Manhattan Mafia Guide (4 page)

Alias: Altroad DeJohn, Jim Carra[?]

Born: 1897
,
³
Porto Empedocle, Sicily

Died: 1972, Suffolk County, New York

Association: D’Aquila, Mangano/Gambino crime families

Many of those in the know believe this five-foot, four-inch, 160-pound veteran mobster turned informant was the same person who shared his life story with veteran journalist Jack Anderson in the late 1960s under the name Jim Carra.

In a widely redistributed January 28, 1968 article published by
Parade Magazine
, entitled “A Top Killer Spills Mob Secrets,” a former mobster with a curiously similar background to Attardi’s provided intimate details of everything from the protocols of a Mafia initiation ceremony to the murder of Albert Anastasia.

Unlike Joe Valachi, whose testimony offered a wealth of information but yielded few arrests, the information Attardi provided to authorities in the 1950s led to a massive infiltration of organized crime that resulted in several convictions. Also unlike Valachi, who has become a household name to even the most casual mob enthusiast, very little has been written about (or even reported on) Attardi.

Let’s start with what we do know from released government files and the few news reports available on the elusive gangster. In 1922, Attardi served a four-month sentence for the violation of the Harrison Act, which was passed in 1914 “to impose a special tax on all persons who produce, import, manufacture, compound, deal in, dispense, sell, distribute, or give away opium or coca leaves, their salts, derivatives, or preparations.”

A January 15, 1947 internal memo from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) field office in New York City claimed that Attardi admitted to attending a 1937 meeting on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, on the farm of Don Vincenzo Vallone. (To whom he admitted this detail is recorded as “unknown.”) In attendance, according to the report, was Dallas mob boss Joseph T. Piranio and underboss Joseph F. Civello.

The reason for the meeting is unknown, though we do know that on October 5, 1937, Attardi; his wife, Josephine “Jose” Attardi, alias “G. Altroad”; and fourteen others were swept up in a coordinated interstate roundup, suspected of conspiring to import narcotics from Europe and distribute them through New York, Texas and Louisiana.

Alphonso Attardi was held in the Galveston County (Texas) Jail until posting $10,000 bond on December 14, 1937. On January 31, 1938, he and his wife were extradited back to New York City, where sixteen of the eighty-eight people named in the indictment were brought to trial in May 1938. Several opted to plead guilty in lieu of facing a jury. At least two witnesses testified to delivering drugs for Attardi from a Galveston nightclub called Turf. On June 2, 1938, Alphonso Attardi was sentenced to two years in Leavenworth, plus a $5,000 fine.
⁴
His wife received two years plus a $1,000 fine, though that was later reduced to five years’ probation.

On May 9, 1950, the FBN headquarters in Washington, D.C., furnished a list of twenty-four Mafia suspects operating in Texas. Among the names on record were New York Mafioso Vito Genovese and Vincent Rao; Attardi was listed as operating in Houston.

Other than that, only two authors that I know of have mentioned Attardi. According to 1963’s
Border Guard: The Story of the United States Customs Service
by Don Whitehead, Attardi spent eight years in the 1940s behind bars on narcotics violations and faced deportation to Italy upon release.

The author goes on to say that Attardi fell in love with a twenty-two-year-old waitress and feared deportation, so he offered himself up to federal authorities. By 1952, Attardi was working with the FBN to set up several successful undercover sting operations, for which he received a paltry $5,000 and disappeared with his new lover.

In
The Great Pictorial History of World Crime
(volume one, published in 2004), author Jay Robert Nash adds that Attardi’s 1940s conviction was a “bum rap” and that while he was in prison, Attardi’s wife passed away and he lost his oil and cheese importing store on Chrystie Street.
⁵

Beyond that, the trail pretty much dries up for Alphonso Attardi. If we are to believe the 1968 claims of Jim Carra, who was admittedly speaking in anonymity under an assumed name, the gangster was initiated into a Sicilian Mafia organization as a teenager before immigrating to New York City in 1919. Here, he started as a bootlegger working for the D’Aquila crime family in the 1920s and went on to watch the Mafia evolve in its most formative years.

“The honor, respect and morality that had been instilled into me in Sicily all became secondary matters. The big thing in the United States was money and more money,” Carra recalled, disenchanted with the greed that polarized the Italian underworld during Prohibition.

B
IONDO
, J
OSEPH

245 East Twenty-first Street, Manhattan, 1930

Alias: Joe Bandy, Joe the Blonde

Born: April 16, 1897, Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, Sicily (b. Biondi, Giuseppe)

Died: June 10, 1966, New York City

Association: D’Aquila family, Gambino crime family underboss

Biondo was a veteran gangster of the bootlegging wars with an influential criminal career spanning four decades. It is believed that Biondo was involved in the plot to kill both Salvatore Maranzano in 1931 and Albert Anastasia in 1957. He was a perpetual member of Interpol’s International List of Narcotics Violators
⁶
and alleged overseer of the Mangano/Anastasia family drug-trafficking operations throughout the early 1950s.

Around the East Village—the neighborhood where Biondo spent much of his life after emigrating from Italy as a baby in 1898—he was mostly known as “Bandy,” but with a thick Lower East Side accent, it came out almost as “bain-tee.” Some insiders from the old neighborhood had no idea it was spelled with a “D” until seeing it in print later on.

The five-foot-four, 150-pound gangster wielded great influence over younger neighborhood toughs and befriended early on future top-level Mafioso like Charlie Luciano, who claimed to have pickpocketed immigrants while living with Biondo on Fourteenth Street as a kid. The two would be close for the rest of their lives.

