The Mob and the City (8 page)

Frank Costello later admitted to the New York State Liquor Authority (NYSLA) that he had, in fact, imported foreign whiskey during Prohibition:

NYSLA: What years were you engaged in bootlegging during prohibition?

Costello: From 1923 to 1926.

…

NYSLA: You brought whisky into the United States?

Costello: That is right.

NYSLA: From places outside the country?

Costello: That is right.
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Costello admitted making at least $305,000 during Prohibition (about $5.2 million in 2013 dollars). He invested his bootlegging profits in slot machines and real estate, and he became a powerbroker in Gotham, finally getting the respect he had so badly wanted.
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LIQUOR DISTRIBUTION

The most dangerous part of bootlegging was not making beer, or even smuggling in foreign liquor, but distributing it without getting robbed or killed. Much of the violence associated with Prohibition was due to truck hijackings and territorial disputes.

Bootleggers had to move high-premium, illegal goods on back roads and through dark alleys. Liquor trucks became prime targets for hijackers. “Four armed ‘hijackers’ yesterday morning forced four truckmen waist deep into the [water canal], and then sped off with two trucks containing 320 cases of whisky, valued at about $30,000,” reported a typical news story from August 1924.
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“A common occurrence was the hijacking of delivery trucks by rival bootlegging groups,” recounted Joe Bonanno. To protect Maranzano's operations, Bonanno began carrying a pistol and hunting down stolen liquor trucks.
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Rival bootleggers fought fiercely over territories around the city as well. Bootleggers would muscle in on neighborhoods and require all the speakeasies to buy booze only from them. “There were guys going around selling beer, and you had to buy it. You just couldn't switch outfits. They may blow you away,” explained John Morahan, who ran speakeasies in Hell's Kitchen. “Owney Madden's beer would come and the guy would say, ‘You take this beer,’ and you didn't have much choice.”
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Arthur Flegenheimer (a.k.a. Dutch Schultz) had fleets of trucks shipping beer from the Bronx down to areas of Harlem he had taken over. He did battle with Jack “Legs” Diamond and his lieutenant Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel over beer territories. A neighborhood study of the South Village found that while alcohol makers were plentiful during Prohibition, “selling liquor was still a rough proposition” and the “deliveries were a dangerous business.”
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Since their product was illegal, bootleggers could not resolve their disputes by calling the police or bringing a civil suit in court. This added up to an extremely dangerous business: roughly one thousand bootleggers would be killed on the streets of New York City during Prohibition. “The scramble for bootlegging revenue was far more vicious and complex in New York than in any other American city,” concluded historian Humbert Nelli.
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It was within this violent context of Prohibition that many
mafiosi
made their names.

THE MAKING OF “JOE THE BOSS” DURING PROHIBITION

Joe Masseria had perhaps the most dramatic reversal of fortune during Prohibition.
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When Masseria got out of Sing Sing prison a couple years before Prohibition, he went back to his sister's saloon on Forsythe Street. Masseria was in the right place at the right time: he was working at the Forsythe Street saloon just before Prohibition went into effect. The saloon was located near the Curb Exchange, an underworld marketplace for illicit alcohol wholesaling on the Lower East Side. Masseria's traits of aggressiveness, fearlessness, and persistence found an outlet as a leader of bootleggers in Prohibition New York. Masseria and his men could assure that shipments of whiskey and other spirits made it through to the thirsty residents of Gotham. His underworld reputation grew amid wild shootouts in 1922.
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MONDAY EVENING, MAY 8, 1922, GRAND STREET, MANHATTAN: THE STREET SHOOTOUT

Around 5:45 p.m. on Monday, May 8, 1922, three well-dressed Italian men were milling in front of a cheese dealer's shop on Grand Street in Little Italy, a block east of the headquarters of the New York City Police. The sidewalks were bustling with people returning from work on the Lower East Side. Joe Masseria and his partner were among those walking up Grand Street. Spotting Masseria, the three men pulled out semiautomatic handguns and fired at their targets.
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With bullets flying at him, Masseria grabbed his .32 caliber Colt pistol and returned fire. Pandemonium ensued as sixty bullets crisscrossed the air. Masseria
stood firm on the street, pushing back his would-be killers with his gunfire. As the gunmen ran off, Masseria realized police were now on the scene. Masseria tossed his Colt and tried to disappear into Little Italy, but he was apprehended. Even though five innocent passersby had been shot, Joe Masseria escaped unscathed. Masseria had a gun permit, and there was no proof he shot any pedestrians: steel bullets were found in the wounded, while his gun was loaded with lead bullets.
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TUESDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 8, 1922, SECOND AVENUE, MANHATTAN: DUCKING BULLETS

Joe Masseria's rivals were still lurking. On Tuesday, August 8, 1922, a Hudson Touring car dropped off two men at a restaurant across the street from Masseria's brownstone at 80 Second Avenue. At 2:00 p.m., they saw Masseria leave his front stoop and walk north on the sidewalk.

