Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (33 page)

Blakey’s father was a Texan who became the president of the First National Bank of Burlington, after working as a bank examiner. Of English stock, the Blakeys were staunch Baptists who had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Bob Blakey’s mother was of Irish descent, and she raised him as a devout
Roman Catholic. His father died of a heart attack in 1945, when Blakey was nine, but providently left him, an older brother, and his mother in reasonably comfortable financial circumstances. Blakey went north for his higher education, graduating with honors from Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. He majored in philosophy, intending to lead a sedate life as a teacher, until he learned of the meager earnings a philosophy professor could command in academia. Hoping to have a large family (he would have eight children), Blakey switched to law as his best bet for a livable income and won a scholarship to Notre Dame’s law school. To support himself during these years, he worked in the summers as a bakery-truck driver, and his on-the-job contacts sharpened his interest in labor law. There were practical lessons to be learned outside the classroom by working side by side with flinty unionized teamsters at the bakery. Blakey found these blue-collar workers proud of the economic gains they had won by signing on with a scrappy union; at the same time they felt helpless to reform its undemocratic structure, which limited their right to choose national and regional leaders.

Blakey made the nuances of collective bargaining and union statutes his prime areas of study, and in 1960 he graduated second in his class. Instead of concentrating on labor law as he had planned, Blakey was selected in a national honors program for a modest-salaried $6,500-a year job as a Special Attorney with the Justice Department in Washington, assigned to the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section.

Joining the department at the tail end of the Eisenhower administration, Blakey spent his first year reading memos and pushing paper through bureaucratic mazes. It was the period when the Justice Department accepted Hoover’s views that the big-city Italian-American gangs were an inconsequential, loose collection of criminals. In rare instances, when an informer or a witness tried to volunteer information about the Mafia to Justice Department prosecutors, he was discouraged. “If anyone started talking about the Mafia or using the word, he was told to shut up,” Blakey discovered. “The Mafia was not relevant to the case and we only wanted to hear about the specific crime being investigated.”

Those conditions and taboos changed dramatically when Robert Kennedy became attorney general in 1961, breathing life into a drive against the Mob and labor racketeering. In law school, Blakey had taken only one course in criminal law, but he had a solid background in applying labor-law statutes to union-corruption cases. As the workload intensified, he quickly cut his teeth on the intricacies of criminal prosecution. He got an eye-opening primer in the
Mafia’s pervasive power from the torrent of electronic-spying information that the FBI was suddenly providing the department’s organized-crime section. The intelligence was passed on to Blakey and other lawyer-prosecutors by agents who withheld the fact that the evidence originated from illegal bugs.

“There was nothing in my background to prepare me for this rush of information about induction ceremonies, blood rites,
omertà,”
he said of the newly opened window into the Mafia. “I was incredulous; it was not part of my consciousness.”

Robert Kennedy’s resignation as attorney general in 1964 was a signal for Blakey’s leave-taking. Inspired by Kennedy, he had committed himself for three years to the unprecedented campaign against mobsters and their infiltration of major labor unions. But it was clear to Blakey that the old lackadaisical thinking had reinfected the Justice Department and that the new administrators would minimize the Mob as a priority. “I was there at the heights with Kennedy and I didn’t want to be there at the bottom,” Blakey told friends.

Returning to Notre Dame, he spent the next two years as an assistant professor, teaching law and mulling over his exhilarating Justice Department hitch. At the law school, he initiated a popular course on organized crime, which his students irreverently called “the gangbusters class.” In retrospect, he wondered about the lasting accomplishments of Robert Kennedy’s strategy. “We were a bunch of bright guys working hard but we had minimal impact,” he concluded pessimistically to himself. Even the crowning prosecution of Robert Kennedy’s campaign—the conviction of Jimmy Hoffa—failed to cleanse the teamsters’ union of Mafia control and corruption. Hoffa’s imprisonment simply opened opportunities for similarly tainted teamster officials to replace him in illicit deals. “Convicting Hoffa,” Blakey reflected, “what difference did it make for the union? Zip.”