On July 4, 1931, Biondo, Luciano and Tommy Lucchese were apprehended together in a Cleveland hotel room and questioned during a police investigation; however, no charges were filed. They were in Ohio to watch Max Schmeling defend the heavyweight title against W.L. Stribling. (Schmeling won by KO in the fifteenth round).

One theory suggests that sometime in 1931, Biondo was visited by Frank Scalise, the newly installed boss of what would become the Gambino crime family.
Capo di tuti capi
Salvatore Maranzano awarded Scalise the position after the Castellammarese War of 1930–31, allegedly with the stipulation that he must help kill another family boss named Vincent Mangano. Scalise couldn’t go through with the murder and went to Biondo about the plan. Biondo then alerted Mangano, Luciano and others. Maranzano was dead by the end of the year.

In the spring of 1942, Biondo quite openly visited exiled Charlie Luciano in Italy and, as expected, was picked up by authorities in Milano and questioned. Biondo insisted he was in Italy for legitimate business on behalf of major corporations back in the States; however, these companies denied knowing Biondo. No evidence could be found of wrongdoing at the time, but it is believed that Luciano introduced Biondo to a third-party supplier of acetic acid, used to cut heroin for street sale. Biondo made several trips to see Luciano over the years, some believe to deliver Luciano his financial share of various rackets going on back in North America.

In October 1958, the FBN intercepted a letter intended for Biondo from fellow Mafioso Nicola Gentile that read, in part, “The road you have taken by virtue of your intelligence has brought you to a superior social level so that today you are a L
EADER
and well regarded.”
⁷

Undercover authorities then posed as representatives of Biondo and met with Gentile, fooling him into providing delicate information. When the narcotics agents unveiled their true identities, Gentile decided to testify against the Mafia.

Joe Valachi claimed that Biondi was involved with Carlo Gambino in the 1957 murder of Albert Anastasia, which earned the capo a spot as underboss to Gambino (who replaced Anastasia as head of the family). He also claimed that Biondo was a member of the Mafia Commission.

An internal FBI memo dated October 3, 1967, states that a source claimed Biondo fell out of favor with Carlo Gambino for his chronic participation in narcotics trafficking and even went so far as to say that Gambino ordered a hit on Biondo by the end of 1965. By that time, Biondo was spending much of his time with his New York City–born wife, Louise Volpe (whom he married in 1925), at their second home at 1936 South Ocean Drive in Hallandale, near Miami Beach, Florida.

Joseph Biondo died in 1966 and was succeeded as underboss of the Gambino family by Aniello Dellacroce. His brother, John Joseph Biondo, was an alleged soldier in the Gambino family at the time of Joseph’s death.

B
UIA
, A
NGELO
A
NTHONY

719 Lexington Avenue, 1950s

Alias: Frenchie, Angelo Russo

Born: July 26, 1910, Nice, France

Died: May 3, 2003, Montgomery, Maryland

Association: Genovese crime family

French-born to Sicilian parents, Angelo Anthony Buia and his brother, Matildo, were considered by the FBN to be major heroin distributors for the Accardi-Campisi crew of the Genovese family.

In August 1955, Buia pleaded guilty to possession of thirty-five ounces of heroin. When a previous conviction for narcotics violations was disclosed, he was sentenced to seven years in prison as a second offender.
⁸

In August 1962, Buia and five other mobsters, including Benedetto Cinquegrana and Carmine Locascio, pleaded not guilty to charges of operating an international drug ring suspected of smuggling over $100 million worth of heroin into the United States over a ten-year period.
⁹
Authorities believed Buia obtained massive amounts of heroin from French sources for three of five Mafia families in New York.
¹⁰

In December 1963, eleven of sixteen indicted New York mobsters were sentenced to seven to twenty-five years in prison; however, all charges were reversed in August 1964 by an appeals court judge.

B
UIA
, M
ATILDO

203 Prince Street, Manhattan, 1950s

Alias: Ralph Stella

Born: October 18, 1907, Castellammare, Sicily

Died: November 23, 1988, New York City

Association: Genovese crime family

Along with his brother Angelo, Matildo was suspected of being involved in international narcotics trafficking for over two decades during the mid-twentieth century.

Matildo’s first arrest on narcotics violations came in 1933, with another conviction in 1938. On August 3, 1955, Matildo and Angelo Buia were arrested for trying to sell approximately thirty-five ounces of heroin to undercover narcotics agents. Matildo was sentenced to five years in prison
¹¹
and was released under probation on April 5, 1959.

C
ATALDO
, J
OSEPH

125 Sullivan Street, 1920, 1930; 59 West Twelfth Street, 1950s

Alias: Joe the Wop

Born: November 16, 1908, Basilicata, Italy (b. Cataldo, Giuseppe)

Died: July 1980, New York City

Association: Most prominent twentieth-century mobsters

Perhaps most infamous for his alleged ties to Lee Harvey Oswald assassin Jack Ruby, Cataldo was a major twentieth-century mobster, racketeer, loan shark, casino manager, nightclub owner and entertainment industry mover and shaker.

Eight-year-old Cataldo arrived in New York City with his family on November 27, 1916, on the steamship
Duca d’Aosta
and earned his status as a U.S. citizen in September 1933. Not much is recorded about his initiation into organized crime or his early career with the mob, though it has been implied that his foray into crime began during Prohibition.