Joe Bruno's Mobsters - Six Volume Set (56 page)

Captain Van Schaick said later, "I stuck to my post in the pilothouse until my cap caught fire. We were then about twenty-five feet off North Brother Island. She went on the beach; bow on, in about twenty-five feet of water. . . . Most of the people aft, where the fire raged fiercest, jumped in when we were in deep water, and were carried away. We had no chance to lower the lifeboats. They were burned before the crew could get at them."

At North Brother Island, nurses, doctors, and even the patients in the island's contagious disease hospital, rushed to help the survivors. Some carried ladders, which they used to guide the survivors, most badly burned, down from the boat. Others caught little children who were heaved down to them by hysterical parents. Within minutes, all the survivors, including the captain and several crew members, were taken safely away from the flaming boat and admitted to the hospital.

From his hospital window, a feverish measles patient saw the horror transpiring in front of him. He summoned the courage, hurried from the hospital, and sprinted into the water. He was able to save several children.

A nurse who couldn't swim dashed into the river to grab several children. She did this repeatedly, when suddenly the tide pulled her into deeper water. Incredibly, the nurse found out she could indeed swim, and she continued rescuing whomever she could reach.

City Health Commissioner Thomas Darlington was present on North Brother Island the day the fiery
General Slocum
ran aground.

“I will never be able to forget the scene, the utter horror of it,” Darlington said. “The patients in the contagious wards, especially in the scarlet fever ward, went wild at things they saw from their windows and went screaming and beating at the doors, until it took fifty nurses and doctors
to quiet them. They were all locked up. Along the beach the boats were carrying in the living and dying, and towing in the dead.”

When the fire first started, someone rang the city desk of the
World
on Park Row. The man, who didn't identify himself, told the newspaper editor that he was in his office at 137
th
Street, and he could see the burning boat from his office window. The editor immediately contacted Eugene Moran, who owned a tugboat company at 134
th
Street. Moran told the editor that he had no tugboats available in that area, but that it would be faster anyway to send his men by elevated train from the Park Row station to the Morris Park station in the north Bronx. The editor ordered his men onto the train, and as a result, the
World
had the story of the tragedy before any other New York City daily newspaper.

When the
World
reporters arrived on the scene, they were overcome by grief. As the boat was enveloped in smoke and flames, the reporters and the
World's
photographers spotted dozens of blackened and bloody dead bodies scattered along the shoreline. As the photographers snapped away and the reporters jotted down their notes, several hardened newspapermen broke down in tears. Then they rushed to find phones so that they could deliver their stories to the rewrite men at their newspaper. Their description of the tragedy on the phones were so graphic, when the rewrite men heard what had transpired, some rushed into the men's room to vomit.

The
New York Times
reported the following day, “On the night of June 15, 1904, grief-crazed crowds lined the shore where the bodies were being brought in by the boatload. Scores were prevented from throwing themselves into the river.”

The police released a report a few days later claiming that 1,031 people had perished in the
General Slocum
fire. For the next few weeks, police divers searched for bodies in the partially sunk remains of the
General Slocum
. Police and rescue parties scoured the banks of the river for miles in both directions looking for bodies.

On the night of the fire, scores of husbands came home from work only to discover that their entire families had perished in the fire. Some committed suicide, others went mad, and some later died of grief. For three days, hearses transversed the streets of
Little Germany carrying bodies and parts of bodies to their graves in Lutheran Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens.

A Federal grand jury indicted eight people as a result of the disaster. Those people included Captain Van Schaick, two boat inspectors, and the president, secretary, treasurer, and commodore of the Knickerbocker Steamship Company.

However, only Captain Van Schaick was convicted at trial. The Captain was convicted of criminal negligence, and failing to maintain proper fire drills and fire extinguishers. There was a hung jury on the manslaughter charge. Captain Van Schaick was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The Captain served three-and-a-half years at Sing Sing Prison before he received parole. On August 26, 1911, the administration of President William Howard Taft voted to release Captain Van Schaick from parole. And on December 19, 1912, President Taft pardoned the Captain, who died in 1927.

The Knickerbocker Steamship Company received a ridiculously small fine, even though there was sufficient evidence that they had falsified inspection records. The sunken remains of the
General Slocum
were raised to the surface and subsequently converted into a barge, which predictably sank during a storm in 1911.

The tragedy of the
General Slocum
forced a major reconstruction of steamboat safety regulations. A week after the fire, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered a five-man commission to investigate why the tragedy had occurred and what could be done to prevent it from happening again. The commission was especially tough on the United States Steamboat Inspection Service (USSIS), which had failed miserably at their job of ensuring steamboat safety. Dozens of USSIS employees were fired, and new inspections of all steamboats were ordered. Not surprisingly, numerous violations were found, running from useless life jackets to rotted fire hoses.

The five-man committee recommended many reforms, including fireproof metal bulkheads to contain fires, steam pipes extending from the boiler into cargo areas (to act as a sprinkler), improved life jackets (one for each passenger and crew member), fire hoses capable of handling 100 pounds o
f pressure per square inch and accessible life boats. All these reforms were immediately instituted, which dramatically improved steamboat safety.

The
General Slocum
fire all but erased the German population from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Soon after the
General Slocum
fire, because memories of the tragedy were too horrible to endure, hundreds of German families moved out of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Some settled in the Upper East Side's Yorkville section, creating a new Germantown. Some moved to Astoria in Queens and others left New York City completely.

Strangely, the memory of
General Slocum
fire, even though it killed almost ten times as many people as did the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, quickly faded from the general public's consciousness. A large part of the reason was that the onset of World War One removed all sympathies for anyone of German descent and all of the victims of the
General Slocum
fire were German.