The Mafia reentered Blakey’s life indirectly through Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory as a full-term president over Arizona’s Republican Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. Goldwater touched upon a sensitive area in the campaign by lacerating Johnson and the Democrats for being soft on crime. After the election, violent felony rates soared and arrests dropped, bolstering the Republicans and jeopardizing the Democrats’ prospects in future national elections. To blunt the GOP’s damaging attacks on his crime-control policies, and perhaps to divert attention from the accelerating war in Vietnam, Johnson did what most politicians do to douse political fires: he formed a study group. Titled the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of
Justice and headed by Attorney General Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, the commission’s stated goal was developing new crime-prevention strategies.

In 1966 nine task forces were established to search for answers, and Blakey signed on as a consultant to one that analyzed organized crime. After two years of research and hard thinking with other commission members, Blakey hit upon a legislative and law-enforcement plan to cripple the Mafia. His theories did not arise from any stunning epiphany but grew during a lengthy analytical process of osmosis in brainstorming sessions with two other consultants, Donald R. Cressey, a sociologist, and Thomas C. Schelling, an economics professor.

Cressey provided him with insight on the organizational composition of each Mob family—the blueprint in place since Lucky Luciano’s 1931 revisions. That structure insulated the Mafia’s leadership from arrests and virtually ensured each borgata’s longevity through steady hierarchical replacements. Blakey saw that the blood and cultural ties of Mafia members enhanced bonding and loyalty, transforming criminal associations into true extended families. These were defining factors that distinguished the Mafia from the Jewish and Irish ragtag ethnic gangs that had been extinguished by divisive internal disputes and by law-enforcement efforts. The Mafia’s unique attributes enabled it to resist traditional police tactics and encroachment and destruction.

From Schelling’s research, Blakey obtained a clearer understanding of the Mob’s diversified system of plunder and profits that also set it apart from other criminal bands. The Mafia families, Blakey decided, were comparable to well-managed, complex industrial corporations. “They were the mirror image of American capitalism. They were aping it.” Meyer Lansky, who proudly estimated that the Mob’s revenues were larger than U.S. Steel’s, would have agreed with him.

Like all lawyers of his generation, Blakey had been trained to focus on an individual prosecution for a specific act or crime—not in large organizational terms. “It blew my mind,” Blakey said of Cressey and Schelling’s analysis of the Mob’s organizational and financial underpinnings. “I started seeing things I had not seen before.”

Instead of prosecutions that focused on an individual mobster and one criminal violation, Blakey began thinking in a spectacularly larger dimension: a law or series of statutes that could destroy in a mass conviction an entire organization—a Mafia crime family. Before his ideas could gel, the Katzenbach commission disbanded in 1967, issuing a list of suggestions and legislative proposals for solving the nation’s crime woes. The task-force pundits on organized
crime, fully recognizing the menace posed by the Mafia, recommended more federal funds and manpower to uproot mobsters in big cities. They also endorsed one of Blakey’s pet proposals: legalizing electronic surveillance as a basic tool for properly investigating mobsters.

Blakey considered himself a liberal Democrat, but in 1968 he became an adviser on crime issues to Richard M. Nixon, the Republican candidate who won the presidency that year. A Republican administration, Blakey thought, would be harder on crime than the Democrats and more receptive to his innovative views on the Mob. Offered a high post in the Justice Department, Blakey turned it down for the chance of working with Senator John McClellan and getting his radical concepts on assaulting the Mafia written into law. In the decade after the Apalachin raid, McClellan, a conservative southern Democrat from Arkansas, had been Congress’s most persistent advocate for harsher laws against organized crime and labor racketeering.

Following his work on the Katzenbach commission, Blakey had helped McClellan draft a groundbreaking law in 1968 on wiretapping and bugging. Known as Title III, the statute for the first time gave Congressional authorization to electronic eavesdropping. Previously under ambiguous laws and court rulings, federal agents could intercept but not disclose or use as evidence information obtained through wiretaps. Because of these restraints, the clandestine electronic spying of the FBI and federal narcotics agents was probably unconstitutional and illegal. The ban on wiretaps and bugs undoubtedly handicapped federal investigations of many crimes, not just those committed by the Mafia.

Under Title III, a provision in the broader Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, a bill endorsed by President Johnson, federal and state prosecutors could seek court approval to wiretap and plant listening devices under strict guidelines. To install the equipment, prosecutors and agents first must get authorization from a judge by presenting evidence that there is probable cause, or sufficient facts, to believe that a crime has been committed or is being planned. The judge has to be further persuaded that electronic surveillance is indispensable and that other investigative methods are unlikely to succeed or are too dangerous. Additionally, the judicial order for intercepting conversations terminates after thirty days unless prosecutors can show incriminating results from the first order and prove that its continuance is vital for an ongoing investigation.

Title III was opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union as a violation of
the Bill of Rights and portrayed as an Orwellian Big Brother expansion of the government’s police powers. Blakey, an ACLU member, considered the organization’s unbending position illogical. He argued that the legislation did not infringe on the civil liberties of the law-abiding public and was a long-overdue weapon for dealing with organized crime. “Our objective was to take illegal wiretaps and bugs out of the back alleys and let the courts decide if there were lawful and sufficient reasons for the surveillance. We imposed severe restrictions on the government and that is pro-civil liberties.”

Championing electronic surveillance, Blakey emphasized another telling point: evidence from a defendant’s own lips obtained through a bug or a wiretap was infinitely more reliable and accurate than testimony from informers who might lie to get lenient sentences for their own crimes.

The thirty-two-year-old Blakey was bristling in 1968 to enact a legislative blockbuster against the Mob when McClellan, as chairman, appointed him as chief counsel of the Senate Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures. Earlier, as a consultant to McClellan on Title III, Blakey had urged the senator to sponsor a larger package of anti-Mafia statutes. With Congress wrestling that year with the Omnibus Crime Control act and the electronic-surveillance controversy, McClellan felt the timing was unfavorable for debate and passage of a larger package of laws to disrupt the Mafia. “Half a loaf now is better than none,” he said after the Title III victory.

John McClellan was seventy-three, Blakey’s senior by more than forty years, when they began molding the latter’s proposals into legislative language. For fifteen years, since the mid-1950’s, McClellan had firsthand exposure to mobsters, presiding as he did over numerous inquiries into union corruption, rackets, and other Mafia misdeeds. At these hearings, the senator’s face was usually an impassive mask. Inwardly he seethed, exasperated at the uncooperative, brazen mobsters who openly defied the government and considered themselves a law unto themselves. A rock-hard Christian fundamentalist, McClellan possessed an Old Testament sense of righteousness and was generally portrayed as a kind and considerate man, but one who truly believed in right and wrong and punishment for evildoers.

Shepherding the first specific anti-Mafia measure presented to Congress, McClellan expressed to other legislators his view that its passage was an absolute moral necessity. Anticipating a fierce civil-liberties fight over expanding the government’s investigative powers, McClellan had a ready rebuttal: “The public is demanding that we recognize that the right of society to be
safe transcends the right of the criminal to be free. When the forces of right and peace clash against the forces of evil and violence, something has to give.”

An adroit lawmaker, McClellan tucked the measures aimed squarely at the Mafia into one statute or section of a larger, widely supported anticrime bill. It was a tactic intended to increase the survival chances of the organized-crime statute in the whipsaw process of amendments and political compromise in both houses of Congress. The overall legislation was titled the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. For McClellan and Blakey, the essence of the act, the heart of their game plan, were provisions labeled the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations section. The law’s abbreviated title was RICO and its strange name was intentional. Blakey refuses to explain the reason for the RICO acronym. But he is a crime-film buff and admits that one of his favorite movies is
Little Caesar
, a 1931 production loosely modeled on Al Capone’s life. Edward G. Robinson portrayed the central character, a merciless mobster, whose fictional nickname—serendipitously for Blakey—was Rico. Robinson’s snarling characterization of the rise and fall of Rico became the prototype for movie gangsters. Dying in an alley after a gun battle with the police, Little Caesar gasps one of Hollywood’s famous closing lines—also Blakey’s implied message to the Mob: “Mother of Mercy—is this the end of Rico?”