Jerry Angiulo's rise to power was not within the Mafia itself, but instead was a result of the Kefauver hearings of 19501951. At the time, Joseph Lombardo, then crime boss of Massachusetts, decided, what with the Senate probers planning to come to town, it would be a good idea to shut down Boston gambling. He was most interested in preventing any Kefauver heat from affecting the business of the mob's racing wire. For that reason he wanted the probers to have as few targets as possible and pulled his men in Boston out of the numbers racket. The ploy worked. Lombardo came off unscathed but, deciding the heat would be around for a while, he remained out of numbers.
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Then Jerry Angiulo, a lowly runner in mob activities, made his move, asking Lombardo's permission to take over the numbers. Lombardo agreed, provided Angiulo understood he had no organization protection, that he was on his own. Well, perhaps not completely on his ownLombardo got himself a cut of the numbers action while suffering no exposure himself.
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Angiulo operated safely until Lombardo was succeeded by new boss Philip Bruccola. Bruccola took so much heat from investigations that he finally fled to Sicily. Now Angiulo was operating without a patron and soon individual mobsters started pressuring him for payoffs. Unable to fight, Angiulo paid until the demands became too great. Finally, he went to Providence where Raymond Patriarca was emerging as the new boss of all New England. He got Patriarca's protection by paying him $50,000 down and guaranteeing him an even larger annual cut from the Boston numbers racket. Patriarca simply placed some phone calls to mobsters in Boston, announcing that "Jerry's with me now" and for them to lay off.
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The mobsters had to obey Patriarca and a new setup came to Boston. Angiulo became not only a "made" mafioso, but also the boss of Boston. And Ilario Zannino, one of the mobsters who had been shaking him down, was designated his number two man.
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In time, Angiulo became a multimillionaire and the New England Mafia's money and payoff man. According to informer Vinnie Teresa, Angiulo claimed he could make 300 of Boston's 360-odd detectives follow his directives. It is very possible that Angiulo was exaggerating, a tendency he had, but it is true that, after the 1981 bugging of Angiulo's office, 40 Boston police officers were transferred because many of their names had been mentioned on the tapes.
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In 1984 New England boss Patriarca died. His underboss Henry Tameleo was in prison and unlikely ever to be freed. Angiulo, as the number three man in the organization, laid claim to the boss position. He didn't get it.
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By that time Angiulo was facing massive federal racketeering prosecutions. If convicted, he could have been sentenced to as much as 170 years. But the threat of imprisonment was not at issue in Angiulo's aborted succession. Many members still smarted over the way he had gotten into the mob. Zannino, his underboss, refused, according to an FBI report, to support him, instead backing Raymond J. Patriarca, the late boss's son, for the leadership. The younger Patriarca, the FBI said, named Zannino his counselor and Angiulo was demoted to the status of a mere soldier. That demotion was not necessarily the worst of Jerry Angiulo's worries. In 1986 Angiulo was convicted on racketeering charges and sentenced to 45 years imprisonment.
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Annenberg, Moses L. (18781942): Gambling information czar
Probably no fortune in America was built on a sturdier foundation of cooperation with organized crime and the Mafia than that of Moses Annenberg. A newspaper circulation man by trade and a gambler to boot, Moe Annenberg rose from poverty in the slums of South Side Chicago to accumulate the largest estimated individual income of any person in the nationthanks to mob money.
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Considered a "circulation genius" by William Randolph Hearst, Moe started out in the circulation department of the
Chicago Tribune
. Later, he was hired away by Hearst's new sheets in town, the
American
and the
Examiner
, serving from 1904 to 1906 as circulation manager. He became a grand operative during the early Chicago newspaper circulation wars, selling newspapers with an army of sluggers, overturning the competition's delivery trucks, burning their papers and roughing up newspaper vendors.
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Moe's "genius," in fact, was muscle. His roster of sluggers reads less like a publishing staff than a muster of public enemies. A typical Annenberg employee was Frank McErlane. Former Chicago journalist George Murray later described the Annenberg-McErlane relationship: "McErlane went on to become the most vicious killer of his time. Moe Annenberg went on to become father of the ambassador to the Court of St. James."
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Under Hearst, Annenberg was one of the highestpaid circulation men in the nation. Hearst so valued him that he tolerated Moe's myriad private business dealings. More than Hearst himself, Annenberg realized the money to be made in the racing information field, both legally and illegally. In 1922 he bought the
Daily Racing Form
and by 1926 his various private businesses became so big he quit Hearst. In a few years Moe took over the
New York Morning Telegraph, Radio Guide, Screen Guide
and, most important, formed the Nation-Wide News Service in association
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