Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (30 page)

The Mafia-LCN lords had good reason to fear Robert Kennedy. In 1960, the last year of the Eisenhower administration, a scant thirty-five low-level gangsters were convicted, mainly on petty gambling charges. During Kennedy’s blitz against higher-ranking mobsters, which lasted less than four years, 116 made mafiosi and associates were indicted, including Jimmy Hoffa. To the nation’s Mafia VIPs those statistics were alarming, and they knew the attorney general was committed to destroying them.

On the legislative front, Robert Kennedy’s warnings about the Mob’s un-contested power, combined with the political strength of the president; created a groundswell for easy passage in Congress of the first package of bills aimed at a national crime organization. Four new laws broadened the federal government’s jurisdictional power to indict mobsters. The main statutes prohibited traveling across state lines for racketeering purposes and the interstate shipment of gambling equipment. Although the laws were difficult to enforce, they marked the first concentrated effort by Congress to impede the Mob.

Within the Johnson administration, Robert Kennedy had a troubled political and personal relationship with his brother’s successor. He stuck it out for nine months, resigning one month after Hoffa’s conviction in 1964. Elected to the Senate from New York, Kennedy in 1968 met the same fate as his brother—an assassin’s bullet—while campaigning in Los Angeles for the Democratic presidential nomination that almost assuredly was his. The assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, had no connection with the Mob.

Clearly, President Kennedy’s murder halted the federal government’s first diligent drive against the Mafia. The steam went out of the Justice Department’s campaign after Robert Kennedy’s departure. His successor, Attorney General Ramsey Clark, concerned about the warrantless electronic surveillance program, pulled the plug on the bugs that were providing the FBI with essential intelligence. Mafia investigations were effectively shelved. Keenly aware of the administration’s indifference, Hoover dropped the Mafia-LCN as an investigative priority.

With the FBI and the government once more quiescent, Mob dons could relax. The pressure was off. Whether or not they had a part in it, the Mafia had triumphed as a big winner after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A Splendid Band: The Mob

“We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.”

T
he catchy phrase sounded like a clever advertising slogan, touting the strength and prominence of a multinational corporation. It was actually an offhanded remark about the Cosa Nostra in an unguarded, totally candid moment, from the lips of the Mob’s financial guru, Meyer Lansky.

During Robert Kennedy’s clamp down, and as part of Hoover’s orders to employ “Highly confidential sources,” agents arranged with several New York hotel detectives to listen in on mobsters who favored their hotels. Mafiosi and their important associates were assigned rooms or suites that had been turned into secret recording studios. Lansky, the last of the big-league Jewish gangsters, and an economic asset for Cosa Nostra, checked into one of these suites at the Volney Hotel on Manhattan’s East Side in May 1962.

Lansky had become a disreputable national figure after his appearance a decade earlier before the Kefauver Committee. With Kennedy on the warpath, Hoover placed Lansky high up on his list of organized-crime targets. The FBI director described the aging, bantam-sized racketeer as an exceptionally important individual in the national crime picture, and he instructed agents to
employ “extraordinary investigative techniques”—Hoover’s euphemism for illegal electronic surveillance.

Recuperating from a recent heart attack, Lansky spent most of his time in his suite, chatting idly about personal matters with relatives and friends. The FBI listened to every word. On the evening of Sunday, May 27, 1962, Lansky and his wife were alone, watching David Susskind’s television program
Open End
, a talk show. The Justice Department’s campaign against the Mafia was spawning headlines and Susskind’s topic that night was organized crime. An agent’s report on the bugging, leaked years later to reporters, stated that Lansky was silent until one of the panelists on the TV show referred to organized crime as being second in size only to the government itself. It was then that Lansky flippantly remarked to his wife, “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.”