This time, Masseria was unarmed and defenseless. Spotting the gunmen, he made a dash for his home, but they cornered him on the sidewalk. As Masseria dodged and weaved at point-blank range, “four bullets passed through his straw hat and two passed through his coat” yet none struck his head or torso. The police found a stunned Masseria “sitting on the edge of his bed, shot-punctured hat still on.” Newspapers reported how Masseria's “astonishing agility in ducking bullets from automatics saved his life.”
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These shootouts enhanced Masseria's standing in the underworld. But he had enough near-death experiences. As an insurance policy, he built an armored sedan with steel plates and inch-thick windows. He would later have a penthouse on the Upper West Side, too. Within a decade, he would go from staring at grey prison walls in Ossining, New York, to a view of Manhattan's Central Park.
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2–4: Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria, ca. 1922. (Courtesy of the New York Police Department)

A NEW MOB: THE MASSERIA FAMILY

Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria's real innovation was creating a mob meritocracy in his new Masseria Family. Rivals such as the Castellammarese clan of Brooklyn limited their membership to men who came from the town of Castellammare del Golfo on the northwestern coast of Sicily. By contrast, Masseria did not particularly care if his men were from his village or were even Sicilians. Rather, Joe the Boss recruited the best bootleggers and racketeers he could find. Masseria was aided by his
consigliere
(counselor) Giuseppe Morello, the former
capo di capi
or “boss of bosses,” who had been released in 1920 after a decade in
Atlanta federal prison. Joe the Boss benefitted from Morello's deep experience and connections. The remnants of the old Morello Family were reconstituted as part of the Masseria Family. Masseria also recruited young new talent like Charles Luciano, who proved himself to be a savvy and cool-headed bootlegger on the Lower East Side.
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Along with able Sicilians like Morello and Luciano, Masseria welcomed into his ranks Neapolitans like Vito Genovese and Joe Adonis; Calabrians (from mainland Italy's southernmost province) such as Frank Costello and Frankie Uale; and American-born men like Anthony “Little Augie Pisano” Carfano. Although Charles Luciano is often said to have “Americanized” the Mafia, the seeds were actually planted by his boss Joe Masseria.
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By the late 1920s, the Masseria Family became a thriving, multifaceted crime syndicate. By swallowing or forcing out competitors, it became the “A & P of bootleggers” in New York. And the Masseria Family was not limited to bootlegging. Masseria's broad confederation held interests in everything from the Italian numbers lottery to the Brooklyn waterfront labor-union locals taken over by mobsters Vincent Mangano and Albert Anastasia (see
chapter 1
). New York police detectives identified “Joe the Boss” as the gangster who was “the biggest of ’em all.”
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THE END OF PROHIBITION

Prohibition officially ended with ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment on December 5, 1933. It was a major blow to bootleggers. “We made $400,000 in one year, and we thought we had something going on forever,” said an Irish bootlegger. “But when Prohibition ended, that was the end of the empire. We had to go to work and find a way to make a living.”
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The thirteen-year boom of Prohibition masked longer-term trends among the gangs. The Prohibition era would be the swan song for the Irish gangsters, the high point for the Jewish syndicates, and the coming-out party for the Italian Mafia. The following sections examine other trends fueling the rise of the modern Mafia.

TRENDS IN THE 1920s: ITALIAN IMMIGRATION, MAFIA FRANCHISES, AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES

Prohibition was not the only factor behind the ascent of the Cosa Nostra. Throughout the 1920s, others forces were having transformative effects on the New York underworld. These included south Italian immigration to New York, Mafia family franchising, and new technologies like the telephone and automobile.

DEMOGRAPHY AS DESTINY: IMMIGRATION TO NEW YORK CITY

“Demography is destiny,” is a truism of population experts.
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In the early twentieth century, New York City was not so much a giant melting pot as a series of overlapping, immigrant enclaves. In 1910, 41 percent of its residents had been born outside America. While Germans and Irish were the largest immigrant groups in the 1800s, Jews and Italians were the largest groups by the early 1900s. “Within the brief span of less than a generation the ethnic composition of the metropolis altered radically,” explains demographer Ira Rosenwaike. “Persons of Jewish and Italian background had become numerically superior to those of Irish and German descent.”
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In
chapter 4
“The Racketeer Cometh” we will see how these demographic trends bolstered the Mafia's labor racketeering. Now, let us look at their social effects on the underworld.

THE SOUTH ITALIAN
COLONIAE
IN NEW YORK CITY

South Italians especially favored living among fellow
paesani
. “No other nationality in New York City is so given over to aggregation as the Italians,” observed a writer. Settlement patterns bear out this observation. Gotham was home to large-scale Italian enclaves. The two largest were Italian East Harlem and the Little Italy along Mulberry Street; each was home to about 110,000 Italians. There were also major settlements in the South Village (70,000 Italians) below West 4th Street in Manhattan; in Belmont (35,000 Italians) in central Bronx; on the northern tip of Staten Island (15,000 Italians); and in Williamsburg (40,000 Italians), Bushwick (30,000 Italians), and Red Hook (20,000 Italians) in Brooklyn.
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