Manhattan Mafia Guide (2 page)

As though it happened over breakfast, Butch the Hat remembers an inauspicious morning during the late 1950s when Red Levine strolled into Ratner’s famous delicatessen on Delancey Street—a spot where he and his most senior crime associates had been dining for nearly half a century—and went completely unrecognized by the fresh-faced new employees who greeted him. Made to wait for service like a
schnorrer
, Levine felt slighted, and fueled by equal parts fury and frustration, he acted out. Gripping the closest serving tray, in one nimble movement he riddled the pastrami-scented airspace with three dozen freshly baked pastries, and until the day he died, he swore he’d never return. Already, it was a new day dawning, and Red Levine, like the assorted mutts with whom he once ran these same streets, wasn’t going gently into night.

Butch the Hat is a world-class reminiscer. When little more than a teenager, he witnessed an underworld slaying that later figured prominently in Martin Scorsese’s classic film
Mean Streets
. Today, the place where it happened is reimagined as a Chinese market, but the men’s room where gunshots rang out is still there, calling Butch back to events that few but he can remember. In Hollywood’s version, the bloody-shirted victim was portrayed by actor David Carradine, but Butch the Hat knew the true-life versions of both victim and killer—one a degenerate alcoholic and the other a deranged Mafia aspirant who was himself later eliminated, his body deposited in the trunk of a stolen car. Before that car trunk, though, home was an apartment across the hall from Butch the Hat. To say the shooter knew where to locate a potential eyewitness would be a gross understatement. Butch lived and breathed just one cup of sugar from catastrophe.

The incident rattled him; day and night, Butch the Hat worried he’d be hauled in by police detectives spotted swarming the crime scene and then nailed on a charge of guilt by association. Too often for his comfort, those cases had a clever way of sticking, and Butch the Hat began to sweat. He knew the killer’s identity, and that was much more, very possibly, than he’d care to admit to police. Weighing it out, he sought the counsel of an elder statesman of the neighborhood, finding him in his usual spot on Mulberry Street, near the entrance of a social club known as the Alto Knights. There, Butch told his story while his uncle, Peter DeFeo, the Genovese crime family’s official armorer, listened in silence.

“Did you do it?” DeFeo asked casually as his nephew concluded his monologue. The older man scanned the opposite sidewalk for familiar faces, occasionally nodding or waving. Butch admitted he hadn’t.

“No? You didn’t? Then let the ones who did it worry.”

And that, as it were, was that. With a few carefully selected syllables, the case was closed, and Butch the Hat hardly spared it another thought. If the cops hauled him in for questioning, he had nothing to hide. So
why
be in hiding?

Afterward, Butch the Hat came to recognize the value of his uncle’s advice, soliciting it more often, and while doing so, he couldn’t help but be awed by the degree of reverence with which full-grown men would approach DeFeo—it rivaled the veneration of Saint Gennaro in the annual street
festa
, which DeFeo was rumored to control. But even then, in his youth, Butch knew the stories that had coined his uncle’s reputation—how DeFeo went into hiding when a woman coveted by Vito Genovese was widowed, her husband strangled on a Greenwich Village rooftop; and how he fled once again, this time to a resort hotel in the Catskills, when an associate nicknamed “the Shadow” was shot dead on the floor of a Brooklyn pool hall. Thirty years later, Butch read in the
New York Times
that the hoodlum who had accused his uncle of the crime was towed from Jamaica Bay, his hands bound together and a block of concrete hardened around each leg. Butch knew all about the dice games, the shylocking and how DeFeo would use his brother-in-law’s name, or even wear his clothes, to throw off investigators. And there were other stories, too—even less flattering ones—but this was Peter DeFeo’s world, and the fact that he had stayed in it so long translated to mean one thing: he knew what it took to survive.

A couple of years before Joey Gallo was gunned down on Mulberry Street, however, something happened—something never fully explained to Butch the Hat. His uncle may have sensed a sea change coming, something in the air that made him uneasy about the future, because he abruptly whisked his family away from the neighborhood, sequestering them all in a luxury hi-rise along Park Avenue. And there they stayed, in some sense never to return.

Instead of following them to the Upper East Side, though, DeFeo stayed put, satisfied to carry on his daily routine until, predictably enough, he was nudged to the sidelines by ambitious underlings and permitted to “retire” into relative seclusion. But even then, Pete DeFeo kept the law guessing: for several years after his passing, rackets detectives of the New York City Police Department were still openly speculating about his criminal activities.

But that’s all over now, and Butch the Hat is among the first to concede that men like DeFeo went out of fashion with the stingy-brim fedora, an institution Butch the Hat tries to single-handedly resuscitate, both in cinema and in life.

Or maybe those customs died in a symbolic blaze of gunfire, as Butch the Hat has suggested at times, alongside “Crazy” Joe Gallo, lying sprawled and bleeding in Hester Street, staring blindly skyward in terror, astonishment or a blending of both. During that pre-dawn shootout in Little Italy, when Gallo’s birth and death so sleekly intersected, some of gangland’s most sacred codes of conduct were shattered. Some say forever.

“Those days are gone,” repeats Butch the Hat once again—as if to persuade himself as well. In private, Joey Gallo seemed to have known it, too.

“Do you remember Ali Baba’s favorite saying?” Gallo asked wistfully in a letter to his younger brother, lamenting the loss of a trusted friend, bushwhacked by rivals while Gallo was stuck behind bars.

“One Hundred Fifty Million Thousand Dollars!”

If he’d been home, Crazy Joe wrote, they’d have been together—“Alive or not.”

“Kid Blast,” perhaps sensing his older brother’s resignation, wrote back reassuringly. “Yussel,” he penned, playfully adopting the Yiddish for Joseph. “Our name, which was always synonymous with honor, loyalty and manhood, if anything, has become an irrevocable fact. Remember, and be at ease to know that whatever your Machiavellian mind comes up with, we have the same parents.”

Again it would be, he promised, like it was in the good old days.

Arthur Nash

A
RTHUR
N
ASH
has worked as a crime beat reporter, and his photographic essay “New York City Gangland” (2010) was praised by Selwyn Raab as the “Eye-Catching Crown Jewel of Mafia History.” Nash is a key contributor to the National Museum of Crime & Punishment in Washington, D.C., as well as the City of Las Vegas’s Museum of Organized Crime & Law Enforcement, also known as “The MOB Museum.” His image library has been sampled by the Discovery, History and Biography Channels. He currently resides at the landmark Hotel Chelsea
.

PREFACE

The very first thing you should know before embarking on a career in criminal research (or referencing any Mafia book, including this one) is that criminals lie—a lot. The second thing you should know is that journalists and authorities also embellish on occasion. (They can’t all be the “biggest bust in history.”) And the information we get from insiders—former Mafioso (rats), law enforcement officials and mob family members—is often skewed to fit a personal narrative. This means that many of the original source “facts” about
l’onorata società
that we have to work with are distorted to begin with. Outlined in this book are many examples of how trumped-up news reports, speculation and folklore have led to many inaccurate beliefs about the Mafia.

Some fantastic authors and researchers of late, like Selwyn Raab, Mike Dash, David Critchley, Arthur Nash and a handful of others, have shed unique light on the subject through personal insight, academic research and/or common sense—a far cry from the sensational Jimmy Breslin articles I grew up with—yet much of the information that is readily available to general audiences via insincere cable television shows, Hollywood movies, amateur blogging and cut-and-paste journalism remains carelessly unreliable.

Presented here is a directory of notable Mafia members who lived and operated in Manhattan over the last century, along with their known and reported home and business addresses, hangouts and so on, based on six years of active research and over a century of community insight. The sources for many of these addresses and stories are news reports, police records, government files, criminal biographies and personal accounts. I did my very best to cross-reference as much as possible by combing through thousands of original source documents and consulting with fellow authors, historians, mob family members, law enforcement officials and local elders to provide as accurate a representation of the subject matter as possible. However, the truth is that there may be many truths, and nobody knows anything
for sure
. (I tend not to trust anyone who claims otherwise.)

In no way is this book intended to glorify the Mafia or present Italians in a bad light. To be perfectly clear, 99.9 percent of Italians are, of course, noncriminals. That should go without saying. When I provide lectures or tours on the subject, I always start out by asking, “Can anybody name three people of Sicilian ancestry who are
not
criminals?” Many are surprised to learn that people like Tony Atlas, Joe DiMaggio, Supreme Court assistant justice Antonin Scalia, Frank Zappa, Cindy Lauper, jazz guitarist Pat Martino and many, many others who have positively contributed to our culture also happen to be of Sicilian heritage.

Illustration showing the sentiment toward Italian immigrants at the turn of the century. The lower left-hand panel shows Italians being drowned, with the caption, “The way to dispose of them.”
The
Mascot,
September 7, 1899
.

In New York City, Italians (they were all simply “Italians” once they arrived in America) played an invaluable role in the development of our infrastructure and the success of the city’s booming garment and shipping industries. One hundred years ago, Italians dug the subway tunnels, swept the streets, unloaded cargo ships, sewed the clothing most Americans were wearing and built the structures many of us are living in now, literally brick by brick. Italians introduced native delicacies, arts, opera and theatrical works that would earn the adoration of the American public. They were successful in banking, sports and politics; established pioneering publishing ventures; became active in trade unions; organized social and political clubs; and opened businesses just like everyone else attempting to achieve the American dream.

When the gates of
L’Isola dell Lagrime
(Ellis Island, referred to as the “Island of Tears”) opened in 1892, Italian immigrants poured into New York City. By 1900, almost a quarter of a million lived here, and two decidedly Italian districts emerged on opposite sides of Manhattan Island. Uptown, East Harlem sheltered a sizable Italian population; downtown, Italians divvied up what would become the largest population of Italians in the country.

Sadly, one of the biggest threats to the progress of Italians of the day came from other Italians. Many who arrived in the United States carried Old World prejudices toward other regional countrymen—and though most were not criminals, many obeyed the code of
omerta
, or “manhood,” meaning you took care of your own business outside the law, which was either ineffectual or nonexistent back in the old country.

On a local level, a young man navigating the streets became a risky proposition, as walking a block or two in either direction from his home could earn him a couple of lumps on the ol’ noggin or worse. For example, the Lower Manhattan Italian district, “Little Italy,” at one time encompassed a vast portion of city real estate, the heart of which was between Worth and Houston Streets and Bowery and Sixth Avenue.

This district was actually divided into several micro neighborhoods. As a general rule, southern Italians settled west of Mulberry Street, and Sicilians to the east. Then those districts were divvied up even further. For example: the neighborhood between Delancey and East Houston Streets became home to immigrants from northern Sicily, in particular the province of Palermo. Each district had very distinct cultures, customs and even languages, yet to outsiders, it was all simply Little Italy.

The insulation and division among the population allowed localized protection rackets to thrive. Many citizens had initially accepted or tolerated this practice, as it had been part of life for generations back in Europe. No one was really immune. There was barely an “honor among thieves,” let alone any moral codes regarding innocents, police or family members of enemies. The infamous Mafia code of “we only kill each other” was not established until much later. Everyone was subject to extortion, kidnapping and targeted and random violence and coercion. Bystanders were of no concern for gangland self-preservationists, and many innocents fell victim to petty underworld disputes.