Although excluded from the Mafia’s ruling class, Lansky was enmeshed in many deals with Mob leaders and reflected their self-confidence at mid-century. Despite the damage done by Bobby Kennedy’s assault, the bosses were not raising a white flag of surrender. Hoover knew this. The Lansky tapes were part of the rich intelligence information secretly gathered through bugs that provided Hoover and his top aides with data on the Mafia’s enormous vitality.

Astonishingly, government statisticians believed that Lansky had vastly undervalued the Mafia’s overall resources in his sardonic U.S. Steel quip. A confidential Justice Department analysis in the mid-1960s conservatively estimated that organized crime’s profits were equaled by those of the
ten
largest industrial corporations combined. The big ten companies cited were General Motors, Standard Oil, Ford, General Electric, Chrysler, IBM, Mobile Oil, Texaco, Gulf, and U.S. Steel. (It was an unscientific analysis based largely on assumptions that the Mob’s profits came mainly from illegal gambling, loan-sharking, hijackings, and narcotics sales. Factoring in the Mafia’s huge markups, low overhead, and avoidance of taxes, the government’s rough estimate was that, nationwide, the mafiosi and their accomplices netted $7 billion to $10 billion a year.)

At the end of 1964, however, Hoover was again free to use his own judgment in determining FBI agendas. There was no interference from Lyndon Johnson’s administration, which was absorbed in the pressing issues of an expanding guerrilla conflict in Vietnam, the War on Poverty, the civil-rights movement, and riots and disorders in some inner cities. Despite the huge number of cases developed in the Kennedy years, the bureau’s director rapidly downgraded the Mafia as a vital priority. Complying with a directive from Attorney General
Ramsey Clark to use electronic surveillance only for “national security” matters, Hoover retired his most effective weapon: the bugs in Mob hangouts.

The Johnson administration’s political concerns dovetailed with Hoover’s own conservative, Cold War priorities. He accelerated investigations of groups that he personally classified as un-American or subversive; these included opponents of the Vietnam War and organizations championing civil rights for African-Americans. (The only hate-filled organization on the other side of the political spectrum that Hoover tried to repress was the rabidly antiblack and anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan.) A new tactic, Cointelpro, FBI-speak for Counter Intelligence Program, was established to monitor and disrupt groups Hoover looked upon unfavorably, and to infiltrate them with agent provocateurs eager to manufacture criminal cases.

An internal letter distributed to all FBI field offices laid bare Hoover’s goals and his divide-and-conquer strategy concerning legitimate civil-rights and political organizations. “The purpose of this program [Coiutel] is to expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activities of the various New Left organizations, their leadership and adherents. In every instance, consideration should be given to disrupting the organized activity of these groups and no opportunity should be missed to capitalize on organizational and personal conflicts of their leadership.”

By the mid-1960s, Hoover’s force of almost 8,000 agents did occasionally arrest blundering minor mobsters whose mistakes could not be ignored. However, with Robert Kennedy gone, there was no longer encouragement from FBI headquarters in Washington to put in exhaustive hours on Mafia-LCN cases. Some dedicated agents continued to be vigilant, but in most regional bureaus the incentive was missing; it was easier to win promotions by capturing amateur bank bandits or concentrating on political dissidents—Hoover’s perennial targets—than through the tedious and unrewarding pursuit of insulated Mob generals.

So the bureau removed the electronic bugs from the Mob’s hangouts and installed them in the gathering places of persons and groups Hoover deemed as subversive or leftist. Investigations of violent radical fringe groups like the underground, bomb-planting Weathermen were unquestionably justified. But the FBI resorted to illegal, unconstitutional methods to bug, wiretap, and place under surveillance prominent political and civil-rights figures who Hoover by his own fiat determined were threats to America’s fundamental values. These included Adlai E. Stevenson, Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956; civil-rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., considered a “communist tool”; British writer Graham Greene, producer of “anti-American” works; and
anti-Vietnam War activists from show business, including John Lennon and Jane Fonda.