In 1905, the Sympathy Society of German Ladies commissioned sculptor Bruno Louis
Zimm to design a memorial fountain, which was unveiled on May 30, 1905 at the northwestern corner of Tompkins Square Park. This white 9-foot fountain is sculpted of pink Tennessee marble. On the front, above the carved lion's head spout and basin, there is a depiction of two innocent children staring off towards the sea, with the inscription, “They were earth's purest children, loving and fair.”

The memorial fountain still stands in Tompkins Square Park to this very day.

G
enovese, Vito

Racket-buster and future
New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey called him the “King of the Racketeers,” and there is no doubt Vito Genovese was one of the most vicious, conniving, and treacherous bosses in Mafia history.

Genovese was born on November 27, 1897 in the tiny town of
Risigliano, located in the Province of Naples in Italy. He reached the equivalent of a fifth-grade education in Italy, when in 1913 he traveled to New York City to hook up with his father, who had come to America a few years earlier.

The Genovese family settled in the Greenwich Village area of Manhattan, and soon Genovese was working for an young up-and-coming gangster named Charles “Lucky” Luciano. Genovese also became tight with Mafia thugs like Frank Costello, Joe “Adonis” Doto, and Albert Anastasia. But he didn't particularly like to associate with Jewish gangsters like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel.

The first time Costello introduced Genovese to Lansky and Siegel as their partners in various criminal enterprises, Genovese said, “What are you trying to do. Load us up with a bunch of Hebes?”

Costello snapped back, “Take it easy, Don Vitone? You're nothing but a fuckin' foreigner yourself.”

Because of the inclusion of criminal mastermind Lansky and the muscle provided by Siegel, the Prohibition era of the Roaring Twenties was very profitable for the Italians mobsters. They also hooked up with Irish mobsters Owney “The Killer” Madden and his partner Big Bill Dwyer, who was known as the “King of the Rum Runners” and was the biggest distributor of illegal booze in the entire United States of America.

During the mid-1920s, the
major Italian mob boss in New York City was Joe “The Boss” Masseria, a porcine-looking thug, barely five-feet-tall, who was said to have the table manners of a “drooling mastiff.” Masseria took Luciano, Costello, and Genovese under his wings, and he inserted Luciano as his second in charge, or “underboss.”

The problem was
Masseria didn't like his men associating with anyone who wasn't a Sicilian, specifically mentioning Lansky, Siegel, Madden, and Dwyer. Masseria wasn’t too fond either of Genovese, who was from Naples, and Costello (real name Castiglia), who was from Calabria. However, Masseria tolerated both men because, after all, they were Italian. However, Masseria would not elevate Genovese and Costello to anything beyond a mere Mafia soldier.

T
his did not sit well with Luciano and his pals, Italian or otherwise.

In 1927, Benito Mussolini chased the Mafia out of Sicily; jailing some and killing others. Salvatore Maranzano, from the area around the Bay of Castellammare in Sicily, escaped to the United States with another group of Mafia exiles. Maranzano's boss Don Vito Cascio Ferro had been imprisoned for life by Mussolini and his Chief of Police, Caesar Mori. So Maranzano, figuring the American Mafia was inferior to the Sicilian brand, decided he would be able to take over all the rackets of Masseria and his cohorts without too many problems; or at least problems he couldn't handle. This led to what historians called the “Castellammarese War.”

A mobster who met Maranzano soon after Maranzano arrived in America later said, “When we arrived it was very dark. We were brought before Maranzano, who seemed absolutely majestic, with two pistols stuck in his waist, and about 90 boys who were also armed to the teeth surrounding him. I thought I was in the presence of Pancho Villa.”

From 1927 to 1930, the Castellammarese War raged all over New York City. Men were killed in, and in front of pool rooms, Italian members-only clubs, all-night diners, bars and restaurants, and even in the streets as they traveled to and from their cars. The killers fired their guns from moving cars, roof tops, and darkened doorways. When the dust cleared, 50 bodies were piled up in the streets, which made Luciano consider the
wisdom of his allegiance to Masseria.

Lansky, who was the closest to Luciano, cautioned Luciano to “Wait the war out. Let the bosses kill each other, then we can step in and take over.”

It is not clear whose idea it was first, but in the spring 1931, Luciano and Lansky had a secret meeting with Maranzano in Maranzano's midtown office. At this meeting it was decided that Luciano and his cohorts would switch sides in the Castellammarese War and back Maranzano. Of course, this meant taking out Masseria, which Luciano had no problem doing.

Luciano figured the best set-up was to entice Masseria into a situation the usually cagey Masseria would feel totally comfortable with. And this, of course was scarfing down food in a four-star Italian restaurant.

On April 15, 1931, Luciano asked Masseria out to lunch in Brooklyn, far from Masseria's stronghold in Manhattan's Little Italy. Luciano told Masseria, “Let’s go over to the Nuova Villa Tammaro Restaurant in Coney Island. They make gravy like in the old country, not the watered-down shit you get here in America.”

The mere mention of food made drool drip down Masseria's lips and double-chin, so he readily agreed to Luciano's request.

The two men took Masseria's bullet-proof limousine from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Brooklyn, and they sat at a table in the back of Nuova Villa Tammaro. In just a few short hours, Masseria consumed more food than the average man could eat in two days. When his belly was full, Masseria requested a deck of cards so that he and his best pal Luciano could play a little poker.

At around 3 p.m., Luciano excused himself
, and he visited the men’s room. Seconds later, four men burst through the front door of the restaurant. They were comprised of the eclectic group of Genovese, Anastasia, Siegel, and a very capable Jewish killer named Red Levine. They reportedly fired 20 bullets at Masseria; some of them actually connecting with their intended target.