The Mob and the City (22 page)

Once drugs reached the streets, the Mafia had no real control over who bought them. The postwar heroin spike devastated poor teenagers in black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. “Every time I went uptown, somebody else was hooked, somebody else was strung out,” remembered Claude Browne. “Drugs were killing just about everybody off in one way or another.”
⁶⁴
Low said the addicts were increasingly “Spanish boys in the eighteen, nineteen bracket. I used to see them turning into bums, being all dirty.”
⁶⁵
Piri Thomas grew up on 104th Street (blocks from the mob's trafficking center), and he mainlined heroin as a teenager. “It becomes your whole life once you allow it to sink its white teeth in your blood stream,” Thomas said.
⁶⁶

The Mafia cultivated an image for shielding Italian neighborhoods from drug pushing. “During the 1950s on Mulberry Street, in the lower part of Manhattan, the Italian gangsters’ image was ‘We keep the drug pushers out of the neighborhood.’ And they did,” said Salerno. “But it wouldn't stop them from selling a kilo of heroin to someone, as long as they knew he wasn't going to try to trickle it back into their neighborhood.”
⁶⁷

The notion that the Mafia could build moats around Italian neighborhoods proved illusory. Salvatore Mondello, who grew up in East Harlem during the 1930s and ’40s, recalls:

Some of my friends tried reefers. The racketeers never distributed reefers on the street. It would have been dangerous to sell that stuff on their home turf. Their honest neighbors would have strongly disapproved. But reefers, I imagine, could be bought elsewhere. Some of my friends could have bought them on other streets in East Harlem.
⁶⁸

Though less prevalent, some inner-city Italian youths got hooked on heroin from East Harlem. Dom Abruzzi started snorting heroin “because it was so cheap—a dollar and a half apiece to split a three-dollar bag—and everybody was getting so high and seemed so happy.”
⁶⁹
Eddie became addicted from breathing in the dust from a Mafia cutting operation where he worked. East Harlem was slowly undermined by drugs smuggled into the country by the Mafia.
⁷⁰

IN SEARCH OF A GRAND CONSPIRACY

Politicians and writers have searched for a single, grand conspiracy to explain the entire drug trade. In the 1950s, FBN Commissioner Harry Anslinger and his deputy Charles Siragusa claimed that Luciano was secretly the “the kingpin” of all the narcotics traffic between “the United States and Italy.”
⁷¹
However, when the drug historians Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen reviewed the FBN's massive surveillance records on Luciano in Italy, they found no evidence that the aging Luciano controlled the transatlantic trade. In my examination of Anslinger's personal papers, I found no prized document showing Luciano pulling the strings of the drug trade from Italy.
⁷²

Others have seized on a meeting at the
Hotel et des Palmes
in Palermo, Sicily, in October 1957. The FBI had long known about this meeting of a dozen Sicilian and America
mafiosi
, including Joe Bonanno and Carmine Galante. FBI director Louis Freeh later speculated that the meeting was held to enlist the Sicilian Mafia in the drug trade.
⁷³
In her 1990 book
Octopus: How the Long Reach of the Sicilian Mafia Controls the Global Narcotics Trade
, the journalist Claire Sterling saw in this meeting the organization of the entire drug trade:

Although there is no firsthand evidence of what went on at the four-day summit
itself, what followed over the next thirty years has made the substance clear. Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are persuaded by now that the American delegation asked the Sicilians to take over the import and distribution of heroin in the United States, and the Sicilians agreed.
⁷⁴

This has been recycled endlessly, most recently by the writer Gil Reavill who cites Sterling's story even while admitting it is a “largely unsourced account.”
⁷⁵

But there
was
firsthand evidence of what went on at the 1957 gathering. Tomasso Buscetta was one of the dozen
mafioso
at the
Hotel et des Palmes
. Buscetta later became a
pentito
(penitent witness) after his sons were killed, and he was the key witness in the “Pizza Connection” heroin prosecution of the 1980s. Buscetta
never
testified that the 1957 gathering was a “summit” to plan a direct Sicily-to-America heroin connection. No such connection was established for another
two decades
. Wiseguys do not have twenty-year drug plans.
⁷⁶

These writers miss the point. No single cabal could predetermine the entire drug trade. There
was
conspiracy in the drug trade. But it was not a single grand conspiracy by a few, omnipotent men. Rather, the drug trade involved many small conspiracies, composed of fluid coalitions of
mafiosi
who put together schemes as the opportunities arose.