The federal cutbacks were matched by a similar slackening-off in the few big-city police departments that had special units investigating organized crime. Robert Kennedy’s drive, combined with Joe Valachi’s compelling testimony, had temporarily persuaded high-ranking police officials in New York of the Mafia’s extensive threat. With Kennedy gone from Washington, New York detectives Ralph Salerno and Remo Franceschini saw interest in the Mafia at the top police department echelons—the brass—gradually diminish in New York. Franceschini’s investigations and wiretaps of gambling activities in the Bronx convinced him that sophisticated organized-crime elements were running multimillion-dollar networks. A chief in the Central Intelligence Bureau, the CIB, rejected Franceschini’s request to expand his investigation, insisting that the Mafia was a fictional delusion. “The chief thought Italian hoods were just a couple of guys rubbing two fifty-cent pieces together,” Franceschini recalled. “He told me, ‘It’s not formalized, it’s not a bureaucracy, it’s not Wall Street.’”

The consensus among the department’s brass was that Jewish bookmakers were raking in the big bucks as organized crime’s most productive moneymakers. Franceschini got nowhere trying to convince officials that major bookies were not independent and could operate only with the acquiescence of one of the five families.

Many CIB cases and intelligence tidbits stemmed from illegal gambling. It was one of the easiest crimes to investigate even though those arrested were usually petty runners, collectors of bets, and bookkeepers who got off easy with fines or light sentences. One method of unearthing tips about gambling operations was bugging and wiretapping social clubs, mafiosi gathering spots in predominantly Italian-American neighborhoods. The clubs were storefronts converted into private dens where made men and wannabes could drink espresso, play cards, gossip with their pals, and plan their activities before heading out for the day’s illicit work. In many respects, the clubs were American mobsters’ versions of cafés in Sicilian village squares.

CIB investigators in the summer of 1964 were listening to a bug and a wiretap in Salvatore “Big Sam” Cavalieri’s club, a Lucchese family rendezvous in East Harlem. Cavalieri was a Lucchese soldier overseeing a large-scale numbers and sports-betting complex of more than fifty bookies. Like the FBI, the CIB used bugs primarily for intelligence purposes, though New York State law
allowed tapes to be used as court evidence under restricted conditions. Seemingly unconcerned about electronic eavesdropping, the leading lights in Big Sam’s place talked openly, and their conversations often allowed the police to puff up arrest statistics by raiding several of Cavalieri’s gambling parlors. More useful to CIB detectives than the low-level collars were the insights they picked up through secret microphones about the Lucchese family’s culture and connections.

One day Carmine Tramunti, a top capo, showed up at Cavalieri’s club and telephoned a soldier about an assignment for his crew from none other than Tommy Lucchese, the boss. Tramunti did not specify details about the job but said gravely, “He wants us to do it.” Franceschini, at a “plant,” a listening post a few blocks away, heard the exchange. “Tramunti’s tone clearly overflowed with reverence and pride at being selected for the job. It was like Lucchese just elevated them to sainthood,” Franceschini said.

That same summer, the detective heard Tramunti telephone Jilly Rizzo, the proprietor of July’s, a trendy Midtown restaurant, and a friend of Frank Sinatra. “Hey,” Tramunti said to Rizzo, “the feast is on. Back at the social club we’re gonna have some steaks, we’re gonna have some sausage. Why don’t you come on up? Bring the ballplayers up too.” Franceschini was aware that some New York Yankee players often stopped by July’s. “Oh yeah?” Rizzo replied. “Frank’s in town. Maybe I’ll bring Frank up.”

Several hours later, according to police surveillance logs, Sinatra showed up with Rizzo at the social club for an impromptu meal with leading members of the Lucchese family. Wiseguys from all over town streamed into the club to shake hands and speak with Sinatra. After Sinatra left, one of the neighborhood wannabes who served him drinks called his grandmother with the exciting news of the singer’s visit. “Frank Sinatra gave me a fifty-buck tip,” he exclaimed.