modestly described himself as a “tomato salesman and real estate investor.” Illegally, he ran casinos, bookmaking rings, slot machines, brothels, and a horse-racing wire service to bookie parlors in the South and Midwest. Federal narcotics agents long suspected that Marcello’s shrimp business was a cover for smuggling heroin and cocaine from Central America and Mexico by boat, but they could never cobble together a case against him.

Because of his wealth and political influence, gained through widespread bribery, Marcello had extraordinary status within the American Mafia. He was the most respected and autonomous godfather outside of New York and Chicago, and had the unique privilege of shaping major crime policies and admitting members to his family without clearing his decisions with the Commission.

The Kefauver hearings, however, had exposed Marcello’s immigration Achilles’ heel: neither he nor his parents had applied for citizenship. After 1952 he had to report every three months to the immigration inspectors for a check on his legal right to remain in the country as an alien. It was a nuisance for the crime boss, but he showed up for the routine quarterly examination for eight years without trepidation.

Singling out Carlos Marcello as one of his first pet projects, Robert Kennedy moved decisively against him. On April 4, 1961, just three months after the new attorney general was sworn in, Marcello dutifully appeared at the New Orleans office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. This time, Kennedy’s immigration agents clasped handcuffs on him and suddenly accused him of holding a passport from Guatemala that had been obtained through a forged birth certificate. Despite the protests of a lawyer who had accompanied Marcello, he was ordered deported immediately. Without a court hearing, the infuriated Mafia boss was hustled onto a government plane and flown to Guatemala City.

For two months, as lawyers scrambled to get the suddenly stateless Marcello readmitted to the United States, he was booted out of one country after another. Guatemala deported him to neighboring El Salvador, where he was locked up in military barracks before being driven to the Honduran border and forced to cross on foot. The paunchy, fifty-one-year-old godfather, dressed in a business suit and tie, trekked seventeen miles under a torrid sun before reaching a peasant village. Finally, Marcello and an American lawyer who was with him got a ride to the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, where investigators lost track of him until he suddenly emerged in New Orleans. How he managed to reenter the country without being stopped by immigration officials is unclear. A prevalent theory is that Marcello got to Mexico and from there sneaked into the country on one of his own shrimp boats, which brought him to a secluded bayou in Louisiana. Rediscovered in New Orleans, Marcello was socked by the government with charges of evading $835,396 in federal taxes, illegal reentry to the country, and perjury. The seething don privately vowed revenge against the young attorney general who had disrupted his life.

While Kennedy spurred his prosecutors and the FBI to harass and dismantle the Mafia, his biggest intelligence and public-relations success arrived serendipitously in the form of a semiliterate criminal named Joseph Valachi. A seasoned “button man,” soldier, and small-time narcotics dealer, Valachi’s career in 1962 was effectively over. Although he had never been convicted of a homicide, Valachi was suspected of being the hit man or wheel man in more than twenty slayings. He was fifty-nine and serving a twenty-year narcotics sentence in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, the same maximum-security prison where his family boss, Don Vito Genovese, was imprisoned for a separate drug conviction. Valachi’s claims to fame were that he had survived the Castellammarese War and that Genovese had been the best man at his wedding.

A combination of convoluted events involving Genovese suddenly made prison life dangerous for Valachi. Rumors spread that he was an informer, and Genovese wanted him to kill another inmate who had supposedly insulted Valachi by calling him a rat. Convinced that the devious Genovese actually distrusted him and had bestowed on him “the kiss of death,” Valachi became semi-paranoid and constantly watchful. On June 22, 1963, walking in the prison yard, he believed that an approaching inmate was an enforcer, Joseph “Joe Beck” DiPalermo, sent by Don Vito to kill him. Grabbing an iron pipe from a construction site in the yard, Valachi battered the other inmate to death. He had killed an innocent man, mistaking his victim for DiPalermo.

From solitary confinement, Valachi sent a message to federal narcotics agents that he was ready to tell all he knew about his thirty years as a mafioso. Valachi and the agents were aware that Genovese’s hatred guaranteed that he would be killed once he was convicted and returned to the general prison population. A deal was cut with the Justice Department: Valachi pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and, in exchange for disclosing what he knew about the Mafia, was promised a lifetime of protection as a pampered prisoner.

Although Valachi’s information was limited to his experiences in the New York area as a lowly soldier in the trenches, he painted the first clear canvas of life inside the Mafia. He confirmed the existence of the five families; he outlined their organizational structure; he exposed the secret “blood” induction ceremony; he explained the effectiveness of the
omertà
vow; and he identified the leaders of each family, thereby for the first time attaching a name tag to each borgata. From Valachi’s debriefings, myths and vague theories about the Mafia were punctured or proven. Hoover’s confidential bugs and wiretaps were a great intelligence victory for the FBI; yet the meaning of segments of conversations and arcane references eluded agents. Valachi, however, with a little prodding, supplied the Rosetta Stone for one mystery: the common identifying name used by all families.

Agents had picked up frequent references beginning with a word in Italian that sounded to them like
cosa
, the Italian for thing, or
casa
, house, or
causa
, cause. At times the phrase was translated by agents as
casa nostra
, our house, or
causa nostra
, our cause.
Nostra
means our. A skilled FBI interrogator, James P. Flynn, raised the subject of the puzzling expression with Valachi, demanding to know if the families used the name Mafia.