MAFIA DRUG OPERATIONS

Joseph Orsini treated countries like his mistresses. A native Corsican, he was convicted of collaborating with the Nazis, and fled France for the United States. In January 1949, he met Salvatore “Sally Shields” Shillitani, a member of the Lucchese Family, and proposed they go into business together. Orsini brought in his Corsican drug contacts; Shillitani brought in his fellow
mafiosi
. All the partners invested money in a fund to finance their operations. The ring met in restaurants, hotel rooms, a construction company office—even on Ellis Island, as Orsini awaited deportation to Argentina for immigration violations.
⁷⁷

To get heroin to New York, the ring constantly adapted. One of the Corsicans had a connection for opium in Yugoslavia. He shipped the opium to Marseilles, where it was converted into morphine then shipped to Paris to be processed into heroin. The ring then sent Americans with automobiles on
“vacations” to Paris, where the cars were loaded up with heroin in hidden caches and shipped back to the United States. The ring was hardly flawless. Investors squabbled over deliveries. The automobile scheme was shut down when too many cars were returning empty. One disastrous day, French police seized a three-hundred-kilo shipment from a boat docked in Marseilles. But because the ring's “merchandise” was so perfect, it still made profits from the kilos that made it to New York.
⁷⁸

The Orsini-Shillitani ring was fairly typical of Mafia drug rings.
Table 5–1
summarizes characteristics of Mafia drug operations for which we have good information. First, the drug rings involved many different coconspirators. Second, they were financed by several
mafiosi
pooling their money. Third, the drug rings were opportunistic. Traffickers crossed Mafia family lines, bought from whatever source was available, and smuggled in the drugs by any means necessary.

THE FRENCH (CANADIAN) CONNECTION

When viewed against this background, the famous “French Connection” case of the early 1960s looks less the mark of something new and more like any other Mafia drug operation. The case was immortalized by William Friedkin's 1971 Academy Award–winning film
The French Connection
starring Gene Hackman. The reporter who wrote the book on which the film was based trumpeted the case as “The World's Most Crucial Narcotics Investigation.”
⁸¹
It wasn't.

In reality, the scheme was a small, family affair involving Pasquale “Patsy” Fuca, his brother Joe, and his father Tony. Patsy's uncle was Angelo “Little Angie” Tuminaro, a trafficker for the Lucchese Family. With their Corsican partners, they refined Turkish opium into heroin in Marseilles. They concealed the heroin in the undercarriage of a 1960 Buick Invicta owned by a Parisian television host, who shipped his car to Montreal, Canada. After smuggling the packages across the border, they stashed the ninety-seven pounds of heroin in cellars around New York.
⁸²

The case might have been called the
French-
Canadian
Connection
to reflect the Mafia's latest adaptation to the drug war. The Canadian Mafia long had its own drug trade. Canadian boss Rocco Perri's associates were into narcotics trafficking as early as the 1920s.
⁸³
When customs enforcement increased on the New York waterfront in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the wiseguys looked north for new drug routes. “When the heat was being put on New York [traffickers would] swing through French Canada because of all the [Montreal] air traffic,” explained Ralph Salerno.
⁸⁴
This gave rise to mob traffickers like Frank and Joseph Controni of Montreal, and Albert and Vito Agueci of Toronto, who smuggled drugs through Canada to New York City.
⁸⁵

NARCOTICS CONVICTIONS OF
MAFIOSI
, 1916–1963

The Mafia's entrenchment in the narcotics trade is also reflected in conviction rates.
Table 5–3
below shows
mafiosi
from the New York metropolitan area convicted on drug charges. To address the myth of generational decline, the table is limited to
mafiosi
who were both born by 1920
and
convicted by 1963. This
places them in the same generation as the leading purveyors of this myth, Joe Bonanno (born 1905) and Angelo Lonardo (born 1911). The pre-1963 time limitation counters the perception that Mafia trafficking only began with the French Connection case, or as Lonardo put it “the late sixties or seventies.”

As the table shows, more than 150
mafiosi
in the New York area alone were convicted on narcotics violations by 1963. Given that Joe Valachi testified there were about two thousand active and twenty-five hundred inactive members in the New York area, this meant that one in thirty-three
mafiosi
were
convicted
traffickers. This is astounding given how weak narcotics enforcement was at the time. As late as 1950, the NYPD's narcotics squad had 18 officers; in 1965, the FBN had only 433 employees nationwide
.
Many mob traffickers evaded the law. Valachi estimated that about “75 tops, maybe 100” in the 450-man Genovese Family were into narcotics—
about one in six
.
⁸⁶

MAFIA LEADERS INVOLVED IN DRUGS

Contrary to myth, drug trafficking was
not
confined to low-level mobsters.
Table 5–2
below shows that all five families had high-ranking leaders with early narcotics convictions: